Execution

[mcgann]

Can anyone please tell me why General Brono oswald Dohmler was executed in Greece after the war, thanks in advance,Jamie.

[Eric Queen]

Jamie,

Do you mean BRAUER ? If so he was executed on Kreta on May 20th, 1947.

EQ

[mcgann]

Yes, I do mean Brauer, can you tell me why he was executed.

[Rick Research]

The Greeks, like the Yugoslavs, executed "everybody." Proportionally more senior officers even than the Soviets did.

Given the brutality of anti-partisan warfare and the number of innocent civilians murdered as reprisals, many of those cases were certainly justified. But given the sheer numbers of executions (anyone think the Soviets were "soft"?), simply having been executed by either the Greeks or Yugoslavs does not necessarily mean that the officers involved "did" anything that would not have gotten them jail time--or no time--in other countries.

One of my friend's dad was a reserve Oberleutnant in the German police, and spent 10 years after the war in Yugoslav captivity. By Tito standards, that meant he was actually innocent of anything.

Brauer may have signed off on executing hostages or something--I don't know. A great many German generals did the same, and in western custody most were out free by 1950. I neither excuse nor condone war crimes, but much depended on where the officer ended up, what he had to "trade," and political symbolism.

Such as the Klaus Barbie case in France not so very long ago. He had even been (rightly) sentenced to death in absentia earlier, only to luck out on living free for decades and finally falling into the net in an age of muddled thinking and misplaced anti-capital punishment sentimentality.

[Prosper Keating]

Brauer was executed for «war crimes», namely the shooting by some of his men of Cretans who had tortured wounded and captured German paras to death in various grotesque ways during Operation «Merkur» in May 1941. I think there were some other charges but it was just another example of victors' justice. The Fallschirmjäger were actually remarkably self-controlled despite the extreme provocation of seeing their comrades so cruelly murdered. I suppose the weeping hearts and woolly liberals would see it from the Bubble & Squeaks' point of view but then, they always do, don't they?

Prosper Keating

[Denis]

Hi
I remember that Gen.Obst Alexander Lohr was also executed. I don't recall by whom though (Greeks or Yugoslavians)
Regards
Denis

[Matt L]

Very well said Prosper.

[Florian Geyer]

Alexander Lohr was executed by the Yugoslavians on 26 Feb. 1947 in Belgrad.
"... in jugoslawischer Kriegsgefangenschaft, wegen angeblicher Kriegsverbrechen zum Tode verurteilt..."
About Bruno Brauer, my information says that he was executed op 20 May 1947 in Athen-Xaidrari?

[Greg Way]

General Bruno Oswald Bräuer

Bräuer was executed by firing squad on 21st May 1947 at the Chaidari barracks in Athens I believe. He was executed along with General Müller, another garrison commander on Kreta during the occupation.
Bräuer was not held accountable for the Kistelli Kissamos murders, or shootings. These were a reprisal for the death of the men from Kampftruppe Mürbe, who fell into positions of a Greek regiment assisted by armed civilians, west of Malame on May 20th 1941. Out of 70 odd Fallschirmjäger only 12-13 survived and would have been excecuted were it not for the intervention of the local NZ commander. I have seen stills of this mass shooting in a french photo booklet of the Fj.
Anyway, I believe that Bräuer stayed behind on Kreta and became the military commander. He treated the cretans fairly and only dished out punishment when occupation troops were killed or property damaged etc. His successor Müller was a butcher and accounted for many reprisal killings.
If Bräuer had have been tried for the Kistelli shootings then surely Kurt Student should have been made accountable. However no charges were brougth against him reference the Crete invasion. The charges against Bräuer were unjust, accoring to his ex Komrades anyway. One veteran I corresponded with was mad that no Cretan civilians were ever brought to trial. Anyway, it is too late for further trials and tribulations. History is laid, Bräuer was executed and buried with his men at Maleme.
Thanks for listening to me.
Greg Way

[Prosper Keating]

Cretans have always been fearsome people. Very hard and very brutal when the need arises. And when there's absolutely no need for it at all. I suppose that the Cretan auxiliaries didn't feel that they were doing anything wrong when they murdered the FJ prisoners. We - that is to say: more developed people from more developed countries - tend to judge them by our standards of behaviour. But with all of these wild peoples from savage lands whose defenders fall back on 'cultural differences' as a defence for any of their crimes - be it carving northern European soldiers up in the 1940s/50s/60s/70s/80/90s etc or raping and mugging old ladies on our streets etc etc - isn't it funny how they avail themselves of our standards when it suits them? The Greeks shot Müller for mistreating Cretan civvies. But Müller was merely behaving like like a native. The arseholes who sentenced him - and Brauer - to death had probably tortured and murdered countless of their own people in the civil war and its aftermath. Funny how it's always a one-way street…and how we are always against the traffic these days.

Jaded?

Yup.

Prosper Keating

[DonC]

Just remember, gents, the old history saw: "The winners write it and the losers bite it." I doubt very seriously that what went on on either side on Crete, Normandy, or Berlin would be considered morally just by many of our more liberal friends and neighbors. It was war, and "War is Hell", or so they say.

Don

[Prosper Keating]

Too true. Once the fighting starts, there aren't any rules anymore…except the one about winning at all costs. War isn't Hell though. Dealing with the memories and dreams when they sneak up on you at that time of the morning when you're neither asleep nor awake is Hell.

Prosper Keating

[Rick White]

Didn't an allied commission or report (Nurnberg Trials?) conclude that the FJ policies in Crete were justified given the civilians' behavior? I seem to remember reading that somewhere.....

Rick White

[Frentebro]

Hi men. I think it'd be more interesting if we could have some real discussion about controversial points like capital punishment & the morality of war instead of just name-calling ("weeping hearts", "fuzzy liberals", etc.). But any of this is off-topic for this forum anyway.

[Prosper Keating]

I was under the impression that the morality of the capital punishment suffered by Bruno Brauer and of the summary capital punishment meted out by the Fallschirmjäger to the Cretan auxiliaries and civilians in question was being debated in this thread.

Hi men. I think it'd be more interesting if we could have some real discussion about controversial points like capital punishment & the morality of war instead of just name-calling ("weeping hearts", "fuzzy liberals", etc.). But any of this is off-topic for this forum anyway.

Ebro Front obviously hasn't been here long enough to witness some of the highly charged arguments about such topics. But we tend to restrict them to the appropriate forum, Der Kneipe, which is where someone could respond to this post of yours by asking you to tell us all what you know about war and what you mean by "the morality of war".

Some wars are more 'moral' than others. But then, didactic materialists and obsessive dissidents only see issues in stark black and white. That's why they support 'isms' that result in living nightmares. I think that when terms like "weeping hearts" and "fuzzy liberals" are used, they are often appropriate.

I remember some very strident 'liberals' in the building I stay in when in New York organising a meeting to condemn American bombing of Belgrade and the Serbs in general in 1999. Having a spare half-hour that evening, I went to it and tried to tell them a bit about what I had seen in the Balkans, first in and around Vukovar in 1991 and lastly in southern Kosova in 1999. What the Serbs had done. It was very fresh in my mind. They weren't interested in what the Serbs had done. They just wanted to criticise the Allied bombing campaign.

I'd say that those 'liberals' and 'weeping hearts' were thinking very fuzzily indeed. You see, if people don't respond to reason and insist upon behaving in an uncivilised, hateful way, then there is no choice but to resort to force. Every tax dollar spent on bombing Serbia was well-spent. Bombing Afghani villagers, on the other hand, because of the mad actions of a wealthy Saudi - made rich by the USA and allegedly trained by the CIA - and a few other wealthy but disaffected Arab social inadequates is morally dubious. We should have bombed King Fahd's palace.

Anyway, while the initial points about Bruno Brauer were valid and appropriate for a forum about Fallschirmjäger, this isn't the place for this sort of discussion so why not raise your questions about capital punishment and the morality of war on Der Kneipe. I'd also tone down the snideness and sarcasm if I were you. It's one thing to come on strong like that to people you know f u c k all about if you're doing it under a real name but under a false name? ZAV!

My grandfather was on the Ebro, by the way.



Prosper Keating