Kurt Meyer on Trial: A Documentary Record (review)

Kurt Meyer was a model SS officer. Trained as a policeman, he joined the SS in 1931 as a twenty-one-year-old officer candidate. In 1939 he commanded companies during the invasions of Poland, France, and the Low Countries. He then commanded the SS Division reconnaissance detachment and distinguished himself and his unit as they spearheaded the invasions of Greece and then Russia. By early 1943 he was a battalion commander, leading a series of bold and successful counterattacks in the Kharkov region. One of the selected officers and NCOs withdrawn from Russia to form the 12th SS, “Hitler Jugend,” 8000 Hitler Youth recruited from the class of 1926, boys who had known only the Third Reich, he was responsible for division training which emphasized live fire and movement exercises and physical fitness, and didn’t utilize standard training manuals. As the unit was deployed to Normandy in Spring 1944, higher headquarters noted: “The quality of the conscripts was high, but that of subordinate officers and NCO’s was poor.” The report didn’t note that Meyer, the training officer, had spent the prior year in Russia where neither side followed the laws of war. The unit was certified combat ready on June 1st.

On June 7th 1944, advance elements of the 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade moving inland from Juno Beach stumbled on the 25th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, commanded by Meyer. Outmanned and outgunned for two hours the Canadians were bested in a series of brief intense clashes. Shortly afterwards, there were reports that prisoners were being killed in battle and afterwards. In Authie village two Canadians’ bodies were placed in a street and repeatedly run over by a tank. The bodies of prisoners had been surreptitiously buried at the Abbaye d’ Ardenne, from whose church tower Meyer had initiated the attack. Meyer, subsequently captured by partisans after he and 500 survivors of the 12th SS kept open the Falaise Gap, was charged with war crimes both for ordering murders and, as a commander, for permitting them.

The book under review, after a forty-nine page Introduction, documents the Meyer case with sections devoted to Legal and Pre Trial Documents (38 pp.), The Trial transcript, (435 pp.), The Decision to Commute Meyer’s Sentence (10 pp.), Transfer to Canada (22 pp.), Appeals and Meyer’s Transfer to Germany (69 pp.), the Decision to Release Meyer (41 pp.); Responses to Meyer’s Release (52 pp.) To what end? Meyer’s was Canada’s first war crimes trial and, as such, is worthy of being memorialized. The legal run-up to the trial is comprehensively described in Patrick Brode’s Criminal Slaughters and Accidental Judgements: Canadian War Crimes Prosecutions 1944–1948, listed in the bibliography. Post trial documentation regarding Meyer’s case might interest students of recent Canadian history. Ultimately the book’s value to a larger readership depends on the trial transcript. Those entertained by reading play scripts or transcripts will enjoy the trial proceedings. Are there other virtues as well? Each part, read aloud by a class member, would illustrate how difficult it is to prove a case of command responsibility. Commentary could raise issues which weren’t explicitly raised in Court. [General Vokes, the convening authority, had led his division at the bloody battle of Ortona in December 1943 and claimed in his autobiography, My Story, “there isn’t a general or colonel I know of on the allied side who hasn’t said ‘Well, this time we don’t want any prisoners’”(p. 206). There was evidence that the 12th SS had heard that the Canadians took no prisoners. Of what value, if any, is a tu quoque defense in a war crimes trial? Shils and Janowitz first wrote of Wermacht unit cohesion three years after Meyer’s trial. What can social science tell us about the behavior of the 12th SS and should social science...