Corruption within the Wehrmacht

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Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Corruption within the Wehrmacht refers to the dishonest and fraudulent conduct of high-ranking officers of the Armed Forces of Nazi Germany to enrich themselves through bribes from the regime. The corruption mechanisms demanded loyalty from the Wehrmacht in exchange for personal wealth in the form of cash, estates, and tax exemptions. It was one of the elements that tied the military to Nazism and aligned it with Adolf Hitler's colonial and genocidal goals of World War II.

Historical context

Historically, German and other European rulers commonly awarded titles, estates and monetary rewards to diplomats and high ranking officers. This was generally done to form a bond between the ruler and important subjects. This historical praxis however differed from the one applied by Hitler. While, in the Kingdom of Prussia, awards were usually given after successful campaigns or wars and were made public, Hitler dispensed the rewards to his elites in secret and during the war rather than at its end.[1]

Mechanism

In order to ensure the absolute loyalty of the Wehrmacht officers and to console them over the loss of their "state within the state", Hitler had created what the American historian Gerhard Weinberg called a "...a vast secret program of bribery involving practically all at the highest levels of command".[2] Hitler routinely presented his leading commanders with "gifts" of free estates, cars, cheques made out for large sums of cash and lifetime exemptions from paying taxes.[3] Typical was the cheque made out for a half-million Reichsmarks presented to Field-Marshal Günther von Kluge in October 1942 together with the promise that Kluge could bill the German treasury for any and all "improvements" he might wish to make to his estate.[3]

Such was the success of Hitler's bribery system that by 1942 many officers had come to expect the receiving of "gifts" from Hitler, and were not willing to bite the hand that so generously fed them.[3] When Hitler sacked Field Marshal Fedor von Bock in December 1941, Bock's first reaction was to contact Hitler's aide Rudolf Schmundt to ask him if his sacking meant that he was not longer to receive bribes from Konto 5 (lit. "bank account 5") slush fund.[4]

Konto 5 special fund

The basis of the corruption system were regular monthly tax-free payments deposited in their bank accounts of 4,000 Reichsmarks for field marshals and grand admirals and 2,000 Reichsmarks for all other senior officers, which came from a special fund called Konto 5 run by the chief of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers.[5] On top of the money from Konto 5, officers received as birthday presents cheques usually made out for the sum of 250,000 Reichsmarks, which were exempt from income taxes, through taxes had to paid on interest earned from them.[6]

This money came as an addition to the official salary of 26,000 Reichsmarks a year for field marshals and grand admirals and 24,000 Reichsmarks a year for colonel generals and general admirals plus tax-exempt payments of 400 and 300 Reichsmarks a month to help deal with rising living costs in war-time.[7] In addition, senior officers were given a life-time exemption from paying income tax, which was in effect a huge pay raise given Germany's high income tax rates (by 1939, there was a 65% tax rate for income over 2,400 Reichsmark) and they were also provided with spending allowances for food, medical care, clothing, and housing.[7] By way of contrast, infantrymen who given the dangerous task of clearing landmines were given a one Reichsmark a day danger pay supplement.[7]

The money from Konto 5 was deposited for the officer's life-time, and did not stop if the officer retired.[8] In the last months of the war, Erich von Manstein, Wilhelm List, Georg von Küchler, and Maximilian von Weichs kept on changing the bank accounts into which Lammers had the money from Konto 5 deposited in order to avoid the Allied advance.[7] Much correspondence followed between these officers and Lammers as they kept writing anxiously to make certain that Lammers was depositing their monthly bribes into the right accounts.[7]

The annual funds distributed by Hitler as personal presents grew from, initially, 150,000 Reichsmark in 1933 to 3,3 million by 1935 to reach 45 million by 1945. Initially these funds came through his office as Reichskanzler and, after 1934, as Reichspräsident. The mandatory pre-1933 checks through parliament and the counter signing of the payments by the German finance minister of the payments were abolished by the Nazis. The money spend was at Hitlers discretion and required no other approval.[1]

Nature of payments

Every officer who started to receive the money always had a meeting with Lammers first, who informed them that the future payments would depend on much loyalty they were willing to show Hitler, and what the Führer gave with one hand, could just as easily be taken away with the other.[9] Payments from Konto 5 to the bank account of General Friedrich Paulus stopped in August 1943 not because Paulus had lost the Battle of Stalingrad, but because Paulus had gone on Soviet radio to blame Hitler for the defeat.[10] In the same way, after the failure of 20 July plot of 1944, the families of Erwin Rommel, Franz Halder, Friedrich Fromm and Günther von Kluge were punished by being cut off from the monthly payments from Konto 5.[10] In the case of Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, it was demanded that his family pay back all of the bribe money he had taken from Konto 5 since the money was given as a reward for loyalty to the Führer, which Witzleben was evidently not.[10] The illicit nature of these payments was underlined by Lammers when he informed the officer that he was to receive money from Konto 5 when Lammers warned them not to speak about these payments to anyone and to keep as few written records as possible.[9]

The Konto 5 slush fund run by Lammers started with a budget of about 150,000 Reichsmark in 1933 and by 1945 had grown to about 40 million Reichsmark[5] Payments from Konto 5, known officially as Aufwandsentschädigungen (compensation for expenses) had been made to Cabinet ministers and senior civil servants since April 1936.[11] As part of the reorganization of the military command structure following the Blomberg–Fritsch Affair in early 1938, it was declared that the service chiefs, namely Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) chief Wilhelm Keitel, Army commander Walter von Brauchitsch, Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring and Kriegsmarine commander Erich Raeder were to have the same status as Cabinet ministers and as such, they all started to receive publicly the same pay as a Cabinet member and privately payments from Konto 5.[12]

Recipients

August von Mackensen

The first officer to be bribed into loyalty was the old World War I hero Field Marshal August von Mackensen, who criticized the Nazi regime for the murder of General Kurt von Schleicher in a speech before General Staff Association in February 1935, and to silence him, Hitler gave Mackensen a free estate of 1,250 hectares later that same year in exchange for a promise never to criticize the Nazi regime again in either public or private.[13] The agreement mostly worked; Mackensen never criticized the Nazi regime in public again, through Hitler was much offended in February 1940 when Mackensen mentioned to Walter von Brauchitsch his view that the army had disgraced itself by committing massacres during the recent campaign in Poland. Hitler felt that to be a violation of their agreement of 1935, through Mackensen was not punished by losing his estate.[13]

Walter von Brauchitsch

In 1938 Brauchitsch decided to divorce his wife to marry a much younger woman who happened to be a "two hundred per cent rabid Nazi".[14] The divorce court had a less kind view of Brauchitsch's decision to end his marriage than did Brauchitsch's political master, and awarded a substantial settlement in favor of the first Frau von Brauchitsch. Hitler then won Brauchitsch's eternal gratitude by agreeing to use the German tax-payers' money to pay his entire divorce settlement, said to have been between 80,000 and 250,000 Reichsmark.[15] Given that Brauchitsch had been promoted army commander to replace Fritsch who had resigned following false allegations of homosexuality, and Brauchitsch was a compromise candidate as the army had refused to accept Hitler's first choice of Walther von Reichenau as Fritsch's successor.[16] The paying Brauchitsch's divorce settlement might be deemed a good investment for the Nazi regime.

Heinz Guderian

Besides the money, General Heinz Guderian was also rewarded with a bribe of a free estate of 937 hectares (which was also tax-free for his entire life-time) in Poland which was confiscated from its Polish owner, and handed over to Guderian.[17] Guderian was informed in early 1943 that if he wanted an estate in Poland, to tell Hitler whose land he wanted and he would get it, which led Guderian to make several visits to Poland to find the right estate to steal. This caused some problems with the SS, which had designs on some of the estates that Guderian desired before a deal was worked out about which estate he could take.[17] Much of Guderian's fury that he expressed in his 1950 memoirs Erinnerungen eines Soldaten about what he regarded as unjust border changes after the war in Poland's favor seemed to be related to Guderian's intensely held private view that the Poles had no right to take away from him the estate that Hitler had given him in Poland.[18]

The historian Norman Goda wrote that after Guderian received his estate in Poland in the spring of 1943, that the doubts that he had been expressing since late 1941 about the Hitler's military leadership suddenly ceased to be expressed, and he became one of Hitler's most ardent military supporters, or as Joseph Goebbels described him in his diary, "a glowing and unqualified follower of the Führer".[19] Before receiving his "gift" of a Polish estate, Guderian as Inspector General for the Panzers had been opposed to the plans for Operation Zitadelle, which was to lead to the Battle of Kursk, one of Germany's worst defeats of the war; after receiving the estate, Guderian did a 180° turn about as to the wisdom of Operation Zitadelle.[19]

Instead of criticizing Zitadelle openly, Guderian approached Goebbels to ask him if he could talk Hitler out of Zitadelle, behavior that Goda described as very atypical for Guderian.[19] Guderian was well known for his brash, blunt outspoken style; for his rudeness to those he disliked (in a notorious incident later in 1943, Guderian refused to shake the hand of Field Marshal Kluge because as he told Kluge to his face he was not worthy of shaking hands) and for using vulgar, profanity-ridden language to describe a plan if he believed it to be bad one.[19][20]

During the 20 July plot of 1944, Guderian ordered Panzer units to Berlin to crush the putsch, and then sat on the Court of Honor that had the responsibility of expelling officers involved in the putsch so that they could be tried before the Volksgerichtshof, a duty that Guderian performed with zeal.[21] It was only after January 1945, when Guderian's estate fell behind Soviet lines that Guderian began to once more disagree with Hitler; disagreements that were so intense that Hitler fired Guderian as Chief of the General Staff in March 1945.[22]

Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb

In 1943 retired Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb managed to have the German state buy him an entire district of prime forest land valued at 638,000 Reichsmark in Bavaria in which to build his estate.[23] In late June-early July 1941, Leeb as the commander of Army Group North had witnessed first-hand the massacres committed by the Einsatzgruppen, Lithuanian auxiliaries and the men of the 16th Army outside of Kaunas.[24] Leeb was described as being "moderately disturbed" after seeing the killing fields of Kaunas, and sent in mildly critical reports about the massacres.[24] Leeb approved of the killing of Lithuanian Jewish men, claiming that this was justified by the crimes that they were supposed to have committed in during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, but the killing of women and children might have been taking things too far.[25] In response, Hitler's aide General Rudolf Schmundt told Leeb that he was completetly out of line for criticizing the massacres at Kaunas, and should in the future co-operate fully with the SS in "special tasks".[24]

Schmundt asked if Leeb really appreciated his monthly payments from Konto 5, and reminded him that his birthday was coming up in September, for which the Führer was planning to give him a 250,000 Reichsmark cheque as a present in reward for his loyalty. Leeb never said a word in protest about the "Final Solution" again, and duly received his 250,000 Reichsmark cheque as his birthday present in September 1941.[26] In September 1941, Franz Walter Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A in a report to Berlin had nothing but praise for Leeb's Army Group North, which Stahlecker reported had been exemplary in co-operating with his men in murdering Jews in the Baltic states.[27] The historian Norman Goda used Leeb as an all-too typical example of a Wehrmacht officer whose greed overwhelmed any sort of moral revulsion that they might had felt about the Holocaust.[26]

Other officers

In general, officers who were in some way critical of Hitler's military, if not necessarily political leadership, such as Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, Admiral Erich Raeder, and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt received (and accepted) larger bribes than officers who were well known to be convinced National Socialists such as General Walter Model, Admiral Karl Dönitz and Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner.[24] The success of Hitler's bribery system backfired in that some officers, who proven themselves especially greedy such as Guderian and Raeder came to be regarded by Hitler as a serious annoyance because of their endless demands for more money and more free land for their estates.[28] Raeder's demand in 1942 that on top of his life-time exemption from paying income taxes that Hitler also cancel out taxes on the interest he earned from his 4,000 Reichsmarks a month payment from Konto 5 was viewed as outrageous.[28] In 1944, Wolfram von Richthofen wrote to the OKW to argue that since he was stationed in Italy, that at least 1,000 Reichsmarks of the 4,000 Reichsmarks deposited in his bank account every month should be in lire to cancel out the effects of rampant inflation in Italy. This demand was regarded as unreasonable even by Keitel, who normally did not reject to providing financial rewards of service for the Führer.[29]

Post-war

The subject of corruption proved to be an embarrassing one for its recipients. Under oath at Nuremberg, Walther von Brauchitsch committed perjury when he denied taking any bribes.[30] Brauchitsch's bank records showed that he had been receiving 4,000 Reichsmark/month payments from Konto 5 from 1938 until the end of the war.[30] At his trial in 1948, General Franz Halder perjured himself when he denied that he had taken bribes, and then had to maintain a stern silence when the American prosecutor James M. McHaney produced bank records showing otherwise.[30] Erhard Milch admitted accepting money when under oath in 1947, but claimed that this was only compensation for the salary that he had been making as an executive at Lufthansa, a claim that Goda called "ridiculous".[30] Weinberg commented that "the bribery system understandably does not figure prominently in the endless memoir literature of the recipients and has attracted little scholarly attention".[31]

Known participants

References

Notes

Citations

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Weinberg, p. 455.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Wheeler-Bennett, p. 529.
  4. ↑ Goda, p. 124.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Goda, p. 102.
  6. ↑ Goda, p. 111.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 Goda, p. 108.
  8. ↑ Goda, p. 113.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Goda, p. 105.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Goda, p. 106.
  11. ↑ Goda, p. 103.
  12. ↑ Goda, p. 130.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Goda, p. 110.
  14. ↑ Shirer, p. 319.
  15. ↑ Goda, pp. 102 & 129.
  16. ↑ Wheeler-Bennett, pp. 370–371.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Goda, p. 115.
  18. ↑ Goda, p. 116.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 19.3 Goda, p. 126.
  20. ↑ Murray & Millet, p. 72.
  21. ↑ Goda, pp. 126–127.
  22. ↑ Goda, p. 127.
  23. ↑ Goda, p. 117.
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 24.3 Goda, p. 112.
  25. ↑ Krausnick, Helmut & Wilhelm, Hans-Heinrich Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938–1942, Stuttgart: 1981 pp. 207–209.
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Goda, pp. 112–113.
  27. ↑ Hilberg, Raul The Destruction of the European Jews, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985, p. 301
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 Goda, p. 125.
  29. ↑ Goda, pp. 124–125.
  30. ↑ 30.0 30.1 30.2 30.3 Goda, p. 123.
  31. ↑ Weinberg, p. 1045.

Bibliography

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