I’m currently reading The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert, a fascinating book in a horrifying way.
There’s only so many times you can read, "and 7000 Jews of village ‘X’ were marched off and shot’ and similar phrases before Stalin’s famous line begins to ring true, (one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic) But it should be required reading for all politicians and others who might be a bit more reluctant to throw threats and abuse around when we can see where it can lead.
It’s a comprehensive work and it made me recall something I read in a different book (sorry, can’t recall the title) that stated that, although it didn’t occur on a large scale, at a later stage of the war the Nazi’s extended their extermination campaign to their own badly wounded and crippled soldiers. Not something that would have gone down too well with troops fighting on the front-line I would have thought…
The other book was a work of fiction but apparently based on real facts, I was a little surprised to read that part because its not something I’ve come across before.
I have tried to google the answer to this question without success but I’m a little leery of putting in the required search terms, some not so pleasant websites tend to pop-up.
I read a book recently that said the same thing. The Germans (or Nazis if you prefer) did have "hospitals " where their amputee soldiers were executed as being of no further use. I will have to look around and see if I can find out the title- it is after midnight here.
Okay, I found the book. It is called “Visions of Victory” by Gerhard Weinberg, a leading American scholar of WW2 (according to the blurb).
The relevant aprt mentions the killing of the handicapped and says it continued until 1945. To quote “By that time, among the tens of thousands murdered were numerous German WW1 veterans, and a start had been made on WW 2 veterans as well”.
Funny, I’d read that the Germans were the best of all the militaries involved in WWII at putting wounded soldiers back into service in non-combat positions.
Look at von Stauffenberg; the guy lost an eye, an arm, and several fingers on the remaining arm, and not only did they not kill him, but instead they put him to work within the military.
The Germans needed everyone they could get- an amputee manning a desk somewhere meant a guy with both arms holding a rifle; executing amputees would have been stupid.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was fairly widespread battlefield euthanasia going on; I doubt that the retreating German officers or men would leave severely wounded comrades to die horribly or be tortured by the Soviets. For that matter, I’ve read accounts of American medical personnel triaging casualties, and another officer following behind and putting down the ones categorized as beyond help in a sort of ad-hoc euthanasia program, so I don’t think it was limited strictly to the Germans.
If it was that extraordinary efforts were not being expended to save gravely wounded soldiers on death’s door who lost limbs I might understand that in a battlefield medical theatre, but actually going back and deliberately killing your own amputee soldiers after they have been stabilized BECAUSE (specifically) they were of no more fighting use? That’s hard to believe, real hard.
If I remember my history correctly, the Nazi’s did some other things to some other people who were no longer of any use to their regime that is hard to believe (real hard) as well…
But in his point he mentioned that they’d already gone through the trouble of amputating and stabilizing the injured soldiers - so he’s asking why they’d bother doing that if they were just going to kill them.
Indeed. The SS’ entire *raison d’etre *was extermination and its furtherance and support. What happens when there aren’t enough people left to exterminate? You make more.
Much of certainly. Probably over half. But the Wehrmacht, especially in the East (where the overwhelming majority of extermination occurred) was largely complicit in the crimes. See both Ordinary Men and Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
I no longer have the book so I can’t check but if I recall correctly the author framed it as a conversation between the main character and an army sergeant who was discussing a carefully hidden fact, that the ‘gas vans’ used to execute Jews and others were now also secretly being used to ‘get rid of’ crippled soldiers who presented a drain on German resources.
As I said this passage got an eyebrow raise from me because I’d never heard of it before but for all the flaws of the book historic inaccuracy didn’t seem to be one of them.
I thought this kind of stuff was more a Japanese thing, death before dishonor and all that, tho that probably involved suicide more than homicide-at the very least I believe injured IJN soldiers would often stay behind during a retreat with a hand grenade or two, and blow themselves up when an American squad came near. That kind of thing was what was expected of them.
Yeah but… it’s a lot easier to kill someone you have identified and demonized as a specific “outgroup” enemy. In this context “enemy” men, women and children get killed without a blink. This scenario is as old as history. In this context even if you hate the “other” you (almost by necessity to have the aforesaid attitude) have a huge level of affiliation for your own group.
With this in mind, to go around killing your own crippled heroic soldiers who have given their all as a matter of efficiency and policy is very hard to believe and smells of bullshit even for the Nazis.
The claim is just not consistent with all the late middle aged to elderly amputee German veterans if WWII I saw while serving as an American soldier in West Germany in the late 60s and early 70s, including public officials I dealt with in the line of duty. That there were badly wounded who were killed rather than let them fall into Russian hands in the darkest days on the Eastern Front is possible, but I can’t accept that it was widespread or a matter of established policy on the part of the armed forces or the NAZI establishment.
I’ll be the first to admit that the Nazis were unsavory. That having been said, killing injured soldiers would destroy the morale of your non-injured soldiers since they would expect that injury would result in death.
I can see and understand such a noble mindset, even from a Nazi who would gladly gun down a village of helpless Polish peasants for a mid-morning amusement, and I have no real idea what the majority of Nazis actually thought, but I could also easily see the attitude of “This gimpy, lazy bastard was stupid/unlucky/careless enough to let the enemy shoot him, and now he’s just one more useless mouth to feed and asshole to wash, who’s care and assistance takes up the time and labor of yet another able-bodied German. A single bullet would nicely free up that much more food and manpower for the use of the Vaterland.”