stand for cross-examination without prolonging the trial for another six months. We, therefore, attempted to choose a representative cross-section. Out of more than a thousand affiants we selected fourteen and requested that they appear in Court. Twelve of them did. The result was very edifying.
On the basis of their testimony and documents submitted during their examination, it appeared that one group of affiants might either have been assigned their own particular seats in the defendants' doctor else have been immediately arrested for the lesser charge of perjury. Colonel von Harling, the Ic or Intelligence Officer of Army Group F, followed the established line in swearing that no Allied commandos were ever executed in the Southeast. This declaration was made just before the Colonel was shown his own handwritten signature on orders which sent three named individuals, and an untold number of other commando prisoners, to the SD for "special treatment" that Harling himself in an unexpected burst of candor admitted it meant liquidation. General Winter was another such witness. Winter, though he succeeded Foertsch as Chief of Staff of Army Group E and later of Army Group F, did not know anything about reprisal ratios. He learned things after the war, of course, but to be perfectly honest, he had to tell this Court that from his recollection of his time in the Balkans he could not remember any such ratios. The Tribunal will remember his sputtering and bewildered explanations when he was shown the document containing notes on a speech that he himself delivered at a conference of chiefs of staff on 9 December 1943 in which a 50:1 hostage ratio for German dead and a 10:1 hostage ratio for German wounded was ordered. Later in that same conference Winter was quoted as having said "unfortunately it is not feasible to behead everybody".
It developed that another class of affiants had absolutely no knowledge whatever on which to base the statements made in their affidavits. General Dehner's chauffeur, was dusting off his desk one day and happened to notice a piece of paper.
He did not know who had written the paper, or what was on the paper, or where the paper had come from, but it was his impression that it had something to do with hostages. On the basis of this he made a statement in his affidavit that General Dehner frequently interceded with agencies which were not subordinate to him when the measures which these agencies took were too severe. Another witness, Hans von Selohow, made an affidavit which contained three paragraphs explaining that the Railroad Security Service was not subordinate to the LXIXth Reserve Corps. On the stand it developed that he did not even know what divisions were in the LXIXth Corps. So far as the Security Service was concerned, he did not know what their duties were, who their commanding officer was, to what extent the activities were coordinated with those of German troops in the area, or whether the Corps or the Railroad Security Service had the greater number of troops.
But there is still a further category of affidavits which differ from those which the Court struck only in that the affiants have not been formally indicted. When one of the defendants here was formerly a Corps commander at the time the Prosecution alleged certain outrages were committed by German troops of that particular Corps, it is a standard practice to produce the affidavits of several of the Corps commander's subordinates who have an obvious self-interest in having this Court find that these outrages were never committed. Still another class of affidavits is comprised of those which eulogize the character and deep religious instincts of the defendants. If any of the defendants ever helped a blind man across the street or petted a dog, the incident is probably described at length in some affidavit as an example of his sympathetic and benign attitude towards the Universe and as proof positive that he could never possibly have done anything unkind. It is true that a casual examination of many of these affidavits will reveal that the affiant has not seen the defendant for 10 or 15 years, but the assertions that the latter is by nature utterly incapable of doing anything that is not recommended by the Sermon on the Mount are apparently thought none the weaker for that.
In one case the affiant even dwelt at length on the fact that one of the defendants had a very moderate appetite because of some stomach ailment. The object of this was apparently to show that the defendant was not immortal.
The question of the credibility of a witness is usually arguable and even a lawyer making a wholesale onslaught on the character of the opposition's proof in the heat of advocacy ordinarily admits to himself that there might possibly exist some ground for disagreement on the matter. But when one witness after another gets on the stand and reads off a series of self-serving declarations from a prefabricated script only to burst like a paper bag on cross-examination and when this process continues almost without exception for seven months, we have no inner misgivings when we make the statement that ninetenths of what has gone into this record as so-called defense testimony, including the affidavits, is completely unworthy of credence.
So much for the general character and credibility of the evidence produced by the Defense. We turn now to the specific assertions and denials made by way of defense. Since most of the defendants have sought sanctuary in certain common arguments, repetition can be avoided if these are taken up generically before going into the specific use which each individual defendant tried to make of them. If a certain standard defense is invalid on general principles, it evidently is worthless in a particular application.
First, the defendants maintain that the documents do not mean what they say. Several ingenious schemes have been contrived to support this thesis. Among these is the "telegraphic style" argument. According to this, the documents must be viewed with caution and alarm because they contain numerous daily reports which were sent either by teletype or radio and therefore do not possess the same profusion of adjectives, modifying clauses and so forth in which we have luxuriated here for the past several months.
We can appreciate the adherence in which these defendants hold a telegraphic style. After having listened to them testify, it is obvious how painful it must be for them to read or hear anything that does not bristle with semi-colons, prepositional phrases, and complex-compound clauses inserted parenthetically into the middle of the sentence just to let the speaker get his breath before he makes his last 400-word sprint to the period. But the defendants profess that the brevity and curtness of these reports leads to ambiguous interpretation. Therefore, they have all testified that these reports are in large measure completely incomprehensible to them. The answer to this is that there were no complaints made about their clarity and meaning at the time they were sent and that they were clear enough to enable the defendants and their subordinates to operate the German Army.
But the telegraphic style argument, handy as it is, will not answer every purpose. When a daily report states that "50 men were standrechtlich erschossen" by German troops, there is not much doubt that fifty men were shot and that they were not shot in combat. When another report says "200 people transferred to Zazaviza concentration camp" by a certain army unit, we have no trouble comprehending what happened. Again, when a report reads "400 conscripted workers shipped off to Germany" by a certain Wehrmacht unit the meaning seems to be fairly clear. The defendants dispose of this by the simple device of bringing forth a new set of definitions. They assure us that we are confused if we interpret these messages as meaning what they say. The standrechtliches erschossen does not mean summarily shot, but shot after court martial. "Concentration camp" does not mean concentration camp, it means collecting camp."Conscripted workers" really means voluntary workers. We have not been furnished with a copy of the dictionary which the defendants use but it would be interesting to know, for example, assuming the term "concentration camp" really did mean something else, what term should be used if the word "concentration camp" were meant.
If the text of any given report is perfectly unambiguous and if even the lexicographical talent which has been displayed here cannot redefine it into incoherence, the defendants still have several shafts for their bow. Generally, the first one to be shot is the non-subordination argument. In the area of command of each corps and army were stationed certain troops or groups of armed men all of whom were assigned some part in carrying out the German occupation but who were not technically part of the Army. Among these organizations were the Security Police, the Einsatz Commandos and other elements of the SD, the indigenous troops belonging to the armies of the puppet states which the Germans had set up, as well as certain non-uniformed guerrilla groups who were technically not part of any army but who operated in close cooperation with the German forces. In one report after another the butcheries and plunders committed by these auxiliary organizations are described. It can be seen from many of these reports that these atrocities were committed while the group in question was in the course of carrying out a certain operation under the tactical command of or in conjunction with the Army.
In others, it is not specifically shown that at the time these crimes were committed, the organizations involved were acting with the Army in achieving a specific aim but it does appear that they were committing their atrocities within the area of a given Army Division and that they were sending constant reports to that Division on the nature and location of their activities. In both cases, however, the defendants disavow any responsibility for acts committed by those units.
But they go further than this in their disclaimer of responsibility. A third class of reports exists. In these, a given Army division merely reports to its corps headquarters that 50 hostages have been hanged in a given locality within the divisional area. Nothing more is said.
In every case where the daily report does not fix with certainty the company or battalion or regiment which pulled the trigger or tied the hangman's knot, the defendants have argued that these things were probably done by the SS or the SD or the Police or the Ustacha or the Kosta Pecanac Chetnicks or the Ezones or by some other unit which was either not subordinate to the Army or else was subordinate only for "tactical" purposes.
There are several answers to this argument. First, it is the Prosecution's contention that when the 173rd Infantry Reserve Division reports that 50 hostages were hanged and 50 shot on the same day within the divisional area and makes no mention of any of these other organizations in that connection, it is to be fairly informed that some unit of the 173rd Infantry Reserve Division did the hanging and the shooting. The defendants all deny that this was so. They say that the division reported everything that happened within its area, whether it was done by the division or not, and that unless the report puts the finger squarely on the second platoon of Company C of the 3rd Battalion of the First Regiment of that particular Army Division no responsibility can be fixed.
We submit that this is an affront to common sense. Time and again these defendants have testified to the way that indiscriminate mistreatment of the population and ill-advised executions, arrests and deportations by the police and the SD merely added to the Army's difficulties in keeping the population pacified and subdued. On the other hand they have testified one after the other that reprisal measures properly directed and carried out with sufficient force had a most salubrious and soothing effect on the natives.
Now, assuming what they have said to be true, does it make sense that an Army division, in reporting the execution of a reprisal measure within its area to corps headquarters, would simply report that 100 people had been hanged if it thought that corps headquarters would have any doubt as to who had done the hanging?
If this had been the case, the reports would have been less than meaningless. Corps headquarters would have had no way of knowing, when it received intelligence or the occurrence of one of these massacres, whether to expect calm and tranquility in that particular area for a while or whether to anticipate new outbreaks of rebellion, acts of sabotage and attacks on German troops and installations. Moreover, when a particular action was committed by any of these extraneous agencies, the Division's report precisely said just that. We contend that the only sensible interpretation to be placed on one of these reports made by an Army division in which the carrying out of a reprisal measure is described, is that the reprisal measure in question was carried out by that division, unless some other group is specifically named, and that in fact corps headquarters when it received such a report placed that identical interpretation on it.
But let us, as devil's advocate, assume for the moment that the chaotic system which the defendants claim was actually followed in making these reports and that corps headquarters or army headquarters, when it received the news that a few hundred hostages had been liquidated in the area of a certain division, had no way of knowing who had ordered and carried it out or what its consequences were likely to be. Are these defendants to be exonerated from responsibility for these outrages which were committed by their satellite organizations? When the relationship between these organizations and the Army is examined it will be seen that it was the Army authorities and no one else who were in a position to forbid, avoid and prevent those slaughters from being committed.
First, let us take the relationship between the Army and the Croatian Domobrans. Shortly after the Germans ijvaded Yugoslavia the so-called independent state of Croatia came into being. As one of the defense witnesses said, "Germany created the state of Croatia." It was and remained a puppet state of the expansive Third Reich. Any doubt as to this would be quickly quieted by the tone of unctuous servility in which the communications addressed by the Croatian government to the Army occupation authorities were couched.
The convenience of establishing such a state from the German standpoint is so obvious that it scarcely need be mentioned. By this simple device the German Army transformed itself from a conquering army stationed in occupied territory to an "allied" force invited to remain in the common struggle. As such, it could step out from under its obligations to the civilian population, As such, it could sponsor the formation of a Croatian army to be used for its own purposes while at the same time masking its own reeking activities behind the facade of Croatian marionettes.
The nature of this parasitic regime, made up of jackals and scavengers who would stop at nothing, not even the murder of thousands of their innocent countrymen, for the few bones which fell from the German stable is so evident that one wonders how anyone can stand in this courtroom, as at least six persons have already done and as three persons will certainly do during the next several days, and hold forth to this Tribunal about the COURT NO.
V, CASE NO. VII.
"independent Croatian Government."
But we are not so much interested in the general nature of the Croatian Government as we are in the relation which the Croatian troops bore to the German commanders. To begin with, the Croatian army was organized and trained by the Germans. Their officers and men, as the documents here show, were screened by the Germans so that all "unreliable elements" could be purged. Once they were trained, they were then equipped and armed by the Germans, and then sent to their permanent stations by the Germans. Now, since all of the "independent state of Croatia" was included in the area of one of the three German Army corps stationed there, and since each of those corps were divided into divisional areas, no matter where the Croat troops were stationed they were bound to be in the area of some German division. Within the divisional area, the Germans indicated where the Croat troops were to be stationed and what their tasks were to be, whether it was the guarding of a bridge by a Domobransunit or the patrolling of a railroad line by a detachment of Ustashi.
Then, from time to time, the Croat units would be notified that the German troops intended to carry out a certain tactical operation. Usually these operations consisted of "mopping up" or "combing out" certain areas in an effort to reduce the activities of the partisans -either by destroying their hospitals and bases of supply or by arresting all the able-bodied men in the locality. The Croat troops in such an operation were assigned a certain definite role to play in conjunction with the German troops. When the operation was finished, the German divisional commander would then instruct the Croat troops to take up their old stations and resume their railroad security activities or whatever else they had been doing.
This is what Rendulic, Dehner and Leyser mean when they say that the Croat troops were not "subordinate" or that they were only "tactically" subordinate to them. It is precisely what Lanz, Felmy and Speidel mean when they correspondingly deny responsibility for the excesses of Greek "volunteer" units. In both cases the evidence is Irrefutable that these sets of gangsters were, from start to finish, no more than the uniformed tools and hirelings of the German army. Dehner and Leyser repeatedly protest that they could not order a member of the Domobrans to be tried by a German court martial. In that they may be technically correct -but neither, for that matter, could they order a German soldier to be tried before a court-martial. Only a divisional commander could do that. But who is so naive as to believe that a divisional commander dictates to his superior at Corps headquarters? The record here shows that the power of the German corps commanders in Croatia was such that they could even remove the Croatian civil officials when it pleased them. It is utterly fantastic for them to say that they could take no measures to curb excesses committed by these Croatian janizaries.
We have singled out the relationship between the Domobrans, which was the regular army of the Croatian "independent state", merely as an illustration. What we have said about them applies with equal force to the Ustascha, the Croatian counterpart of the Waffen-SS. It applied with perhaps even more compelling force to the groups of Serbian non-uniformed irregulars -- the Kosta Pecanac, Danzic and even certain branches of the Mihailovic Chetniks -- who were armed and used by the German Army whenever it suited their convenience. It applies, in short, to all of the countries in Southeastern Europe in which the Germans set up puppet regimes and used indigenous troops to murder their compatriots.
The relationship between a principal and an accessory before-the-fact to murder does not depend on the word "subordination" and the use of that term as these defendants here attempt to apply it to these indigenous troops is as false as the premise upon which it rests - i.e. the myth of the independence of these puppet governments who were installed and kept in power solely at the whim of German arms.
The defendants seek also to escape responsibility by the use of their famous subordination principle for the acts of units of police troops which operated within their areas of command. The witness Korn exploded the theory of the independence of the police troops from Army jurisdiction. According to him, during the 18 months he was in the Southeast the police troops only once carried out an operation alone - that is to say, without the help of the Army. The police troops received their ammunition, transport and supplies from the Army and it was impossible, he said, for the police to carry on an operation of any size or importance without first obtaining the consent and approval of Army authorities. This is fully borne out by what the witness Bach-Zelewski had to say of the close cooperation between the police troops and the first Cossack Division in the course of Operation Arnim. The defendants say that they were not informed of the activities of the police; but the documents show that the police periodically reported to the Army on precisely what they were doing.
The defendants say that they and their Army subordinates protested against the activities of the police from time to time. They may have done so, but that their protests were not based on any humane considerations was shown by the testimony of one of the defendant's own witnesses, General von Behr, who testified that he as divisional commander objected to the activities of the police only because they were not carried out with enough troops to be really effective:
In other words he was not protesting against the severity of the measures taken by the police, but because they were not severe enough. Of further import is the significant fact that evidence of these protests is strangely missing from the captured German Army documents.
The next group which operated within the area of the Wehrmacht command were the Einsatzkommandos of the SD. The defendants now disclaim any responsibility for what these people did and say that they had no idea of their operations and no means of curbing them even if they had known. This, of course, flies into the teeth of the many documents here which show that on most of the large scale mopping up operations carried out by the Army, units of the SD were attached to each Army unit for the purpose of screening the inhabitants, cleaning up the rear area after the Army troops had advanced, taking care of the parsons who were arrested and who were subsequently to be transferred either to concentration camps or hostage camps or shipped off to Germany for forced labor in factory and mine. The SD was the most murderous and dreaded organization in Germany, with the possible exception of the Gestapo, and it is understandable that the defendants are a little sensitive when it is pointed out that the German Army and the SD frequently worked in close cooperation. But the proof showed beyond any doubt that close harmony existed between the two organizations and that when the Army had any need for the special services which the SD was so expert in furnishing, they joined hands and worked together as on a common enterprise.
Finally, the defendants seek to throw as much of the blame for this complex of outrages as possible on their favorite whipping-boy, the Waffen-SS. Here again it is claimed that the Army had no authority over the SS except in a purely "tactical" sense. One example is sufficient to show how elastic this term "tactical subordination" is, as used by the defendants. The court will remember General von Leyser's description of the partisan attack on an armed truck convoy in Albania, in the course of which three German female employees who were being evacuated from Tirana were captured. From the war diary of the XXIst Mountain Corps we discover that an SS Oberfuehrer has ordered an SS major to burn down some villages in the locality of the attack and to kill the population. The report goes on to say: "The approval of the Corps is still missing. Major Frank asks whether the Corps agrees to the carrying out of these reprisal measures and asks for an immediate reply". Two days later a report shows that the SS Division Skanderbeg is holding hostages, who were presumably seized in connection with this same attack. Still later, we find Corps headquarters directing the SS Division Skanderbeg not to carry out the shooting of 50 hostages, because such an action might jeopardize the negotiations with the partisans for the return of the three German women.
Now, if the SS was only "tactically subordinate" to the Army, then we can only conclude from this report that the shooting of hostages and the burning down of villages are to be considered as strictly tactical measures. Obviously, the SS would not have asked the Corps for permission to do these things unless it was necessary to obtain permission from the Army before doing it.
This one representative example - an illustration which could be multiplied many score, will suffice.
SS atrocities occurred not in spite of Army opposition but because they were an integral part of, and consistent with, German Army occupation policy. But even when "disciplinary" as opposed to "tactical" jurisdiction of the Army over one of the conventional scapegoat agencies is proved - as was the case with Felmy and the Rosenberg detachment operating within his area of command in South Greece in 1941 - then we are told, surprisingly enough, that "disciplinary" authority is of no particular importance since it refers only to such minor questions as proper dress, military courtesy and the like. Thus when Army commanders have it, "disciplinary" authority is essentially unimportant; but when they don't have it, it assumes proportions of importance limited only by the defendants' endurance and vehemence of speech.
The Tribunal should keep in mind in considering all of these attempts to shuttle the responsibility from the Army to one of these other organizations that we have been told time and again by these defendants and their witnesses that within a given divisional area the division commander was held primarily responsible for everything that happened and that he was the highest German authority there. The same was true of the Corps commanders to an even greater extent. The German Army was always by far superior in numbers, power, prestige and influence to any of the other units which have been mentioned. The fact that the police, the SD and indigenous troops are named in these reports show that the army authorities were kept fully posted on their activities. Without the full knowledge and consent of the Army these organizations could not have come into a given divisional area at all, much less functioned independently after they got there.
The picture which has developed from the exaggerations made by these defendants in their effort to shift responsibility from the Army to other agencies in completely ridiculous. We are supposed to believe that within any given sector assigned to an Army division, there were all sorts of odd groups - police, SS, the SD, various units of indigenous military and semi-military personnel, and even certain elements of the Wehrmacht itself, such as parts of the notorious Brandenburg Division, wandering around, stumbling over each other, getting in each other's way and working at cross purposes. They would have us understand that these units simply marched over the division area at random, hanging, shooting, burning and plundering without giving the Division any idea who and where they were, what their purpose, and how they were achieving it. Merely to sum up this description is enough to demonstrate its absurdity. If this were actually what took place, then it it would have been the Germans much more than the Croats, Serbs, Albanians, or Greeks who were the partisans. The truth is, as we have already shown, that the commanding officers of the Army possessed all of the power necessary to restrain these auxiliaries and they not only had the power but also the duty, since it was they who were primarily responsible for maintaining peace and security within their areas of command. Since they had both the power and the duty to prevent these outrages, it is they and no one else who should be held accountable for their having occurred.
We pass on now to the next excuse offered by the defendants - that they were ignorant of the commission of these crimes.
When they are asked to explain a daily report from one of their subordinate units which mentions the burning down of several villages, or the hanging of a dozen-odd hostages in reprisal for an attack on a truck convoy or a railroad blasting, they say it is very difficult for them to do this, because although this report was made to their own headquarters they did not read it and only saw it here at Nuremberg for the first time. How often have we listened to that enervating chant - "I learned of these things for the first time here in this courtroom."
General Dehner offered as proof of his ignorance the fact that many of those daily reports addressed to his corps from the various divisions which formed it did not show his initials, whereas it was his invariable custom, he said, to put his Initials on every such report that he read. On cross-examination, however, it developed that the presence or absence of his Initials on a document had little or no bearing on his knowledge of the events described in it because, in the first place, the papers which he initialed were frequently the first drafts while the documents presented in evidence here were the final drafts; and, in addition, because whether he read the report or not made very little difference since his chief of staff had a duty to give him oral summaries of all reports which he did not actually read.
Geitner's testimony on the subject of his initials was even more involved. According to him he had two methods of initialing. In both cases he used the letter "G" but if the letter was "a long cursory 'G'" that indicated that he had seen the order only after his commander had signed it; whereas in the rare instances in which he saw the particular order before it went to the commander for his signature, the letter was made in a more precise, formal and soldierly fashion.
Following this discourse on calligraphy the number of subjects which had not been Drought into this case as a matter of defense was reduced to two - falconry and the occurrence of sun spots - an omission attributable no doubt to oversight rather than to lace of diligence on the part of counsel.
But judging from the testimony of the other defendants, particularly List, Kuntze and Foertsch before him and Felmy and Speidel after him, General Dehner's case was typical. Each in his turn has testified about briefings and the daily morning and evening conferences when the various situation reports from the field were discussed. One of the main purposes of these conferences was to enable the commanding officer to find out from his Chief of Staff, the Ia and the Ic officers, and various other experts exactly what was happening within his area of command.
But it is not necessary to go into a detailed analysis of all the wonders to which we have been treated in the course of the attempts made to bolster these professions of ignorance. These men were the highest ranking members of the German Army within their respective areas. But even if they did not know of this constant campaign of terror and murder of the civilian population being carried out by their troops, reports of which were being sent to their headquarters at least daily, and usually, twice a day, it makes no difference from a legal standpoint. They were charged with the duty of knowing it. It was It was their business to know what was being done by their troops and they cannot escape the responsibility for these atrocities by saying that they did not bother to read what was furnished there for the specific purpose of allowing them to know.
This interpretation of the duty of a commanding officer is not novel. In U.S. v. Oswald Pohl, et al., tho court said, "The law of war imposes on a military officer in a position of command an affirmative duty to take such steps as are within his power and appropriate to the circumstances to control those under his command for the prevention of acts which are violations of the law of war". (Tr. 8123). That Tribunal pointed out that the Supreme Court of the United States had already announced this principal in tho Yamashita case.
Another popular fable is the sick leave or holiday explanation. This is given in two different situations. In the first one, the defendant formulated an order for some criminal acts, passed it on to his subordinates and then went to the hospital or took a few days' leave. In this courtroom he takes the position that no blame can attach to him if he was not actually sitting in his office at the time the culpable act was carried out. That such an argument is even put forward shows the desperation of the person making it. If a terrorist leaves a time bomb with a 24-hour fuse in a London railroad station and ten people are subsequently killed by the explosion, it is hardly a legal defense to the charge of murder that the man who planted the bomb was in Dublin when it went off. This is precisely analogous to the argument which the defendants make here.
Then there is another situation in which the holiday or sick leave argument is advanced. Here the defendant himself did not actually give the specific order before he left his headquarters. It was given either by his Chief of Staff or by whoever happened to be his responsible deputy during his absence. The defendant, therefore, disavows any responsibility for tho order even though upon his being advised of it, he took no stops either to rescind it, to reprimand the officer who actually signed it, or to forbid the issuance of similar orders in tho future.
How one can well imagine the subsequent fate of a subordinate who, having temporarily taken over his superior's duties during a short absence, attempted during that time to issue an order to kill people without having first assured himself that any orders of this kind would meet with his superior"s full approval and be ratified and defended upon the latter"s return. Yet these defendants seriously argue that every time they went to the hospital or to the homeland for a few days their chiefs of staff or deputies not only issued orders without their knowledge and approval, but indeed issued orders which effected a complete reversal of all policies which had been announced and followed previously. If this had been the case, it would have been necessary for every commanding officer in the German Army to stay awake and alert twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in order to insure against one of his subordinate's bringing about a complete shambles every time ho turned his back.
This last variation of the holiday-sick leave argument is merely one of a number of means which have been employed in an effort to achieve tho same end. The end is not very pretty, but then those defendants are in no position to pay too much attention to aosthetic considerations. The aim is simply to shove the responsibility for those crimes on to their fellow officers in the German Wehrmacht. They will first try to place the onus on the police or the SS, but if that maneuver is too far-fetched, they then cast about to find some other German Army officer to boar the blame. As was to be expected, their first choice for the role of scapegoat is generally some officer of lower rank than their own, such as a divisional commander. But if that is not feasible, then as a last resort they say that the responsibility rests with their superiors.
Then does every defendant, be he a full Army or but a Corps commander conveniently place himself in a pivotal position from which he can, as the winds seem to blow, pass criminal responsibility either up or down the military pyramid.
Now this all a ticklish business, of course, and has to be approached with case and circumspection. It is not strategically advisable simply to blame any superior officer who may be lying around handy. After all, the German Army must be vindicated, and that aim cannot be accomplished if all of its high-ranking officers are to be smeared with accusations of participating in the kind of indefensible butcheries that we have heard discussed here. So a technique has been devised to meet the requirements of the delicate situation. In blaming their superiors, the defendants here have been careful to do one of two things s they have either phrased their language in vague, corporate terms by saying that the OKH or the OKW was responsible, without naming particular individuals; or else, if it seemed more expedient to unload the blame onto a specific individual, they have been careful to choose individuals who are dead.
First, take the case in which their subordinates have been selected to bear the responsibility. This excuse is patently based upon a deliberate distortion of the whole concept of military organization, not only as it was known in the German Army, but in every army in the world. When the general of an army issues an order, it is to his corps commanders that he looks for its execution. If the order is disobeyed or clumsily carried out, it is the corps commander who is called on the carpet. Perhaps the order was not carried out because some major general was derelict in his duty. Possibly the fault is really that of some colonel or major.
But an army commander is not disposed to be interested in first causes. It may be that for want of a nail the shoe was lost and that eventually for want of the shoe the battle was lost. But neither the blacksmith nor the horse is held accountable by the commanding general.