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In German military history, Bandenbekämpfung (), 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.
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.
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 Kriminalpolizei (criminal police), the SD, and the Waffen-SS. There were a number of SS-led actions implemented against so–called "partisans" in Lviv, Warsaw, Lublin, Kovel, and other places across Poland.
When the Wehrmacht entered Serbia in 1941, they carried out mass reprisals against alleged "partisans" 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".
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 Greek resistance from 1942 onward invoked mass reprisals in places such as Viannos, Kedros, Mousiotitsa, Kommeno, Lingiades, Kalavryta, Drakeia massacre, Distomo massacre, Mesovouno, Pyrgoi massacre, 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.
Before invading the Soviet Union for Operation Barbarossa, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, and Chief of the SD Reinhard Heydrich, as well as SS General Heinrich Müller briefed the Einsatzgruppen leaders of their responsibility to secure the rear areas—using the euphemism "Sonderbehandlung"—against potential enemies; this included partisans and anyone deemed a threat by the Nazi functionaries. When Heydrich repeated this directive as an operational order ( Einsatzbefehl), he stressed that this also meant functionaries of the Comintern, Jews, and anyone of position in the communist party. This was part of the SS contribution to prevent acts they considered to be criminal in the newly conquered territories, to maintain control, and to effect the efficient establishment of miniature Nazi governments, constituted by mobile versions of the Reich Security Main Office.
Starting the same day Germany invaded the Soviet Union (22 June 1941), the 12th Infantry Division command issued orders that guerilla warfare combatants were not to be quartered as POWs but were to be "sentenced on the spot by an officer", meaning they were to be summarily shot. To this end, the Nazis welcomed partisan warfare since in the mind of Hitler, such circumstances opened up "the possibility of annihilating all opposition".
On 31 July 1941, the 16th Army command were informed that any "Partisan-Battalions" formed behind the front that were not properly uniformed and without appropriate means of identification, "were to be treated as guerrillas, whether they were soldiers or not". Any civilians who provided any assistance whatsoever were to be treated likewise, which historian Omer Bartov claims "always meant one thing only: death by shooting or hanging". Members of the 18th Panzer Division were instructed likewise on 4 August 1941. Nearly always, these genocidal measures were "camouflaged" in reports by coded formalised language, using terms like Aktion, Sonderbehandlung (special handling), or Umsiedlung (relocated).
From September 1941 onwards through the course of World War II, the term Bandenbekämpfung supplanted Partisanenkämpfung (anti-partisan warfare) to become the guiding principle of Nazi Germany's security warfare and occupational policies; largely as a result of Himmler's insistence that for psychological reasons, bandit was somehow preferable. Himmler charged the " Prinz Eugen" Division to expressly deal with "partisan revolts". Units like the SS Galizien—who were likewise tasked to deal with partisans—included foreign recruits overseen by experienced German "bandit" fighters well-versed in the "mass murder of unarmed civilians".
In keeping with these extreme measures, the OKW issued orders on 13 September 1941, that "Russian soldiers who had been overrun by the German forces and had then reorganised behind the front were to be treated as partisans—that is, to be shot. It was left to the commanders on the spot to decide who belonged to this category." In late 1941, German security divisions, including the 707th, 286th, 403rd, and 221st, conducted operations in Belarus that resulted in the execution of thousands of civilians, predominantly Jews. These actions were officially reported as anti-partisan activities, but the minimal German casualties suggest that these were not genuine combat operations against armed resistance.
The radicalisation of "anti-bandit" warfare saw further impetus in the Führer Directive 46 of 18 August 1942, where security warfare's aim was defined as "complete extermination". The directive called on the security forces to act with "utter brutality", while providing immunity from prosecution for any acts committed during "bandit-fighting" operations.
The directive designated the SS as the organisation responsible for rear-area warfare in areas under civilian administration. In areas under military jurisdiction (the Army Group Rear Areas), the Army High Command had the overall responsibility. The directive declared the entire population of "bandit" (i.e. partisan-controlled) territories as enemy combatants. In practice, this meant that the aims of security warfare was not pacification, but complete destruction and depopulation of "bandit" and "bandit-threatened" territories, turning them into "dead zones" ( Tote Zonen).
Over time, the Wehrmacht acculturated to the large scale anti-bandit operations, as they too came to see the entire population as criminal and complicit in any operation against German troops. Many German Army commanders were unbothered by the fact that these operations fell under the jurisdiction of the SS. Historians Ben Shepherd and Juliette Pattinson note:
As the war dragged on, the occupation's mounting economic rapacity engendered a vicious cycle of further resistance, further German brutality in response, and the erosion of order and stability across occupied Europe. Here, the issue of how occupation strategy shaped the partisan war connects with... how the nature and course of the partisan war was affected by the relationship between the occupied rear and the front line. Indeed, in eastern Europe during World War II, most directly in the Soviet Union, keeping occupied territory pacified was crucial to supplying not just the German front line, but also the German domestic population.
Historian Jeff Rutherford claims that "Whilst the Wehrmacht focused on the Red Army, SD and other SS formations would combat any resistance movements in the rear. In effect, the German Army willingly ensnared itself in the Nazi machinery of annihilation and extermination by working with the SS to systematically suppress partisan movements and other forms of perceived resistance." To this end, Einsatzgruppen, Ordnungspolizei, SS-Sonderkommandos, and army forces—for the most part—worked cooperatively to combat partisans ("bandits"), not only acting as judge, jury, and executioners in the field, but also in plundering "bandit areas"; they laid these areas to waste, seized crops and livestock, enslaved the local population, or murdered them. Anti-bandit operations were characterised by "special cruelty". For instance, Soviet Jews were murdered outright under the pretext that they were partisans per Hitler's orders. Historian Timothy Snyder asserts that by the second half of 1942, "German anti-partisan operations were all but indistinguishable from the mass murder of the Jews." Other historians have made similar observations. Omer Bartov argued that under the auspices of destroying their "so-called political and biological enemies", often described as "bandits" or "partisans", the Nazis made no effort "to distinguish between real guerrillas, political suspects, and Jews."
According to historian Erich Haberer, the Nazis' murderous policies toward the Jews provided the victims little choice; driven to "coalesce into small groups to survive in forested areas from where they emerged periodically to forage food in nearby fields and villages, the Germans created their own partisan problem, which, by its very nature, was perceived as banditry." Typically these "heroic and futile acts of resistance" against the Nazi occupiers were often in vain considering the "insurmountable odds" of success, although Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto managed to resist for upwards of four months, which historian Patrick Henry notes, was "longer than some national armies" managed. Such activity "worked powerfully against the anti-Semitic stereotype...that Jews would not fight." Correspondingly, there are estimates that 30,000 Jews joined partisan units in Belorussia and western Ukraine alone, while other Jewish partisan groups joined fighters from Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia, where they assisted in derailing trains, destroying bridges, and carrying out sabotage acts that contributed to the deaths of thousands of German soldiers.
Surging operations from better equipped partisans against Army Group Centre during 1943 intensified to the degree that the 221st Security Division's did not just eliminate "bandits" but laid entire regions where they operated to waste. The scale of this effort must be taken into consideration, as historian Michael Burleigh reports that anti-partisan operations had a significant impact on German operations in the East; namely, since they caused "widespread economic disruption, tied down manpower which could have been deployed elsewhere, and by instilling fear and provoking extreme countermeasures, drove a wedge between occupiers and occupied".
Following the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, the Nazis intensified their anti-partisan operations in Poland, during which German forces employed their version of anti-partisan tactics by shooting upwards of 120,000 civilians in Warsaw. Ideologically speaking, since partisans represented an immediate existential threat, in that, they were equated with Jews or people under their influence, the systematic murder of anyone associated with them was an expression of the regime's racial antisemitism and was viewed by members of the Wehrmacht as a "necessity of war". Much of this Nazi mindset in killing partisan "enemies" was not just an immediate expediency but was preemptive warfare against "future" enemies.
In 1941, when there was little real partisan threat, the German use of indiscriminate brutality helped accentuate the problem. Subsequently, Soviet success on the front line that winter encouraged partisan resistance, and the Germans responded with increased mass killing...Among the German officers were fanatics who could draw no distinction between partisans and the rest of the population, as well as moderates and self-styled pragmatists, and the last had the most decisive effect on troop conduct. Diversity did not, however, lead to any marked lessening of the institutional ruthlessness that was accentuated by Nazi ideology...A lack of sufficient manpower for the extensive long-term occupation of areas susceptible to the partisans helped lead to a reliance on high-tempo brutality, a correlate of German operations at the front.
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