Walter Braemer


Walter Braemer was a general in the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht and a high-ranking SS commander during the Nazi era. He was a Nazi criminal responsible for mass murders of the civilian population of Bromberg/Bydgoszcz in Poland at the outset of the Second World War, and later for crimes against humanity in the Hol­o­caust in the Soviet Union. He escaped prosecution and punishment after the war despite having been held for 2½ years as a prisoner of war by the British.

Early career

Braemer was born at Königsberg, then an East Prussian port city on the Baltic Sea, on 7 January 1883. His military career under the German Empire and the Weimar Republic bears the unmistakable hallmarks of patronage commonly accorded at the time to people of high birth.
On 2 March 1901, at the age of 18, he enlisted as a Fähnrich in the 2nd Hanoverian Dragoon Regiment No. 16, a unit of the 20th Division of the Prussian Army stationed in the northern garrison town of Lüneburg in the Prussian Province of Hanover. Less than eleven months later, on 27 January 1902, he was promoted, without much education, military or other­wise, to the commissioned rank of Leutnant his commission as an officer having been issued on 22 June 1900, that is, actually prior to his enlistment in the army, at a time when he was a civilian minor of 17 years of age.
Only subsequently, for two years between 1906 and 1908, did he study at the Military School of Equitation in Hanover. This course was followed by 2 years 9 months and 3 weeks he spent at a military academy where he was enrolled until 21 July 1911.
In April 1912, was detached to the central military command known as the "Great General Staff", the governing body of the army. While there, he was given the higher rank of Rittmeister on 17 February 1914, and five days later formally inducted into the Great General Staff at the age of 31.
When the First World War broke out, Braemer was transferred on 2 August 1914 to the headquarters of the 9th Cavalry Division, a formation newly raised specifically for the war effort, where he served as a third-in-command under the fellow-Prussian commander Eberhard Graf von Schmettow and the latter's right hand or "Ia", Major Herwarth von Bittenfeld.
Braemer married Erika Freiin von der Goltz on 27 December 1915; they had three children. Between 9 September 1916 and 18 April 1917 he circulated between the General Staffs of such formations as the 75th Reserve Division, and the 6th and 7th Cavalry Divisions, before being appointed to the General Staff of the XII Corps at Dresden. On 17 January 1917 he was decorated with the Royal Prussian Hohenzollern House Order for military exploits that remain a complete mystery. He then served for a few months between November 1917 and March 1918 under the :de:Oberquartiermeister|Ober­quartier­meister within the command known as the 10th Army in Cologne, before being posted very briefly on 28 March 1918 to the General Staff of the 234th Infantry Division |234. Division, and the next month again to that of the XXVI Reserve Corps.
After the War he served in the 20th Reichswehr Brigade based at Allenstein in Ermland, 126 km south of his native Königsberg in East Prussia, before being delegated to a desk job at the Bendlerblock in Berlin the Ministry of the Reichswehr for a period of 2 years and 3½ months between 13 December 1919 and 1 April 1922. While there he was again promoted to the rank of Major on 1 January 1922. For 18 months between April 1922 to October 1923 he was squadron leader in the 2nd Cavalry Regiment Rei­ter-Re­gi­ment that garrisoned both Allenstein and Osterode in Ermland, then within the Province of East Prussia. Next, over the period of 3 years and 4 months from October 1923 to Feb­ru­a­ry 1927, Braemer served on the General Staff of the 6th Division at Münster in Westphalia: here he saw another ad­vance­ment in rank to Oberst­leutnant on 1 April 1926. From 1 February 1927 to 1 Jan­u­a­ry 1931 he held the command of the 6th Cavalry Regiment Reiter-Regiment |6. headquartered in the northern town of Pasewalk, about 40 km west of Stettin in Western Pomerania a post in which he spent 3 years and 11 months. A promotion to the rank of Oberst was accorded him there on 1 October 1929. Lastly, Braemer held the military command of the city of Inster­burg in East Prussia, some 100 km east of his native Königsberg, during the nearly 22-month period from 1 January 1931 to 30 November 1932. Here he was elevated to the General­major­ship on 1 October 1932, and two months later retired from the Reichswehr at the age of 49.

Nazi period

The beginning

Two years and eight months after Hitler's rise to power and nearly three years after his leave-taking of the army, on 1 October 1935, Braemer then aged 52 joined the SS with the rank of Standartenführer, and in this rank was posted as a "training consultant" to the General Staff of the SS circuit or Ober­abschnitt known as command Nord, where he stayed until 15 April 1936, to be transferred to the Ober­abschnitt Nord­west for one month, before being moved again to the Ober­abschnitt Nord­see, where he stay­ed until 1 July 1938. All three SS districts in question were at the time head­quar­ter­ed at Altona in Hamburg. In the course of his SS service Braemer gained two promotions, ultimately to Bri­ga­de­füh­rer, the fourth-highest rank in the SS, a remarkably quick climb accomplished in less than 2 years and 9 months since joining the ranks. The latter rank of Bri­ga­de­füh­rer was conferred on him only after he had be­come member of the Nazi party sometime in 1937 with the membership number 4012329. At this time Braemer involved himself with Himmler's Lebens­born So­ci­e­ty, an or­gan­i­za­tion whose purpose was to devise ways and means of en­gi­neer­ing the genetic makeup of the German nation by promoting Nazi eugenics and "breeding" pure "Aryans".
On 1 July 1938 Braemer was appointed to the rank of Generalmajor of the Wehrmacht, the same rank he last held in the Reichswehr, and was placed by the SS once again at the disposal of the army. At the time of mobilization mounted in preparation for the Nazi attack on Poland Braemer was appointed the commander of the 580th Rear Army Area, a po­si­tion codenamed "Korück 580" korück being an acronym formed from the words Kommandant and rückwärtig, short for Kommandant des rück­wärtigen Armee­gebietes 580. He received that command on 26 August 1939, six days before the invasion of Poland.
Four days after becoming Korück 580, on 30 August 1939, Braemer gave the order for the formation of the concentration camp at Liepe, 8 kilometres west of the current German-Polish border, which camp was es­tab­lish­ed on 1 September 1939, the first day of the Second World War. As Korück 580 Braemer was also responsible for the creation of the camps located at Łopienek and other localities.

Criminal activities

Poland

Shortly after the strike on Poland Braemer found himself with the Nazi invasion force in the Polish region of Cuyavia, where according to latest scholarship he was appointed by the 4th German Army in his capacity as Ko­rück 580 the commandant of the northern Polish city of Bydgoszcz, a position in which he formally styled himself in his written proc­la­ma­tions as the "chief in executive authority". His short stint as the supremo of Bydgoszcz lasted with effect from 5 Sep­tem­ber 1939 some earlier published sources cite the date of 8 Sep­tem­ber 1939 for his assumption of this post. The dates are significant, as his appearance on the Bydgoszcz stage is said in some sources to have lasted for a total of only six days. Within just four days of Braemer's beginning to exercise his "executive authority" he be­came personally re­spon­si­ble for the murder of 370 Polish civilians in Bydgoszcz in the large-scale pacification operations he ordered. These included the public execution by a firing squad in the city's historic Old Market Square on 9 September 1939 of a large group of civilians ran­dom­ly round­ed up in the streets a short while earlier in the day, a crime which provoked in the ensuing months a protest from the Vatican. By 8 September 1939 the total number of civilian victims of Bydgoszcz executions grew to 200400 by various es­ti­mates; on 9 Sep­tem­ber 1939 another 120 were shot. The next day, 10 September 1939, in a Braemer-ordered raid on the working­-class Byd­goszcz neigh­bour­hood of "Swedish Heights" between 120 and 200 ci­vil­ians were killed,­­­ while another public execution staged on that day in the centrally located Old Market Square claimed 20 victims. It is said that the mass murders of civilians in Bydgoszcz went on at such a pace that Braemer, although a "com­pe­tent commandant", eventually lost all count of how many had been killed and he allowed the slaughter to con­tin­ue. Apparently the level of atrocities was such that on occasion it produced qualms of conscience in his own executioners, but never in Braemer himself. While carrying out his actions against the townsfolk of Bydgoszcz, in reprisal for the stiff resistance that the civilian population put up against the German invaders after the Polish armed forces withdrew from the city on 4 September 1939, Braemer instituted at the same time ethnic-cleansing policies against the Jewish minority of the town, being able as a result to report on 14 November 1939, in the 11th week of the war, that "the Jewish question does not arise in Bydgoszcz... because during the säu­be­rungs­ak­ti­on­en all the Jews who did not deem it advisable to flee from the city beforehand were eliminated". The Bydgoszcz massacres are the primary reason for which some German his­to­ri­ans have con­sid­er­ed Braemer an "extremist" among the Nazi Wehrmacht's corps of generals. Others have described him as a "fanatical Nazi" who resorted to "unheard-of brutality".
Little is known of Braemer's activities immediately following his disappearance from the Bydgoszcz scene, a community on which he left an indelible mark, and there is no clear record of his departure as such. Historians have merely noted that he did not play any role in the occupation of the historical region of Greater Poland, i.e. of the lands to the west of Cuyavia where Bydgoszcz is located, thereby suggesting that his activities were of interest to researchers in other areas. It is on record, how­ever, that Braemer continued as Ko­rück 580 for a total of nearly 21 months until 19 May 1941.
After his appointment as Ko­rück 580 came to an end on 19 May 1941, Braemer spent 35 days, until 24 June 1941, officially mothballed in the füh­rer­re­ser­ve or officers' reserve pool within the German Army High Command as his new assignment was being prepared for him.

The Baltic and Byelorussia

Two days after the commencement of the Operation Barbarossa, Braemer was appointed the :de:Wehrmachtbefehlshaber|Wehr­macht­befehls­haber or supreme military commander of the so­-call­ed Reichskommissariat Ostland, a Nazi régime established in the combined occupied territory of the Baltic states, parts of north­eastern Poland and western Byelo­Russia, head­quarter­ed in Riga, the capital of Latvia. He was to hold this office during the period of about 2 years and 10 months between 24 June 1941 and 20 April 1944. In some reports his ap­point­ment to this post was already finalized in the planning stages on 27 May 1941. In this ca­pac­i­ty Braemer was heavily im­pli­cated in the mass murder of the Jew­ish population in the territories under his command. He was responsible for, among other things, prom­ul­gat­ing legislation that laid the legal and operational ground­work on the basis of which whole Jewish communities numbering thousands of people were ex­ter­mi­nated in the Holocaust. Thus for example, on 25 Sep­tem­ber 1941 Braemer issued his "Guidelines for Military Security and Maintenance of Quiet and Order" which specifically stipulated the "imperative elim­i­na­tion" of, among others, "Jews and philo­se­mit­ic elements ". The pivotal role that Braemer played in the Holo­caust of the Jewish populations in Bye­lo­rus­sia has been described by the German historian Hannes Heer. Braemer has been shown to possess the notorious distinction of having originated the first annihilation op­e­ra­tions against the Jewish ghettos in Bye­lo­Russia: the Smilavichy ghetto, whose 1,338 inhabitants were mur­der­ed on 14 October 1941; the Koidanovo ghetto, with its 1,000 victims on 21 October 1941; fol­low­ed by the murder of 5,900 people in the predominantly Jewish town of Slutsk on 27 and 28 October 1941 in a massacre some­times eu­phe­mis­tic­al­ly referred to as the "Slutsk Affair" and that just to begin with. Braemer's service in the Ostland was considered so meritorious by both the Wehrmacht and the SS that he was rewarded with two military promotions, viz., to Ge­ne­ral­leut­nant on 1 July 1941, just a week after arrival, and later, 14 months into his tour of duty, on 1 September 1942, as a reward for a job well done, to Ge­ne­ral der Ka­val­le­rie z.v. ; and then again on the last day of his assignment with an SS pro­mo­tion to the rank of Grup­pen­füh­rer, the third-highest SS rank overall. Goebbels went so far as to discuss Braemer's "po­lit­i­cal ideas" in his diaries.

Conflict with Lohse

Nazi approval of Braemer was not universal, however. During his tenure as the Wehrmachtbefehlshaber or territorial military commander of the Reichskommissariat Ostland, Braemer had an immediate su­pe­ri­or in the person of Reichskommissar Hinrich Lohse, the overall governor of the Ostland who was likewise headquartered in Riga, Latvia. While Lohse's slapping of Braemer on the face in public at the Riga Opera House during the banquet celebrating Hitler's birthday on 20 April 1944 prob­a­bly should not be made too much of, it is indicative nonetheless of the tensions simmering within the Nazi leadership in the Ostland and points at least to the pos­si­bil­i­ty that even to high-ranking Nazis like Lohse the methods used by Braemer in the implementation of the Holocaust might have seem­ed ob­jec­tion­a­ble, even if the event has also been put down to the incipient panic in the face of looming defeat or to personal rivalries be­tween two Nazi apparatchiks vying for a position of pre­-em­i­nence within the Ostland bu­reauc­ra­cy. In some reports the punch from Lohse is said literally to have knocked Braemer to the ground. But the knockout blow appears to have been invested with figurative significance as well, as the in­ci­dent marks Braemer's exit from the scene in Riga and, con­verse­ly, his pro­mo­tion by the SS to the afore­men­tioned higher rank of grup­pen­füh­rer on the same day. Braemer was 61-years' old at the time.

The end game

After his retirement on 20 April 1944 from the position of Wehrmachtbefehlshaber in the Ostland an office to which Braemer was first appointed on 24 June 1941 but which from 30 January 1942 onwards he had been holding concurrently with his SS posting on the command of Ober­abschnitt Nord­see, an SS beat headquartered at Altona near Hamburg he continued on active duty in the latter post for 6 months and 3 weeks longer, until 9 November 1944, even while being rusticated by the army to the Führerreserve or officers' reserve pool within the German Army High Command with effect from 20 April 1944.
After nearly nine months in reserve, on 17 January 1945 Braemer was suddenly recalled by the Wehrmacht to active duty as a so-called "general on special assignment" and in that capacity posted to the Military District Command I at Königs­berg, his native place |Wehr­kreis I, only to shift after just five days doubtless in connection with the tightening vice grip by the Soviet forces investing the city to the Military District Com­mand II at Stettin in Western Pom­er­a­nia, some 480 kilometres away from Königsberg and its Eastern front, where he spent the following 19 days in a similar capacity between 22 January and 10 February 1945. Finally, during the ensuing 22 days between 10 February and 4 March 1945 Braemer exercised "military authority" as a Korück or rear-army-area com­mand­er for the Wehrmacht's 11th Army a largely fictitious formation contrived on paper by Himmler for the sake of providing em­ploy­ment to the rapidly in­creas­ing cadre of unemployed SS functionaries before being relegated once more and for the last time to the Führerreserve of the German Army High Com­mand on 4 March 1945, two months before the end of the War.

Aftermath

Braemer surrendered to the British Second Army in the port city of Lübeck in Germany on 2 May 1945 and detained as a prisoner of war. Eight months later, on 9 January 1946 he was transferred to the prisoner-of-war camp in South Wales, the so-called Special Camp 11, where high-value Nazi captives awaiting extradition to Nuremberg were imprisoned. Braemer was interned at Island Farm for 21 months as prisoner No. A451665. On 6 Oc­to­ber 1947, Braemer was transferred from Island Farm via Camp 43 to the Civil Internment Camp No. 6 at Neuengamme near Hamburg, a post-Nazi concentration-camp facility used after the War specifically for detention of suspected German war criminals. There he was apparently set free some­time later that October without extenuating cir­cum­stances, having spent less than 2½ years in prisoner-of-war camps but without having been brought to trial for war crimes. This outcome was ap­par­ent­ly brought about by the deliberate shielding of Braemer by British authorities wilfully refusing to take cognizance of his past as a war criminal.
On 30 August 1948, ten months after his release from British custody, the government of Poland requested the extradition of Braemer on the charge of murder of twenty hostages and hundreds of civilians in Poland in 1939. By the admission of British Foreign Office personnel, the facts of the case were never in dispute, "not even by Braemer himself". Nevertheless, after legal manoeuvrings and much prevarication intended to shield Braemer from responsibility for his crimes, the ex­tra­di­tion re­quest was refused in September 1950 by the Gov­ern­ment of the United Kingdom. According to some sources, the Polish request for Braemer's extradition was initially presented to the British authorities as early as 1945. In a ruling by the British Extradition Court in Hamburg that has only recently half a century after the fact been called into question by some British historians such as Donald Bloxham, Braemer was in effect declared innocent of war crimes on the grounds that the execution ordered by him of the hostages in question "had been so ordered in accordance with the law of nations".
Although Telford Taylor, the legendary American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, takes note of Braemer in several of his books, there is no record of Braemer's having ever been called to answer for his role in the Holocaust on the territory of the Soviet Union.
Braemer died of natural causes in Hamburg on 13 June 1955, at the age of 72, a free man who has never been convicted of or charged in open court with any crime.
Braemer's personal papers and personnel files are preserved at the German Federal Archives-Military Archives located at Wiesentalstraße 10 in the city of Freiburg im Breisgau, and at the Bundesarchiv Berlin.

Awards and decorations