The March (1945) - Blame For The Marches

Blame For The Marches

SS Generalleutnant Gottlob Berger, who was put in charge of POW camps in 1944, was arrested and put on trial in the Ministries Trial in 1947. In 1949 there was an attempt to assign blame for the marches against Berger and the indictment read:

that between September 1944 and May 1945, hundreds of thousands of American and Allied prisons of war were compelled to undertake forced marches in severe weather without adequate rest, shelter, food, clothing and medical supplies; and that such forced marches, conducted under the authority of the defendant Berger, chief of Prisoner-of-War Affairs, resulted in great privation and deaths to many thousands of prisoners.

Berger claimed that it was in fact the Germans' duty under the Geneva Convention to remove POWs from a potential combat zone, as long as it did not put their lives in even greater danger. He also claimed that the rapid advance of the Red Army had surprised the Germans, who had planned to transport the POWs by train. He claimed that he had protested about the decision, made by Hitler, according to him, but he was "without power or authority to countermand or avoid the order". The case failed due to these claims and the lack of eyewitness evidence - most ex-POWs were completely unaware of the trial taking place.

However in 1949, Berger was convicted for his role in the genocide of European Jews and sentenced to 25 years in prison. The sentence was reduced to 10 years in 1951 because of his refusal to kill the "Prominente" (famous or high-ranking Allied officers), who were held at Oflag IV-C (Colditz Castle), despite direct orders from Hitler. He had helped these prisoners escape by moving them to Bavaria and then onto Austria where he met up with them twice before they were returned to American forces. Berger claimed that he had saved the Prominente from Gestapo head Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who had sent agents to kill them.

After the war, Berger claimed that Hitler had wanted more shootings of prisoners and more punishments, but that he had resisted this. In 1948 Berger gave details to an American judge in Nuremberg of Hitler's plans to hold 35,000 Allied prisoners hostage in a 'last redoubt' in the Bavarian mountains. If a peace deal was not forthcoming, Hitler had ordered that the hostages were to be executed. Berger claimed that on 22 April 1945 Hitler had signed orders to this effect and these were passed to him by Eva Braun but he decided to stall and not carry out the order.

Berger also claimed that he had opposed a plan, proposed by the Luftwaffe and approved by Hitler, to set up special POW camps for Commonwealth and American airmen in the center of large German cities to act as human shields against Allied bombing raids. Berger realized that this would contravene the Geneva Convention and argued that there was not enough barbed wire - as a result this plan was not implemented. Berger was released from jail in 1951 and died in 1975.