Thursday May 31, 1945


The Allied military commanders in Germany, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, General Dwight David Eisenhower, Marshal Georgij Konstatinowitsch Shukow and Géneral de Division Marie Joseph Pierre François Koenig ...



... which together form the "Allied Control Council", which now represents the highest executive power in Germany, adopts its first two laws today;

Law number 1 prohibits, without exception, all laws that the National Socialists passed during their reign ...:



Law number 2 prohibits the Nazi party itself and without exception all of its sub-organizations!



The ban applies "forever".

The corresponding articles of the aforementioned law read:

The Control Council decrees as follows:


Article I. 1. The National Socialist German Workers' Party, its divisions, its affiliations and its dependent organizations, including semi-military organizations and all other Nazi institutions created by the Party as tools of its rule, have been abolished by this law and declared illegal.


2. Those Nazi organizations that are listed on the list in the appendix, or those that should also be identified, have been expressly dissolved.


3. The formation of any of the listed organizations, be it under the same name or under a different name, is prohibited.


In addition to the NSdAP, the following associations are banned:

1. NSdAP law firm
2. Chancellery of the Führer of the NSdAP
3. NSdAP International organization
4. People's League for Germanism abroad
5. Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle
6.Party examination board for the protection of Nazi literature
7. Reich Organization Leader of the NSdAP
8. Reich Treasurer of the NSdAP
9. Führer representative for the supervision of all intellectual and ideological training and
Education of the NSDAP
10. Reich Propaganda Leader of the NSdAP
11.Reichsleiter for the press and central publishing house of the NSdAP (Eher publishing company)
12. Reich press chief of the NSdAP
13.Reichsamt for the peasentry
14. Head Office of Public Health
15. Main Office for Educators
16. Head Office for Local Politics
17. Head Office for Officials
18. NSdAP commissioner for all questions of popular culture
19. Racial Policy Office of the NSdAP
20. Office for clan research
21. Colonial Political Office of the NSdAP
22. Foreign Policy Office of the NSdAP
23. Reichstag faction of the NSdAP
24.Reichs women leading
25. NS Medical Association
26. Main Office for Technology
27.NS Association of German Technicians
28.NS Teachers' Association
29. Reich Association of German Officials
30. Reich Colonial League
31.NS womanhood
32. NS Reichsbund of German Sisters
33.German women’s work
34.Reichsstudienführung
35. NSD Student Association
36.German student body
37. National Association of Lecturers
38.NS Law Keeper Association
39. NS-Altherrenbund of German students
40. Reich Association German Family
41. German Labor Front
42. NS Reichsbund for physical exercises
43. NS Veterans association (Kyffhäuserbund)
44. Reich Chamber of Culture
45. German Community Day
46 Secret State Police (Gestapo)
47 German hunters
48. Advisory Council on Population and Racial Policy
49. Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood
50. Winter aid organization
51. Main Office for Victims of War
52. NSKOV (Nazi war victim care)
53. SA (assault divisions), including the SA defense teams
54th SS (Schutzstaffeln), including the Waffen-SS, the SD (SS Security Service) and all departments that
Exercise command of the police and SS at the same time
55. NSKK (NS Driver Corps)
56. NSFK (NS Air Corps)
57.HJ (Hitler Youth) including their sub-organizations
58. RAD (Reich Labor Service)
59.OT (Organization Todt)
60.TENO (technical emergency aid)
61. National Socialist People's Welfare

The "Third Reich" is also ended administratively, which is why my book ends today! The country is almost completely destroyed, the army mostly in captivity, the leadership dead or in prison.

What remains is a destroyed continent and tens of thousands of severely traumatized people!

The war unleashed by Germany called for hecatombs of the dead - more than half of them civilians!

Belgium: 60,000
Bulgaria: 32,000
Germany: 6,553,000
Finland: 91,700
France: 360,000
Greece: 180,000
Great Britain: 332.825
Italy: 300,000
Yugoslavia: 1,690,000
Netherlands: 220,000
Norway: 10,000
Poland: 6,000,000
Romania: 378,000
Soviet Union: 27,000,000
Hungary: 950,000
USA: 407.316



The post-war period has begun.

The - smaller - part of the Germans found the end of the war honest and relieved as liberation, the larger part as "defeat" and "breakdown".

Most have in common a lie that they take with them to the successor states of the "Third Reich", Austria, the Soviet Union (East Prussia), Poland (Silesia, Pomerania etc.), the GDR and the Federal Republic:

"We didn't know anything!"

This sentence can be described as a founding myth, especially of the Federal Republic. And those who could be proven to have "known" mostly relied on "command emergency" ("I had to do it, otherwise I would be ...") - and were reinforced by ridiculously low judgments!

To date, not a single Nazi judge has been charged with his actions and not one of those involved in the terrible "T 4 action", including the killing of so-called "unworthy lives", ie the state-controlled murder of mentally disabled people understanding is ...:



A flood of justification books flooded the Federal Republic, the content of how one could have won the war if Hitler alone had not done everything wrong!

As a prominent example, I would mark the book "Lost Victories" ...



... of the former Generalfeldmarschall Erich von Lewinski (called von Manstein) ...:



But hardly anyone wondered what would have happened if the Germans had really won the war ...

Many high-ranking and highest-ranking Nazis made a second career after the war, one (Hans Globke) ...



... became Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's most important State Secretary, another one (Hans Filbinger, who has my uncle on his conscience!) ...



... became Prime Minister of the State of Baden Württemberg, and when this clean gentleman died in 2007, I had to watch on TV how his successor (now EU Commissioner!) incensed him at the public funeral service as a "resistance fighter against the Nazis" ...

Another, Hans-Georg Kiesinger even made it to the Federal Chancellor ...:



... and was therefore slapped in public by the prominent French anti-fascist Beate Klarsfeld in 1968 ...:



... another, SS-Hauptsturmführer Hanns Martin Schleyer, became president of the German employers' association (and was murdered by terrorists in 1977)...:



And one cannot imagine what would have become of the chairman of the "People's Court", the blood judge Roland Freisler, if he had not been accidentally killed on February 3, 1945 by a bomb attack ...

The life lie of "We didn't know about anything" could be maintained until the end of the 1960s - until a new generation started asking questions to their parents ...


**continued next post**

Epilog:

On October 16, 1946, the ten condemned to death in the Nuremberg Main War Criminal Trial were hanged. An eleventh escapes execution.

To be hung up ...:

Wilhelm Keitel (former chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht) ...:




Alfred Jodl (former chief of the Wehrmacht executive staff) ...:




Hans Frank (former governor general of occupied Poland) ...:




Julius Streicher (former editor of the anti-Semitic hate sheet "Der Stürmer") ...:




Ernst Kaltenbrunner (former head of the Reich Security Main Office and the "Gestapo") ...:




Joachim von Ribbentrop (former Nazi Foreign Minister) ...:




Wilhelm Frick (former (until 1943) Minister of the Interior of the Nazi state) ...:




Alfred Rosenberg (former chief ideologist of the NSdAP) ...:




Arthur Seyss-Inquart (former Reich Commissioner for the occupied Netherlands) ...:




Fritz Sauckel (former general representative for forced labor in the Nazi state) ...:




Their executioner is US Master Sergeant John Woods ...:




Hermann Göring (former "Reichsmarschall", air force chief and owner of other highest offices) eludes execution by suicide with cyanide ...:



The US guard Herbert Lee Stivers gave him the poison. In the next picture he is standing behind the accused on the wall, far right ...:





And with this ends my series "100 Days in History - The Agony Third Reich". The whole thing was a pretty hard piece of work - also psychologically, because the constant occupation with blood and death is certainly not subject to entertainment tax.

But I hope it was interesting for you readers.



Cheers

Interesting read and surely a lot of work. If you publish a book I would buy it but you should doublecheck the context of your accompanying - at times graphic - pictures. Maybe you should add Günter Grass beside Martin Schleyer. As a writer and one representative of the arrogant moral approach by which the new generation of 1960 judged their fathers (and mothers) he simply "forgot" that he was a former member of the SS - likewise many of the new generation forgot about their support of the RAF-terrorists and their glorification of murderous communist regimes....to forget about their faults is something that is not limited to one generation or nation (my personal lesson learned).
Cheers, Martin

And so it ends.

I've recently finished reading a book at home about Nazi hunters from an Allied viewpoint. What is shameful really, and many will find surprising, is the Allies' lack of will to bring many of these monsters to justice. The prevailing viewpoint being "We've just won that war. Why keep fighting it when we've now got a new one to deal with(The Cold War)."
To some extent I suppose they contented themselves with dealing with the figureheads.

Interesting to see in black & white the cost of the lives lost. I'll bet any money the true figure is actually higher. I don't know if they figure only people who died before say, June 1945.

Impossible to calculate of course, is the number of shattered lives that could never be the same again. When I was a kid in the 1970s & 80s, my grandparents' generation 'didn't speak about the war.' It was certainly never ever mentioned in school. They do formal lessons in it now. These days every schoolkid in Britain knows about Remembrance Day etc. That generation is all but gone now. Maybe people found it hard to talk about.

I admire those who helped rebuild a broken Europe afterwards.

Martin - you're a star.

Thanks for your effort Martin. A highly interesting read with many things I did not know of yet.

Adrian

Thank you for taking the time and effort to put this together. Certainly an eye opener!
BR
Ian

...a very interesting read indeed. Thank's!

Thank you, Martin, for all your effort and scholarly application to this monumental task. A salutary lesson for us all, and yet there are still those who deny many of the foul occurrences of those years (and since, in other theatres). Personally, I find revisionist excusers revolting, and have had to end a friendship because of it.
Well done, sir, ..now take a deep breath and take a well-earned rest

Alan

Epilog II


On June 7, 1951 - six years after the end of the war - the last seven death sentences from the Nuremberg war crimes trials were carried out in the courtyard of the Landsberg am Lech prison.

There are four members of the so-called "SS Einsatzgruppen" who committed mass murders behind the German front in the east:

Ex SS-Gruppenführer and lieutenant general of the police Otto Ohlendorf, commander of"Einsatzgruppe D", which
in southern Ukraine and the Caucasus killed thousands of people ...:






Former SS-Brigadeführer and major general of the police, Erich Naumann, chief from November 1941 to March 1943 of the "Einsatzgruppe B", which murdered in the army area of the "Heeresgruppe Mitte" ...:





Ex SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, commander of the "Sondereinsatzgruppe", which played a leading role in the murder of the Soviet Jews and among other things for the massacre in the gorge of Baby-Jar near Kiev was responsible, where in a single day in September 1941 more than 30,000 people were murdered...:





Ex SS-Obersturmbannführer Werner Braune, commander of "Sonderkommando 11b", which murdered in southern Ukraine and the Crimea ...:




Two concentration camp minions are also executed ...:


Ex SS-Hauptsturmführer and adjutant of the camp commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp, Hans-Theodor Schmidt ...:





Ex SS-Hauptscharführer Georg Schallermair, command leader of the "Mühldorf Außenkomando", one Subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp ...:



And finally a desk perpetrator:



- Ex SS-Obergruppenführer and general of the Waffen SS Oswald Pohl, who served as head of the SS economic and Main Administrative Office (WVHA) was significantly involved in the implementation of the Holocaust ...:





All convicts die from the gallows ...:




May they NOT rest in peace!


Cheers

Martin, only now finished to catch up with this intriguing thread

It was both informative and emotional for me, as your thread touched my own family history in at least two points. If I may add my family perspective:
My Grandparents Vilmos (B. 1908, Hebrew name Binyamin Ze'ev), and Ilona (B. 1909, Hebrew name Chaya) and my aunt, Anna (B. 1938, Hebrew name Hanna) were Hungarian Jews. They were separated in 1942 when my grandfather was forcefully taken to be in slave-labor company sent to the eastern front. He was one of 3 surviving out of 300 who were in that group. He was sent to Dachau and eventually liberated there by the Americans. My grandmother and aunt were sent in 1944 to forced labor camps in Austria (luckily for them, as their train was originally destined to Auschwitz). After liberation they were transferred to Terezinstadt, which by that time was already liberated and functioned as a transition camp for refugees. A bit later the family was reunited. Needless to say, both grandparents lost countless relatives (parents, siblings, etc) and friends to the Nazis and their collaborators.
My mother, Alice (Hebrew name Sarah) was born in 1946, and in 1950 they immigrated to Israel. My grandparents passed away many years ago, but I am lucky to have my aunt Hannah around, who made order for me in all that history, in a phone call we just had.

Again, thank you for the thread, and good luck with the book!

Benny

Thank you!

It is always very moving for me when the fates of individual people become visible behind the mere "numbers" ...


Cheers