The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945

By Walter Rabus, Alfred de Zayas, Alfred-Maurice de Zayas

Book Overview

A best seller when it was published in Germany in 1980, and now translated into English by the author, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945 is the only account to date of the German investigations of war crimes allegedly committed by?the Allied armies against the Nazi regime. During World War II the little-known German Bureau on War Crimes documented and filed reported cases of Allied violations of the laws of war. Filling 226 volumes, these files were seized in 1945 by American troops and brought to the United States, where they were treated as classified material, out of reach of scholars and journalists. They were returned to the Federal Republic of Germany's Bundesarchiv in 1968 and released in 1973. Alfred de Zayas is the first researcher to evaluate this material, which represents the most important discovery of World War II records since the Nuremberg trials. In addition, he studied related files in German, American, British, and Swiss archives and interviewed more than three hundred German military judges and witnesses involved in the bureau's investigations. His book documents many of the alleged violations and also describes the bureau's origin, organization, and modus operandi. Widely praised, the German edition was the subject of a television special in 1983.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803216807
• ISBN13: 9780803216808
• Release Date: September 1989
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 364 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

War Crimes Investigation

Prof. Dr. Alfred de Zayas is a taboo-breaker. In his books "Nemesis at Potsdam" and "A Terrible Revenge" he broke the silence surrounding the expulsion of 15 million Germans from their homelands in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of WWII, an ethnic cleansing that 2 million did not survive. In the "Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau" he analyzes the extant records of the bureau in the legal division of the Wehrmacht which contain investigations of alleged Allied war crimes, including the Soviet murder of Ukrainians in Lemberg, of the Polish officers at Katyn, of German POWs at Broniki, Feodosia and Grischino. This book- as well as all the others by Dr. de Zayas - is based on meticulous research. Studying 226 volumes of records, which had been returned by the National Archives in Washington to the German Bundesarchiv and declassified, studying pertinent archives in France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the USA and Great Britain, Dr. de Zayas supplements the information by interviewing hundreds of judges and victims - not just anybody, but those persons who carried out the investigations and those persons who gave testimony under oath to the judges 1939-45.. In this book de Zayas examines the method of collection by the War Crimes Bureau and compliance of the Allied Armies with the Geneva and Hague conventions. During the course of the war, 2000 German military judges examined alleged Allied war crimes such as shooting at shipwrecks, killing prisoners of war, bombing civilian targets. In his discussions of atrocities committed by the Allies in the West, he found no fabricated atrocities but well documented data. He puts the information into the proper historical perspective and also deals with the Nazi crimes documented in the Nuremberg trials. The German investigations resulted in protest notes to the Allies via neutral Switzerland. More than 350 references with pictures and facsimiles make this book one of the best sources for researchers delving into the history of WWII. The United States Prosecutor at Nuremberg, Benjamin Ferencz, reviewed this book in the American Journal of International Law, which had two large editions with the University of Nebraska Press. Picton Press in Rockland Maine reissued a new revised book in 2000 since the Nebraska edition sold out in 1999. Julius Loisch

Informative and Fascinating

The best chapter in this book was DeZayas's sorting out the details of what occurred prior to and during the German invasion of Lvov Poland (now Lviv Ukraine), which is the subject of much politically motivated distortion and misinformation. This book also documents more than several cases where the German army executed German soldiers who committed crimes such as rape and murder of civilians. This book is worth reading as are all of DeZayas's books - informative and fascinating.