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Eavesdropping on Hitler’s Reich
the mass-liquidation of thousands of Jewish women and infants
at Skirotawa near Riga on Sunday, November 30, 1941 – there is
all the halting train of thought, the uncertainties, the local-colour
which makes for authenticity, but also the phrase which betrays
instantly that Bruns was auch dabei: »Das sehe ich noch vor meinem
geistigen Auge,« as he describes the murder of a strikingly beautiful
young Jewish girl.
To a prosecutor, the significant data would be the name of the
main criminal, recalled by Bruns as Altmeyer, the baby-faced, slender
young S.S. officer with ash-blond hair and grey-blue eyes (in
fact Werner Altemeyer, the Stabsleiter attached to the Bürgermeister
von Riga, trained at the NS-Ordensburg at Crössinsee� Pommern).
To the general reader, perhaps, the fact that a twenty-one-year-old
should have had the Vollmacht to execute this crime in the name
of the German people; to an independent historian there are other
points of interest – the cowardice of Bruns and his senior-officer
colleagues, none of whom wished personally to sign a report to the
Führer’s headquarters about the atrocity they had witnessed (»Wie
bringen wir es dem Führer zu Gehör?«; and the fact that Hitler – far
from having issued the order, as claimed by Altemeyer – allegedly
intervened to order a halt to »diese Massenerschiessungen« as soon
as a report, signed by a junior officer, was forwarded to him.
Hören wir also jetzt die Stimme des Generalmajor Walter Bruns,
im Originalton April 1945:
BRUNS: Als ich davon hörte, daß am Freitag [wohl am 28.
November 1941] die Juden erschossen werden sollten, ging ich zu dem
21-jährigen Burschen [Werner Altemeyer] und sagte, daß sie sich in
meinem Dienstbereich sehr nutzbar gemacht hatten, außerdem: der
Heereskraftfahrtpark hatte 1500, dann hatte die Heeresgruppe etwa
800 Frauen eingesetzt, um Wäsche zu nähen von den Beständen, die
wir in Riga gefunden hatten, dann nähten in der Nähe von Riga etwa
1200 Frauen aus mehreren Millionen gefundener Schaffelle das, was
uns dringend fehlte: Ohrenschützer, Pelzklappen, Pelzwesten usw. Es
war doch nichts vorgesehen, weil ja doch der Krieg in Rußland ›sieg-