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French MacLean

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Merode Castle After the Fight

Merode Castle After the Fight

After the 39th Infantry Regiment stormed and captured the castle from the German 3rd Paratroop Division (3. Fallschirmjäger-Division), they stayed there for the night.  The regimental cannon company, later that evening, began firing at the castle, believing an enemy counter-attack was underway.  The boys in Company B, 39th Regiment, including Private First Class “Mac” MacLean, did not find this amusing.  The author is currently amassing research material to wrote a book on his father’s company.  Visit the Hürtgen Forest during this process with French for a really in-depth look at the battle.

Merode Castle After the Fighting

Merode Castle After the Fight2013-01-13T16:26:20-06:00

Walking Through the Forest

Walking Through The Forest

The Hürtgen Forest has miles and miles of trenches and the remnants of the fighting, as well as pieces of the Westwall, or Siegfried Line.  Rusted helmets, broken messkits and even rotted German boots bear witness to the ferocity of the fighting.  When walking through the woods, be careful not to pick up bazooka rounds or other dangerous ordnance.

Walking Through the Trees

Walking Through the Forest2013-01-13T16:28:35-06:00

Dragon’s Teeth

Dragon’s Teeth in the Forest

Most open areas in the forest had this type of obstacle.  Standing in the middle of rows of dragon’s teeth and looking at the German side some 200-500 yards will often reveal where a bunker was that would keep the obstacle under observation and fire if necessary.  Obstacles not covered by fire are almost worthless.  The Germans also made extensive use of anti-tank and anti-personnel landmines.

Dragon's Teeth in the Hürtgen Forest

Dragon’s Teeth2013-01-13T16:31:50-06:00

Merode Castle

Merode Castle in the Hürtgen Forest

Both the 1st Infantry Division and the 9th Infantry Division tried to wrest this formidable fortress from the German 3rd Fallschirmjäger Division.  The 39th Infantry Regiment of the 9th Infantry Division finally succeeded on December 12, 1944.  We will visit the scene of the fighting.  Here is a rare view of the castle from 70 years ago.

Merode Castle before the Fight

Merode Castle2016-01-13T18:02:11-06:00

Ride the Battlefield

Ride the Battlefield

You can ride the battlefield at the Little Bighorn with French and Crow Tribe expert horsemen with Ken Real Bird.  The photo shows me in my younger days riding the range in northern Colorado.  If I can do it, so can you — and you’ll have a memory of a lifetime.

You can ride the battlefield with French, shown here in his younger days riding the range in northern Colorado

You can ride the battlefield with French, shown here in his younger days riding the range in northern Colorado

Ride the Battlefield2016-01-13T17:54:31-06:00

Franz Novak

Franz Novak

SS-Hauptsturmführer Franz Novak was born on January 10, 1913 in Wolfsberg in the Carinthia district of Austria.  The son of a locomotive driver, he joined the Hitler Youth and subsequently the Nazi Party. Following the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor who had banned the Nazi Party, Novak fled to Germany.  The crime occurred on July 25, 1934, when ten Austrian Nazis entered the Chancellery building and shot Dollfuss to death; Novak was involved in the plot.  In 1938, he joined the SS and Security Service.  Following the Anschluss, Novak returned to Austria, working in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, first in Vienna, then Berlin, and finally in Prague. Novak was SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann’s railroad and transportation timetable expert and thus occupied a liaison role with the Ministry of Transport.

Personnel file photo of Franz Novak

Personnel file photo of Franz Novak

Once Eichmann had  coordinated the deportations of Jews from a specific region with that area’s local government, he would assign his deputy, SS-Sturmbannführer Rolf Günther the task of arranging transportation.  Günther, in turn, notified his subordinate, Franz Novak, of the number of people to be deported, the origin of the proposed movement and the final destination.  Novak then contacted Office 21 of the Reichsbahn Traffic Section and the railroad men would handle the rest.  Novak worked with Eichmann on the deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944 to Auschwitz.

After the war, Novak went into hiding in Austria under an assumed name, but reverted to his real name in 1957.  Following Eichmann’s trial in 1961, which revealed the role Novak played in the deportation of Jews to their deaths, he was arrested.  In 1964, an Austrian court sentenced Novak to eight year’s imprisonment; during the trial Novak had said:  “For me, Auschwitz was just a train station.”

After an appeal, a retrial was ordered in 1966 and Novak was acquitted. This reversal did not sit well in Austria.  Two years later, the Austrian Supreme Court revoked the result of the second trial and ordered a third trial.  This court, meeting in 1969, issued a unanimous verdict of guilty, resulting in a sentence of nine year’s imprisonment.  Novak’s attorney pleaded for a nullification of the verdict and Novak was not re-arrested. After the third appeal to the Austrian Supreme Court, a verdict of guilty was handed down by a court in 1972.

The ruling explicitly denied that Novak was obligated to obey binding orders.  However, he was convicted not for murder, but for committing “public violence under aggravating circumstances” by transporting human beings without providing sufficient water, food and toilet facilities.  Seven of the eight members of the jury did not convict Novak of being an accessory to murder.  He was granted a pardon by Austrian President Rudolf Kirchschläger.  Franz Novak died on October 21, 1983 in Langenzersdorf (just north of Vienna), Austria.

 

 

Franz Novak2016-03-28T21:01:55-05:00

Dr. Rudolf Lange

Dr. Rudolf Lange

SS-Standartenführer Dr. Rudolf Lange was a key figure in the Einsatzkommando and the Wannsee Conference.  The son of a railway construction supervisor, Rudolf was born on November 18, 1910 in Weisswasser, in eastern Saxony.  Lange received a doctorate in law in 1933 at the University of Jena and soon joined the Gestapo.  He served in the Gestapo office in Berlin in 1936, transferring to Vienna, Austria in 1938 to coordinate the annexation of the Austrian police system with the Reich.  In 1939, Lange transferred to Stuttgart.  He ran the Gestapo offices in Erfurt and Weimar in 1939, before returning to Berlin.

On June 5, 1941, Dr. Lange reported to Pretzsch, in the Wittenberg district in Saxony-Anhalt, and the staff of Einsatzgruppe A.  Lange rose to command Einsatzkommando 2 on December 3, 1941; he also held the position of commander of the Security Service in Latvia.  He planned and executed the murder of 24,000 Latvian Jews at the Rumbula Forest near Riga from November 30 to December 8, 1941.

Lange was then invited to attend the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, to help discuss the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”  It was held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, along Lake Wannsee on January 20, 1942.  The three-story villa, in which the meeting was held, was built as a villa residence for factory owner Ernst Marlier, a manufacturer of pharmaceutical preparations, in 1915.  Marlier purchased two plots of land on Grosse Seestrasse (later renamed Am Grossen Wannsee) from the Head Forestry Office in Potsdam and the Royal Prussian Waterway Engineering Authority.  Marlier sold the property in 1921 to the North German Real Estate Company in Berlin for 2,300,000 Reichsmarks.  Friedrich Minoux, a member of the board of this company, obtained the property in 1937.  He was arrested in 1940 for helping to embezzle 8,800,000 Reichsmarks.  While in prison, he sold the property for 1,950,000 Reichsmarks to the  Nordhav Foundation, an organization that had been established in 1939 by Reinhard Heydrich to create and maintain holiday homes for members of the SS security services and their relatives.  It was rumored that Heydrich planned to ultimately keep the property for his own home.

Although Lange was the lowest ranking of the present SS officers, Reinhard Heydrich viewed Lange’s direct experience in conducting the mass murder of deported Jews as valuable for the conference.  Afterward, Lange returned to Riga, where he remained until 1945, when he assumed command of the Security Service and Security Police for the Reichsgau Wartheland, at Posen, Poland.  He was promoted to SS-Standartenführer, but soon after, the Red Army surrounded Posen (now Poznań.)  During the siege, Lange was wounded organizing the security police defenses in the city.  He committed suicide at the Kernwerk core fortress in Posen on February 16, 1945, hours before Soviet troops overran these final defenses.  He was posthumously awarded the German Cross in Gold.

Dr. Rudolf Lange2016-03-04T20:19:17-06:00

Dr. Karl Gebhardt

Dr. Karl Gebhardt

Possibly a childhood friend of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, SS-Gruppenführer Dr. Karl Franz Gebhardt was born in Haag/Upper Bavaria on November 23, 1897.  He was wounded in action and the winner of the Iron Cross 1st Class, while assigned to the 4th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, in World War I; he was also a British prisoner of war for a short time.

He later graduated the University of Munich as a physician.  In 1923, he was a member of the Freikorps/Bund Oberland and participated in the Beer Hall Putsch.  He joined the Nazi Party and SS in 1933.  In 1937, he became chair holder for orthopedic surgery at the University of Berlin. Gebhardt subsequently a personal physician to Heinrich Himmler.  His other titles included Chief Surgeon to the Reich Physician to the SS and Police, President of the German Red Cross.

In 1940, Dr. Gebhardt served a tour of duty in the 2nd SS Division Das Reich.  On May 27, 1942, Himmler sent Dr. Gebhardt to Prague to assist Reinhard Heydrich, who had been gravely wounded in an assassination attempt.  Gebhardt disdained the use of sulfonamide, expecting Heydrich to make a full recovery without antibiotic use (which Gebhardt thought worthless).  Heydrich died of sepsis.

During the war, Dr. Gebhardt conducted horrific medical experiments on several dozen female inmates at the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück.  For his achievements, Gebhardt received the Knights Cross of the War Service Cross; he also received the German Cross in Silver.  The “Doctors’ Trial” convicted him of crimes against humanity and issued a death sentence on August 20, 1947.  Karl Gebhardt was executed by hanging on Wednesday, June 2, 1948 at the Landsberg Prison.  His remains were transferred to Munich, where he is buried in the Ostfriedhof (Plot 8, Row 5, Grave 1/2)

Dr. Karl Gebhardt2017-01-27T08:21:18-06:00

Dr. Roland Freisler

Roland Freisler

Dr. Roland Freisler served as the Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice and President of the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof.)  Freisler was born on October 30, 1893 in Celle, in Lower Saxony.  The son of an engineer, Roland attended school at the Kaiser Wilhelm grammar school; in 1912, he took his Abitur test for university admission, finishing first in his class.  He went to the University of Kiel, but his schooling was interrupted by World War I.

After the outbreak of the war, Freisler joined the 167th Infantry Regiment in Kassel.  In November 1914, attached to the 26th Reserve Corps, his unit attacked Langemarck in Flanders.  Freisler was wounded, and after convalescing for several months in Germany, he returned to his regiment, which was transferring to the northern sector of the Russian front.  He was promoted to lieutenant and won the Iron Cross 2nd and 1st Class.  Russian troops later captured Freisler, while he was on a reconnaissance patrol.  He remained in a prisoner of war camp north of Moscow until July 17, 1920, when he returned to Germany.

He then resumed his academic career, attending the University of Jena and the University of Berlin.  He joined the extreme right wing Völkisch-Sozialer Bund and followed that by joining the Nazi Party, with membership number 9,679.  He was married and had two sons.

In February 1933, Hitler appointed Freisler a department head in the Prussian Ministry of Justice. He became Secretary of State in the Prussian Ministry of Justice in 1933–1934, and served in the Reich Ministry of Justice from 1934 to 1942.  In October 1939, Freisler introduced the concept of the “precocious juvenile criminal” in the Juvenile Felons Decree.  This law provided the legal basis for imposing the death penalty and penitentiary terms on juveniles for the first time in German legal history.  Freisler represented the Reich Ministry of Justice at the Wannsee Conference, where he stood in for provisional Minister Dr. Franz Schlegelberger.

On August 20, 1942, Hitler named Freisler to be the President of the People’s Court.  During his time there, 90% of all proceedings ended with death sentences or life imprisonment.  His most infamous trials occurred in August 1944, when he sentenced numerous major participants, to include Generalfeldmarschall Erwin von Witzleben, in the failed July 20 attempt to assassinate Hitler at Rastenburg.

On February 3, 1945, Freisler was conducting a Saturday session of the People’s Court, when American bombers attacked Berlin.  The People’s Court was severely damaged.  In one report, Freisler was crushed beneath a fallen masonry column in the courtroom; another account stated that Freisler was struck by a bomb fragment, while trying to get to a bomb shelter and bled to death on the pavement outside the People’s Court.  Luise Jodl, then the wife of General Alfred Jodl, recounted more than twenty-five years later that she had been working at the Lützow Hospital, when Freisler’s body was brought in, and that a worker commented, “It is God’s verdict.” According to Mrs. Jodl, “Not one person said a word in reply.”  Freisler’s remains are interred in the plot of his wife’s family at the Waldfriedhof Dahlem cemetery in Berlin.  His name is not shown on the gravestone.   His funeral was attended by his wife, a few colleagues from the People’s Court a few Nazi Party functionaries and a representative of the Ministry of Justice.

 

 

Dr. Roland Freisler2016-03-04T20:29:12-06:00
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