Tapping Hitler's Generals

A few months later General BADER asked me: ‘Why didn’t you carry out that order?’ I told him that no one could order me to do something opposed to my honour as an officer and beside, that that order was frightfully stupid as it caused every Serbian to take up arms. That was our difficulty: we received orders which made us feel morally obliged to oppose. The ethical principle is quite obvious. Take an extreme case: you are ordered to torture your mother. You should rather die than carry that out. That’s obvious. Just as when you are ordered to shoot a hundred innocent Serbs, which is just as stupid and dirty; it’s a question of ethics. If I, because I passed that order on–or possibly one of my ‘Bataillonskommandeure’ may have carried it out, and the Allies charge me on that account and say: ‘You passed that order on.’ I’ll answer: ‘Well, I had to, otherwise I’d have been shot.’ That is my defence, but it doesn’t excuse me morally.

HEIM: The only question is: what shall be our attitude when we are put before one of those Courts of Inquiry? In my opinion our conduct must be uniform, we must uphold the principle of only having carried out orders. I don’t know what I should have done in your case. I should probably have acted in the same way. Today, however, I think we must stick to that principle if we are to create a uniform basis which would provide us with a more or less effective defence and, above all, prevent the Allies from playing us off against each other in the worst possible manner. There are soldiers too, among those holding the Court of Inquiry. When they retire for the verdict, they’ll say: ‘There’s nothing you can say against that point of view.’

WILDERMUTH: They certainly won’t say that because they go by completely different standards from ours.[330]

HEIM: They may say it in very serious cases like that one, for instance.

WILDERMUTH: That field order was valid for the whole of SERBIA. Now it becomes interesting: when BADER heard about that incident at BELGRADE, he wanted to go for that commander.[331] The ‘Division’ shielded him, by saying: ‘Excuse me, those were orders, which he carried out. Think before you issue orders.’ Then everything petered out in the usual way, apart from some minor repercussions, just as if the order had never been issued.

HEIM: You can’t even imagine all the examples which occurred in practice.

WILDERMUTH: I’ll tell you of another instance in which I intervened. It concerned the well-known order issued in 1942, regarding activities by saboteurs and commandos, who were to be shot immediately. I read that order when in hospital at home. After I got out again, the order was mentioned during an officers’ conference in the 43rd ‘Regiment’,[332] and I said it naturally only concerned people not in uniform, although it was quite obvious that the order had a different intention.

HEIM: At the time HITLER at any rate, thought those terror measures would frighten his opponents.

HEYDTE: I quite agree with you, Sir.

HEIM: We ought to discuss these matters at a larger gathering in order to create a basis of defence, and a fairly sound one at that.

WILDERMUTH: Then there were things which hadn’t been ordered, but which gradually became customary. At LE HAVRE I once had thirty people, including some who had collaborated with us, arrested. There they were in prison. A terrific air raid took place.[333] We couldn’t very well leave them there and I didn’t know what to do with them. One of my staff suggested: ‘Let’s shoot them!’ Whereupon I said: let them go and join the resistance movement outside the town. Thirty people make no difference. But at other places other measures were adopted.

HEIM: You must give different examples to the English, because they and especially the Americans do not think along the same purely military lines as we do.