Tag Archives: Minsk

Arthur Nebe

Arthur Nebe

The last few days I have seen articles about the German government commemorating those who were involved in the  20th July 1944 assassination plot.

In a way I can understand it why they are doing this, but having that said I don’t agree with it.

Yes it is true these men planned to kill Hitler but not because they didn’t believe in his policies, because all of them had signed up to Nazi ideology one way or another. They wanted to kill them because they didn’t agree with the way he was conducting the war and the consequences of that.

Some of them had actively and willingly participated in the killing of innocent lives..

None more so then Arthur Nebe. he was a key figure in the security and police apparatus of Nazi Germany and a Holocaust perpetrator.He  was  given command of Einsatzgruppen B between June and November 1941, an extermination unit whose headquarters were in Minsk, and  also covered the area of the Moscow front.During this period of five months,he was responsible  for  46,000 executions.

Minsk

In a  report he issued on July 23,1941 , Nebe stated the idea of a “solution to the Jewish problem” being “impractical” in his region of operation due to “the overwhelming number of the Jews”; there were too many Jews to be killed by too few men. By August 1941, Nebe came to realize that his Einsatzgruppe’s resources were insufficient to meet the expanded mandate of the killing operations, resulting from the inclusion of Jewish women and children since that month.

During visits to Russia in 1941,  Himmler learned the psychological impact of shooting women and children on the Einsatzgruppen. He therefore commissioned Arthur Nebe to explore ways of killing that were less stressful for the task force.

Nebe decided to try experimenting by murdering Soviet mental patients, first with dynamite near Minsk, and then with automobile exhaust ,gas vans,at Mogilev. These vans had already been used before  in 1940 for the gassing of East Prussian and Pomeranian mental patients in Soldau.

However the Gas van was not a Nazi but a Soviet invention.The gas van was invented in the Soviet Union in 1936, by Isay Berg, the head of the administrative and economic department of the NKVD of Moscow Oblast.

vans

In March 1944, after the “Great Escape” from Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp, Nebe was ordered by Heinrich Müller, to select and kill fifty of the seventy-three recaptured prisoners in what became known as the “Stalag Luft III murders”.Also in 1944, Nebe suggested that the Roma interned at Auschwitz would be good subjects for medical experiments at the Dachau concentration camp.

Nebe was was executed in Berlin at Plötzensee Prison on 21 March 1945, because of his involvement in the July 20 plot.

 

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Sources

Traces of War

Holocaust research project

Bundesarchiv

 

Wilhelm Kube’s Paradox in the Holocaust

Wilhelm Kube

Wilhelm Kube was a devout Christian as well as a zealous Nazi. Those 2 aspects of his life clashed a few times during WWII.

In July 1941, just after the German occupation of the western parts of the Soviet Union, he was appointed Generalkommissar for Weissruthenien (now known as Belarus).

As Generalkommissar he was in charge of the extermination of the large Jewish population of his assigned region. He was nevertheless disgusted and outraged by the massacre in  Slutsk in October 1941.  SS Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews without the permission  of the local Nazi civil administration and Security SS authorities. Local non-Jewish Belarusians were also massacred, causing great resentment among the population.

einsatz

Kube wrote in protest to his supervisor and Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler:

“The town was a picture of horror during the action. With indescribable brutality on the part of both the German police officers and particularly the Lithuanian partisans, the Jewish people, but also among them Belarusians, were taken out of their dwellings and herded together. Everywhere in the town shots were to be heard and in different streets the corpses of shot Jews accumulated. The Belarusians were in greatest distress to free themselves from the encirclement.

I am submitting this report in duplicate so that one copy may be forwarded to the Reich Minister. Peace and order cannot be maintained in Belarus with methods of that sort. To bury seriously wounded people alive who worked their way out of their graves again is such a base and filthy act that the incidents as such should be reported to the Führer and Reichsmarschall.”

In another letter dated December 16 1941 to Hinrich Lohse the Reichskommisar for Ostland.

Hinrich_Lohse

“Minsk
Generalkommissar for Byelorussia
To: Reichskommissar for Ostland

I wish to ask you personally for an official directive for the conduct of the civilian administration towards the Jews deported from Germany to Byelorussia. Among these Jews are men who fought at the Front and have the Iron Cross, First and Second Class, war invalids, half-Aryans, even three- quarter Aryans. . .

. . .These Jews will probably freeze or starve to death in the coming weeks.
. . On my own responsibility I will not give the SD any instructions with regard to the treatment of these people. . .

I am certainly a hard man and willing to help solve the Jewish question, but people who come from our own cultural sphere just are not the same as the brutish hordes in this place. Is the slaughter to be carried out by the Lithuanians and Letts, who are themselves rejected by the population here? I couldn’t do it. I beg you to give clear directives [in this matter,] with due consideration for the good name of our Reich and our Party, in order that the necessary action can be taken in the most humane manner.
Heil Hitler!
Wilhelm Kube”

Despite these contradicting feelings he participated in an atrocity on 2 March 1942 in the Minsk ghetto.

minsk_ghetto

During a raid by German and Belarusian police, a group of children were seized and thrown into pits of deep sand to die.

At that moment, several SS officers arrived , among them was  Wilhelm Kube, immaculate in his uniform, threw handfuls of sweets to the distressed children. All the children died in the sand.

Donation

I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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Source

Remember.org