Nazi German troops massacred a large number of surrendering Soviet prisoners of war. The bodies of captured Soviet soldiers, driven into trenches and killed, piled up. The Nazi Wehrmacht's campaign of extermination was a war crime. During this period, Kurt Wafner (1918-2007) witnessed and collected photographs of the atrocities committed by the Nazi German army. The Wehrmacht was just as brutal as the SS and police, and after the "evacuation of the Minsk ghetto," in which some 6,000 to 10,000 Russians and Jews were purged in November 1941 alone, he went to see hell with his own eyes. The place was littered with broken glass, clothing, body parts of murdered people, and dead babies gnawed on by rats.
Kurt Waffner was drafted into the army in 1939 and served in the labor service. His enrollment in engineering school was cut short by military service; he was released from military service in the summer of 1939, citing poor eyesight. Later overturned, he served in the artillery in Frankfurt, where his eye disease worsened, and he took a clerical job. 1941 saw him sent to guard French prisoners of war in Berlin. Using the tactics of a good soldier, he did not contribute to the war effort. The situation changed dramatically when the Nazi Germans invaded Eastern Europe, and he was sent to the Eastern Front. In his unit, he met two Communists. They were sent to guard the Russian prisoners of war in Minsk. They had been sent to guard Russian prisoners of war in Minsk. One of the Communists let some of the POWs go, excusing himself as "dead drunk," and was arrested by the military police and disappeared.
As the Nazi German army went dark in World War II, Kurt Wachner continued his underground activities in the physics laboratory of Siemens AG in an effort to get on the sick list. After World War II, under the East German regime, he joined the militia and the Communist Party, but continued to hold anarchist views; in 1947, he was asked to help the secret police, which he refused. Suffering from tuberculosis, he quit the militia. Trained as a librarian, he left the Communist Party in 1950. He worked in a variety of jobs, including as a publishing editor, head of the Roman Zeitung, which published a weekly serial novel, author of radio plays, and journalist. He was always aware of the repression of state censorship. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he got in touch with the German anarchist movement and wrote articles about his experiences and photographs. 2000 saw the publication of his autobiography, My Life as a Book Lover and Anarchist. He published his autobiography, My Life as a Book Lover and Anarchist, in 2000 and died on March 10, 2007.
After the defeat of Nazi National Socialism, the military brass and general staff gathered and propagated the legend of the "clean Wehrmacht. The troops did their military duty with decency and dignity, keeping their distance from Hitler and the Nazi regime. The atrocities committed by Himmler's Einsatzgruppen were known only after the fact. Perpetrators and accomplices of serious crimes were able to speak of their innocence. However, the Wehrmacht as a whole is an organization that refuses to acknowledge its active participation in Nazi war crimes. The military was complicit in but documented three major crimes: extermination of Jews, genocide of prisoners of war, and terrorism against civilians. These war crimes, committed in violation of international law and beyond all rules of war, determined above all the brutality of the war against the Soviet Union. The same war crimes were executed in other parts of the world, such as the Balkans and Italy. The primacy of politics over war no longer applies. In the war of extermination of the Nazi National Socialists, political goals and war aims became indistinguishable.
After 1945, thousands of perpetrators and hundreds of thousands of their accomplices returned to German soil. They found themselves in postwar German society and spoke eloquently about what had happened. What a veil of fog was then created in the journals and literature, where interest in clarification and prosecution waned.
