In the course of the present Trial a great deal of evidence of application of the “Kugel” order has been submitted. One of the examples of this kind of crime is the murder of 50 officer-pilots. The fact that this crime was inspired by the High Command cannot be doubted.
OKW also distributed an order for the destruction of the “commando” units. The original order was submitted to the Court (PS-498, USA-501). According to this order officers and soldiers of the “commando” units had to be shot, except in cases when they were to be questioned, after which they were shot in any case.
These orders were unswervingly carried out by the commanding officers of Army units. In June 1944 Rundstedt, the Commander-in-Chief of the German troops in the West, reported that Hitler’s order in regard to “the treatment of the ‘commando’ groups of the enemy is still being carried out” (PS-531, USA-550).
3. The High Command, along with the SS and the Police, is guilty of the most brutal police actions in the occupied regions.
The instructions relating to special regions, issued by OKW on 13 March 1941, contemplated the necessity of synchronizing the activities in occupied territories between the army command and the Reichsführer of the SS. As is seen from the testimony of the chief of the 3d Department of RSHA and who was concurrently chief of the Einsatzgruppe “D”, Otto Ohlendorf, and of the chief of the VI Department of RSHA, Walter Schellenberg, in accordance with OKW instructions there was an agreement made between the General Staff and the RSHA about the organization of special “operational groups” of the Security Police and SD—“Einsatzgruppen”, assigned to the appropriate army detachments.
Crimes committed by the Einsatzgruppen on the territory of the temporarily occupied regions are countless. The Einsatzgruppen were acting in close contact with the commanding officers of the appropriate army groups.
The following excerpt from the report of Einsatzgruppe “A” is extremely characteristic as evidence:
“. . . among our functions as the establishment of personal liaison with the commanding officer both at the front and in the rear. It must be pointed out that the relations with the army were of the best, in some cases very close, almost hearty, as, for instance, the commander of the tank group, Colonel-General Hoppner” (L-180).
4. The representatives of the High Command acted in all the echelons of the army, as members of a criminal group.
The directives of the OKW and the General Staff, in spite of the manifest violations of international law and customs of warfare, not only did not provoke any protest on the part of the higher staff officers of the command of the various groups of the armies but were: inflexibly applied and supplemented by still more cruel orders in the development of such directives.