Bandenbekämpfung
In German military history, Bandenbekämpfung, also referred to as Nazi security warfare during World War II, refers to the concept and military doctrine of countering resistance or insurrection in the rear area during wartime with extreme brutality. The doctrine provided a rationale for disregarding the established laws of war and for targeting any number of groups, from armed guerrillas to civilians, as "bandits" or "members of gangs". As applied by the German Empire and later Nazi Germany, it became instrumental in the crimes against humanity committed by the two regimes, including the Herero and Nama genocide and the Holocaust.
Historian Alex J. Kay estimates that around one million civilians died as a result of German anti-partisan warfare—excluding actual partisans—among the 13 to 14 million people murdered by the Nazis during World War II.
Background
According to historian and television documentary producer, Christopher Hale, there are indications that the term Bandenbekämpfung may go back as far as the Thirty Years' War. Under the German Empire established by Otto von Bismarck in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War—formed as a union of twenty-five German states under the Hohenzollern king of Prussia—Prussian militarism flourished; martial traditions that included the military doctrine of Antoine-Henri Jomini's 1837 treatise, Summary of the Art of War, were put into effect. Some of the theories laid out by Jomini contained instructions for intense offensive operations and the necessity of securing one's "lines of operations". German military officers took this to mean as much attention should be given to logistical operations used to fight the war at the rear as those in the front, and certainly entailed security operations. Following Jomini's lead, Oberstleutnant Albrecht von Boguslawski published lectures entitled Der Kleine Krieg, which outlined in detail the tactical procedures related to partisan and anti-partisan warfare—likely deliberately written without clear distinctions between combatants and non-combatants. To what extent this contributed to the intensification of unrestrained warfare cannot be known, but Prussian officers like Alfred von Schlieffen encouraged their professional soldiers to embrace a dictum advocating that "for every problem, there was a military solution". Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, Chief of the Prussian General Staff, added hostage-taking as a means of deterrence to sabotage activities and the employment of collective measures against entire communities, which became the basis for German anti-partisan policies from 1870 and remained as such through 1945.Franco-Prussian War
Prussian security operations during the Franco-Prussian War included the use of Landwehr reservists, whose duties ranged from guarding railroad lines, to taking hostages, and carrying out reprisals to deter activities of francs-tireurs. Bismarck wanted all francs-tireurs hanged or shot, and encouraged his military commanders to burn down villages that housed them. More formal structures like Chief of the Field Railway, a Military Railway Corps, District Commanders, Special Military Courts, intelligence units, and military police of varying duties and nomenclature were integrated into the Prussian system to bolster security operations all along the military's operational lines.Boxer Rebellion and Herero Wars
Operationally, the first use of tactics later associated with Bandenbekämpfung occurred in China following the Boxer Rebellion, after two German officers went missing. German troops conducted over fifty operations, including burning a village and taking prisoners. Soon after, the infantry received a handbook for "operations against Chinese bandits". The first full application of Bandenbekämpfung in practice, was the Herero and Nama genocide, a campaign of racial extermination and collective punishment that the German Empire undertook in German South West Africa against the Herero and Nama people. The genocidal campaign against the Herero people was so extreme that an estimated 66–75 percent of the population perished.World War I
During World War I, the Imperial German Army ignored many of the commonly-understood European conventions of war when between August and October 1914 and murdered some 6,500 French and Belgian citizens. In 1914, German troops, outraged by alleged civilian "resistance", responded with mass reprisals. Though some incidents stemmed from panic, many were the result of explicit orders. Soldiers even admitted to killing civilians—including women and children—based on vague suspicions of gunfire. On some occasions, attacks against German infantry positions and patrols that may have actually been attributable to "friendly fire" were blamed on potential francs-tireurs, who were regarded as bandits and outside the rules of war, eliciting ruthless measures by German forces against civilians and villages suspected of harboring them. These German units "had received orders to show no mercy" and as a result laid waste to towns such as Andenne, Dinant, Tamines, Aarschot, and Rossignol.Throughout the war, Germany's integrated intelligence, perimeter police, guard network, and border control measures coalesced to define the German military's security operations. Along the Eastern Front sometime in August 1915, Field Marshal Erich von Falkenhayn established the Government General of Warsaw over former Congress Poland under General Hans von Beseler and created an infrastructure to support ongoing military operations, including guard posts, patrols, and a security network. Maintaining security meant dealing with Russian prisoners, many of whom tried to sabotage German plans and kill German soldiers, so harsh pacification measures and terror actions were carried out, including brutal reprisals against civilians, who were subsequently labeled as bandits. Before long, similar practices were instituted throughout the Eastern and Western areas of German occupied territory. Repression intensified under Ludendorff and Hindenburg’s “silent dictatorship” beginning in 1916; they interpreted Clausewitz as justifying total subjugation of enemy nations.
World War II
During World War II, the German Army policy for deterring partisan or "bandit" activities against its forces was to strike "such terror into the population that it loses all will to resist". Even before the Nazi campaign in the East began, Adolf Hitler had already absolved his soldiers and police from any responsibility for brutality against civilians, expecting them to kill anyone that even "looked askance" at the German forces. Much of the partisan warfare became an exercise of antisemitism, as military commanders like General Anton von Mauchenheim gennant Bechtolsheim exclaimed that whenever an act of sabotage was committed and one killed the Jews from that village, then "one can be certain that one has destroyed the perpetrators, or at least those who stood behind them". Commander of Einsatzgruppe B, Arthur Nebe, expressed a similar opinion when he commented: "Where there’s a partisan, there’s a Jew, and where there’s a Jew, there’s a partisan."Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 and its reorganisation, security and policing merged with the establishment of Bandenbekämpfung operations. Aside from the groups assigned to fight partisans, additional manpower was provided by the Gestapo, the Kripo, the SD, and the Waffen-SS. There were a number of SS-led actions implemented against so–called "partisans" in Lemberg, Warsaw, Lublin, Kovel, and other places across Poland.
When the Wehrmacht entered Serbia in 1941, they carried out mass reprisals against alleged "partisans" by executing Jews there. The commander responsible for combating partisan warfare in 1941, General Franz Böhme, reiterated to the German forces, "that rivers of German blood" had been spilled in Serbia during the First World War and the Wehrmacht should consider any acts of violence there as "avenging these deaths".
File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-166-0525-30,_Kreta,_Kondomari,_Erschießung_von_Zivilisten.jpg|thumb|alt=Civilians being shot at by a German firing squad|Execution of civilians, Kondomari, Crete, 2 June 1941
During the Battle of Crete shootings; 2) forced levies; 3) burning down villages; and 4) extermination of the male population of the entire region". General Student also demanded that "all operations be carried out with great speed, leaving aside all formalities and certainly dispensing with special courts". This contributed to a series of collective punishments against civilians in Kandanos, Kondomari, and Alikianos, immediately after Crete fell. During the Axis occupation of Greece, the emergence of armed resistance from 1942 onward invoked mass reprisals in places such as Viannos, Kedros, Mousiotitsa, Kommeno, Lingiades, Kalavryta, Drakeia, Distomo, Mesovouno, Pyrgoi, Kaisariani and Chortiatis, along with numerous other incidents of smaller scale. Generals whose units also committed war crimes under the guise of Bandenbekämpfung included Walter Stettner, commander of the 1st Mountain Division in Epirus, and Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, who led the 22nd Air Landing Division in Crete.
Before invading the Soviet Union for Operation Barbarossa, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, and Chief of the SD Reinhard Heydrich, as well as SS General Heinrich Müller briefed the Einsatzgruppen leaders of their responsibility to secure the rear areas—using the euphemism "special treatment"—against potential enemies; this included partisans and anyone deemed a threat by the Nazi functionaries. When Heydrich repeated this directive as an operational order, he stressed that this also meant functionaries of the Comintern, Jews, and anyone of position in the communist party. This was part of the SS contribution to prevent acts they considered to be criminal in the newly conquered territories, to maintain control, and to effect the efficient establishment of miniature Nazi governments, constituted by mobile versions of the Reich Security Main Office.
Starting the same day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the 12th Infantry Division command issued orders that guerilla warfare combatants were not to be quartered as POWs but were to be "sentenced on the spot by an officer", meaning they were to be summarily shot. To this end, the Nazis welcomed partisan warfare since in the mind of Hitler, such circumstances opened up "the possibility of annihilating all opposition".
On 31 July 1941, the 16th Army command were informed that any "Partisan-Battalions" formed behind the front that were not properly uniformed and without appropriate means of identification, "were to be treated as guerrillas, whether they were soldiers or not". Any civilians who provided any assistance whatsoever were to be treated likewise, which historian Omer Bartov claims "always meant one thing only: death by shooting or hanging". Members of the 18th Panzer Division were instructed likewise on 4 August 1941. Nearly always, these genocidal measures were "camouflaged" in reports by coded formalised language, using terms like Aktion, Sonderbehandlung, or Umsiedlung.
From September 1941 onwards through the course of World War II, the term Bandenbekämpfung supplanted Partisanenkämpfung to become the guiding principle of Nazi Germany's security warfare and occupational policies; largely as a result of Himmler's insistence that for psychological reasons, bandit was somehow preferable. Himmler charged the "Prinz Eugen" Division to expressly deal with "partisan revolts". Units like the SS Galizien—who were likewise tasked to deal with partisans—included foreign recruits overseen by experienced German "bandit" fighters well-versed in the "mass murder of unarmed civilians".
In keeping with these extreme measures, the OKW issued orders on 13 September 1941, that "Russian soldiers who had been overrun by the German forces and had then reorganised behind the front were to be treated as partisans—that is, to be shot. It was left to the commanders on the spot to decide who belonged to this category." In late 1941, German security divisions, including the 707th, 286th, 403rd, and 221st, conducted operations in Belarus that resulted in the execution of thousands of civilians, predominantly Jews. These actions were officially reported as anti-partisan activities, but the minimal German casualties suggest that these were not genuine combat operations against armed resistance.