Einsatzgruppe General Poem by Paul Hartal

To his great vexation, three of the SS General's
sisters married Jewish men. This may have had
contributed to his desire to demonstrate to his
masters on whose side he really was. And so,
SS Obergruppenfuehrer Erich von dem Bach-
Zelewski became one of Hitler's favourite
generals, brutal and ruthless.

Bach-Zelewski was born in1899 in Lauenburg,
Germany.The city now belongs to Poland
and called Lebork. At age fifteen,
Bach-Zelewski volunteered for the Prussian
Army. During the First World War he was
wounded twice, suffered gas injuries and
awarded the Iron Cross.

In 1930 he joined the Nazi Party and three
years later he was promoted to the rank
of SS Major General.

In 1939, shortly after the German invasion
of Poland, Bach-Zelewski suggested
to Himmler setting up a concentration camp
in Auschwitz. On July 18,1941, a month
after Hitler's hordes invaded the Soviet Union,
the SS general reported to Berlin
that in a cleansing action at Slonim in Belarus
his police units shot 1,153 Jews. The message
was intercepted and deciphered
by British intelligence.

Bach-Zelewski served as SS and police leader
in Belarus and other territories occupied
by the Nazis. He had overseen the activities
of Einsatzgruppe B, mobile killing squads
under the command of SS-Gruppenfuehrer
Arthur Nebe. The Einsatzgruppen perpetrated
heinous atrocities during the war. Their task
was to murder Jews, communists and partisans.

The Slonim massacre was followed
by myriad others. Bach-Zelewski commanded
genocidal operations in many places
that had been trampled down by Nazi boots,
including Riga, Minsk and Mogulev.
His police corps in the territory under his
jurisdiction in Latvia, Belarus and Poland
killed over 200,000 Jews.

In July 1943 he took command of anti-partisan
operations not only in Russia and Poland but
also in France, Belgium, the Netherlands,
Norway and Yugoslavia. A year later he was
in charge of all troops battling against
the Polish Home Army.

In the course of the two months
of fierce fighting during the Warsaw Uprising
of the summer of 1944, Bach-Zelewski's troops
killed 200,000 civilians, including 65,000 men,
women and children, whom they slaughtered
in mass executions.

In the Nuremberg trials Bach-Zelewski insisted
that he was innocent and had no blood on his
hands. The SS general shifted the burden
of responsibility for the atrocious crimes of
the Nazis to the leaders of The Third Reich.
He blamed Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Frank
and Rosenberg for the annihilation of
approximately six million Jews.

Hjalmar Schacht, who served in Hitler's
Government as Minister of Economics,
did not have a particularly flattering opinion
of Bach-Zelewski. After the war, he called
the SS general, 'a frightful liar, a criminal
and a killer.'

In Nuremberg the mass murderer SS general
escaped his hanging in exchange
for his incriminating testimony against the Nazi
leaders of the Reich. In 1949 he left prison.
A decade later however, he was convicted by
a German court for murder. Ironically,
this conviction had no relation to Bach-Zelewski's
countless crimes in the Second World War.

The former SS general was sentenced
for killing in 1934 a Nazi storm trooper
during the Night of the Long Knives,
when Hitler ordered the execution of his
brown-shirted opponents.
Thirty eight years later Bach-Zelewski died
in a Munich prison.