Max von Schenckendorff (24 February 1875 – 6 July 1943) was a German military general in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during World War II. He was the commander of Army Group Centre Rear Area, the area of military jurisdiction in the rear of Army Group Centre, from March 1941 until his death in 1943. He organized the Mogilev conference, in which Wehrmacht and SS officers discussed "bandit fighting" tactics, meaning the mass murder of Jews and other real or perceived enemies. The conference resulted in an intensification of the genocide that was already taking place in Army Group Centre Rear Area. Max von Schenckendorff died of a heart attack on 6 July 1943, while on leave in Krummhübel in the Giant Mountains.
Family Max Heinrich Moritz Albert von Schenckendorff was born February 24, 1875, in Prenzlau, Brandenburg. He came from the old noble family of Schenkendorff, which was first documented in the 13th century. The family's ancestral seat was in Schenkendorf in Lower Lusatia, Brandenburg. The region around the village, where the family owned extensive lands, was called Schenckenländchen (Schencken Country). Today, the village is called Sękowice and belongs to the rural municipality of Gubin on the Neisse River in Poland.
The male members of the Schenckendorff family were mostly landowners, civil servants, and officers. His father, Albert, was an officer in the 64th Brandenburg Infantry Regiment "General Field Marshal Prince Friedrich Karl of Prussia", ultimately reaching the rank of colonel and commander.
Max, the eldest of three brothers, was named after his ancestor Max von Schenkendorf (1783–1817), a lyric poet who was active as a writer of patriotic poems and songs during the Napoleonic Wars of Liberation. His two brothers also became officers. His brother Günther, a captain and commander of the III Battalion of the 64th Infantry Regiment, fell in the Battle of Verdun at Fort Douaumont. His brother Heinrich died in 1941 as a lieutenant general and commander of the military replacement inspectorate in Liegnitz.
In 1904, he married Lena Sophie von Langendorf from Schleswig-Holstein. They had a son and four daughters.
Service in World War I Max von Schenckendorff was educated in the Prussian Cadet Corps and prepared for an officer's career. On 17 March, 1894, he joined the 47th Infantry Regiment "King Ludwig III of Bavaria" (2nd Lower Silesian) in Posen as a lieutenant. He rose through the ranks over the next 17 years until December 1911, when he became, like his father before him, commander of the 10th company in the 64th Infantry Regiment in Angermünde in Brandenburg.
On 2 August, 1914, the day after the commencement of formal hostilities, Schenkendorff was appointed company commander of the 64th Infantry Regiment. He participated in heavy fighting in northern France and was temporarily assigned as a battalion commander. In October, he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class.
In December 1914, his unit was withdrawn from the front for the first time. Schenckendorff contracted severe migraines and was hospitalized. He subsequently became commander of a recruit depot responsible for training replacements for the III Army Corps. There, beginning in March 1915, he developed new training methods, attracting the attention of his superiors. In April, he was given responsibility for the entire recruit training of the III Army Corps. On 18 April, 1915, he was promoted to major. Throughout the rest of the war Schenckendorff alternated between service in the field in Serbia, at the Battle of Verdun, and in Romania, Alsace, and Northern France, on the one hand, and training responsibilities on the other, for which he was singled out for praise by Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg.
Schenckendorff witnessed the collapse of the German Empire and the armistice while on duty in Berlin finishing a training film on tank warfare. He believed, like many of his fellow officers, in the so-called stab-in-the-back myth, according to which the Army, undefeated in the field, had been "stabbed in the back" by "unpatriotic" civilians from the homeland.
Schenckendorff was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd and 1st Class, the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords, and the Austrian Military Merit Cross 3rd Class with War Decoration. He was also appointed a Knight of Justice of the Order of St. John.
Between the wars After hostilities ended Schenckendorff was given leave to return to Angermünde. In mid-January 1919, he received command of the II Battalion of Infantry Regiment No. 64, the home regiment of the noble Schenckendorff family. It was disbanded that April. After that Schenckendorff served in a variety of positions, while publishing a comprehensive guide to military training in 1928. He retired from active service on February 28, 1930, after which he busied himself with veterans affairs and youth fitness. He and his wife joined the Nazi Party in 1933.
Activities during World War II Early efforts to eliminate civilian and partisan resistance Schenckendorff returned to active duty with the outbreak of the Second World War in August 1939, originally as commander of Border Guard Command 13 in Glogau, Upper Silesia. In March 1941, just months before the Nazi invasion of the USSR, Schenckendorff was appointed commander of Rear Area 102, Army Group Center.
The troops under Schenckendorff's command were occupied in the first weeks of the invasion with capturing straggling Soviet soldiers, which Schenckendorff hoped to accomplish through the systematic search of villages after searches of forests proved ineffective. In these villages, residents were to be interrogated to identify those not living there and to deal with them according to "generally issued orders". His Corps Order No. 39 directed the Wehrmacht to take on the job of policing the newly conquered territory by appointing mayors for these villages, then holding them accountable with their lives for any attacks in or near these villages. This Order marked the first radicalization of the Wehrmacht's approach to dealing with popular resistance in the occupied territory.
As the war progressed the German forces faced increased resistance from partisan units. Schenckendorff responded by dispersing his forces into platoons that would encircle villages at dawn, then interrogate their residents. By September Schenckendorff ordered the troops under his command "to act more ruthlessly than before” and to use “the most severe means”.
The Mogilev conference Later that month Schenckendorff led the Wehrmacht's first anti-partisan training course in Mogilev. The course brought together sixty-one officers from the OKH (Army High Command), Army Group, the SS and the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service; SD), field commands, economic inspectorates, and police, as well as regimental and battalion officers from von Schenckendorff's unit. These officers were intended to serve as multipliers, disseminating the methods against not only partisans in the rear areas of Army Center, but other "enemies of the Reich".
Schenckendorff's opening speech does not suggest that he was a fanatical anti-Semite or that he totally believed in the links between the Jews and the partisans that was a fundamental tenet of both Nazi and Wehrmacht policy. Instead he stressed the threat posed by Bolsheviks and approached the elimination of partisans as a military operation.
Schenckendorff's opening speech does not suggest that he was a fanatical anti-Semite or that he totally believed in the links between the Jews and the partisans that was a fundamental tenet of both Nazi and Wehrmacht policy. Instead he stressed the threat posed by Bolsheviks and approached the elimination of partisans as a military operation.
The enemy must be completely annihilated. The constant decision-making over the life and death of captured partisans or suspects is difficult even for the toughest soldier. Action must be taken. The right course of action is to act ruthlessly and mercilessly, completely disregarding any personal feelings.
This policy of "complete annihilation" of partisans and civilians suspected of attacking German troops had been made part of official Wehrmacht policy, announced in the Barbarossa decree signed by OKW chief Wilhelm Keitel on 13 May 1941, several weeks before Germany launched its attack on the USSR. There was a dramatic increase in atrocities against Jews and other civilians in the last three months of 1941.
Schenckendorff's tactics The manual that Schenckendorff circulated at this conference noted the difficulty of tracking small, flexible groups of partisans and focused instead on isolating them from the civilian population on which they depended for support. He highlighted three key points:
Finding and killing partisan supporters within the population. Gaining the trust of the population. Engaging the participation of the population in the fight against the partisans.
In order to prevent partisans from moving around using public roads Scheckendorff barred the movement of the local population, including women and young people, handing those who violated the ban over to the SD, the GFP (General Police Force), or prisoner-of-war camps. He also called for the removal of non-residents in order to eliminate suspected partisans and their supporters.
Schenkendorff's previous efforts to encircle partisan groups had largely failed because the partisans had slipped through the loose security lines in the forests. Schenkendorff now organized offensives intended to drive the enemy toward German-held lines where they would be annihilated. While Schenkendorff spoke of gaining the trust of the population and engaging them in the fight against the partisans, he resorted to terror tactics directed at civilians: beatings of local villagers during their interrogations, and murdering an arbitrary number of people response to acts of sabotage from nearby villages. Later that year, when the Wehrmacht adopted Corps Order No. 75, a formal policy of burning villages that supported partisans or merely sympathized with them, he implemented that policy as well.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Generalfeldmarschall Walther von Brauchitsch, endorsed Schenkendorff's manual on 25 October, 1941 as a "guideline for combating partisans" for the army. With this, Schenkendorff established himself as a "partisan expert" until his death. Later that year he was awarded the German Cross in Gold for his actions against partisans.
His plans to eradicate the partisans that year were aborted, however, by the failure of Operation Typhoon, the German attack on Moscow, which required the transfer of troops to the front to resist the subsequent Soviet counterattack in early December of 1941. As winter made large-scale operations more difficult, the partisans were able to reorganize. Schenckendorff, whose health was failing, was sent home on leave over the New Year period.
Commander of the Rear Area of Army Group Center, 1942–1943 In the spring of 1942, the partisans began a concentrated effort to destabilize the German occupation administration and attack supply lines, killing collaborating residents and their families, looting businesses, and attacking roads, railway lines, and bridges. While the partisans mostly refrained from direct attacks on German soldiers, the Wehrmacht was unable to maintain control over much of the rear area, as more and more troops and other security forces now had to be deployed to secure the railway lines.