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Josef Harpe (21 September 1887 – 14 March 1968) was a German general during World War II who commanded the 9th Army. He was a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords of Nazi Germany.
Harpe served on the Eastern Front, where he commanded XXXXI Panzer Corps and the 9th Army. From September 1944 to January 1945 Army Group A, when he was relieved of his command due to the inability of German forces to stop the Soviet Vistula–Oder Offensive. He ended the war commanding the 5th Panzer Army on Western Front.
Harpe was also responsible for establishing the Ozarichi death camps, which is considered by historians to be one of the worst atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht.
He served on the Eastern Front, where he commanded, from July 1942 until October 1943 the XXXXI Panzerkorps and from September 1944 to January 1945 Army Group A. On 12 March 1944, Harpe established the makeshift Ozarichi death camps in Belarus. There were no buildings or sanitary facilities; it was just a massive closed-off area with barbed wire. Soldiers of the 35th Infantry Division, led by Johann-Georg Richert, reinforced by additional troops from Einsatzkommando of Einsatzgruppen, forced at least 40,000 civilians into the camp, shooting at least 400 of them along the way after they became too weak to continue walking. The prisoners were mostly family members of slave laborers, children under 13, the sick, mothers with infants, and the elderly. These people were viewed by the Germans as "useless mouths".
The prisoners, many of whom had contracted typhus, had to survive in the open in the marshlands without shelter, medical aid, food, or water. "There was a gate with barbed wire, small watch towers with soldiers and German shepherds, but nothing else," recalled one survivor, Larisa Stashkevich. She said that anyone who even attempted to light a campfire was immediately gunned down. The only way to keep warm was to use the corpses of murdered prisoners.
Dieter Pohl has called the establishment of the camp "one of the worst crimes the Wehrmacht ever committed against civilians". By the time troops of the 65th Army of the First Belorussian Front liberated those in the camps on 19 March 1944, at least 9000 people had died. The German high command celebrated the thousands of deaths as a success, calling the civilians "useless mouths". The troops freed 33,480 people, including 15,960 children under the age of 13, from the Ozarichi concentration camps.
He was relieved of his command due to the inability of German forces to stop the Soviet Vistula–Oder Offensive, which resulted in the Soviet capture of most of Poland. He ended the war as the commander of the 5th Panzer Army on the Western Front. Harpe was taken prisoner by the United States Army on 17 April 1945. Although Harpe was held as a prisoner of war by the United States, he was never charged with any crimes. He was released from custody on 14 April 1948, and died a free man in 1968.
Although Harpe never faced prosecution for the Ozarichi camps, Richert did. He was prosecuted by a Soviet military court in the Minsk Trial for his role in the deportations and other atrocities against Soviet civilians. Richert was sentenced to death, and hanged in 1946.
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