Wehrmacht

Wehrmacht {{Audio|De-Wehrmacht-pronunciation.ogg|listen}} was the name of the armed forces of Germany from 1935 to 1945. It replaced the old Reichswehr and was succeeded by the current Bundeswehr.

War crimes

It was long popularly believed that war crimes were for the most part committed by the Nazi party's paramilitary SS organisation. However, during the 1990s, a Wehrmachtausstellung (Wehrmacht exhibition), mostly based on photographs, toured through Germany claiming the Wehrmacht had participated heavily in the war crimes. Although some photographs were out of context, the exhibition provided documention that any notion of a "clean" Wehrmacht was a post-war fiction. In the book Keine Kameraden (No Companions), Christian Streit asserted that while the Wehrmacht indeed fought the western allies mostly according to the rules of war, it regularly committed atrocities in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Wehrmacht commander Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was hanged for war crimes in 1946.

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Examples include:

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• September Campaign in Poland Wehrmacht units killed at least 16,000 Poles during the September Campaign through executions, field incidents or murder. By late October 50,000 civilians had perished including 7000 Jews.
• Wehrmacht POW-camps Beginning in September 1939 prisoners from Poland and later the USSR suffered immensely in these due to lack of food, clean water, medicine and brutality by Wehrmacht guards.
• The Kommissarbefehl The commissionar-order provided for the immediate execution of political commissars of the Red Army. The order was formulated on Hitler's behalf by the Wehrmacht command and distributed to units among usual command channels.
• Destruction of Warsaw Up to 250,000 civilians were killed. Human shields were used by German forces during the fighting. During the Wola Massacre 50,000 civilians were murdered to intimidate the Poles into surrender.
• Eastern Front During the campaign in the East the Wehrmacht regularly murdered civilians in anti-partisan operations.
• Italy Italian soldiers were massacred by German forces on the Greek island of Cephalonia. Italian villages ware razed and their inhabitants murdered during anti-partisan operations.
• Greece During anti-partisan operations the Wehrmacht pursued a policy of taking hostages and executing whole male population in given territory or selected hostages.

It should be noted that the regular armed forces of the allies have also been accused of war crimes during WWII, such as the Dachau Massacre. However critics of this comparison point out that those and similar abuses, while perhaps tolerated by the Allied command, were not official policy endorsed by the leadership and were isolated incidents in contrast to deliberate and massive war crimes commited by Wehrmacht soldiers and endorsed by many of their commanders.

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