Erich von Manstein

Manstein commanded the 11th Army that invaded the Crimean Peninsula in September 1941 and took Simferopol on 1 November. In that region his troops operated in the same space as Einsatzgruppe D's killing operations. The unit travelled in the wake of Manstein's 11th Army and was supplied by his command with vehicles, fuel and drivers; military police cordoned off the sites where the Einsatzgruppe shot Jews. Captain Ulrich Gunzert, who witnessed a massacre of Jewish women and children, asked Manstein to stop the murders and is reported to have been told to forget what he had seen and concentrate on fighting the Red Army. Eleven of the seventeen charges later brought against him concerned the maltreatment and murder of Jews and prisoners of war in Crimea.

On 20 November 1941 Manstein issued an order modelled on the Reichenau Severity Order, praised by Hitler. In it he affirmed that the "Jewish Bolshevik system" had to be eradicated once and for all and demanded that his troops stifle at the outset any uprising, which was mostly instigated by Jews. He also endorsed the plundering food strategy in the occupied territory, writing that a large part of the population of enemy cities would have to go hungry but that, out of misplaced humanity, nothing intended for the home front should be given to prisoners or civilians not working for the Wehrmacht. The mass killings in Crimea grew out of precisely this calculus. In Simferopol, Krymchaks and Jews were rounded up between 9 and 13 December 1941 with personnel supplied by the army's field police and field gendarmerie, loaded onto trucks and shot in an anti-tank ditch about ten kilometres outside the city. Einsatzgruppe D had planned the murder of the Jews for March 1942, but the 11th Army headquarters pressed for an earlier date, chiefly because of the catastrophic food situation: with Sevastopol still unconquered and eastern Crimea open to a Soviet counterattack, famine riots in the rear could have put the 11th Army in grave danger. Roughly 13,000 people, among them about 10,600 Jews, some 1,500 Krymchaks and 600 to 1,000 Roma, fell victim to the massacre, and the number of Jews killed in Simferopol rose to nearly 10,000 by February 1942.

Concealment of this responsibility was not confined to his memoir. At Nuremberg Manstein denied any knowledge of the Einsatzgruppen's activities and testified that soldiers under his command were not involved in the murder of Jewish civilians. Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D, contradicted him, testifying that Manstein was aware of what was happening and that his Eleventh Army was actively involved. At the Hamburg trial in 1949 the prosecution confronted him with the order of 20 November 1941 that he had signed; he replied that he remembered asking for a draft of such an order but had no recollection of signing it. He stated in court that he had received no reports of Jews being shot, and his defence counsel Paget characterised the atrocity charges as Soviet propaganda. Though acquitted on the three charges relating to the extermination of the Jews, he was convicted on nine of the seventeen charges and sentenced to eighteen years. The judge advocate held that it was immaterial whether Manstein was aware of the mass killings in his area: he should have known, and he should have tried to stop them.