Page 362 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

362 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

war academy openly taught that its doctrine differed: article 2 of Hague, which allowed the
civilian population to take up arms and resist invasion, ‘did not conform with the German
view’. ‘Francs-tireurs’ were therefore criminals who had to be eliminated without further
ado.
The institutional memory of the army also predisposed it to draconian solutions: the
memory of the war of 1870/71 and military training inculcated the expectation that there
would be a levée en masse and franc-tireur resistance. After all, there had been real francs-
tireurs in the Franco-Prussian War.
Commanders such as generals von Einem and von Bülow therefore issued orders at the
start of the invasion ‘to burn down the villages and shoot everyone’ because of the ‘treach-
erous firing by the Belgian population’. By any standard these were criminal orders, and
the executing of civilians was a war crime. During the war the Allies resolved to prosecute
alleged war criminals, and after the war attempted to have 844 suspects extradited for war
crimes trials.
Clearly, however, the genocidal killings in the Second World War were in an entirely dif-
ferent category. But when did the transition to genocidal killing take place, and why? Tradi-
tionally, the turning point has been seen as the year 1941, but some historians argue that the
invasion of Poland in 1939 already marked the opening of genocidal war.
Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 showed how the new warfare evolved
out of the spirit of the old. The first draft decrees to prepare the invasion in fact appeared to
be almost identical to orders issued in 1914: the decree on ‘war jurisdiction’ of 13 May 1941
stated that ‘Francs-tireurs are to be eliminated without mercy by the troops in combat or
while escaping.’ There were to be ‘collective measures of violence against villages.’ Any ci-
vilian calling for resistance or disobedience to German orders was also termed a franc-tireur
and ‘eliminated’. The Wehrmacht commanders of 1941 denied the population the right to
defend themselves; just as in 1914 that was a conscious breach of international law.
What was new was the radical ideological component. Hitler had prepared the Wehrma-
cht generals for Operation Barbarossa with a speech on 30 March 1941 in which he said that
the coming war would be a ‘struggle between two ideologies: Bolshevism equals criminality.
We must take our leave of soldierly comradeship. The communist has never been a comrade
and will never be one. This is a war of annihilation.’ Not only francs-tireurs but also ‘the
bearers of the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy’, and ‘political commissars’ in the Red Army
were to be killed. The ‘commissar order’ and other decrees brought about the unprecedented
radicalization of the war of racial annihilation which distinguished the war of 1941 from the
campaign against Poland in 1939.
In fact, the parallels between 1939 and 1914 were stronger than those with 1941. In the
first eight weeks of the invasion and occupation of Poland, 16,336 civilians were killed,
mostly on the pretext that they had resisted. Most victims were men, not women and chil-
dren, and the killing thus lacked one essential feature of genocide. Even the language echoed
that of 1914: the victims were not ‘partisans’, but ‘francs-tireurs’.
Nevertheless, the invasion of Poland was no conventional war. The Nazi leadership re-
garded the Polish elite, the clergy and the Jews as the ringleaders of resistance, and in Sep-
tember/October 1939 Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, repeatedly informed