The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945 - Research and Authorship

Research and Authorship

The book examines the records of the work of the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, a body set up to collect evidence of war crimes committed by both the Allies and the Wehrmacht in World War II. Examples include the murder of Ukrainians in Lviv by the NKVD in 1941, the murder of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn in 1940, executions of German prisoners of war by French irregulars in 1944, and the sinking of the German hospital ship Tübingen by the RAF in 1944. De Zayas was the first researcher to evaluate the extant 226 volumes; about half of the total records, the rest apparently having been burned in Langensalza, Germany, near the end of the war (de Zayas; pp. xiii-xiv). These records, captured by the US Army in May 1945, had been classified documents in the United States for several decades, and had been returned by the US National Archives to the German Bundesarchiv in 1975.

De Zayas was head of a working group specialising in international humanitarian law, the "Arbeitsgruppe Kriegsvölkerrecht", at the Institute of International Law at the University of Göttingen. Together with a Dutch colleague from the University of Amsterdam, Walter Rabus, he undertook the evaluation of the recently declassified records, as well as related records of the Wehrmachtführungsstab, Fremde Heere Ost, and Kriegstagebücher (war diaries of army units). The project was financed by the University of Göttingen and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Between 1975-1979, the project involved the interviews of hundreds of witnesses who had given testimony before the German military judges in 1939-45, and more than a hundred of the judges who had been involved in the investigations. Two international conferences were held to discuss the project, one at the Institute of International Law in Göttingen, and the other at the Institute of International law at the University of Cologne. attended by international experts, the Director of the German Bundesarchiv, witnesses, and judges.

The result of the research was a 520-page book in German, consisting of two parts: a history of the bureau, its members, working methods, etc.; and a second part, consisting of case studies. It became the subject of a television documentary by the ARD/WDR in Germany, the broadcast receiving the largest number of viewers on 18 March and 21 March 1983. The 384-page English edition of the book was translated by de Zayas and published by the University of Nebraska Press in November 1989. De Zayas gave a series of guest lectures on the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau at universities in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, including the German Historical Institute in London. The German version of the book was heavily criticised by the media of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The book has remained in print for over thirty years and reached the 8th revised edition in Germany (Lindenbaum Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-936176-39-9) and the 4th revised edition in the United States (with Picton Press in Rockland, Maine).