‘ Untarnished Regiment ’? Divergent Perspectives on the Wehrmacht's 9th Infantry,1939–1941

Ninth Infantry in History

We know more about the 9th Potsdam Infantry Regiment than about comparable units in the German Wehrmacht. Its original officer cadre was dominated by ‘Prussian’ nobles with connections throughout the elite. Ninth Infantry produced two wartime field marshals in Ewald von Kleist and Ernst Busch, 27 generals, and in Captain Richard Baron von Weizsäcker a mayor of West Berlin in 1981–84 and president of Germany in 1984–94. The regiment is also a focus because several erstwhile officers conspired ahead of the putsch on 20 July 1944. We thus have a rich collection of ‘classic’ accounts of Graf Neun or ‘Count Nine’ as the unit was known in allusion to the titled element among its leaders. Unusually, there is a detailed regimental history. ¹ There are recollections and studies encompassing attitudes to Hitler and the Jews. ² There is an account of Weizsäcker in the regiment in 1939–45, and elaborations including the ex-president's own (he was not a frondeur). ³ Ninth Infantry figures in histories of the conspiracy and of leading putschists who served in its ranks. Notable were Brigadier General Henning von Tresckow and Lieutenant Fritz-Dietlof Count von der Schulenburg. Tresckow was in IR 9 in 1926–34. After 1941 he led the military dissidents and was to be chief of police if the coup succeeded. Schulenburg fought with the regiment in 1941. His army rank belied his past as deputy head of police in Berlin and governor of Silesia, and he was designated to be minister of the interior. ⁴ The IR 9 plotter Major Axel Baron von dem Bussche-Streithorst has a Festschrift which includes contributions from Weizsäcker and Bussche himself. ⁵ Major Kurt Baron von Plettenberg, a minor dissident who was a regimental battalion commander in 1940, earned a biography. ⁶ This literature agreed unisono that the unit was not involved in atrocities. In later years Bussche and fellow regimental conspirator Lieutenant Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin (Kleist) often spoke about their formation. The Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel in reviewing a film featuring them in 2004 called IR 9 ‘Das unbefleckte Regiment’, the ‘untarnished’ or ‘unblemished’ regiment. ⁷

Aims, Sources, and Criteria

This paper analyses two linked sets of phenomena. It draws on unexplored or little-known German records and Polish, Jewish, and Soviet sources to provide the first comprehensive picture of IR 9's part in atrocities in 1939–41. No regimental records have survived, but extant material from its division (it controlled and spoke for Graf Neun) and from other Wehrmacht echelons were reviewed. These contemporary orders and reports include the regiment's admissions of murdering Soviet POWs. With Polish and Jewish recollections, they place Graf Neun at or adjacent to locations where crimes were committed. Allowing for some potential flaws, the body of evidence indicates that in Poland IR 9 facilitated illegalities, and on the eastern front both supported and joined in. In many respects the regiment did not differ from other front-line units.

The other aim is to trace and deconstruct the unusually consistent suppression in traditional accounts of the regiment's embroilment. Survivors such as Weizsäcker, Kleist, and Bussche shaped the tenor. The paper reports widespread selectivity with sources and contexts. It points to crass omissions, and to fictions intended to exculpate. The accounts reflected the orthodoxy of the day, ‘clean Wehrmacht’, a prime distortion among hand-steered interpretations of the Hitler era prevalent in post-war Germany. ⁸ The pathology was finally extinguished after 1995 by two historical exhibitions (together, Wehrmachtaustellung). Since then, scholars have revolutionized knowledge of the planning, direction, and implementation of the atrocities of the Ostheer, the army in the East. An assessment in 2020 found that in the Soviet theatre the military shared responsibility for over 17.3 million illegal deaths. ⁹ The classic accounts also reflected the illusion that Tresckow and entourage began dissent in late 1941 in revulsion at killings by SS-police Einsatzgruppen (EG) of Soviet Jews as such. This required amnesia about wide-scale murders in Poland and the Soviet Union in 1939–41. The ‘Tresckow myth’ was destroyed by German historians by 2011. ¹⁰ Also, in the early years of this century historians in the West belatedly recognized that Poland in 1939 was a trial run for the Soviet campaign.

In 2004 in a comprehensive study of Ostheer crimes Christian Hartmann suggested that the proportion of perpetrators was nearer 5 percent, not the 60–80 percent postulated by Hannes Heer. While making nods towards wider responsibility, Hartmann considered direct involvement only. With a few key exceptions, the surviving records are insufficient to demonstrate Graf Neun's specific acts. They do indicate facilitation and support. Jurisprudence deployed by the US and its Allies after 1945 encompassed complicity, and command and group responsibility. These concepts held for 1,600-plus Nuremberg and national proceedings against over 8,200 putative criminals of all grades, Wehrmacht people included. Allied law adduced complicity to those who ‘wilfully and knowingly’ were ‘principals in, accessories to, ordered, abetted, took a consenting part in, and were connected with’ a range of illegal ‘plans and enterprises’. ¹¹

Attitudes and Awareness

The regiment began in Potsdam during the Weimar period as descendant of Prussian guard formations. Class, cultural, and political attitudes would have prepared its officers for wartime illegality. It is reasonable to deduce these from studies of the German nobility's support for Nazi ideology, from IR 9's departures from traditional law, and from the views and deeds of some July 20 conspirators. We can surmise that many in Graf Neun were fellow travellers of National Socialism, or true believers. Stephan Malinowski has stressed the contribution of the nobility in bringing Hitler to power. He and Jonathan Petropoulous reported widespread support for the Nazi party (NSDAP) in the ranks of the ‘well-born’. Malinowski found 3,592 party members in a sample of 312 families of the old nobility. They included famous Prussian names such as Schwerin, Hardenberg, and Tresckow. There were 41 Schulenburgs, including the influential Fritz-Dietlof and his father. Schulenburg père, erstwhile commander of the elite Garde du Corps and adjutant to the Kaiser, was an officer in the party's Sturmabteilung (SA). Weizsäcker's father was also in the NSDAP. ¹² Graf Neun swore loyalty to Hitler. We can presume that it welcomed departures from the Treaty of Versailles. There was no discernable reaction to the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934, nor to less immediately violent resiling from traditional law. We should not be surprised: in the crucial period 1 January 1932 to 14 October 1935 the (non-aristocratic) Busch commanded the regiment. Busch was a fanatical Nazi from the Weimar days when he headed a battalion in Graf Neun.

Support for the Nazis entailed anti-Semitism. Officers in IR 9 went along with the elimination of Jews from the army after 28 February 1934. So too with progressively more vicious measures, such as the Nuremberg legislation in 1935, and the Reichskristallnacht official pogrom in 1938 (Schulenburg was implicated as deputy head of the Berlin police). The classic accounts failed to notice that German anti-Semitism was extraordinary for its time. Some scholars blundered in unconscionable ways. Ekkehard Klausa's casuistry gave us ‘anti-Semitism light’ (‘leichter’ Antisemitismus) in the German upper class. Hans Mommsen, Peter Hoffmann, and Ulrich Heinemann admitted uncritically that most conservatives wanted to expel Germany's Jews. Peter Hoffmann had Schulenburg's friend the putschist Colonel Claus Schenk Count von Stauffenberg supporting exclusion providing ‘law, decency and good behaviour held’. Mommsen ascribed similar preference for due process in misplaced praise of Carl Goerdeler, one-time mayor of Leipzig and the designated chancellor if the putsch succeeded. ¹³ Goerdeler spoke for opposition and perhaps for ‘milder’ elements in Graf Neun when in early 1942 he ordained that most German Jews should be expelled to Canada or (say) Argentina. Other Jews would stay in the eastern ghettos until the military decided their fate. In 2011 in his 81st year Peter Hoffmann desperately doubled down on his defence of Goerdeler. But there could be no justification for what the putative chancellor was planning, just as the Holocaust proper was to begin. ¹⁴

After Versailles Germany's greatest territorial losses were to Poland. The resultant corridor cut off East Prussia from the bulk of the Reich, reflecting the pattern from 1466 to 1772 (to 1656 most of East Prussia was a Polish fief). The lands regained by Poland were populated overwhelmingly by Poles. From the outset of the Weimar Republic most Germans wanted to re-draw the frontier. In 1939 large parts of Poland were annexed, the border running much further East than in 1914. Some of the remainder became a German-run satrapy termed Generalgouvernement (GG), within the Reich in formal terms. Graf Neun's officers would have welcomed the extinction of Poland, and the annexations. Their behaviour and the policies of the dissidents provide evidence: until 1944 the frondeurs were expecting Germany to retain the 1914 or October 1939 boundaries. ¹⁵ The intention in the annexed areas and ultimately GG was to ‘germanize’ and colonize. Such aims represented a murderous version of Prussian policy from the 1770s. Thus, Schulenburg believed that the Germans had an absolute right to rule and to settle. In 1939 and early 1940, he implemented such tenets in Upper Silesia (see below). In 1943 the would-be interior minister still wanted Poland to remain extinguished, and for the Reich to absorb large swathes of eastern and western Europe. ¹⁶ Graf Neun's experiences in Poland are described below and illustrate German policy into early 1941.

The classic accounts painted a peacetime picture of sophisticated cynicism in Graf Neun. Klausa damned with faint praise in telling us its officers supported Hitler but mocked the Nazis. Bussche saw IR 9 as ‘bereft of any political perspective [Weltanschauung], it had a certain pride in its traditions, and also a certain humanity’. Paul Krug offered a slapstick picture of evaded Hitler salutes. Weizsäcker stressed upright behaviour and discipline. For Kurt Finker Graf Neun was apparently home to ‘respect for the rule of law, liberalism, self-discipline, responsibility, and humanity’. ¹⁷ Such special pleading is unconvincing. It is more likely that in their mess in Potsdam its officers shared the regime's love for conquest, its contempt for Jews, and its colonial disdain for the Slavs.

In 1939–41 Graf Neun was in 23rd Infantry Division (23 ID). The division directed the regiment and ran its sustainment, hence the significance of divisional records. At full strength the 23rd totalled 17,734: Graf Neun and two other regiments each numbered 3,049. In war 23 ID was first under Lieutenant General Walter Count von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt and from 1 June 1941, Major General Heinz Hellmich. Their deputies, designated Erster Generalstabsoffizier, first general staff officer or Ia (‘Eins a’), ran operations. The commander, the Ia, and the head of logistics (Ib) issued mimeographed orders to reflect army or corps instructions. The counterparts in Graf Neun were its commanders, Colonel Werner Baron von und zu Gilsa to 31 January 1941, Colonel Adolf Raegener thereafter. The classic accounts ‘forgot’ how in the field the experiences of IR 9's officers would be enhanced. Standing orders unsurprisingly called for neighbouring staffs to be in touch. The division started with 1,236 motor vehicles and around 900 horse wagons. Supply tails could extend to over 250 kilometres. Shared logistics and POW collection points meant that there was constant interaction with other units, paramilitaries such as police and EG, and civilian administrators. ¹⁸

The experiences would have been supplemented back home. The regiment's officers were entwined with Germany's elite via a web of professional, social, and family ties. ¹⁹ Schulenburg was friends with Weizsäcker, Bussche, and Kleist (the last was described as Schulenburg's protégé). In pre-war years a Grafenkreis, a ‘circle of counts’, met to discuss current matters. This included Schulenburg and ‘liberal’ dissidents led by Helmut James Count von Moltke. In wartime Schulenburg joined the ‘liberals’ at 13 planning sessions. The plotters had numerous contacts abroad and access to foreign media, even in the depths of war. ²⁰ There were many links to the older generation. Key for the frondeurs were Goerdeler and Ulrich von Hassell, ex-ambassador and would-be foreign minister. Weizsäcker's father, Ernst Heinrich Baron von Weizsäcker, was an SS Brigadier General and no dissident. Until 1943 he ran the foreign ministry as its state secretary. ²¹ People such as these led discussions at the regimental officers’ mess in Potsdam. ²² Today the consensus among researchers is that the German elite were aware from the outset of the murders of Poles, Jews, and Soviet citizens. This encompassed the Holocaust ‘by bullets’ in the fields of Poland and the Soviet Union and ultimately in death factories. ²³ The classic accounts generally conformed to the post-war omertà, but several admissions slipped through to imply early and widespread knowledge.

Graf Neun Invades Poland

The invasion of Poland was lawless in essence and in execution. Graf Neun and most of the military participated with enthusiasm. Bussche recorded his happy fulfilment of duty (freudig erfüllter Pflicht), Weizsäcker noted relief that the corridor was being eliminated. ²⁴ There was broad support, for hatred of Poland, the Poles, and the country's 3.5 million Jews, was prevalent among all classes. Timothy Snyder has reminded us that the logic was ‘that Poland did not, had not, and could not exist as a sovereign state. Soldiers taken prisoner could be shot, since the Polish Army could not really have existed as such’. ²⁵ The Wehrmacht invaded on 1 September 1939, its five armies comprising sixty-six divisions plus auxiliaries. It progressively occupied the western part of Poland. ²⁶ The invasion broke four international accords. The destruction of the Polish state, annexations to the Reich, and creation of the GG, all contravened international law. The latter were ‘achieved’ by heads of civilian administration assigned to each army, designated Chef der Zivilverwaltung (CdZ). ²⁷ Atrocities during and after the fighting were both centrally directed and spontaneous. They broke German military law, which incorporated the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 (Hague) and the Geneva Convention of 1929, to which Poland was also party. During the Wehrmacht's rule to 25 October perhaps 50,000 Polish soldiers and Polish and Jewish civilians were illegally put to death. Still, under ‘clean Wehrmacht’ the campaign was presented as ‘normal’, on the lines of France in 1940. As noted, western historians now have a new perspective. We know that 1939 was a war of annihilation, a Vernichtungskrieg presaging that in the Soviet Union. ²⁸

The most radical policy involved EG, teams of killers from the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo, Security Police) and Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service or SD). EG were assigned to each army to murder the Polish elite. ²⁹ On 9 August 1939, the army's command Oberkommando des Heeres, OKH, enjoined front-line units to sustain the EG. Divisional Ib logistics leaders and Ic intelligence officers were to oversee the murder teams. ³⁰ Other criminal edicts came from OKH, the Wehrmacht high command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW), and senior commanders. Illegalities included over 30 mass shootings of POWs. Spontaneous crimes included murders driven by hysteria known as Freischärlerwahn or francs-tireurs madness. ³¹ The army perpetrated innovative crimes under Hague when pursuant to an OKH order of 9 August it set out to incarcerate all military-age male civilians. Some 300,000 were detained, women and children too, and an estimated 13,000 died. Most were released after some weeks, many were held on and subjected to forced labour. In Graf Neun's area the internments melded with army-assisted expulsions of Jews to the Soviets, and of Poles from areas annexed by the Reich. ³²

Twenty-third Infantry was under Fourth Army led by Lieutenant General Günther von Kluge. Fourth Army with Third Army under Lieutenant General Georg von Küchler formed Army Group North commanded by General Fedor von Bock. The Twenty-third advanced across the corridor to East Prussia, and again into Poland. Graf Neun faced what to the Germans was ‘insidious’ combat as the Poles dared to take cover. Purported franc-tireur activity was rife. The division gave a free hand: ‘partisans’ should be handled ‘appropriately [entsprechend]’. Bussche saw divisional Feldgendarmerie kill 15 civilian youths without trial. On 8 September 23 ID with IR 9 spent 10 hours in the town of Gniew. The officers would have known that in the castle ethnic German terrorists were holding around 2000 civilians in atrocious conditions, pending expulsion. ³³ On 10 September Bock commanded his army group to burn entire villages if precise targets were not available. This illegal order repeated the instruction that all military-age Poles and Jews ‘be very speedily detained and taken away’. ³⁴

On 13 September Graf Neun began to march from East Prussia to Białystok. Here it encountered a network of shtetls, townships where Jews formed a significant element of the population. Units in Third and Fourth Armies displayed extreme versions of the anti-Semitic fervour shown across Poland. Michał Grynberg concluded that this was to remove Poles and Jews from territories targeted for annexation. We have numerous accounts suggesting that it was standard to mete out beatings to Jews, to deny food and water, and to kill at random. Army units stole, destroyed dwellings and shops, and immolated synagogues. Polish and Jewish men were marched off, many treks became death marches. The first half of September saw 13,000 Poles sent to work in East Prussia. Two EG intermixed with Third and Fourth Armies complemented the military's actions. ³⁵

The zone through which the regiment advanced had been penetrated on 8–10 September. In the town of Łomża and its surrounds Lieutenant General Heinz Guderian's XIX Corps in Fourth Army initiated roundups of up to 14,000 civilian Poles and Jews, who were marched 55 kilometres into East Prussia. Stragglers were usually shot. Graf Neun would have noted the columns on the sole metalled road. Twenty-third Infantry's staff passed through Łomża, entering the small shtetl of Wizna on the 14th. In Wizna it was probably 10th Panzer Division under Guderian which immolated the synagogue and set Jewish dwellings ablaze, and this would have been noted by divisional leaders. Close by was Tykocin, another small township. Here Brigade Lötzen, another XIX Corps formation, was most likely responsible for anti-Semitic outrages. When 23 ID's leadership and IR 9 moved into Tykocin its male Poles and Jews were still locked in a church with no food and water, and Graf Neun would have been aware. From 16 to 18 September 23 ID and IR 9 joined other units in the city of Białystok. Avron Zbar reported that its Jews, perhaps 43,000 out of a population of 100,000, suffered robberies and random shootings. ‘Several hundred’ Bialystoker Jews were murdered during the army's week-long sojourn prior to the entry of the Soviets. Fourth Army moved to Białystok on 18 September. The army's staff had been in the barracks at Zambrów, where just before its arrival on 14 September 20th (motorized) Infantry Division in Guderian's corps had murdered 200 Polish POWs. EG IV joined in Białystok on the 20th having followed 23 ID from Łomża, and duly perpetrated its own outrages. Graf Neun retired north to East Prussia, marching through Knyszyn and Grajewo. Elements of Division Brand in XXI Corps in Third Army remained in these shtetls. Jews and doubtless Poles too from both settlements were being corralled in the same direction, there was a single metalled road. Nachman Rapp recounted that in Grajewo he saw the Germans burn synagogues and Jewish houses. A mentally disabled woman had her eyes gouged out; a miller was dismembered by bayonet. At that stage, EG V was in Łomża ‘controlling’ Jews and shoving civilians out to East Prussia, pursuant to Third Army's orders. ³⁶

This record suggests that IR 9's officers were consciously part of an invasion force that perpetrated unprecedented excesses. The anti-Jewish acts were common knowledge. So were the mass arrests and murderous forced marches, ordered by OKH and Bock. The EG killings were no secret: by 27 September the army's C-in-C General Walther von Brauchitsch had to tell all troops in Poland that ‘army personnel are forbidden to join [teilnehmen] in police executions’. ³⁷ By the second week of October Goerdeler and Hassell knew. ³⁸ Remarkably, the classic accounts were tacit about the overriding illegality of the liquidation of Poland and contained no mention of the widespread criminal acts against its inhabitants. The sole exception is the shooting of civilians by divisional Feldgendarmerie.

Poland After the Fighting

From August 1939 to early 1940 Schulenburg was civil governor (Regierungspräsident) of Silesia. As acting CdZ Schulenburg led the incorporation of Polish Upper Silesia. He held command responsibility for three EG which with police, ethnic German terrorists, and army destroyed synagogues and murdered some 1,500 POWs and civilians. ³⁹ Thereafter, Schulenburg continued to implement Volkstum or ethnic policy. He engaged with the Reich's supremo for security and colonization, Heinrich Himmler, on expulsions and settlement. ⁴⁰ The policy called for continued killing of the Polish elite, expulsion of all Jews and most Poles, and strict separation of remaining Poles from incoming German colonists. Under Schulenburg at least 204,000 were expelled. Schulenburg was responsible for the deaths in the process of some 13,000 people. ⁴¹

From 15 September 1940 to late April 1941, Twenty-third division with Graf Neun enforced German rule in Reichsgau Wartheland, an area of annexed western Poland. The division was again assigned to Fourth Army led by Kluge, now field marshal. Weizsäcker, Bussche, and Kleist were joined by Schulenburg. Twenty-third Infantry was in the Inowrocław region, the bulk of IR 9 in the town of Włocławek. Wartheland under erstwhile CdZ and now Gauleiter Arthur Greiser saw vicious application of Volkstum policy. Graf Neun assisted by helping to hold down the Poles and Jews. As in Silesia, the first strand was murder or elimination of the Polish elite. EG VI began this during the fighting. Systematic murders, tellingly labelled Intelligenzaktion, continued, and covered 23 ID's territory. By the time Graf Neun arrived most of the elite had been eliminated: an estimated 10,000 Poles were dead by May 1940, tens of thousands had been sent to concentration camps. ⁴² Next came vehemently applied ‘germanization’. Polish was forbidden in public, Polish institutions were closed, no telephones or radios were permitted, Apartheid ruled in stores and public transport. ⁴³ As begun by Schulenburg in Silesia, replacement of the natives was the goal. The colonization was initially chaotic but after 1 December 1939 Himmler oversaw matters. ⁴⁴ There was no secrecy: on 24 October 1940 Himmler boasted to the world via the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Switzerland that up to 600,000 Poles and Jews from Wartheland were to be transplanted to the GG. The Jews would be joined by co-religionists from the Reich and placed into ghettos. ⁴⁵

By the end of 1940 some 68,000 Poles had been expelled from 23 ID's area, and approximately 230,000 from Wartheland as a whole. Their assets had been stolen. Up to 268,000 Germans had entered. Greiser's territory remained the epicentre for colonization. It accounted for two-thirds of the approximately 928,000 Poles ultimately displaced, and for almost three-quarters of the 730,000 German colonizers. As for Wartheland's 435,000 Jews, smaller communities including those in 23 ID's base of Kruszwica were murdered in 1939. Some 140,000 were robbed and expelled to the GG in the period to April 1940. ⁴⁶ The sheer number which remained led the Germans to concentrate them. The very first ghetto was in Wartheland, in October 1939. By 30 April 1940, the vast Jewish reservation in Łódź held 163,777. Christopher Browning et al. reported that,

Although the Wartheland is best remembered for the Łodz [sic] ghetto, there were in total some 57 ghettos established in the territory. Wartheland was a key laboratory for this aspect of the Nazi regime's evolving and radicalizing anti-Jewish policy, because it was the site of some of the first ghettos established (…) ⁴⁷

The final strand was theft of Polish and Jewish wealth: governmental, religious and private. Chaotic early expropriations included around 100,000 volumes, 1,000-plus incunabula among them, stolen when the cathedral in Włocławek was closed in November 1939. The thievery became systematic when Haupttreuhandstelle Ost (HTO), ‘Main Trustee Office East’, was established on 19 October 1939. HTO stole non-farm property pending transfer to colonists. (Himmler's apparatus managed rural land.) On 17 September 1940 as Graf Neun was arriving, the so-called Polenvermögensverordnung or ‘Polish property ordinance’ came into force. All non-German property was at the disposal of the Reich. Polish assets could be stolen, Jewish property had to be. ⁵³ HTO claimed on 31 March 1945 that its haul from Wartheland was over US$ 11 billion in 2023 dollars (per Bundesbank data). True market values would have been many times higher. Stolen rural land would have added yet more. ⁵⁴ The Third Reich evolved grandiose plans for colonization of the Slavic East, notably versions of the Generalplan Ost. ⁵⁵ Wartheland was where many Volkstum fantasies came closest to realization. It astonishes therefore that the classic accounts were silent on the regiment's role as pillar of the colonial and anti-Jewish system in Wartheland. The sole exception was Bussche's confection about the ghetto in Włocławek.

The Soviet Theatre: Criminal Orders, POWs

From 22 June 1941 to its destruction before Moscow the ‘aristocratic’ Graf Neun was in combat in the East. Its parent 23 ID was in Army Group Centre led by Bock, also now a field marshal. The division was assigned to VII Corps under Lieutenant General Wilhelm Farmbacher, mostly in Fourth Army under Kluge. From 17 October, 23 ID oscillated between XXXXI Corps in Ninth Army and V Corps in Fourth Army (in December confusion was such that for a time it was in both). ⁵⁶ The regiment marched through southern Białystok, south of Minsk, and fought for Mogilev, Roslavl, and near Vyazma. Weizsäcker was wounded on 22 July and convalesced in Germany, returning on 22 November. Bussche was hit in early September and retired from the Ostheer. Schulenburg left too. When the regiment's staff was eliminated on 10 December only 318 remained of the almost 3,000 who had started out. ⁵⁷ Weizsäcker fought in successor units to the end, Kleist until July 1943 when he too was wounded.

On 30 March 1941 Hitler revealed his exterminatory intentions to around two hundred senior generals. The plans and orders would have percolated to Graf Neun. ⁵⁸ The Ostheer received the notorious Criminal Orders concocted by OKH and OKW. The Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlass or ‘martial jurisdiction decree’ commanded elimination without trial of francs-tireurs and ‘hostile’ civilians. The ‘commissar order’ or Kommissarbefehl mandated the killing of communist leaders. ⁵⁹ To 10 August, OKH, Fourth Army, VII Corps, and 23 ID issued a slew of clarifications. All also applied to IR 9. Fourteenth June saw the corps Ia Colonel Hans Krebs order rebelliousness (Auflehnung) to be ruthlessly suppressed by mass shootings and village burnings. ⁶⁰ He subsequently called for civilians if armed merely with a razor to be eliminated (erledigt) and females in uniform to be shot (23 ID let them become POWs). Locals were not to see the ‘necessary’ executions. Other directives urged that shootings be limited to communist elements ‘especially Jews’, and to soldiers in civilian garb. If saboteurs could not be identified, battalion leaders were to impose violent group punishments (kollektive Gewaltmassnahmen). Isolated enemy soldiers and their helpers were to be shot as francs-tireurs. Civilians whose attitude and bearing (Gesinnung und Haltung) were ‘dangerous’ were to be delivered to EG, doubtless for murder. ⁶¹ All 43 corps and virtually all divisions in the Ostheer implemented the Orders. ⁶² Seventh Corps and 23 ID as a whole did so, there is no sign of demurral by Graf Neun. A total of 3,430 commissar deaths was reported by Felix Römer in his canonical studies. Seventh Corps’ count of 35, and the division's three, are relatively low, but the tallies were often flawed. Some commissars and ‘Freischärler’ were sent to 23 ID for interrogation and shooting, per orders (höhere Weisung entsprehend, befehlsgemäss). This happened on 28 June, 2 July, and 27 July. The division boasted that in August and September it had killed around 55 purported ‘spies’, mainly civilian girls aged 14–20. ⁶³

The Orders did not mandate the mass civilian deaths from starvation and other causes which culminated after 1941. However, that year as the weather deteriorated Graf Neun joined other units in commandeering village houses. The inhabitants were cast out to freeze. ⁶⁴ The killing of POWs was also not ordered, but as seen, most German units regarded ambushes, shooting from cover, or resistance by isolated groups as tantamount to partisan action. Ben Shepherd has argued that ‘Only rarely did German army units systematically kill all surrendering Red Army soldiers …’. Dieter Pohl disputed this. ⁶⁵ In any event, on 24 June IR 9 reported that despite waving white cloths some Soviets continued to fight. Hellmich grasped the chance illegally to order 23 ID and thus the regiment to disregard such signals: ‘Es gibt kein Pardon’, take no prisoners. On 28 June, Graf Neun complained that the enemy had had the temerity to ambush it, and to use bayonets on some wounded. ‘Gefangenen wurden nicht gemacht’, no prisoners were taken. ⁶⁶ Schulenburg objected to unplanned (planlose) shootings, this being bad for discipline and SS-like. Prisoners were indeed to be shot, but at an officer's bidding. On the 29th he welcomed clear orders, doubtless those from Hellmich. ⁶⁷ We can see the prevailing climate from a report by a Jewish eyewitness, Srolke Kot, on the road to Słonim with Graf Neun and other units. He saw captives being executed. German troops were shooting at groups of prisoners, apparently for fun, and murdering stragglers. ⁶⁸ Twenty-third Infantry's war diary reported that to 13 July only 1,507 POWs had been taken for ‘the men often took no prisoners in outrage at the enemy's deceitful [hinterlistige] methods.’ ⁶⁹ Despite Schulenburg's admissions, other accounts made no mention of Criminal Orders or the treatment of POWs after capture.

The Soviet Theatre: Anti-Semitic Excesses

Up to one million Soviet Jews were murdered in 1941, mainly in the old ‘Pale’ of settlement in pre-war Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. The army facilitated and joined in the annihilation. Graf Neun's line of advance traversed Belarus, itself with one million vulnerable Jews. ⁷⁰ After widespread early pogroms, the second half of 1941 saw EG and cognate entities with army aid begin to kill entire communities. By 3 October Mogilev was the first sizeable Soviet city where all had been murdered. ⁷¹ Ninth Infantry was implicated in several outrages. The most noteworthy were in Białystok on 27 June when the regiment was alongside 221st Security Division (Sicherungs-Division), then in VII Corps. ⁷² The 221st committed grotesque murders of an estimated 2,200 Bialystoker Jews, shooting, impaling children on bayonets, and burning up to 2,000 alive in the Great Synagogue. We have macabre accounts of victims hanging themselves to avoid the flames. The fires were spread through the Jewish quarter by grenade, many more died. Graf Neun was under orders to secure the right flank of the 221st and to maintain contact with it in Białystok. About two hundred metres separated the bulk of the regiment from pogrom and fires. Schulenburg saw the flames, and noted Jewish bodies strewn in the streets. ⁷³

Heer has recently shown how hatred of the Jews ‘exploded’ along IR 9's axis of advance. He described remarkable violence in Słonim, a town where Jews formed almost two-thirds of the 16,000-plus population. A 3-week rolling pogrom began when 18th Panzer Division entered on 24 June. Thousands perished. Graf Neun with 23 ID marched through on 4 July, following its corps. Graf Neun and other VII Corps officers would have known what was happening. ⁷⁴ Further East the regiment would have encountered or heard of other outrages. In Mogilev on 26 July Fifteenth Infantry Division secured the centre while Graf Neun established contact. Fifteenth Infantry shot 50–70 Jews as ‘reprisal’. ⁷⁵ The classic accounts were reticent on anti-Jewish acts, and kept them away from Graf Neun. ‘Białystok’ was mentioned only by Schulenburg, who blamed the SS (Ulrich Heinemann tucked it into a footnote). There was silence about Słonim and Mogilev. Wolfgang Paul's regimental history had a sole allusion to any crimes in 1941, when in July a padre suffered a crise de conscience involving unspecified rearward ‘National Socialist atrocities’. Bussche claimed that his dissidence began when he saw mass shootings of Jews at Dubno in Ukraine on 3–5 October 1942 (see below). This provided even greater distance to IR 9. Dubno gave Mainhardt Neyhauss-Cormons call to write about the EG. But the author made crass errors, claiming that EG were isolated from army formations. ⁷⁶

The Soviet Theatre: POWs Behind the Lines

After the Jews, the largest group extinguished by National Socialist Germany was Soviet POWs. Some 5.7 million were taken captive. Around 3.3 million perished, some two million in 1941. Many died in camps in the Reich and GG, but in 1941 and after the Ostheer caused mass mortality though forced marches, shootings, starvation, exposure, and disease. ⁷⁷ If Twenty-third Infantry initially took few prisoners, it later reported tallies of over 12,000 at Mogilev (VII Corps recorded 35,000), and 17,295 at Roslavl. Krebs boasted that to 16 October, VII Corps had captured no fewer than 255,889. ⁷⁸ The regiment's route encompassed locations which at times accommodated 32 collection points, transit camps (Durchgangslager or Dulags), and other-rank destination camps (Stammlager or Stalags). ⁷⁹ Many were logistics and medical nodes. On 25 and 30 August 23 ID and VII Corps described resources at Smolensk and Roslavl, including Dulag 130 in Roslavl. The division reported satisfactory food for its 22,300 divisional and seconded troops, for horses too, but was silent on POWs. Many camps were gigantic, and mortality was commensurately vast. In late November, camps in Belarus had death rates of two percent daily. Thirty thousand died in Stalag 341 and Dulags 127 and 185 in Mogilev. In early September, Bussche was hospitalized close to Dulag 130, and almost certainly learned of POW mortality in that camp that was to total some 50,000 by end-November. ⁸⁰ Seventh Corps reported on 14 October that 40,000 had been held near Smolensk for days, without food, in the open (it froze at night), prior to being marched 60 kilometres to Dorogobuzh. ⁸¹ In October, OKH allowed EG to shoot commissars, Jews, and other ‘undesirables’ in camps near the front. On the 21st OKH drastically reduced rations: non-working POWs were condemned to death. OKH knew in October that 600,000 POWs had already died. When thousands of the prisoners made by the regiment and 23 ID were perishing, Graf Neun would have been aware. ⁸² It is troubling that while the classic accounts intermittently mention POWs, they are wholly silent in respect of the regiment's embroilment in their mass annihilation.

Conclusions

The basic finding of this paper is that in 1939–41 Graf Neun was aware of and facilitated a range of illegalities, and that evidence has survived showing specific cases when it joined in commission. In many respects, the regiment did not differ from its equivalents. However, it was one of a limited number to support repressions of Poles and Jews in 1940 and 1941. In 1941, it joined other front-line units in the Ostheer in following Criminal Orders, and in killing POWs after combat. Given today's knowledge, little of this may be surprising.

The paper also indicates how in contrast to the record, scholars and survivors constructed the ‘untarnished’ trope. This begs questions of context and motivation. Much of the myopia was typical for the time, when delusions about ‘clean Wehrmacht’ and Tresckow team ruled, but the brazen confections showed real creativity. This probably had roots in the rise of 20 July in Germany's national narrative. During the final decades of the last century, the dissidents became heroes, so ‘needed’ the exonerations. And as special seedbed for the military fronde the regiment had to remain ‘untarnished’. The silence about entire criminal domains empowered authors to give grossly flawed readings. Eberhard Schmidt, Engert, and Peter Hoffmann told us that only in late 1939 did Schulenburg ‘probably’ hear of unspecified excesses in Poland, and ‘possibly’ inform others. This disregarded what the soldiers had done, the elite knew, and Polish historiography had told for decades. Schulenburg had himself overseen EG killings, so this untruth was epic. ⁸³ A need was seemingly felt to distance Graf Neun from anti-Semitic, if not anti-Polish, repressions in Wartheland. The result was Bussche's tragi-comic tale about the IR 9 commander being shocked, like Captain Renault in Casablanca, by the ghetto in Włocławek. A similar desire for absolution could have been behind the belated clerical crise reported in 1983 by Paul.

As we know, Schulenburg, Tresckow, and many other putschists perished in 1944. However, after the war several regimental survivors achieved significant positions. Bussche ‘merely’ ran the German peace corps. But from 1962 to 1998 Schulenburg's erstwhile protégé Kleist led the Munich Security Conference. He was a cold-war luminary in NATO. As noted, Weizsäcker was more significant: mayor of West Berlin, and to 1994 the ‘reunification’ president. Such people, other veterans, and their many acolytes had a vital interest in building and sustaining stories of an ‘untarnished’ IR 9 linked to 20 July. Weizsäcker was allowed to exaggerate his involvement with the plot. The genuine frondeur Bussche reported that his dissidence began when he saw the mass shootings of Jews at Dubno on 3–5 October 1942. This was widely repeated. Indeed, Weizsäcker claimed that Bussche's account of Dubno (in one case wrongly placed by the ex-president behind Graf Neun's lines) influenced his own attitude to the regime. ⁸⁴ Bussche contradicted himself by recounting that in 1940 Schulenburg helped him to enlightenment when they encountered Judenpogrome in Wartheland. Again, Schulenburg was himself a recent pogrom-monger, but no-one explored the anomaly. ⁸⁵ No-one saw fit to ask why Weizsäcker, Bussche, and others were not moved by mass shootings, expulsions, and ghettos in Poland in 1939–41, by the obscene Warsaw Ghetto in particular, or by EG and army killings in the Soviet theatre in 1941 and during 1942.

Bussche died in 1993, Kleist in 2013, and Weizsäcker in 2015. Bussche and Kleist were ‘let off’ by time but Weizsäcker was made to confront his past. The ex-president's excuses, as in 1997 in his memoirs and in 2009 in the magazine Der Spiegel, were lamentable. He maintained that in 1939 he had no idea what he was doing in Poland. He was silent about atrocities then or in Wartheland. As for the Soviet front, it was indeed hard ‘to resist [standzuhalten]’ the impact of the Wehrmachtaustellung. Yet IR 9 was innocent, at worst ‘vague rumours [dumpfe Gerüchte]’ had circulated about excesses elsewhere. Weizsäcker had felt ‘outrage’ at the order to kill surrendering Soviets and claimed that as adjutant he quashed it. Unfortunately, he became adjutant only on 22 November 1941, while as we saw the order came in June and was obeyed. Confronted by Der Spiegel with the signal of 28 June 1941 reporting POW killings, Weizsäcker was ‘distraught’ but again knew nothing. Ninth Infantry did not murder, he blustered, the very idea was ‘monstrous’. Ironically, Weizsäcker stressed his closeness to Schulenburg, whose criminal involvement, as in Silesia, was confirmed in Germany in 1997. Subsequent biographers all but called Weizsäcker a liar. In Gunter Hoffmann's view, Weizsäcker artfully yielded selected insights but hid others. Hermann Rudolph saw that the Wehrmachtaustellung gave Weizsäcker a bad conscience (ihn das Thema umtreibt). The author suggested bluntly that for the ex-president atrocities by Graf Neun did not happen, because they simply could not have happened. ⁸⁶ Indeed: if Weizsäcker had conceded, he would have ended Graf Neun's ‘untarnished’ status at a stroke. He would have admitted that many post-war careers, his own above all, were built on gross untruths about the army and the regiment. Worse, there could have been legal implications. Schulenburg, Tresckow, and several other military putschists were hypothetically liable for arraignment by post-war allied courts, for specific war crimes and crimes against humanity. But Graf Neun officers such as Weizsäcker and Kleist might have also qualified, if only under rules on command responsibility and complicity. ⁸⁷ For decades German justice was derelict in pursuing Nazi crimes. ⁸⁸ German judges have belatedly arraigned the last survivors who were ‘merely’ present where killings occurred. However uncomfortable, for contemporary German jurisprudence too Weizsäcker might have deserved the dock. ⁸⁹

Coda

David Stahel first warned of the survival of ‘clean Wehrmacht’ in 2018, with reference to Wikipedia. In 2022 Geoffrey Megargee posthumously expanded on the delusion's ‘amazing’ resilience:

It clings to life even today. It rears its ugly head on WW II websites, in behind-the-scenes debates over Wikipedia entries, in reenactors’ groups, and in popular books and magazines. It overlaps with Holocaust denial and minimalization, and it has connections to neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements. ⁹⁰