The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945

by Richard J. Evans

Above all, said Hitler, Germany had one factor that made it unbeatable – himself. ‘I am convinced of the powers of my intellect and of decision . . . The fate of the Reich depends on me alone . . . I shall shrink from nothing and shall destroy everyone who is opposed to me.’ Destiny was with him, he proclaimed, buoyed up by his escape from the beer-cellar bomb a fortnight before. ‘Even in the present development I see Providence.’9

From this quote alone, it is obvious that overall, he was a poor leader.

In some cases, as in the town of Zloczów, local German army commanders protested and managed to get the murders stopped, at least temporarily.45 By contrast, in the village of Byelaya Tserkow, south of Kiev, the Austrian field commander, Colonel Riedl, had the entire Jewish population registered and ordered a unit of Task Force C to shoot them all. Together with Ukrainian militiamen and a platoon of soldiers from the Armed SS, the Task Force troops took several hundred Jewish men and women out to a nearby firing range and shot them in the head. A number of the victims’ children were taken in lorries to the firing range shortly afterwards, on 19 August 1941, and shot as well, but ninety of the youngest, from small babies up to six-year-olds, were kept behind, unsupervised, in a building on the outskirts of the village, without food or water. German soldiers heard them crying and whimpering through the night, and alerted their unit’s Catholic military chaplain, who found the children desperate for water, lying around in filthy conditions, covered in flies, with excrement all over the floor. A few armed Ukrainian guards stood about outside, but German soldiers were free to come and go as they pleased. The chaplain enlisted the aid of a regimental staff officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, who, after inspecting the building, posted soldiers round it to prevent the children being taken away. Outraged at his authority being overridden, Riedl protested to the regional c...

By contrast, in the village of Byelaya Tserkow, south of Kiev, the Austrian field commander, Colonel Riedl, had the entire Jewish population registered and ordered a unit of Task Force C to shoot them all. Together with Ukrainian militiamen and a platoon of soldiers from the Armed SS, the Task Force troops took several hundred Jewish men and women out to a nearby firing range and shot them in the head. A number of the victims’ children were taken in lorries to the firing range shortly afterwards, on 19 August 1941, and shot as well, but ninety of the youngest, from small babies up to six-year-olds, were kept behind, unsupervised, in a building on the outskirts of the village, without food or water. German soldiers heard them crying and whimpering through the night, and alerted their unit’s Catholic military chaplain, who found the children desperate for water, lying around in filthy conditions, covered in flies, with excrement all over the floor. A few armed Ukrainian guards stood about outside, but German soldiers were free to come and go as they pleased. The chaplain enlisted the aid of a regimental staff officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, who, after inspecting the building, posted soldiers round it to prevent the children being taken away. Outraged at his authority being overridden, Riedl protested to the regional commanding officer, Field Marshal von Reichenau, that Groscurth and the chaplain were departing from proper National Socialist ideology. ‘He expla...

‘That a whole people, men, women, children, are simply being slaughtered, in the twentieth century, by us, us of all people, who are fighting a crusade against Bolshevism: this is such a dreadful blood-guilt that one wants to sink into the ground with the shame of it.’

‘With this terrible murder of the Jews,’ wrote Wilm Hosenfeld on 16 June 1943, ‘we have lost the war. We have brought upon ourselves an indelible disgrace, a curse that can never be lifted. We deserve no mercy, we are all guilty.’