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.
He is not interested in hearing that an order miscarried because of the obstinacy or stupidity of a divisional commander. If a corps commander attempted to render such an explanation he would be told nine times out of ten that it was his job to have discovered the divisional commander's inadequacy long before and to have sacked him and replaced him with some more capable person.
This is not only the practical way in which an army operates but it is the only logical way. All armies are pyramidal in their organization. There is not time for an army commander or an army group commander to call a convention of all his divisional and regimental leaders every time he issues an order. The function of the corps is to make this unnecessary. The corps commanders are told what they are supposed to do and there, so far as their superior is concerned, the matter ends. If this were not so, the phrase "chain-of-command" would have no meaning. Aside from the fact that it is more than a trifle cowardly for these men to try to shift the responsibility to their subordinates for having executed orders which these men passed on after they were received from higher headquarters, the whole concept is grotesque.
Then take the case in which they have blamed their superiors. The Prosecution has already pointed out in its brief that the plea of superior orders is no defense at all. We shall not repeat here the abundance of authorities which we have already cited in support of our position on this legal issue. But a few remarks should be made with reference to some of the testimony on the subject.
The defendants themselves have not been consistent in the stand which they have taken on the issue of obedience to superior orders. Several of then are charged with having carried out the notorious Commissar Order. Every one of those has steadfastly denied that troops under his command summarily murdered political commissars in compliance with that unquestionably criminal mandate.
All have admitted having received the order or at least having been apprised of its contents. Now it should be remembered that the Commissar Order was Fuehrerbefehl, which is to say that it was issued by the highest possible authority. Yet the defendants say that they deliberately neglected or refused to obey it because they felt it was illegal, unsoldierly, and inhumane or because they believed it would have the precise opposite effect from that which was intended. In that matter they insisted upon substituting their own judgment for that of Adolf Hitler and Field marshal von Brauchitsch. Yet the very defendants who have testified in that vein about the Commissar Order have said that they had no right to forbid or discourage the shooting of hostages because hostage executions had been ordered by the OKW.
Another general observation might be made about the testimony which has been offered on the superior order defense. Except for Brigadier General von Geitner, the lowest-ranking defendants in this deck were Lieutenant Generals who commanded between 50,000 and 100,000 troops. Career officers who spent their lives learning their profession, they obtained their rank because in the opinion of their superiors they possessed the intelligence and judgment which the responsibility of such a position demanded. Within the framework of the broad directives given to those men, they were allowed and expected to exercise a wide discretion in carrying out their duties. We could hear testimony until doomsday that a Lieutenant General or a Colonel General or a Field marshal was only a loud speaker through which the commands of his superiors were amplified or echoed and it would still not be convincing.
If these men had disagreed with the policies which were being executed within their respective spheres of command, whether such policies affected the treatment of the civilian population, the discipline of the German troops, or the political and racial programs behind the directives handed down from higher echelons, that disapproval would have manifested itself immediately in a hundred different ways.
If they were the tools through which the murderous theories of Streicher, Himmler and Hitler were implemented, it was because their compliance was completely voluntary. The criminal liability for what they did cannot be shunted up the line.
A corollary of the superior order defense is the one predicated upon the assumption of the legality of orders emanating from Hitler and the OKW. Every defendant, without exception, has said that when such orders reached him, it never occurred to him to question their legality no matter what the subject matter or how severe the measures prescribe. They argue that there was a multitude of legal exports at OKW headquarters in Berlin and that they could not be expected to doubt that every OKW order had been subjected to the scrutiny of these jurists before it was sent out.
One would have to be credulous indeed to believe that professional soldiers with decades of active service and the experiences of a previous world war behind then were so ignorant as not to know that orders which denied the belligerent status to their enemies, which forbade the taking and indeed commended the execution of prisoners of war, and which established arbitrary hostage execution ratios of 50 and 100-to-1, were in patent violation of every recognized standard over set by civilized nations for the conduct of warfare. This plea would have no validity as a legal defense even if we believed them. The maxim ignorantia juris non excusat is as well recognized by the criminal codes of the continent as it is by Anglo-American law.
But how can one possibly accept this argument as sincere? Highranking military judges were readily available at Army and Division, and in Lanz's case even at Corps, headquarters if legal advice had been desired, which it clearly was not. Moreover, none of these very defendants, as they were eager to point out, assumed that the Commissar and Commando and Military Mission orders were valid, even though they, too, stemmed from the evil triumviato in Berlin.
Nor, on other occasions, when they were anxious to demonstrate their basic humaneness, did they hesitate to describe their misgivings about those same hostage, reprisal and band warfare regulations whose legality they insist had to be presumed. Consistency is a word which apparently is not found in their dictionary.
Along with superior orders, military necessity is the most basic of the defenses herein advanced. This defense is almost always yoked together with a long description of what the defendants call "Balkan mentality". Me have been told that this peculiar "Balkan mentality" is incomprehensible to the western European mind; that all of southeastern Europe is populated by uncivilized savages who are and were incapable of appreciating the finer things of life such as the presence of 20 or 30 divisions of German troops whose only purpose was to act as missionaries of culture and to protect these helpless people against an invasion by the American, British or Russian "enemy". We have been told that the disappointing response of the Balkan peoples to all the advantages of a German occupation was proof in itself that that occupation was a positive been to the region. The Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Albanians and Greeks have been depicted as having had only one desire -- to murder as many Germans and as many of each other as possible. We have been informed that the racial and religious hatreds which exist between the various groups in the Balkans are so deepseated and bitter that had it not been for the Germans they would leave annihilated each other wholesale. This is the picture of "Balkan mentality" as the defendants have painted it.
From this they go on to say that in dealing with such a situation ordinary measures were insufficient. To a man all of these defendants have testified that in their opinion it was impossible to govern in Yugoslavia and Greece without the use of reprisal measures.
The execution of hostages, the burning of villages and the shooting of captured partisans was, therefore, a case of military necessity.
The argument of the defense of military necessity is unconvincing here for several reasons. In the first place, it is the prosecution's contention that the plea of military necessity can never be used as a defense for the taking of an unarmed civilians life, if he is innocent of any hostile conduct against the occupying power. Section 24 of the American Army Field Manual correctly states the accepted definition of that term in international law. It reads:
"Military necessity admits of --
a. All direct destruction of life or limb of armed enemies, and of other persons whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable in the armed contests of war."
The emphasis of the word "armed" in the test necessarily excludes from the class of persons whose killing may be justified on the grounds of military necessity persons such as those who were used by the German troops as hostages.
In the second place, it is inconsistent to attempt to defend the same action by the plea of superior orders and also by that of military necessity because the two are mutually exclusive. If an act was committed solely because of superior orders, then presumably there was no military necessity for doing it; whereas if it was done because of military necessity, it would have been done anyhow regardless of the existence or non-existence of superior orders.
In the third place, the defense of military necessity flies into the teeth of all the available evidence here. In addition to the oral testimony of such witnesses as General von Greiffenberg, Bach-Zelewski, and even General Winter, there are among the documents many complaints made by responsible German officers, who pointed out that the technique of reprisal measures had proved to be a boomerang in that it resulted in a stiffening of partisan resistance in the areas where these measures were carried out.
We need not here go into a long refutation of what the defendants have said about "Balkan mentality". They were not in a position while in the Balkans to get a very clear or detached view of it, any more than the Balkan peoples were able to view from a favorable vantage point what could be conceivably argued to be a unique German mentality. The mentality of the Serbs, the Croats and the Greeks was undoubtedly a source of frustration and bafflement to the defendants, just as perhaps the British mentality was. Whatever the present or future relations between the United States and the Governments of Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece may be, the tenacious and inextinguishable spirit with which these people resisted the German occupation, sustained for two long and bitter years only by their own determination, will always be remembered as one of the greatest demonstrations of courage displayed during this or any other war. Resistance against enslavement has absorbed a good deal of these people's time during the past 100 years. It has been less than a century since the Serbs and Greeks threw off the Turkish yoke, and scarcely more than two decades have passed since those same heroic Serbs battled unaided for almost four years against the armies of the Triple Alliance. The Germans knew this, of course, when they invaded Yugoslavia, but these defendants and their brother officers thought that by applying von Clausewitz's theory of unrestricted warfare with sufficient ruthlessness they could break the spirit of these long-suffering people as even the Turks had failed to do before them. The long record of crimes which have been described at the bar of this Tribunal are the natural result of the practical application of this method of restoring quiet to the Balkans.
It not only failed but it stirred up such a hornet's nest of resistance that tens of thousands of soldiers desperately needed elsewhere were immobilized to do nothing but garrison and police duty -- all because of this obstinate "Balkan mentality".
The contention predicated and the allegedly binding effect of the surrender of the Greek and Yugoslav armies is just as infirm as the other so-called defenses. General Tsolocoglu who signed the capitulation agreement on the part of the Greek Epirus Army was not the commander-in-chief of that Army but only its deputy commander-in-chrief. Further, there is no evidence whatever that Tsolocoglu was authorized either by the Greek Government, headed by King George II, or by the actual commander-in-chief of the Epirus Army to sign that capitulation agreement. The defense had not even attempted to prove who signed the capitulation agreement on behalf of the Greek Thracian Army or that capitulation too was authorized by the Greek Government.
The situation is even clearer in the case of the capitulation of the Yugoslav Army. The surrender agreement there was signed by the former, and deposed, Foreign Minister of Yugoslavia, Cincar Markovic. The commander-in-chief of the Yugoslav forces, General Simovic, who was simultaneously Prime Minister of King Peter's government, not only did not sign the agreement of surrender of the Yugoslav armed forces but had previously fled the country along with the rest of his cabinet for exile in England. In this case not even the deputy commander-in-chief of the Yugoslav armed forces, General Kalafotovic, signed the agreement of surrender to the Germans. So much for the facts regarding the defense based upon the capitulation of Greece and Yugoslavia.
The legal theory of the defense on this point seems to be this -- when an officer signs an agreement of surrender, even though he is not only not authorized but specifically forbidden from doing so, then it is unlawful thereafter for any of that officer's countrymen under any circumstances to take up arms against the conquering power. If this reasoning is valid, then all of the American forces in the Pacific after April 1942 could have been treated as francs-tireurs simply because General Wainwright, their fellow American, had surrendered on Corregidor. Before the defendants can justify themselves for having refused to accord belligerent status to a particular partisan on this ground, it must first be shown that the partisan in question had formerly been a member of the Yugoslav Army and was, therefore, constructively bound by the surrender agreement. One need not labor the obvious by remarking that no such proof has been offered.
The defense with respect to these capitulation agreements has still a further flaw. It was said that following the collapse of Greek resistance in April 1941, the Greek prisoners were allowed to return to their homes with the understanding that they would not in the future take up arms against the conqueror. Prisoners of war, who are set at liberty on parole, are bound, on their personal honor, scrupulously to fulfill the engagements they have contracted. Presumably one of those engagements which the surrendered Greek soldiers contracted to fulfill, though the evidence is flimsy to say the least, was to never again take up arms against Germany. But even if any evidence of such a parole agreement at the time of the surrender of the Greek forces had been made out by the defense, it would not be binding here for several reasons.
First, prisoners of war may be set at liberty on parole only if the laws of their country allow and there has, of course, been no proof of what Greek law is on this matter.
Furthermore, there can be no paroling on the battle field, no paroling of entire bodies of troops after battle, and no dismissal of large numbers of prisoners by a general declaration. Even if one accepts the scant proof offered by the defense on this point, it can scarcely be doubted that this forbidden type of parole was exactly the kind that the German Army there adopted at the time of the Greek surrender.
In addition, a prisoner of war cannot be compelled to accept his liberty on parole nor is the hostile government obliged to accede to the request of a prisoner to be set at liberty on parole. There has been no proof that the Greek government-in-exile ever consented to or ratified the discharge of captured members of the Greek Army on parole -- even if there was any such discharge on the part of the German Army at that time. The only evidence adduced by the defense would indicate that the Greek prisoners of war were merely disarmed and sent home without further ado to save the German Army the trouble of feeding them.
Further, the conqueror has certain duties and obligations to perform to the conquered even in a case of an unconditional surrender. The making of an unconditional surrender does not free the victor from his obligation to observe international law; and when the Germans commenced their campaign of indiscriminate shootings and hangings of the civilian population, even former members of the Greek and Yugoslav Armies, who had given their individual paroles - if such there were - were perfectly justified in using whatever means they could to rid their country of this plague.