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david irving Secretly Overheard:
people were shot; he knows it for a fact, but I didn’t know it. I’ve never
spoken to an eye-witness of a thing like that. I’ve heard it, but it was
impossible to establish the truth of things like that.
Kittel is on the list of criminals, and one must not forget that . . . But
I asked Kittel: “What did you do on that Sunday morning when the
hundreds of people were shot near your house?”
Then he said, “Everyone knew about it. So in a certain sense he was
implicated in it, and one must not forget – I believe Generalmajor
Wilhelm Ullersperger is also afraid of a similar fate and [Kurt] Meyer
will say to himself anyhow, “They’ll have their knife into me, because
soundsoviele Kriegsgefangene were shot by my Division [Hitler
Jugend].” Those people know for a fact that they probably haven’t a
chance of returning to their own country. So the one result is complete
agreement with all these notions expressed by Goebbels; and the other
result is the personal rows that we have here.
Kittel described it to me like this: . . . one Sunday morning he was
woken from his beautiful sleep by intermittent rifle fire. So he asked
someone to go and see what was happening. After a time this fellow
returned and reported to him that a few hundred Jews were assembled
there and were just being shot. That was in the area south-east or
south-west of Riga. He experienced that same thing again at Krakau.
Then he said that soldiers under his command who were off duty on
Sunday morning and who were stationed in that village had all gone
there and watched it. They [the Jews] had dug their own graves, and
then they picked up the children by their hair and then simply killed
them. The S.S. did that. The soldiers stood there, and besides that the
Russian civilian population stood 200 metres away and watched as
they were killed there.
He [Kittel] proved how vile the whole thing was by the fact that an
out-and-out S.S. man who was employed on his staff later succumbed
to a nervous breakdown and from that day onwards kept saying that
he couldn’t carry on any longer, it was impossible; he was a doctor. He
couldn’t get over it. That was his first experience of such things actually
being done.
A cold shudder run through [Generalleutnant) Schafer and myself
when we heard that, and then we said to Kittel: “What did you do
then? You were lying in bed and heard that, and it was only a few
hundred metres away from your house. Then surely you must have
reported that to your Oberbefehlshaber. Surely something was bound
this is a copyright manuscript © david irving 2007