Einsatzgruppe General

To his great vexation, three of the SS General's sisters married Jewish men. This may have had contributed to his desire to demonstrate to his masters on whose side he really was. And so, SS Obergruppenfuehrer Erich von dem Bach- Zelewski became one of Hitler's favourite generals, brutal and ruthless. Bach-Zelewski was born in1899 in Lauenburg, Germany.The city now belongs to Poland and called Lebork. At age fifteen, Bach-Zelewski volunteered for the Prussian Army. During the First World War he was wounded twice, suffered gas injuries and awarded the Iron Cross. In 1930 he joined the Nazi Party and three years later he was promoted to the rank of SS Major General. In 1939, shortly after the German invasion of Poland, Bach-Zelewski suggested to Himmler setting up a concentration camp in Auschwitz. On July 18,1941, a month after Hitler's hordes invaded the Soviet Union, the SS general reported to Berlin that in a cleansing action at Slonim in Belarus his police units shot 1,153 Jews. The message was intercepted and deciphered by British intelligence. Bach-Zelewski served as SS and police leader in Belarus and other territories occupied by the Nazis. He had overseen the activities of Einsatzgruppe B, mobile killing squads under the command of SS-Gruppenfuehrer Arthur Nebe. The Einsatzgruppen perpetrated heinous atrocities during the war. Their task was to murder Jews, communists and partisans. The Slonim massacre was followed by myriad others. Bach-Zelewski commanded genocidal operations in many places that had been trampled down by Nazi boots, including Riga, Minsk and Mogulev. His police corps in the territory under his jurisdiction in Latvia, Belarus and Poland killed over 200,000 Jews. In July 1943 he took command of anti-partisan operations not only in Russia and Poland but also in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Yugoslavia. A year later he was in charge of all troops battling against the Polish Home Army. In the course of the two months of fierce fighting during the Warsaw Uprising of the summer of 1944, Bach-Zelewski's troops killed 200,000 civilians, including 65,000 men, women and children, whom they slaughtered in mass executions. In the Nuremberg trials Bach-Zelewski insisted that he was innocent and had no blood on his hands. The SS general shifted the burden of responsibility for the atrocious crimes of the Nazis to the leaders of The Third Reich. He blamed Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Frank and Rosenberg for the annihilation of approximately six million Jews. Hjalmar Schacht, who served in Hitler's Government as Minister of Economics, did not have a particularly flattering opinion of Bach-Zelewski. After the war, he called the SS general, 'a frightful liar, a criminal and a killer.' In Nuremberg the mass murderer SS general escaped his hanging in exchange for his incriminating testimony against the Nazi leaders of the Reich. In 1949 he left prison. A decade later however, he was convicted by a German court for murder. Ironically, this conviction had no relation to Bach-Zelewski's countless crimes in the Second World War. The former SS general was sentenced for killing in 1934 a Nazi storm trooper during the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler ordered the execution of his brown-shirted opponents. Thirty eight years later Bach-Zelewski died in a Munich prison.