Bio of General der Artillerie Eugen Müller

 

 

Eugen Müller in a portrait taken on 3 May 1939, not long after he was promoted to Generalmajor (1 April 1939) and taken the place of the retired General der Infanterie Curt Liebmann as the commander of the Kriegsakademie.

Eugen Müller (19 July 1891 – 24 April 1951) was a German general in the Wehrmacht during World War II. He is known for having drafted the criminal Commissar order in preparation for Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.

Eugen Müller was born in Metz, Alsace-Lorraine, on 9 July 1891. He joined the German Army straight from school, at nineteen years of age. He began his military career in the Bavarian Army, joining the First Bavarian Artillery Regiment, in 1912. From 1914 to 1918, during the First World War, Müller served as an officer in the Imperial German Army. By the war's end, he had reached the rank of Major. He stayed in the army, now part of the Reichswehr, after the war and was promoted to Oberstleutnant in October 1933, and Oberst in 1935. On 1 April 1939, Müller was promoted to the rank of Generalmajor and took command of the War Academy.

At the eve of World War II, on 1 September 1939, Eugen Müller was assigned to the Headquarters Chief of Staff of the Army, under the command of Generaloberst Franz Halder. Müller was in charge of legal and criminal action relating to the occupied areas in Europe. On 1 August 1940, he was promoted to Generalleutnant. Prior to the attack against the Soviet Union in 1941, Muller had played a leading role in training military staff officers responsible for enforcing military law in occupied territories. On 1 June 1942, Müller was promoted to the rank of General der Artillerie. He remained at the General Staff until the end of the war.

The first draft of the Commissar Order was issued by General Eugen Müller on May 6, 1941 and called for the shooting of all commissars in order to avoid letting any captured commissar reach a POW camp in Germany. The German historian Hans-Adolf Jacobsen wrote:

    "There was never any doubt in the minds of German Army commanders that the order deliberately flouted international law; that is borne out by the unusually small number of written copies of the Kommissarbefehl which were distributed".

The paragraph in which General Müller called for Army commanders to prevent "excesses" was removed on the request of the OKW. Brauchitsch amended the order on May 24, 1941 by attaching Müller's paragraph and calling on the Army to maintain discipline in the enforcement of the order. The final draft of the order was issued by OKW on June 6, 1941 and was restricted only to the most senior commanders, who were instructed to inform their subordinates verbally.

The enforcement of the Commissar Order led to thousands of executions. The German historian Jürgen Förster wrote in 1989 that it was simply not true, as most German Army commanders claimed in their memoirs and some German historians like Ernst Nolte were still claiming, that the Commissar Order was not enforced. On September 23, 1941, after several Wehrmacht commanders had asked for the order to be softened as a way of encouraging the Red Army to surrender, Hitler declined "any modification of the existing orders regarding the treatment of political commissars".

Source :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_M%C3%BCller
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Eugen_M%C3%BCller

Bio of General der Infanterie Karl von Roques

Generalleutnant der Luftwaffe Karl von Roques with his spouse.

Karl von Roques (7 May 1880 – 24 December 1949) was a German general and war criminal during the Second World War, who commanded the Army Group Rear Area behind Army Group South. Following the war, Roques was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in the High Command Trial. He died in 1949 while serving his sentence.

Karl von Roques was born in a German noble family of Huguenot descent. He entered the German Imperial Army in 1899. During the First World War, Roques served in staff roles in several divisions. By the end of the war he was promoted to major. After the armistice, Roques remained in the Reichswehr, serving in the Ministry of War, and then in staff and command roles in the army. Starting in 1934, Roques served as chief of staff and then the president of the Reichsluftschutzbund. In October 1938 he was recalled to active duty and in the Luftwaffe with the rank of lieutenant-general. In June 1939, Roques left the Luftwaffe with the rank of general.

During the Second World War, Roques served as an active officer in the Wehrmacht. In December 1939, he was given command of the new 142nd Infantry Division. From 15 March 1941 to October 1941, he was commander of the rear areas of Army Group South. On 1 July 1941, Roques was promoted to General der Infanterie.

As commander of the rear areas, Roques carried extermination policies against the Soviet partisans, Slavic and Jewish population. In October 1941, Roques was transferred to the Führerreserve. In June 1942 he assumed command of the rear areas of Army Group South, and after the dividing of the army group in Army Group A and Army Group B, he commanded the rear areas of the former. On 1 January 1943, Roques was again placed in the Führerreserve and on 31 March 1943 he was again pensioned off. In August 1943 he went to Warsaw as a representative of the German Red Cross.

After the German capitulation, Roques was arrested and tried in the High Command Trial. He was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. Moved for reasons of bad health from the Landsberg prison to a hospital in Nürnberg, he died there on 24 December 1949.

Source :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_von_Roques

https://www.sammlermarkt-nord.net/shop/generalleutnant-karl-roques-with-german-social-welfare-decor-p-13193.html?language=en

German POWs Reaction to Holocaust Film

The immediate reaction of German Prisoners of war upon being forced by the US Army to watch to the uncensored footage of the concentration camps shot by the US Signal Corps, 1945. After the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, films of the atrocities of the Holocaust were shown to the prisoners, which engendered shock, anger, and disbelief; amazed and disbelieving prisoners nicknamed them knocken films (films of bones). After compulsory viewing of an atrocity film, 1,000 prisoners at Camp Butner dramatically burned their German uniforms while a few prisoners even volunteered to fight in the war against Japan (the idea however was dropped by the American military). This forced process itself was part of the Allied policy of postwar denazification, meant to purge Germany of the remnants of Nazi rule and rebuild its civil society, infrastructure, and economy.

Source :
https://www.checkhookboxing.com/index.php?threads/eerie-creepy-photos-updated-the-story-behind-the-japanese-samurai-sword-assassination-photo.40853/page-96
http://www.historyinorbit.com/rare-historic-photos-n/13

War Crime of Soviet NKVD

A member of the Leibstandarte Division photographed with a distraught crowd of women after seeing the piles of corpses of murdered people by NKVD in Lviv, late June 1941. From 22 June 1941 to 28 June 1941 before the German advance arrived, the Soviet NKVD brutally massacred over 4,000 of Ukrainian and Polish civilians and political prisoners in the city of Lviv. The NKVD committed many massacres in Eastern Europe, primarily Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Bessarabia and other parts of the Soviet Union from which the Red Army was retreating in 1941.

Source :
http://5sswiking.tumblr.com/post/147866015232/a-member-of-the-leibstandarte-division