A best seller when it was published in Germany in 1980, and now translated into English by the author, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945 is the only account to date of the German investigations of war crimes allegedly committed by the Allied armies against the Nazi regime. During World War II the little-known German Bureau on War Crimes documented and filed reported cases of Allied violations of the laws of war. Filling 226 volumes, these files were seized in 1945 by American troops and brought to the United States, where they were treated as classified material, out of reach of scholars and journalists. They were returned to the Federal Republic of Germany’s Bundesarchiv in 1968 and released in 1973. Alfred de Zayas is the first researcher to evaluate this material, which represents the most important discovery of World War II records since the Nuremberg trials. In addition, he studied related files in German, American, British, and Swiss archives and interviewed more than three hundred German military judges and witnesses involved in the bureau’s investigations. His book documents many of the alleged violations and also describes the bureau’s origin, organization, and modus operandi. Widely praised, the German edition was the subject of a television special in 1983.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Published in Germany in 1980, this well-documented report evaluates previously inaccessible archival material about a little-known German office that during WW II investigated crimes allegedly committed by Allied armies against German soldiers and civilians. De Zayas, a United Nations legal officer for human rights, substantiates that the Allies, particularly the Soviets, perpetrated numerous atrocities. The German bureau appears to have performed creditably without becoming an instrument of Nazi propaganda; however, it is difficult to accept the author's assertion that "the German military judge . . . saw himself as a protector of generally accepted human values and not until after the German unconditional surrender was he confronted with the full reality of Nazi crimes." De Zayas defensively reiterates that his intention is not to weigh Allied excesses against Nazi horrors but to establish the folly of war. The Allied confrontation with Hitler, however, does not bolster his advocacy of pacifism. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
This significantly revised and somewhat abridged version of a work originally published a decade ago in German addresses two themes. It is first a case study of bureacracy in the T16rd Reich. T'he Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau was responsible for investigating alleged violations of the laws and customs of war by both Gen. any's armed forces and their opponents. De Zayas describes an agency that carried out its investigations methodically and responsibly, seeing itself as protecting generallyaccepted human values as well as specific German interests. The Bureau's conviction that Germany's fighting men were waging an honorable war, with most of the significant atrocities committed by the other side, seems willful if not perverse in the context of recent research by such scholars as Manfred Messerschmidt and Jurgen Fdrster, stressing the Wehrmacht's permeation at all levels by National Socialist values and ideas. De Zayas' evidence, however, lends support to an alternative perspective developed by Walter Laqueur in The Terrible Secret. Applied there to the Holocaust, it is relevant in this context as well. Disbelief can stem from a lark of experience or imagination. Hitler's war itself was a dubious enough enterprise in the minds of most Gem ans. If to basic doubts was added the question of whether one was serving a system implementing genocide, the emotional burden became unbearable. In a broader context, de Zayas denies any intent to establish a tu quoque argument--to balance, that is, the crimes of the Allies against those of the Nazi system. His text, indeed, highlights ~he intrinsic difference between the combatants. 77he most comprehensive German investigations, inevitably, were conducted between 1939 and 1942-the years of victory, when evidence could be systematically collected in territory controlled by the Wehrmacht. On the whole, these cases describe war crimes rather than crimes against humanity. Prisoners are shot; civilians are murdered; corpses are mutilated. However horrifying the reports may be, they are a far cry from the mass reprisals undertaken in the Balkans, from the systematic starving of Russian POW's, and above all, from the Final Solution. Even the harrowing of eastern Germany by the victorious Soviet armies in 1945 was a crime of vengeance, not ideology. That point established, de Zayas' work is a useful corrective to a current tendency to moralize the Second World War as -- From Independent Publisher
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Informative and Fascinating,
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This review is from: The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945 (Paperback)
The best chapter in this book was DeZayas's sorting out the details of what occurred prior to and during the German invasion of Lvov Poland (now Lviv Ukraine), which is the subject of much politically motivated distortion and misinformation. This book also documents more than several cases where the German army executed German soldiers who committed crimes such as rape and murder of civilians. This book is worth reading as are all of DeZayas's books - informative and fascinating.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
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This review is from: The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945 (Paperback)
Prof. Dr. Alfred de Zayas is a taboo-breaker. In his books "Nemesisat Potsdam" and "A Terrible Revenge" he broke the silence surrounding the expulsion of 15 million Germans from their homelands in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of WWII, an ethnic cleansing that 2 million did not survive. In the "Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau" he analyzes the extant records of the bureau in the legal division of the Wehrmacht which contain investigations of alleged Allied war crimes, including the Soviet murder of Ukrainians in Lemberg, of the Polish officers at Katyn, of German POWs at Broniki, Feodosia and Grischino. This book- as well as all the others by Dr. de Zayas - is based on meticulous research. Studying 226 volumes of records, which had been returned by the National Archives in Washington to the German Bundesarchiv and declassified, studying pertinent archives in France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the USA and Great Britain, Dr. de Zayas supplements the information by interviewing hundreds of judges and victims - not just anybody, but those persons who carried out the investigations and those persons who gave testimony under oath to the judges 1939-45.. In this book de Zayas examines the method of collection by the War Crimes Bureau and compliance of the Allied Armies with the Geneva and Hague conventions. During the course of the war, 2000 German military judges examined alleged Allied war crimes such as shooting at shipwrecks, killing prisoners of war, bombing civilian targets. In his discussions of atrocities committed by the Allies in the West, he found no fabricated atrocities but well documented data. He puts the information into the proper historical perspective and also deals with the Nazi crimes documented in the Nuremberg trials. The German investigations resulted in protest notes to the Allies via neutral Switzerland. More than 350 references with pictures and facsimiles make this book one of the best sources for researchers delving into the history of WWII. The United States Prosecutor at Nuremberg, Benjamin Ferencz, reviewed this book in the American Journal of International Law, which had two large editions with the University of Nebraska Press. Picton Press in Rockland Maine reissued a new revised book in 2000 since the Nebraska edition sold out in 1999. Julius Loisch
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