7 - The Debate over Combatant Status and Its Consequences

Summary

ON NOVEMBER 10, 1965, BGS Lieutenant Colonel Hans-Jürgen Pantenius delivered a lecture on the 1944 Warsaw Uprising to a group of his fellow commanding and junior officers in Bonn. The Bundestag had recently passed controversial legislation that designated border police officers as military combatants in the event of an attack on the Federal Republic. The lecture was supposed to provide its leadership cadre with a case study for urban combat in conjunction with the pub-lication of a new “street fighting” manual. Pantenius, a decorated vet-eran of Nazi Germany's motorized infantry units who also held a PhD in history, fought in Poland, France, and the Soviet Union. At Warsaw he commanded Infantry Regiment 690 of the 337 Volksgrenadier Division attached to General Smilo Freiherr von Luttwitz's 9th Army. Although he arrived in the city after the main resistance ended, he remained as an instructor at the Wehrmacht's “Combat School for Street and Fortress Fighting” established in Warsaw's Mokotów district. He trained the Wehrmacht and SS units stationed there that hunted down and massa-cred the remaining Polish resistance and then destroyed what was left of Warsaw. He told his audience that Warsaw suffered during the orig-inal German invasion of 1939, but “compared with the destruction of German cities in 1943 and 1944, this damage was not significant.”

A discussion about Nazi Germany's brutal suppression of Polish resistance and criminal destruction of Warsaw as some sort of tactical model for democratic civilian police officers is troubling on many levels. In the twenty years since the Third Reich collapsed, several high-profile criminal cases such as the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem highlighted the crimes Germany's armed forces perpetrated during the war. So why revive such a terrible example of Nazi violence as some form of lesson, unless as an instruction for what not to do in a democracy? What could the Federal Republic's border police officers possibly glean from a discussion about the wanton destruction of an entire city? To be sure, the 1960s ushered in a paradigm shift in postwar mem-ory culture, where West Germans began focusing more on Holocaust victims rather than their own wartime suffering.