Philip W. Blood - Birds of Prey

Some issues remained unresolved. There was evidence of Polish collaboration with the Germans, especially in hunting and as forest guides. Identifying those persons was impossible as Germans reports did not include names. The problem of confused languages was an added complication. German soldiers, usually clerks in headquarters, compiled combat reports that struggled with Polish and Russian names. In Białowieźa, the occupation bureaucracy cast transliterations of Polish and Russian. Today, the only impact of this chaos is to cause confusion to researchers. An example: the Polish town of Hajnówka was translated by the Germans as Gainovka during the Great War, and Hainowka under the Nazis. The Germans translated Białowieźa as Bialowies in both world wars. Pruzhany in Belarus was Pruzhany when it came under Poland before 1939, and Pruzana under German occupation. The GIS maps adopted the German and narrative took the present-day Belarus form. The other prominent towns including Narewka, Topiło, Czolo, and Popielewo, Suchopol, Bialy Lasek, and Kamieniec-Litewski have remained unchanged. The Germans referred to Narewka Mala in their reports and that name is used throughtout the manuscript in accordance with the German records. Many villages disappeared and their names later replicated far beyond the original site. Others cannot be identified on any maps and the reader has to accept that some villages are now lost from record and memory.

Since the war, there have been several changes in the political boundaries of the region adding further confusion to place names. To identify such places, the original name is adopted, but in brackets the present name and nation: for example, Nassawen, East Prussia (Lessistoje: Kaliningrad Oblast). Any faults in translations are of course mine. Time was also a critical factor in this book, because a certain level of real-time has been restored to events. The 24 hours clock regulated military life, with the Luftwaffe reports adopting that time system, but which time zone were they working towards—Berlin or Moscow? The Białowieźa occupation was a confusion of time. The Germans imposed curfews between dusk and dawn, which the partisans and Jews ignored. Luftwaffe patrols rarely began before dawn or continued after dusk; the partisans attacked when there were no patrols. The atmospherics of darkness and lightness is better reflected by am/pm, which is adopted throughout the book.

In principle, the citations for the archival sources follow the original text. However, certain sources the shortand, the notes and the unclear dates led me to anglicize dates and document pages to ensure clarity. For example, this German citation include document number in the diary and the anglicized date: “BArch, RL 31/2, document 3, Wehrmacht-kommandantur Bialowies Tgb.Nr 686/42, An des Lw.Sicherung-Batl. z.b.V. Bialowies, 29 July 1942.” Words can have legal implications for academic research in Germany. In 1992, Christopher Browning accepted the restrictions of Federal German laws for data protection on the use of names of individuals. Those laws are still in force at the time of writing, and I also agreed to abide by the strict code of privacy. In an article about Białowieźa from 2010, I adopted pseudonyms. 48Since then, several German books have placed the names of many individuals that were assigned to serve in Białowieźa in the public domain. My research database is more extensive than those books, and so I adopted a mix of anonymity and openness. For those persons not yet published in the public domain and in the interests of anonymity, I have adopted the first name with the first letter of the surname followed by two **—for example, Rudolf F**. The names of men already published remain in full—for example, Walter Frevert. The ranks of those from criminal organisations, such as the Nazi Party and the SS, have been kept to the original.

1Christopher Hale, Hitler’s Foreign Executioners: Europe’s Dirty Secret (Stroud, 2011).

2Jeff Rutherford & Adrian E. Wettstein, The German Army on the Eastern Front , (Barnsley, 2018), p. 41. They refer to Auftragstaktik as ‘Mission Command’, a commander ordered a mission, arranged forces and set the goal but then left it to a junior officer or NCO to complete the mission as they saw fit.

3Michel Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: The Power and Production of History, (Boston, 1997), p. 1.

4Blood, Hitler’s Bandit Hunters, passim.

5NARA, RG165 721A, Seventh Army Interrogation Center APO 758, Final Interrogation Report, Historical Section of the OKL, Ref. No. SAIC/FIR/51, 3 October 1945.

6Philip W. Blood, ‘Bandenbekämpfung, Nazi occupation security in Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia, 1942–45,’ PhD diss. (unpublished), Cranfield University, 2001.

7Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Stuka Pilot, (Exeter, 1952), p. 36.

8NARA, RG319, Winiza (sic) massacres, September–October 1952, 66 Counter-Intelligence Corps Detachment, 17 October 1952.

9Autorenkollektiv, Bilanz des Zweiten Weltkrieges – Erkenntnisse und Verpflichtungen für die Zukunft, (Oldenburg, 1953).

10H. Boog, Die deutsche Luftwaffenführung 1935–1945, (Stuttgart, 1982); W. Murray (1996), The Luftwaffe 1933–45: Strategy for Defeat, (Washington DC, 1996); J.S. Corum, The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918–1940, (Kansas, 1997).

11Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45, German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, (New York, 1986), p. 3.

12Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, (New York, 1998).

13Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (Hg.), Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944, (Hamburg, 1995). Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (Hg.), Verbrechen Der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen Des Vernichtungskrieges 1941–1944, (Hamburg, 2002).

14Hannes Heer, Tote Zonen: Die Deutsche Wehrmacht An Der Ostfront, (Hamburg, 1999).

15Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, (New York, 1985 revised).

16Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (New York, 1996).

17Yitzak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, Shmuel Spector, The Einsatzgruppen Report, (New York, 1989).

18Father Patrick Desbois and Paul A. Shapiro, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 million Jews, (New York, 2009).

19Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942–1944, (London, 1984).

20Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944, (Hamburg, 1999).

21Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, (London, 2008), pp. 153–4.

22William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922–1945, (London, 1984).

23Browning, Ordinary Men, passim.

24Eric Hobsbawm, On History, (London, 1997), p. 201.

25Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson and István M. Szijártó, What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, (London, 2013), p. 164 and p. 166.

26Claire Zalc and Tal Buttmann (ed), Microhistories of the Holocaust, (New York, 2017).

27Tomasz Samojlik, Conservation and Hunting: Białowieźa Forest in the Time of Kings, (Białowieźa, 2005), Bogumila Jedrzejewska and Jan M. Wójcik, Essays on Mammals of Białowieźa Forest, (Białowieźa, 2004); see also Jan Walencik, The Last Primeval Forest in Lowland Europe, (Białowieźa, 2010).

28Simon Winder, Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern, (London, 2010), p. 17.

29Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, (New York, 1995), pp. 75–120.

30Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, (London, 2011).

31Simon Harrison, Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War, (New York, 2014).