In German military history, (), also referred to as Nazi security warfare during World War II, refers to the concept and military doctrine of countering resistance or insurrection in the rear area during wartime with extreme brutality. The doctrine provided a rationale for disregarding the established laws of war and for targeting any number of groups, from armed guerrillas to civilians, as "bandits" or "members of gangs". As applied by the German Empire and later Nazi Germany, it became instrumental in the crimes against humanity committed by the two regimes, including the Herero and Nama genocide and the Holocaust.
Historian Alex J. Kay estimates that around one million civilians died as a result of German anti-partisan warfare—excluding actual partisans—among the 13 to 14 million people murdered by the Nazis during World War II.
Background According to historian and television documentary producer Christopher Hale, there are indications that the term Bandenbekämpfung may go back as far as the Thirty Years' War. Civilians and military officers in Prussia during Napoleon's campaign were not themselves unacquainted with the practice of "partisan" warfare as Prussian field marshal August Neidhardt von Gneisenau and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz encouraged mass resistance by civilians and instructed the Landsturm to strike at the French enemy's rear, disrupt their movements, and interdict supply lines in an effort to mobilize its population. The Prussians later termed this identical conduct as "banditry" when the French employed it against Prussian forces in 1870. For the Prussians, the legitimacy of irregular resistance evidently depended not on its nature but on which army it threatened.
Under the German Empire established by Otto von Bismarck in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War—formed as a union of twenty-five German states under the Hohenzollern king of Prussia—Prussian militarism flourished; martial traditions that included the military doctrine of Antoine-Henri Jomini's 1837 treatise, Summary of the Art of War, were put into effect. Some of the theories laid out by Jomini contained instructions for intense offensive operations and the necessity of securing one's "lines of operations". German military officers took this to mean as much attention should be given to logistical operations used to fight the war at the rear as those in the front, and certainly entailed security operations. Following Jomini's lead, Oberstleutnant Albrecht von Boguslawski published lectures entitled Der Kleine Krieg ("The Small War", a literal translation of guerrilla), which outlined in detail the tactical procedures related to partisan and anti-partisan warfare—likely deliberately written without clear distinctions between combatants and non-combatants. To what extent the teaching of these Prussian military officers and theorists contributed to the intensification of unrestrained warfare cannot be known precisely, but officers like Alfred von Schlieffen encouraged professional soldiers to embrace a dictum that advocated "for every problem, there was a military solution". Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, Chief of the Prussian General Staff, added hostage-taking as a means of deterrence to sabotage activities and the employment of collective measures against entire communities, which became the basis for German anti-partisan policies from 1870 and remained as such through 1945.
Franco-Prussian War Prussian security operations during the Franco-Prussian War included the use of Landwehr reservists, whose duties ranged from guarding railroad lines, to taking hostages, and carrying out reprisals to deter activities of francs-tireurs. Bismarck wanted all francs-tireurs hanged or shot, and encouraged his military commanders to burn down villages that housed them. More formal structures like Chief of the Field Railway, a Military Railway Corps, District Commanders, Special Military Courts, intelligence units, and military police of varying duties and nomenclature were integrated into the Prussian system to bolster security operations all along the military's operational lines.
Boxer Rebellion and Herero Wars Operationally, the first use of tactics later associated with Bandenbekämpfung occurred in China following the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), after two German officers went missing. German troops conducted over fifty operations, including burning a village and taking prisoners. Soon after, the infantry received a handbook for "operations against Chinese bandits" (Banden). Inside a German military manual from 1902, one finds the characterization of mass shootings as a "humane" act, since such expedients allegedly shortened wars and reduced German casualties. The first full application of Bandenbekämpfung in practice, was the Herero and Nama genocide (1904–1908), a campaign of racial extermination and collective punishment that the German Empire undertook in German South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) against the Herero and Nama people. The genocidal campaign against the Herero people was so extreme that an estimated 66–75 percent of the population perished.
World War I
During World War I, the Imperial German Army ignored many of the commonly-understood European conventions of war when between August and October 1914, they murdered some 6,500 French and Belgian citizens. In 1914, German troops, outraged by alleged civilian "resistance", responded with mass reprisals. Though some incidents stemmed from panic, many were the result of explicit orders. Soldiers even admitted to killing civilians—including women and children—based on vague suspicions of gunfire. On some occasions, attacks against German infantry positions and patrols that may have actually been attributable to "friendly fire" were blamed on potential francs-tireurs, who were regarded as bandits and outside the rules of war, eliciting ruthless measures by German forces against civilians and villages suspected of harboring them. These German units "had received orders to show no mercy" and as a result laid waste to towns such as Andenne, Dinant, Tamines, Aarschot, and Rossignol.
Throughout the war, Germany's integrated intelligence, perimeter police, guard network, and border control measures coalesced to define the German military's security operations. Along the Eastern Front sometime in August 1915, Field Marshal Erich von Falkenhayn established the Government General of Warsaw over former Congress Poland under General Hans von Beseler and created an infrastructure to support ongoing military operations, including guard posts, patrols, and a security network. Maintaining security meant dealing with Russian prisoners, many of whom tried to sabotage German plans and kill German soldiers, so harsh pacification measures and terror actions were carried out, including brutal reprisals against civilians, who were subsequently labeled as bandits. Before long, similar practices were instituted throughout the Eastern and Western areas of German occupied territory. Repression intensified under Ludendorff and Hindenburg’s “silent dictatorship” beginning in 1916; they interpreted Clausewitz as justifying total subjugation of enemy nations.
World War II During World War II, the German Army policy for deterring partisan or "bandit" activities against its forces was to strike "such terror into the population that it loses all will to resist". Even before the Nazi campaign in the East began, Adolf Hitler had already absolved his soldiers and police from any responsibility for brutality against civilians, expecting them to kill anyone that even "looked askance" at the German forces. Much of the partisan warfare became an exercise of antisemitism, as military commanders like General Anton von Bechtolsheim exclaimed that whenever an act of sabotage was committed and one killed the Jews from that village, then "one can be certain that one has destroyed the perpetrators, or at least those who stood behind them". Historian Jonathan Dimbleby contends that members of the 707th Infantry Division operated on the explicit doctrine that "without a single exception Jews and partisans are an identical concept" and therefore subject to execution without distinction. Commander of Einsatzgruppe B, Arthur Nebe, expressed a similar opinion when he commented: "Where there’s a partisan, there’s a Jew, and where there’s a Jew, there’s a partisan."
Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 and its reorganisation, security and policing merged with the establishment of Bandenbekämpfung operations. Aside from the groups assigned to fight partisans, additional manpower was provided by the Gestapo, the Kripo (criminal police), the SD, and the Waffen-SS. There were a number of SS-led actions implemented against so–called "partisans" in Lemberg, Warsaw, Lublin, Kovel, and other places across Poland. But it was not only the SS but also the Wehrmacht that carried out such actions. For instance, in the Polish town of Częstochowa (which fell without a struggle on 3 September 1939), German troops indiscriminately torched shops and houses, rounded up some 10,000 citizens—forcing them face-down in the main square before the cathedral—and immediately shot any male found carrying a firearm, razor, or pocket knife; several hundred were killed in what the Wehrmacht officially designated an "anti-partisan" operation.
When the Wehrmacht invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, they carried out mass reprisals against alleged "partisans" in Serbia by executing Jews there. The commander responsible for combating partisan warfare in 1941, General Franz Böhme, reiterated to the German forces, "that rivers of German blood" had been spilled in Serbia during the First World War and the Wehrmacht should consider any acts of violence there as "avenging these deaths". Böhme also instructed his men concerning partisan activity: "...in the event of attacks on German soldiers or ethnic Germans, the hostages will be shot...for every German killed, 100 hostages will be shot. For every wounded German, 50 will be shot. The executions are to be carried out by the troops, if possible by the unit affected by the attacks." Often, the method of execution was adjusted (some more brutal than others) to reinforce the psychological impact of the punishment.
During the Battle of Crete (May 1941), German paratroopers encountered widespread resistance from the civilian population. This resistance outraged General Kurt Student, commander of the XI Air Corps, who ordered "revenge operations," consisting of: "1) shootings; 2) forced levies; 3) burning down villages; and 4) extermination of the male population of the entire region". General Student also demanded that "all operations be carried out with great speed, leaving aside all formalities and certainly dispensing with special courts". This contributed to a series of collective punishments against civilians in Kandanos, Kondomari, and Alikianos, immediately after Crete fell. During the Axis occupation of Greece, the emergence of armed resistance from 1942 onward invoked mass reprisals in places such as Viannos, Kedros, Mousiotitsa, Kommeno, Lingiades, Kalavryta, Drakeia, Distomo, Mesovouno, Pyrgoi, Kaisariani and Chortiatis, along with numerous other incidents of smaller scale. Generals whose units also committed war crimes under the guise of Bandenbekämpfung included Walter Stettner, commander of the 1st Mountain Division in Epirus, and Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, who led the 22nd Air Landing Division in Crete.