1945: German soldiers for cowardice
11 comments April 27th, 2012 Headsman
Throughout the last days of the Third Reich, it ruthlessly forced its desperate conscripts by threat of summary execution into service to slow the overwhelming Soviet army.
Borrowing a page from Gen. Ferdinand Schoerner's no-mercy demonstrative hangings of any "straggler" found behind front lines without orders, Goebbels
issued a radio proclamation to the trapped troops [of Berlin]: "Any man found not doing his duty will be hanged from a lamp post after a summary judgment. Moreover, placards will be attached to the corpses stating: 'I have been hanged here because I am too cowardly to defend the capital of the Reich. I have been hanged because I did not believe in the Fuhrer. I am a deserter and for this reason I shall not see this turning point in history.
SS members, aware that they would be in for the worst of it after the war (and that their mandatory blood-type tattoos would make them easy to identify) were the ones sufficiently motivated to impose this policy. One German in the city at the time recalled the horror of seeing
boys who were found hiding were hanged as traitors by the SS as a warning that, 'he who was not brave enough to fight had to die.' When trees were not available, people were strung up on lamp posts. They were hanging everywhere, military and civilian, men and women, ordinary citizens who had been executed by a small group of fanatics.
Although it's not specifically an execution story, the horrifying consequences of this lethal paranoia under siege are the theme of the West German film Die Brücke, in which a rare veteran sergeant looking after some child-conscripts is shot by a patrol when he can't produce orders … leaving the children alone to be butchered pointlessly defending a bridge.
"This event occurred on April 27, 1945," the film concludes about its (fictional) plot. "It was so unimportant that it was never mentioned in any war communique."
From the Themed Set: The Death Rattle of the Third Reich.
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1877: James Singleton, Beeville character - 2019
1827: Joseph Sollis, the sheriff unmanned - 2018
1896: Carl Feigenbaum, the Ripper abroad? - 2017
1803: Michael Ely, personator - 2016
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1883: Henry De Bosnys, bane of Elizabeths - 2014
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1995: Nie Shubin. Oops. - 2009
1733: William Gordon, almost cheating death - 2008
1942: The village of Lidice, for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich
1944: Twenty-two or more Poles
1941: Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya
1871: The Paris Commune falls
1847: The San Patricios
1199: Pierre Basile, marksman
1941: Sixteen Yugoslav partisans and one German soldier
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Children,Cycle of Violence,Death Penalty,Desertion,Execution,Germany,Gibbeted,Hanged,History,Known But To God,Mass Executions,Mature Content,Military Crimes,Occupation and Colonialism,Public Executions,Soldiers,Summary Executions,Uncertain Dates,Wartime Executions,Wrongful Executions
Tags: 1940s, 1945, battle of berlin, world war ii
1945: Wilhelm Cauer, but not Helmuth Weidling
1 comment April 22nd, 2012 Headsman
On this date in 1945, the brilliant scientist Wilhelm Cauer was summarily executed by Red Army soldiers advancing into besieged Berlin.
Cauer hailed from a rich lineage of academics.
Although his career prospects in Nazi Germany were ultimately limited owing to that lineage's kinship to Frederick the Great's Jewish banker, they were not so limited that he was not able to become a university professor and one of the founding figures in the field of engineering network synthesis filters. The elliptical filter is known as the "Cauer filter" in his honor.*
By the end of World War II, he was, like millions of less-distinguished countrymen and -women, merely a person in the way of a terrible conflagration.
Cauer succeeded in evacuating his family west, where the American and not the Soviet army would overtake it — but for reasons unclear he then returned himself to Berlin. His son Emil remembered (pdf) the sad result.
The last time I saw my father was two days before the American Forces occupied the small town of Witzenhausen in Hesse, about 30 km from Gottingen. We children were staying there with relatives in order to protect us from air raids. Because rail travel was already impossible, my father was using a bicycle. Military Police was patrolling the streets stopping people and checking their documents. By that time, all men over 16 were forbidden to leave towns without a permit, and on the mere suspicion of being deserters, many were hung summarily in the market places. Given this atmosphere of terror and the terrible outrages which Germans had inflicted on the peoples of the Soviet Union, I passionately tried to persuade my father to hide rather than return to Berlin, since it was understandable that the Red Army would take its revenge. But he decided to go back, perhaps out of solidarity with his colleagues still in Berlin, or just due to his sense of duty, or out of sheer determination to carry out what he had decided to do.
Seven months after the ending of that war, my mother succeeded in reaching Berlin and found the ruins of our house in a southern suburb of the city. None of the neighbors knew about my father's fate. But someone gave identification papers to my mother which were found in a garden of the neighborhood. The track led to a mass grave with eight bodies where my mother could identify her husband and another man who used to live in our house. By April 22, 1945, the Red Army had crossed the city limits of Berlin at several points. Although he was a civilian and not a member of the Nazi Party, my father and other civilians were executed by soldiers of the Red Army. The people who witnessed the executions were taken into Soviet captivity, and it was not possible to obtain details of the exact circumstances of my father's death.
Cauer's name was actually on a list of scientists the Soviets were looking to recruit, not eliminate. Presumably he and those other civilians who shared his nameless grave fell foul of the occupying army in some incidental way and were shot out of hand in the fog of war.
By contrast, April 22 was the lucky day for Wehrmacht General Helmuth Weidling.
Weidling had been forced by overwhelming Russian power to withdraw from a position and an enraged Hitler ordered him summarily shot.**
Fortunately, it was not effected so "summarily" that Weidling wasn't able to get his side of the story in and have the execution order revoked. Lucky Helmuth was within hours, uh, "promoted" to commander of the Berlin Defence Area, which is supposed to have led him to remark, "I'd rather be shot than have this honour."
This was not to be his fate.
Instead, after a week's overseeing the suicidal exertions of his underaged, underarmed Volkssturm militia, it fell to Weidling on May 2 to issue the order directing remaining garrisons in Berlin to lay down their arms.
On April 30, 1945, the Führer committed suicide, and thus abandoned those who had sworn loyalty to him. According to the Führer's order, you German soldiers would have had to go on fighting for Berlin despite the fact that our ammunition has run out and despite the general situation which makes our further resistance meaningless. I order the immediate cessation of resistance.
The devastated Berlin of the Soviet encirclement was Weidling's last glimpse of his homeland: he was flown to the USSR as a prisoner of war and died there in captivity in 1955.
* Also working against the big brain's career path in academia: "few people could appreciate the vast potential of Cauer's special field of work … for mathematicians, he seemed too involved in applied sciences, and for electrical engineers his contributions included too much mathematics." These days, Cauer's disciplined application of mathematical principles to the field of network filtering is precisely what he's remembered for.
** This was a notably bad day for der Fuhrer: it was also on April 22 when the impotence of the German army's remaining shreds caused him to launch into that bunker tirade that has spawned a thousand Internet parodies.
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1939: Jose Aranguren, Civil Guard general - 2019
Feast Day of Saint Leonides of Alexandria - 2018
1947: Garlon Mickles, the last hanged in Hawaii - 2017
1803: Cato, slave of Elijah Mount - 2016
1815: George Lyon, career thief and possible poltergeist - 2015
1831: Charles Gibbs, the pirate - 2014
MMI: Two thousand and one days, a dystopia - 2013
1705: The Camisards Catinat and Ravanel - 2013
1930: William Henry Podmore, inculpated - 2011
1846: The last civil executions in Portugal - 2010
1997: Hostage-takers in Lima - 2009
1980: Thirteen deposed Americo-Liberian officials - 2008
1943: Not Anatoly Kuznetsov, insignificant little chap
1942: Not Hersh Smolar, saved by Genesis
1918: Tsar Nicholas II and his family
1943: 98 American civilian contractors on Wake Island
1942: Partisans by the Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger
1941: Twenty Red Army officers
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Borderline "Executions",Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Desertion,Execution,Germany,History,Innocent Bystanders,Intellectuals,Mass Executions,Military Crimes,No Formal Charge,Not Executed,Notable Participants,Occupation and Colonialism,Pardons and Clemencies,Russia,Shot,Soldiers,Summary Executions,USSR,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1940s, 1945, adolf hitler, april 22, battle of berlin, berlin, engineering, fascism, helmuth weidling, red army, wilhelm cauer, world war ii