REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
TEACHING LESSON 10
HANDOUT 10A
GERMAN OFFICERS STATE THEIR CASE. PART I

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USHMM: courtesy National Archives Otto Ohlendorf testifying on his own behalf at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, 9 Oct. 1947

At the Nuremberg War Trials, Otto Ohlendorf, an officer in the German army, was questioned about his leadership of the Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing units. These squads moved from place to place killing groups of people and piling their bodies into mass graves often dug by the victims themselves. Under Ohlendorf’s direction, Special Task Unit D murdered about 90,000 Jews. The mobile killing units operated in newly captured Soviet territory in 1941, killing more than 1.2 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war taken by the Germans. Ohlendorf was a university-educated officer who held a Ph.D. in law. An academic and intellectual, he held the position of Director of Research at the Institute for World Economy and Maritime Transport before becoming commander of Ein-satzgruppen D. Two excerpts from his testimony at the Nuremberg Trials follow:

PROSECUTOR : What were the instructions with respect to the Jews and the communists [officials]?

OHLENDORF : The instructions were that in the Russian operational areas of the Einsatzgruppen, the Jews as well as the Soviet political leaders were to be liquidated.

PROSECUTOR : And when you say “liquidated” do you mean “killed”?

OHLENDORF : Yes, I mean “Killed.” In the late summer of 1941 Himmler . . . assembled the leaders and men of the Einsatzkommandos, repeated to them the liquidation order, and pointed out that the leaders and men who were taking part in the liquidation bore no personal responsibility for the execution of this order. The responsibility was his alone and [Hitler’s]. . . . To me it is incon-ceivable that a subordinate [secondary] leader should not carry out orders given by the leaders of the state.

PROSECUTOR : Was the legality of the orders explained to these people in a dishonest way?

OHLENDORF : I do not understand your question. Since the order was issued by the superior authorities, the question of legality could not arise in the minds of these individuals for they had sworn obedience to the people who had issued the orders.

COUNSEL : What were your thoughts when you received the order for the killings?

OHLENDORF : The immediate feeling with me and the other men was one of personal protest, but I was under direct military coercion and carried it out. The order, as such, even now I consider to have been wrong, but there is no question for me whether it was moral or immoral, because a leader who has to deal with such serious questions decides on his own responsibility. This is his respon-sibility. I cannot examine and I cannot judge. I am not entitled to do so. What I did there is the same as is done in any other army. As a soldier, I got an order and I obeyed this order as a soldier.  

• Make a list of the main arguments Ohlendorf uses to explain his actions.
• Next to each argument you have listed, write three or four sentences describing how you think the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trial would answer each argument the defendant has made.
• What person or group do you think the defendant would blame for the loss of life that occurred in the Holocaust?

German Officers State Their Case, Continued
Rudolf Hess became an active member of the SS in 1934. He ran concentration camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen before becoming the commander of the Auschwitz death camp in May 1940. Acting on instructions from Heinrich Himmler, Hess turned Auschwitz from a concentration camp into the largest center for the mass murder of European Jews. Over four million people were systematically put to death at Auschwitz. Hess served as head of this camp from 1940 until the end of 1943. In November 1943, Hess was moved from Auschwitz to Berlin where he worked for the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office. However, he returned there in the summer of 1944 to oversee the murder of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews. Hess was tried at Nuremberg. A part of his explanation for his actions at the camp follows:

Don’t you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things. It never ever occurred to us—and besides, it was something already taken for granted that the Jews were to blame for everything. We just never heard anything else. Even our military training took for granted that we had to protect Germany from the Jews. It only started to occur to me after the collapse that maybe it was not quite right, after I had heard what everybody was saying. We were all trained to obey orders without even thinking. The thought of disobeying an order would simply never have occurred to anybody and somebody else would have done just as well if I hadn’t. Himmler had ordered it and had even explained the necessity and I really never gave much thought to whether it was right or wrong. It just seemed necessary.  

When, in the summer if 1941, Himmler gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz, where mass exterminations could take place and personally carry out these exterminations, I did not have the slightest idea of their scale or conse-quences. It was certainly an extraordinary and monstrous order. Nevertheless, the reasons behind the extermination program seemed to me, right. I did not reflect on it at the time. I had been given an order and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination was necessary or not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view.

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USHMM: courtesy Harry S Truman Library Rudolf Hess being interrogated by U.S. attorneys for information pertaining to the Nuremberg Trials, fall 1945

Since my arrest, it has been said to me repeatedly that I could have disobeyed this order, and that I might have assassinated Himmler. I do not believe that of all the thousands of SS officers there could have been found a single one capable of such a thought. It was completely impossible. Certainly many SS officers grumbled about some of the orders that came from the SS, but they nevertheless always carried them out.

• Make a list of the main arguments Hess uses to explain his actions during the Holocaust.
• Next to each argument you have listed, write three or four sentences describing how the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials might answer each argument the defendant has made.
• On what person or group do you think the defendant would place the blame or responsibility for the persecution and loss of life that occurred in the Holocaust?

Published in cooperation with the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust
Copyright © 2002 by the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. Updated 2005.
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/holocaust_council/