It is a familiar scene from the Nazi invasion of Western Europe: the captors with their heavy guns, casually cruel as they herd their ragged prisoners into the woods; the stronger victims given shovels and ordered to break the leafy soil; the machine guns made ready; the helpless captives with their heads bowed and their hands tied; and the eye witness who survives to tell the tale…
“Preparations for the executions were made, and the first group was taken away. I heard wild shooting in all directions. Some men of this first group tried to run, but they couldn’t make it. Together with the work group, I had to collect the bodies. There were ten…We were not allowed to look up, but from a distance of about 20 meters, I saw that three more groups of ten men each were executed, 40 men in all…The dead were then buried in the grave.”
The familiarity of the scene is misleading. For in this account, which concerns a mass murder in Annecy, south east France, in September 1944, the familiar roles have been reversed. Here, it is not the Nazis who are accused of murder, but French civilians, members of the resistance. The surviving eye witness is not a Jewish civilian nor an allied soldier, but a German, Anthon Gottschaller, and the corpses which were heaped into the hole in the woodland floor belonged to his fellow German prisoners of war.
Gottschaller told his story in 1983 after a German television documentary investigated reports that Nazi POWs had died at the hands of the allies. He joined some of his former comrades in wondering out loud whether justice would ever catch up with war criminals who happened to have ended the war as victors.
Now, the Government appears inadvertently to have raised the same question. The War Crimes Inquiry which Douglas Hurd set up in February 1988 was briefed to gather evidence of crimes in German-occupied territory committed by people who now live in Britain. There was never any suggestion that they were looking for crimes committed by the allies. In due course, the inquiry received 301 allegations and, as expected, the vast majority of them involved Germans or their collaborators who had taken refuge in Britain, but seven of the allegations pointed the finger at allied personnel. All of them concerned murder or manslaughter.
The inquiry considered the allegations and then, in September 1988, passed all seven to the Director of Public Prosecutions. He has since decided that three of them should be dropped: one, which alleged the massacre of survivors from a sunken ship, because there was no evidence to support the charge; one, which complained that the carpet bombing of Dresden was a crime, because, in the DPP’s view, this action was justified under international law; and the third because it was too general to permit a specific criminal charge.
But the DPP is still actively considering whether to prosecute in the other four cases and it is a measure of the seriousness with which he is treating them that he has called on the Ministry of Defence to supply more information. There is, therefore, the unexpected prospect of British soldiers and officers joining their Nazi counterparts on the long road to the dock at the Old Bailey.
As a matter of justice, the issues raised by these allied cases are no different to those raised by the suspected Nazi criminals – essentially whether the trial of such ancient allegations is useful and fair, or even possible, given the deterioration of evidence. But from a political point of view, they raise different questions and some heated passion, particularly over the core question of the extent to which the allies indulged in the kind of crimes which are familiarly linked only with the Nazis.
The case for the prosecution is that allied crimes have been whitewashed by victorious governments who had no desire to pollute the prestige of victory and that after the war Nazis were convicted and shot for some crimes whose exact equivalents went unpunished in allied ranks. The evidence of allied crimes is riddled with uncertainty, it falls far short of proof, and, generally, it has been pushed on to the sidelines of history, and yet it is there.
Military historian Eric Morris, a former Sandhurst College lecturer, has studied the Italian campaign. “There is no doubt that some of the allies had a very bad reputation among the Germans for shooting prisoners,” he said. “I emphasise that there is no corroboration for this at all, but the evidence of, for example, some of the diaries of German soldiers in Italy is that the Canadians had a very bad name for it and some of the American units, too. The 45th Infantry of the US National Guard was one.
“It’s easy enough to understand. You capture a bunch of the enemy. Two men are sent to take them back as prisoners. Then either it’s too far or something goes wrong and they shoot them and then they report back that the prisoners have trodden on a mine or got caught in shellfire. And senior officers might well ignore it. It wasn’t of value. They were the enemy. If they die, they die. But there is, to my knowledge, no hard proof of this.”
The material which makes the strongest claim to be hard proof of allied crimes was collected by a team of lawyers from the Wehrmacht High Command who had been instructed to pursue reports of allied abuses. Their work was routinely distorted in Nazi publications which were presented in a tone of gloating self-justification, but the raw material was used to establish a little known unit, the Wehrmacht Untersuchungsstelle fur Verletzungen des Volkerrechts – the German War Crimes Bureau.
If the Germans had won the war, this is the evidence from which they would have constructed their own war crimes trials, and despite being bombed in Berlin and narrowly escaping the flames in Thuringia, the yellowing files survived the war. They were transported to secret archives in Washington DC, finally declassified in 1965 and returned to Germany where they now fill 226 neatly bound volumes in the military archives in Freiburg. They form a discordant chorus of German anger and pain.
Here are more than a hundred depositions from German sailors who report that their comrades were shot in the water as they swam from their wrecked vessels. Here are witnesses describing British soldiers looting shops and homes in Belgian market towns and shooting men and women who strayed on to the streets. Here are the names of allied warships and even individual allied officers who are blamed for crimes.
Here is the voice of Karl Michaelis, a Nazi NCO, who was wounded in fighting near Le Havre in June 1940: “Because of my wounds, I was unable to continue fighting and lay on the ground…The British came from behind the barn, 15 or 20 men…My (five) men had their arms up and none of them had any weapon. Without speaking a word, the British aimed at my comrades and shot them.”
Here are German survivors of the battle for Crete: “A British soldier wearing a British helmet came up to the wounded soldier and shot him…A civilian rolled over the body of the sergeant; I saw with my own eyes how he cut out the sergeant’s eyes…The British soldiers took Corporal H prisoner; I saw them press him to the ground and then shoot him in the mouth with a pistol.”
And here is a catalogue of slaughter laid at the door of Russian allied soldiers and civilians, stretching from the first rumours of the notorious massacre of 14,000 Polish prisoners in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, through the murder of German prisoners and wounded in Feodosia and Grischino, to the butchery of men women and children in the Baltic states.
This Wehrmacht material is raw, untreated allegation and it has the unmistakeable stink of propaganda about it. Some historians reject the bureau’s work in its entirety. David Ceserani, director of studies at the Wiener Library in London and chief researcher to the all-party Parliamentary war crimes group said: “The idea that the Germans were interested in international law is laughable. The historians who are trying to dig up this material now are right-wing revisionists. It’s a complete joke.”
Cesarani points out that in Parliamentary debates over the new War Crimes Bill, the subject of allied crimes was most keenly raised by Tory backbenchers who wanted to bury the entire issue of crimes by either side. “I think it’s a red herring,” he said. “It’s an attempt by a process of embarrassment to have the whole thing put back under wraps. All the way through the war, the allies were prosecuting men for crimes of looting and raping and shooting prisoners, while the Germans had given up keeping their own men in line. There might be a handful of allied war criminals who got away with it, but I doubt it.”
All the historians agree that there was a real difference between the two sides in their attitude to human rights and international law. Keith Simpson, former political advisor at the Ministry of Defence and author of The History of the German Army, said: “There are major distinctions: allied officers basically abided by the Geneva convention in the treatment of prisoners; there was no allied policy of mass murder of civilians; no policy of starvation and torture. When you talk about war crimes by the allies you are talking about events in the heat of battle, whereas with the German side there is a whole series of well-documented orders.”
And yet, nearly 50 years later, there is still the voice of Anthon Gottschaller and his old comrades asking for justice under international law, and in the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, four files sit waiting for a decision.
