"...A similar gauntlet, but more lethal, was organized four days later by officers of the Waffen-SS Viking division following the shooting death of the commander of one of the division's regiments. [note: may have been SS-Staf. Hilmar Wackerle of the Westland regt.?] Günther Otto, a twenty-one year-old butcher assigned to the train that carried fresh meat for the troops, described the experience in a Nurenburg trial deposition after the war:
'...The members of the meat train and the bakery company systematically rounded up all Jews who could be found based on their facial characteristic and their speech, as most of them spoke Yiddish. Obersturmführer Braunnagel of the bakery company and Untersturmführer Kochalty were in charge of rounding them up. Then a path was formed by two rows of soldiers. Most of the soldiers were from the meat train and the bakery company, but some of them were from the 1st Mountain Hunter Division. The Jews were then forced to run down the path and while doing so the people on both sides beat them with their rifle butts and bayonets. At the end of the path stood a number of SS and Wehrmacht officers with machine pistols, with which they shot the Jews dead as soon as they had entered into the bomb crater [being used as a mass grave]. [Superior officers of the regiment] were part of this group that conducted the shootings. About fifty to sixty Jews were killed in this manner."*
The Viking Division 'had been indoctrinated with anti-Semitic thoughts in Dachau and Weuberg' by a major and a corporal, Otto explained, 'but we were never told that the anti-Semitic program went as far as extermination.'"**
Peter Neumann, a young SS officer in the division, write in a letter "Liquidations, executions, purges. All these words, synonyms with destruction, seem completely banal and devoid of meaning once one has gotten used to them."**
* "Masters of Death: The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust" pg. 63
** Ibid. pg 146
from the WSSOB site!
did man of Wiking ever been to court for these warcrimes?
jan willem
