title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: For the period 2011–2013, the estimated median annual income for a household in the city was $23,785, and the median income for a family was $32,221. Male full-time workers had a median income of $31,026 versus $28,858 for females. The per capita income for the city was $15,511. 34.2% of the population and 26.9% of families were below the poverty line. Of the total population, 55.0% of those under the age of 18 and 18.4% of those 65 and older were living below the poverty line.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: The unemployment average is reported at 9%. Most of the jobs center around health care, defense, telemarketing and retail.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: The Bruce Springsteen song "The River" mentions the Johnstown Company: "I got a job working construction, for the Johnstown Company, but lately there ain't been much work, on account of the economy." "Highway Patrolman", another Springsteen song, has the lyrics "as the band played 'Night of the Johnstown Flood'."


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: The 1977 film "Slap Shot", directed by George Roy Hill and starring Paul Newman, was a parody loosely based on the real-life Johnstown Jets ice hockey team and its North American Hockey League championship in 1976. In the movie, Johnstown was rechristened "Charlestown" and the Jets as the Charlestown Chiefs. The film's premiere engendered some local controversy, as some thought Johnstown was portrayed in a less than flattering light. "Slap Shot" has since become the iconic movie about hockey and its foibles. Screenwriter Nancy Dowd would revive the fake town of "Charlestown" in her screenplay for the 1981 punk rock satire "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains", but the film itself was shot in Canada.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: "All the Right Moves", a high school football drama set in the fictional town of Ampipe and featuring Tom Cruise, Lea Thompson and Craig T. Nelson, was filmed in the area. Locations seen in the movie are the old Johnstown High School in the Kernville neighborhood, torn down shortly afterwards; the Carpatho-Russian Citizen's Club in East Conemaugh; the Franklin works of Bethlehem Steel; the Point Stadium; the Johnstown "Cochran" Junior High football practice field and the Johnstown Vo-Tech football locker room.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: "The Johnstown Flood", written and directed by Charles Guggenheim, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, Short Subject in 1989. The film was commissioned by the Johnstown Flood Museum Association, which later reorganized as the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, and is shown every hour at the Johnstown Flood Museum.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: Mystery novel writer K. C. Constantine fictionalized many elements of Johnstown and its culture as "Rocksburg" in his novels, although the nearby city of Greensburg also provides some of the lore for Rocksburg.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: In 2000, Kathleen Cambor published "In Sunlight, In A Beautiful Garden". The novel followed its characters through the events leading up to and including the 1889 flood. Although the protagonists in the novel were fictional, several historical figures, such as Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick and Daniel Morrell were also depicted in the book.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: Author James Patterson had his fictional serial kidnapper, Gary Soneji, from "Along Came a Spider" stop at a convenience store on his way through Johnstown. Author David Morrell had his fictional character "Eliot" recruit two brothers from an orphanage in Johnstown to train as assassins in "The Brotherhood of the Rose".


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: In the 1978 film "Dawn of the Dead", a character mentions that they are flying over Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and quips that the people are actually entertained by the zombie outbreak. George A. Romero filmed the majority of the zombie movie at the Monroeville Mall, some 50-odd miles away.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: Johnstown is featured in "Defenders of Freedom" Volume 1 (2010) and "Defenders of Freedom" Volume 2 (2012). Both are hardcover books, published by the "Williamsport Sun-Gazette", featuring first person stories of Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, military veterans who served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. In the foreword of each volume, Johnstown native and nationally recognized newspaper publisher Bernard A. Oravec shares stories of his father's military police service in Germany and growing up in Johnstown's west end during the 1970s.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: Author and Johnstown native Robert T. Jeschonek wrote a nonfiction history of the local landmark Glosser Bros. Department Store and its multimillion-dollar parent company in his 2014 book "Long Live Glosser's". Jeschonek also depicted a fictional 1975 tour of the Glosser Brothers Department Store in his 2013 novelette "Christmas at Glosser's". Johnstown is the setting of Jeschonek's story "Fear of Rain", which was nominated for a British Fantasy Award. His mystery novels "Death by Polka" and "The Masked Family" are also set in and around Johnstown.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: Johnstown is featured in "A Community Keystone; The Official History of The Williamsport Sun-Gazette" (2018). This 448-page hardcover book contains a detailed newspaper and community history that chronicles the entire 217 years of newspaper publication in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, since 1801. This book was featured on PCN's PA Books television show on November 11, 2018. The PA Books episode contains a lengthy discussion with Johnstown native and nationally recognized newspaper publisher Bernard A. Oravec, who wrote the foreword and published the book. In his foreword, Mr. Oravec describes the importance of defending the First Amendment and his family's experience as eastern European immigrants in Johnstown during the early-mid 20th century.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: The 2021 book "Smalltime: The Story of My Family and the Mob", by Russell Shorto, is the story of organized crime in and around Johnstown, and the connections Shorto's family had to the American Mafia. Another book that was published in 2021, "Disastrous Floods and the Demise of Steel in Johnstown", by Pat Farabaugh, explores the three major floods that hit the city in 1889, 1936 and 1977, as well as the history of the steel and coal industry in the region.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: A reduction in steel production also reduced coal mining in Pennsylvania, which was important to the Johnstown economy. In 1982, Johnstown's longest-serving mayor, Herbert Pfuhl Jr., said that, as a result of the decline, city revenues had fallen approximately 35 percent.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: The Johnstown economy later recovered somewhat, largely due to industry around health care and high-tech defense, but was reported to be the third-fastest shrinking city in the U.S. in 2017. Nonetheless, in 2018, Johnstown was ranked 169th among "The Best Small Places For Business And Careers" in the U.S., by "Forbes".


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: Johnstown's television market is part of the Johnstown/Altoona/State College market. NBC affiliate WJAC-TV 6 (which also operates the market's CW affiliate through The CW Plus on its DT4 subchannel) and Fox affiliate WWCP-TV 8 are licensed in the city. Johnstown is also served by CBS affiliate WTAJ-TV 10 and ABC affiliate WATM-TV 23, both based in Altoona, and State College-based PBS member station WPSU-TV 3, licensed to Clearfield but based on the Pennsylvania State University campus. Several other low-power stations, including WHVL-LD 29 (MyNetworkTV) in State College, also transmit to Johnstown.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: WPCW 19, the CW's owned-and-operated station in Pittsburgh licensed to Jeannette, began operations in Johnstown and later moved to serve the Pittsburgh area, but would continue to be available in Johnstown until September 2019 as the market's default CW affiliate.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: The main highway connecting Johnstown to the Pennsylvania Turnpike is U.S. Route 219. There is also State Route 56, which is an expressway from 219 until Walnut Street. From there, it provides a connection to U.S. Route 22 to the north of Johnstown, which connects to Pittsburgh and Altoona.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: The local airport is the John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport, served by United Express, with flights to Washington-Dulles and Chicago-O'Hare via Clarksburg.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: Passenger rail service is provided by Amtrak's daily "Pennsylvanian". The city is located on the former mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Norfolk Southern operates 60–80 trains daily on these rails. CSX also has a branch into the city.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: CamTran operates the local bus service and the Johnstown Inclined Plane (funicular). Until 1976, local transit service was operated by a private company, Johnstown Traction Company. Streetcars (or "trolleys") operated in Johnstown until 1960, and trolley buses from 1951 until 1967.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: Johnstown has been home to a long succession of minor league hockey franchises dating back to 1940. One of the more recent manifestations, the Johnstown Chiefs, were named for their "Slap Shot" counterparts. The team made their debut in January 1988 with the All-American Hockey League, joining the league midway through the season. After one season in the AAHL, the Chiefs became one of five teams to join the newly founded East Coast Hockey League (now ECHL). The team announced in February 2010 that they would be leaving Johnstown for a location in South Carolina. In April 2010 it was announced that the Wheeling Nailers of the ECHL would call Johnstown home for 10 games during the regular season and for one of their preseason games. They returned once again for the 2011–12 season. After the 2011-2012 NAHL hockey season, the Alaska Avalanche relocated to Johnstown and became the Johnstown Tomahawks and have remained in Johnstown ever since.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: The city also has history in amateur and professional baseball. Since 1944, Johnstown has been the host city for the AAABA Baseball Tournament held each summer. Several Major League Baseball players have played on AAABA teams over the years, including Hall-of Famers Al Kaline and Reggie Jackson and former Major League managers Joe Torre and Bruce Bochy. The organization also has its own Hall of Fame instituted in its 50th anniversary year of 1994.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: In addition, the city has hosted several incarnations of a minor-league baseball team, the Johnstown Johnnies, beginning in 1884. The last team to play as the Johnnies, as a part of the Frontier League, left the city in 2002.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: Johnstown also hosts the annual Sunnehanna Amateur golf tournament at its Sunnehanna Country Club. The invitational tournament hosts top amateur golfers from around the United States.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: Johnstown is home to the Flood City Water Polo team. Established in 2005 by Zachary Puhala, the team takes its name from the history of floods in the area. FCWP is part of the American Water Polo Organization.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: On May 2, 2015, Johnstown was announced as the winner of the 2015 Kraft Hockeyville USA contest and was awarded $150,000 toward improvements of the Cambria County War Memorial Arena. The contest was sponsored through a partnership between Kraft Foods, the National Hockey League (NHL), and National Hockey League Players' Association (NHLPA). In addition to the cash prize, the arena won the opportunity to host the September 29, 2015, NHL pre-season game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and Tampa Bay Lightning.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: Johnstown hosts a number of events each year. "Thunder in the Valley" is a motorcycle rally with weekend crowds ranging from 150,000 to 200,000. The AAABA amateur baseball tournament is held at the Point Stadium in downtown Johnstown. The Flood City Music Festival is held at Peoples Natural Gas Park. The Sunnehanna Amateur golf tournament is held once a year at Sunnehanna Country Club. Professional golfers have played in this tournament as amateurs such as Tiger Woods, and Arnold Palmer.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: Per WJAC; in the year 2022, Johnstown has had 12 homicides as of August. Statistics have not been updated since 2018 — “The chances of becoming a victim are 2.27% higher than the rest of Pennsylvania. The chances of becoming a victim of a violent crime in Johnstown are 1 in 184 where the average for Pennsylvania is 1 in 316.”


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: The Johnstown Fire Department has available response teams for Hazardous Materials (HAZMAT) and a boat in which they are able to perform water and ice rescues. Along with the fire department is part of the Special Emergency Response Team (SERT). The fire department also provides on-site classes on fire safety.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: The Johnstown Police Department (JPD) has 35 full-time officers and the chief of police is Richard Pritchard.


title: Johnstown, Pennsylvania

text: The Johnstown City Hall is located at 401 Main Street. The Mayor of Johnstown is Frank Janakovic, and the Deputy Mayor is Marie Mock. Janakovic attended the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. He acquired a minor in business accounting and a degree in Sociology. Janakovic was also a co-founder of ACRP (Alternative Community Resource Program), an organization that helps underprivileged families.


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: The "Quantum" class is a class of cruise ships from Royal Caribbean International, previously known by the code name "Project Sunshine".


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: On 11 February 2011, Royal Caribbean announced that they had ordered the first of a new class of ships from Meyer Werft, scheduled to be delivered by Fall 2014. At the time, the project was code-named "Project Sunshine". Later that year, two 20.5-megawatt ABB Azipod XO propulsion units were ordered for that ship. On 29 February 2012, the company announced that a second "Project Sunshine" ship had been ordered and would be delivered by Spring 2015, and ordered identical Azipod propulsion units shortly thereafter. Just under a year later, on 31 January 2013, steel cutting was performed for the first ship. The same day, Royal Caribbean announced the official name of the new class of ships, "Quantum" class, as well as the names of the first two ships in the class, "Quantum of the Seas" and "Anthem of the Seas".


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: "Quantum of the Seas" was delivered on 28 October 2014. "Quantum of the Seas" spent its inaugural 2014–2015 season sailing from Cape Liberty in Bayonne, New Jersey. Beginning late June 2015, the ship began sailing three- to eight-night itineraries year-round from Shanghai to Japan and South Korea.


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: "Anthem of the Seas" was delivered to Royal Caribbean on 10 April 2015. The ship spent its inaugural 2015 season sailing from Southampton, Hampshire, UK.


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: On 30 May 2013, Royal Caribbean announced that they had signed a contract with Meyer Werft for a third "Quantum"-class ship for delivery in mid-2016. On 18 September 2014, the name of the third "Quantum"-class ship was announced to be "Ovation of the Seas". "Ovation of the Seas" was delivered to Royal Caribbean on 8 April 2016. The ship was originally planned to homeport in Tianjin to sail in Asia, but moved to Sydney in June 2016 to begin cruising in Oceania seasonally. She debuted in Alaska in the summer of 2019.


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: On 7 May 2015, Royal Caribbean entered into an agreement with Meyer Werft for a fourth "Quantum"-class ship for delivery in 2019, subject to financing and other conditions. Royal Caribbean announced on 26 April 2017, that the fourth "Quantum"-class ship would not only be designed and based in the Asia-Pacific region; but will also be based on a new "Quantum" Ultra-class design.


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: In June 2018, it was revealed that the fourth ship would be "Spectrum of the Seas". It can accommodate 4,246 guests at double occupancy and 1,551 international crew members.


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: On 3 November 2015, Royal Caribbean entered into an agreement with Meyer Werft for a fifth "Quantum"-class ship, also a "Quantum" Ultra-class ship and the sister ship to the first "Quantum" Ultra-class ship. Scheduled to be delivered in April 2021, it was given the name, "Odyssey of the Seas", on 1 February 2019. She is the first "Quantum"-class ship to be homeported in South Florida, at Port Everglades.


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: The "Quantum" class represented a different direction for Royal Caribbean. The and designs evolved into the , which was considered the pinnacle in terms of scale and facilities. By contrast, the "Quantum"-class lineage is closer to that of the , which was designed for cruising in cooler climates. The "Quantum" class is smaller than the preceding "Oasis" class, just as the "Radiance" class is smaller than the preceding "Voyager" class. Nonetheless, despite not being Royal Caribbean's largest class of ship, the "Quantum" class has pioneered several new innovations to the cruise line.


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: "Quantum"-class ships have 16 passenger-accessible decks, 8 of which feature balcony staterooms overlooking the ocean. All balcony staterooms above the lifeboats are recessed into the superstructure and do not look down directly at the ocean. There are a total of 2,090 staterooms: 1,570 balcony staterooms, 147 ocean-view staterooms, and 373 inside staterooms. Of those staterooms, 34 are wheelchair accessible and 28 are studio staterooms for single travelers (including 12 studio staterooms with balconies). All aft-facing staterooms are 2-story "loft" suites. All interior staterooms feature a floor-to-ceiling, 80-inch high-definition TV screen showing live views from the outside of the ship, which Royal Caribbean calls a "Virtual Balcony". On average, staterooms on the "Quantum" class are 9 percent larger than those on the preceding "Oasis" class.


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: A new feature on the "Quantum" class is "RipCord by iFLY", a skydiving simulator set in a recirculating indoor recreational vertical wind tunnel. Another innovation on the "Quantum" class is the "North Star" observation tower, located at the forward end of the top deck. It uses a glass-walled capsule on the end of a crane arm to lift groups of up to 14 guests up and over the edge of the ship, reaching heights of up to above sea level.


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: Royal Caribbean introduced the first escape room experience on a cruise ship on the "Anthem of the Seas" in partnership with Puzzle Break, billed the "Escape from the Future." "Spectrum of the Seas" was the first "Quantum"-class ship to install Sky Pad, a virtual reality experience with a trampoline and bungee ropes for guests to undergo different simulations and play interactive games.


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: Like the earlier and "Oasis-class" ships, the "Sports Court" on the aft of deck 15 features a complimentary Wave Loch Flowrider surf simulator and a rock-climbing wall. Other complimentary outdoor features are located on deck 14, including an outdoor pool with a large video screen, an indoor pool with a retractable roof, an indoor "Solarium" with an adults-only pool, and the "H2O Zone" kids' water park, featuring the first wave pool on a cruise ship, and at least four whirlpools. Throughout the ship, staples included on recent Royal Caribbean ships that are also in "Quantum"-class ships include a Spa and Fitness Center on decks 15 and 16, the "Adventure Ocean" kids club on decks 11 and 12, a Broadway-style "The Royal Theater" on decks 3–5, and a casino on deck 3. Unlike the earlier "Voyager", "Freedom", and "Oasis" classes, "Quantum"-class ships do not feature a Viking Crown Lounge or ice skating rink, and the Royal Promenade mall down the center of the ship is replaced with the two-story "Royal Esplanade".


title: Quantum-class cruise ship

text: "Quantum"-class ships are powered by two Azipod XO thrusters that have a capacity of and four bow thrusters with a power output of each. The diesel-electric propulsion system powers the ships for a cruising speed of . Wärtsilä provides the two scrubbers on each ship that enable a reduced sulfur emission output and a cleaner exhaust. "Quantum"-class ships use an air lubrication system (ALS) to reduce the friction in the water in order to improve the performance of the vessel during cruising.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: During World War II, the German combined armed forces ("Heer", "Kriegsmarine" and "Luftwaffe") committed systematic war crimes, including massacres, mass rape, looting, the exploitation of forced labor, the murder of three million Soviet prisoners of war, and participated in the extermination of Jews. While the Nazi Party's own SS forces (in particular the "SS-Totenkopfverbände", "Einsatzgruppen" and Waffen-SS) of Nazi Germany was the organization most responsible for the genocidal killing of the Holocaust, the regular armed forces of the "Wehrmacht" committed many war crimes of their own (as well as assisting the SS in theirs), particularly on the Eastern Front in the war against the Soviet Union. According to a study by Alex J. Kay and David Stahel, the majority of the Wehrmacht soldiers deployed to the Soviet Union participated in war crimes.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: When the Nazi Party came to power, it was welcomed by almost the entire officer corps of the "Reichswehr" as a way of creating the "Wiederwehrhaftmachung" (remilitarization) of Germany, namely the total militarization of German society in order to ensure that Germany did not lose the next war. As such, what both the Nazis and the German Army wanted to see was a totally militarized "Volksgemeinschaft" (people's community) that would be purged of perceived internal enemies like the Jews who it was believed had "stabbed Germany in the back" in 1918. The Wehrmacht was created by Adolf Hitler in 1935 with the passing of a law introducing conscription into the armed forces. It was composed of volunteers and conscripts.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Many officers therefore willingly embraced National Socialist ideology in the 1930s. Acting on his own initiative, the Defence Minister Werner von Blomberg had purged the Army of all its Jewish personnel in February 1934. On December 8, 1938, the Army leadership instructed all officers to be thoroughly well versed in National Socialism and to apply its values in all situations. Starting in February 1939, pamphlets were issued that were made required reading in the Army. The content can be gauged by the titles: "The Officer and Politics", "Hitler's World Historical Mission", "The Army in the Third Reich", "The Battle for German Living Space", "Hands off Danzig!", and "The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the Third Reich". The latter essay proclaimed: Attitudes like the ones expressed above colored all the instructions that came to Wehrmacht troops in the summer of 1939 as a way of preparing for the attack on Poland.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: During the planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union a number of orders were devised by the Wehrmacht leadership. The orders contravened international law and established codes of conduct and became known collectively as "Criminal Orders". The orders were a declaration of war against the civilian population.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In November 1935, the psychological war laboratory of the War Ministry submitted a study about how best to undermine Red Army morale should a German-Soviet war break out. Working closely with the émigré Russian Fascist Party based in Harbin, the German psychological warfare unit created a series of pamphlets written in Russian for distribution in the Soviet Union. Much of it was designed to play on Russian anti-Semitism, with one pamphlet calling the "Gentlemen commissars and party functionaries" a group of "mostly filthy Jews". The pamphlet ended with the call for "brother soldiers" of the Red Army to rise up and kill all of the "Jewish commissars".


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Although this material was not used at the time, later in 1941 the material the psychological war laboratory had developed in 1935 was dusted off, and served as the basis not only for propaganda in the Soviet Union but also for propaganda within the German Army. Before Barbarossa, German troops were exposed to violent anti-Semitic and anti-Slavic indoctrination via movies, radio, lectures, books and leaflets. The lectures were delivered by "National Socialist Leadership Officers", who were created for that purpose, and by their junior officers. German Army propaganda portrayed the Soviet enemy in the most dehumanized terms, depicting the Red Army as a force of Slavic "Untermenschen" (sub-humans) and "Asiatic" savages engaging in "barbaric Asiatic fighting methods" commanded by evil Jewish commissars to whom German troops were to grant no mercy.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that junior officers tended to be especially zealous National Socialists with a third of them being Nazi Party members in 1941. The Wehrmacht did not just obey Hitler's criminal orders for Barbarossa because of obedience, but rather because they shared Hitler's belief that the Soviet Union was run by Jews, and that it was necessary for Germany to completely destroy "Judeo-Bolshevism".


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The order cast the war against the Soviet Union as one of ideological and racial differences, and it provided for the immediate liquidation of political commissars in the Red Army. The order was formulated in 1941 with the participation of the Army High Command (the OKH) and issued by the Wehrmacht High Command (the OKW). General Franz Halder welcomed it, writing that "Troops must participate in the ideological battle in the Eastern campaign to the end".


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: On 17 July 1941, the OKW declared that the Wehrmacht was to:[F]ree itself from all elements among the prisoners of war considered Bolshevik driving forces. The special situation of the Eastern Campaign therefore demands "special measures" [an euphemism for killing] which are to be carried out free from bureaucratic and administrative influence and with a willingness to accept responsibility. While so far the regulations and orders concerning prisoners of war were based solely on "military" considerations, now the "political" objective must be attained, which is to protect the German nation from Bolshevik inciters and forthwith take the occupied territory strictly in hand. As such, all Soviet POWs considered to be commissars together with all Jewish POWs were to be handed over to the "Einsatzgruppen" to be shot. The OKW attached great importance to the killings of POWs believed to be commissars as it was believed that if the captured commissars reached POW camps in Germany that they would stage another German Stab-in-the-back like that believed to have caused Germany's defeat in World War I. Between July–October 1941, between 580,000 and 600,000 POWs in Wehrmacht custody were turned over to the SS to be killed. In September 1941, both Helmuth James von Moltke and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris wrote memos pointing out to the OKW that the order of July 17, 1941 was illegal under international law.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In particular, both Moltke and Admiral Canaris noted that the German claim that Soviet POWs had no rights because the Soviet Union had not ratified the Geneva Convention was invalid, as Germany had ratified the Geneva Convention and thus under international law was obliged to provide humane treatment for the POWs in its care. In response, Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel wrote: "These scruples accord with the soldierly concepts of a chivalrous war! Here we are concerned with the extermination of an ideology. That is why I approve and defend this measure".


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In the summer of 1942, there was an illusory liberalization of the treatment of captured political officers. On 10 June, the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller issued an order on the segregation of prisoners and ordered that commissars be isolated from the rest of the prisoners and sent to Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. However, this did not change the plight of commissars much, as Mauthausen was one of the worst Nazi concentration camps where they usually waited for a slow death. On 20 October 1942, Müller again ordered commissars captured in battle to be shot on the spot. Only those commissars who were identified as deserters were sent to Mauthausen. In the following months, reports continued to be filed regarding the executions of Soviet commissars. The last known account of the liquidation of a political officer came from units of Army Group South in July 1943.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The historian Jürgen Förster wrote that the majority of Wehrmacht officers sincerely believed that most Red Army commissars were Jews and that the best way to defeat the Soviet Union was to kill all of the commissars so as to deprive the Soviet soldiers of their Jewish leaders.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The background behind the Barbarossa Decree was laid out by Hitler during a high-level meeting with military officials on 30 March 1941, where he declared that war against Soviet Russia would be a war of extermination, in which both the political and intellectual elites of Russia would be eradicated by German forces, in order to ensure a long-lasting German victory. Hitler underlined that executions would not be a matter for military courts, but for the organised action of the military.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The decree, issued by Field Marshal Keitel a few weeks before Operation Barbarossa, exempted punishable offenses committed by enemy civilians (in Russia) from the jurisdiction of military justice. Suspects were to be brought before an officer who would decide if they were to be shot.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Contrary to what was claimed after the war, the Wehrmacht generals such as Heinz Guderian, did not intend to mitigate the records of the jurisdiction of an order, or in any way violate Hitler's intentions. His command was intended solely to prevent individual excesses which could damage discipline within army ranks, without changing the extermination intentions of the order. As part of the policy of harshness towards Slavic "sub-humans" and to prevent any tendency towards seeing the enemy as human, German troops were ordered to go out of their way to mistreat women and children in Russia.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The "Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia" issued by the OKW on 19 May 1941 declared "Judeo-Bolshevism" to be the most deadly enemy of the German nation, and that "It is against this destructive ideology and its adherents that Germany is waging war". The guidelines went on to demand "ruthless and vigorous measures against Bolshevik inciters, guerrillas, saboteurs, Jews, and the complete elimination of all active and passive resistance." Influenced by the guidelines, in a directive sent out to the troops under his command, General Erich Hoepner of the Panzer Group 4 stated:The war against Russia is an important chapter in the German nation's struggle for existence. It is the old battle of the Germanic against the Slavic people, of the defence of European culture against Muscovite-Asiatic inundation and of the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. The objective of this battle must be the demolition of present-day Russia and must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron resolution to exterminate the enemy remorselessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the contemporary Russian Bolshevik system are to be spared.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In the same spirit, General Müller, who was the Wehrmacht's senior liaison officer for legal matters, in a lecture to military judges on June 11, 1941, advised the judges present that "...in the operation to come, feelings of justice must in certain situations give way to military exigencies and then revert to old habits of warfare ... One of the two adversaries must be finished off. Adherents of the hostile attitude are not to be conserved, but liquidated". General Müller declared that, in the war against the Soviet Union, any Soviet civilian who was felt to be hindering the German war effort was to be regarded as a "guerrilla" and shot on the spot. The Army's Chief of Staff, General Franz Halder, declared in a directive that in the event of guerrilla attacks, German troops were to impose "collective measures of force" by massacring villages.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: German Army propaganda often gave extracts in newsletters concerning the missions for German troops in the East:"It is necessary to eliminate the red subhumans, along with their Kremlin dictators. German people will have a great task to perform the most in its history, and the world will hear more about that this task will be completed till the end.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: As a result of this sort of propaganda, the majority of the "Wehrmacht Heer" officers and soldiers tended to regard the war in Nazi terms, seeing their Soviet opponents as so much sub-human trash deserving to be trampled upon. One German soldier wrote home to his father on 4 August 1941 that:


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The order was in line with the interests of the Wehrmacht command, which was eager to secure logistical facilities and routes behind the front line for the divisions on the Eastern Front.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In October 1941, the commander of the 12th Infantry Division sent out a directive saying "the carrying of information is mostly done by youngsters in the ages of 11–14" and that "as the Russian is more afraid of the truncheon than of weapons, flogging is the most advisable measure for interrogation". The Nazis at the beginning of the war banned sexual relations between Germans and foreign slave workers. In accordance to these new racial laws issued by the Nazis; in November 1941, the commander of the 18th Panzer Division warned his soldiers not to have sex with "sub-human" Russian women, and ordered that any Russian women found having sex with a German soldier was to be handed over to the SS to be executed at once.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: A decree ordered on 20 February 1942 declared that sexual intercourse between a German woman and a Russian worker or prisoner of war would result in the latter being punished by the death penalty. During the war, hundreds of Polish and Russian men were found guilty of "race defilement" for their relations with German women and were executed.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The Night and Fog Decree, issued by Hitler in 1941 and disseminated along with a directive from Keitel, was operated within the conquered territories in the West (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands). The decree allowed those "endangering German security" to be seized and made to disappear without trace. Keitel's directive stated that "efficient intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do not know his fate."


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Wehrmacht attitudes towards Poles were a combination of contempt, fear, and a belief that violence was the best way to deal with them.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The Wehrmacht responded brutally to acts by alleged insurgents during the invasion of Poland in 1939 and was responsible for indiscriminate shootings of prisoners of war and civilians. Any act of defiance was met with the most ruthless violence, although the Army leadership did seek to discourage so-called "wild" shootings where Wehrmacht troops would shoot civilians on their own initiative or participate in murders conducted by the SS. Court-martial proceedings were begun against some of the junior officers who had led these shootings, but this was nullified on 4 October 1939, when Hitler pardoned all military personnel who had been involved in war crimes in Poland. After the end of hostilities, during the Wehrmacht's administration of Poland, which went on until 25 October 1939, 531 towns and villages were burned; the Wehrmacht carried out 714 mass executions, alongside many incidents of plunder, banditry and murder. Altogether, it is estimated that 16,376 Poles fell victim to these atrocities. Approximately 60% of these crimes were committed by the Wehrmacht. Wehrmacht soldiers frequently engaged in the massacre of Jews on their own, rather than just assisting in rounding them up for the SS.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In the summer of 1940, Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office (including the Gestapo), noted that: "...compared to the crimes, robberies and excesses committed by the army [part of the Wehrmacht], the SS and the police don't look all that bad". Even when the German Army was not involved in war crimes, all of the top military leaders were aware of what was happening in Poland. None objected on moral principles; the few who did object did so due to concerns about discipline. Moreover, the general who objected the loudest to war crimes in Poland, General Johannes Blaskowitz, was opposed to the Army committing war crimes with the SS, not the idea of atrocities against Poland. The Israeli historian Omer Bartov wrote that Blaskowitz was actually "legitimizing murder" by expressing approval of SS massacres while demanding that the Army be kept out of the massacres as damaging to discipline. Bartov wrote that once officers and troops saw that murder was "legitimate" in Poland, the effect was that the Army tended to copy the SS.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Up to 13,000 soldiers and between 120,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed by German-led forces during the Warsaw Uprising. At least 5,000 German regular soldiers assisted the SS in crushing Polish resistance, most of them reserve units. Human shields were used by German forces during the fighting.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Throughout the campaign Wehrmacht engaged in widespread theft and plunder of Polish citizens' property. Until 3 November 1939 the Wehrmacht sent to the Nazi Germany 10,000 train wagons with stolen property including agricultural machinery, furniture and food.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In one of the Germany military's first acts of World War II the German air force, the "Luftwaffe", bombed the Polish town of Wieluń and later went on to bomb cities across the country, including Warsaw, Frampol and various other cities. Collectively the bombings killed tens of thousands of Polish civilians. However, no positive or specific customary international humanitarian law with respect to aerial warfare existed prior to and during World War II which means that at the time, strategic bombings were not officially war crimes. For this reason, no German officers were prosecuted at the post-World War II Allied war crime trials for aerial raids.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Numerous examples exist in which Polish soldiers were killed after capture; for instance, at Śladów, where 252 prisoners of war (POW)s were shot or drowned, at Ciepielów, where some 300 POWs were killed, and at Zambrów, where a further 300 were killed. Polish POWs of Jewish origin were routinely selected and shot on the spot.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The prisoners in the POW camp in Żyrardów, captured after the Battle of the Bzura, were denied any food and starved for ten days. In many cases Polish POWs were burned alive. Units of the Polish 7th Infantry Division were massacred after being captured in several individual acts of revenge for their resistance in combat. On September 11, "Wehrmacht" soldiers threw hand grenades into a school building where they kept Polish POWs. According to German historian Jochen Böhler, the Wehrmacht mass murdered at least 3,000 Polish POWs during the campaign.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The killing of POWs by "Wehrmacht" soldiers started during the September 1939 Poland campaign. In many cases large groups of Polish soldiers were murdered after capture. Hitler's Commando Order, issued in 1942, provided "justification" for the shooting of enemy commandos, whether uniformed or not.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Between 25 and 28 May 1940, the "Wehrmacht" committed several war crimes in and near the small Belgian village of Vinkt. Hostages were taken and used as human shields. As the Belgian Army continued to resist, farms were searched and looted, and more hostages were taken. In all, eighty-six civilians were executed. Besides Vinkt, other massacres and shootings happened with estimates of 600 victims.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: During the rout of the French Army, in June 1940, the Großdeutschland Regiment massacred African soldiers and their White officers it had taken prisoner near the Bois d'Eraine. Ten more Black Frenchmen were murdered near Lyon.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The same month, 9th Infantry Division massacred Black soldiers of the 4th North African Infantry Division they had captured near Erquivillers. A German officer is cited in French reports as explaining "an inferior race does not deserve to do battle with a civilized race such as the Germans."


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In September 1944, during the retreat from France, the garrison of Brest executed civilians and looted and destroyed civilian property during the Battle for Brest. The commander of the garrison, "Generalleutnant" Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke, was convicted of war crimes relating to these actions in 1951.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The massacres include that of at least 1500 black French POWs of West African origin and was preceded by propaganda depicting the Africans as savages. From October 1942 onwards, the "Wehrmacht" carried out the 'Commando Order' calling for the summary execution of all captured commandos, even if in uniform. After the Italian armistice in 1943, many POWs were executed on several occasions when Italian troops resisted their forcible disarmament by the Germans. The massacre of the Acqui Division at Kefalonia is the most infamous.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Following the Yugoslav coup d'état on 27 March 1941, Hitler considered this act to be a personal insult and called for the immediate destruction of Yugoslavia via Führer Directive 25. Commencing on 6 April 1941, Führer Directive 25 was enacted with a large scale bombing of Belgrade occurring in the early hours of the invasion. Indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets lead to the deaths of between 1,500 and 17,000 civilians. Following the end of the war, "Generaloberst" Alexander Löhr was found guilty of war crimes including his part in the bombing of Belgrade. He was executed in 1948.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In Serbia and Greece, many villages were razed and their inhabitants murdered during anti-partisan operations. Examples in Greece include Alikianos, Chortiatis, Kaisariani, Kalavryta, Kali Sykia, Kallikratis, Kleisoura, Kondomari, Kommeno, Lyngiades, Malathyros, Mesovouno, Mousiotitsa, Paramythia and Skourvoula; the razings of Kandanos, Anogeia and Vorizia; the Viannos massacres; and numerous incidents of smaller scale.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: On 26 March 1944, 15 uniformed US Army officers and men were shot without trial at La Spezia, in Italy, after orders of the commander of the German 75th Army Corps, General Anton Dostler, despite the opposition of his subordinates of the 135th Fortress Brigade. Dostler was sentenced to death by an American military tribunal and executed by firing squad in December 1945.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Some German officers had considered Communism in the Soviet Union to be a Jewish plot even before the Third Reich. In 1918, Karl von Bothmer, the German Army's plenipotentiary in Moscow called the Bolsheviks "a gang of Jews" and expressed the desire "to see a few hundred of these louts hanging on the Kremlin wall". Evaluations of the Red Army by the visiting "Reichswehr" officers during the period of German-Soviet co-operation in the 1920s often show anti-Semitism with comments about the "Jewish slyness" of General Lev Snitman or the "Jewish blood" of General Leonid Vajner being very typical.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In 1932, Ewald Banse, a leading German professor and a member of the National Association for the Military Sciences (a group secretly financed by the "Reichswehr") wrote in a pamphlet calling for "intellectual world domination" by Germany wrote that the Soviet leadership was mostly Jewish who dominated an apathetic and mindless Russian masses. In 1935, Colonel Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel in a report about the military capacity of the Red Army wrote that the commissars were "mostly of the Jewish race".


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In the spring of 1941, Heydrich and General Eduard Wagner successfully completed negotiations for co-operation between the "Einsatzgruppen" and the German Army to allow the implementation of "special tasks". Following the Heydrich-Wagner agreement on 28 April 1941, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch ordered when Operation Barbarossa began that all German Army commanders were to identify and register all Jews in the occupied areas in the Soviet Union at once and to co-operate fully with the "Einsatzgruppen". Each "Einsatzgruppe", in its area of operations, was under the control of the Higher SS and Police Leaders. In a further agreement between the Army and the SS concluded in May 1941 by General Wagner and Walter Schellenberg, it was agreed that the "Einsatzgruppen" in front-line areas were to operate under Army command while the Army would provide the "Einsatzgruppen" with all necessary logistical support. Under the guise of "anti-bandit" ("Bandenbekämpfung") operations, the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union massacred Jews and other civilians. Co-operation with the SS in reprisals and anti-Jewish operations was close and intensive.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In August 1941, following the protests by two Lutheran chaplains about the massacre of a group of Jewish women and children at Byelaya Tserkov, General von Reichenau wrote:The conclusion of the report in question contains the following sentence, "In the case in question, measures against women and children were undertaken which in no way differ from atrocities carried out by the enemy about which the troops are continually being informed".I have to describe this assessment as incorrect, inappropriate and impertinent in the extreme. Moreover, this comment was written in an open communication which passes through many hands. It would have been far better if the report had not been written at all. One SS man who saw the killings at Byelaya Tserkov described them as follows:I went to the woods alone. The Wehrmacht had already dug a grave. The children were brought along in a tractor. I had nothing to do with this technical procedure. The Ukrainians were standing around trembling. The children were taken down from the tractor. They were lined up along the top of the grave and shot so that they fell into it. The Ukrainians did not aim at any particular part of the body. They fell into the grave. The wailing was indescribable. I shall never forget the scene throughout my life. I find it very hard to bear. I particularly remember a small fair-haired girl who took me by the hand. She too was shot later ... The grave was near some woods. It was not near the rifle-range. The execution must had taken place in the afternoon at about 3.30 or 4.00. It took place the day after the discussions at the "Feldkommandanten"...Many children were hit four or five times before they died.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In the summer of 1941, the SS Cavalry Brigade commanded by Hermann Fegelein during the course of "anti-partisan" operations in the Pripyat Marshes killed 699 Red Army soldiers, 1,100 partisans and 14,178 Jews. Before the operation, Fegelein had been ordered to shoot all adult Jews while driving the women and children into the marshes. After the operation, General Max von Schenckendorff, who commanded the Army Group Centre Rear Area ordered on 10 August 1941 that all Wehrmacht security divisions when on anti-partisan duty were to emulate Fegelein's example and organized between 24 and 26 September 1941 in Mogilev, a joint SS-Police-Wehrmacht training event on how best to murder "partisans", and by extension, Jews. The seminar, which became known as the Mogilev Conference, ended with the 7th Company of Police Battalion 322 of the Order Police shooting 32 Jews at a village called Knjashizy before the assembled officers as an example of how to "screen" the population for partisans. As the war diary of the Battalion 322 read:


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Based on what they had learned during the Mogilev Conference, one Wehrmacht officer told his men "Where the partisan is, there is the Jew and where the Jew is, there is the partisan". The 707th Infantry Division of the Wehrmacht put this principle into practice during an "anti-partisan" sweep that saw the division shoot 10,431 people out of the 19,940 it had detained during the sweep while suffering only two dead and five wounded in the process.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: At Mirgorod, the 62nd Infantry Division executed "the entire Jewish population (168 people) for associating with partisans". At Novomoskovsk, the 444th Security Division reported that they had killed "305 bandits, 6 women with rifles ("Flintenweiber"), 39 prisoners-of-war and 136 Jews". In revenge for a partisan attack that had killed one German soldier, the "Ersatz-Brigade" 202 "as an act of retaliation shot 20 Jews from the villages of Bobosjanka and Gornostajewka and burnt down 5 Jew-houses". Even more extreme was the case in Serbia, where the majority of the Jews there were murdered by the Wehrmacht, not the SS.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: At Šabac in Dulag 183, a German transit camp for POWs in World War II Serbia, which opened in September 1941 (and closed in September 1944), Partisan POWs and members of their families were held. It is estimated that more than 5,000 persons were executed, not counting Jews and Roma people. "Central European Jewish refugees, mostly Austrians, were shot by troops of predominantly Austrian origin in retaliation for casualties inflicted by Serbian partisans on the German Army". The orders issued by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in September 1941 called for the German Army to shoot 100 Serbs for every German soldier killed by the Serb guerrillas and did not call for Jews to be singled out. Due to rampant anti-Semitism in the German officer corps, Serbian Jews were scapegoated and targeted for mass retaliatory shootings. German historian Jürgen Förster, a leading expert on the subject of Wehrmacht war crimes, argued the Wehrmacht played a key role in the Holocaust and it is wrong to ascribe the Shoah as solely the work of the SS while the Wehrmacht were a more or less passive and disapproving bystander.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The Wehrmacht also worked very closely with the "Einsatzgruppen" in murdering members of the Jewish population of the Soviet Union. On October 10, 1941, General Walther von Reichenau drafted an order to be read to the troops under his command stating that: "the soldier must achieve full understanding of the necessity for a harsh but just vengeance against Jewish subhumanity." Upon hearing of Reichenau's Severity Order, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the commander of Army Group South announced his "complete agreement" with it, and sent out a circular to all of the Army generals under his command urging them to send out their own versions of the Severity Order, which would impress upon the troops the need to exterminate Jews.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: General Erich von Manstein, in an order to his troops on 20 November 1941 stated: Jewry is the middleman between the enemy at our rear and the still fighting remnants of the Red Army and the Red leadership; more than in Europe, it [Jewry] occupies all key posts of the political leadership and administration, of trade and crafts and forms the nucleus for all disquiet and possible revolts. The Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated once and for all. On 6 July 1941 "Einsatzkommando" 4b of "Einsatzgruppe" C – which was operating in Tarnopol at the time – sent a report which noted "Armed forces surprisingly welcome hostility against the Jews". On 8 September 1941 "Einsatzgruppe" D reported that relations with the German Army were "excellent". Franz Walter Stahlecker of "Einsatzgruppe" A wrote in September 1941 that Army Group North had been exemplary in co-operating with his men in murdering Jews and that relations with the Fourth Panzer Army commanded by General Erich Hoepner were "very close, almost cordial".


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The "Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War" had been signed by Germany and most other countries in 1929, while the USSR and Japan did not sign until after the war (the final version of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949). This meant that Germany was legally obliged to treat all POWs according to it, while in turn, Germans captured by the Red Army could not expect to be treated in such a manner. The Soviet Union and Japan did not treat prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Convention. While the Wehrmacht's prisoner-of-war camps for inmates from the west generally satisfied the humanitarian requirement prescribed by international law, prisoners from Poland (which never capitulated) and the USSR were incarcerated under significantly worse conditions.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: By December 1941, more than 2.4 million Soviet Red Army troops had been taken prisoner. These men suffered from malnutrition and diseases such as typhus that resulted from the Wehrmacht's failure to provide sufficient food, shelter, proper sanitation and medical care. Prisoners were regularly subject to torture, beatings and humiliation. All Jews, commissars, "intellectuals" and Muslims serving in the Red Army were either executed by the Wehrmacht or handed over to the SS to be shot.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The Muslim POWs were shot because they were circumcised, and therefore might be Jewish; it was felt to be safer to simply shoot all circumcised POWs rather run the risk that a Jewish POW might escape execution by claiming to be a Muslim. Reflecting the close co-operation between the Wehrmacht and the SS was an "Einsatzgruppen" report, which read:In Borispol, following a demand by the Commandant of the local P/W camp, a platoon of "Sonderkommando" 4 shot 752 Jewish prisoners of war on 14 October and 356 on 16 October 1941 including several commissars and 78 wounded Jews handed over by the camp medical officer.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: According to a RHSA report of 5 December 1941, the Wehrmacht had, since 22 June, handed over to the "Einsatzgruppen" 16,000 Soviet POWs to be liquidated.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Between the launching of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941 and the following spring, 2.8 million of the 3.2 million prisoners taken died while in German hands. The German failure to attain their anticipated victory in the East led to significant shortages of labor for German war production and, beginning in 1942, prisoners of war in the eastern POW camps – primarily Soviets – were seen as a source of slave labor to keep Germany's wartime economy running.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: On 6 August 1941, the OKW declared that Soviet POWs capable of work were to receive 2,200 calories/day and those not capable of work 2,040 calories/day. On 21 October 1941, the OKW ordered a huge reduction in the food rations for Soviet POWs, with POWs incapable of work henceforth to receive only 1,490 calories/day. In a meeting of senior generals called at Orša on 13 November 1941, the Army's First quarter-master General Eduard Wagner stated "Non-working prisoners of war in the camps are to starve".


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: 5.7 million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner during the war, of whom at least 3.3 million (58 percent of the total) died in captivity.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: According to the "Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos", it was typical for camps devoted to armaments production to be run by the branch of the Wehrmacht that used the products. Many places used Luftwaffe guards in concentration camps. In 1944, many Wehrmacht soldiers were transferred to the "SS-Totenkopfverbände" to alleviate personnel shortages in concentration camps.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Newer research has exposed Wehrmacht war crimes in North Africa. This opposes the term "War without hate" which is used by some authors to describe the North African Campaign.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Giordana Terracina writes that: "On April 3, the Italians recaptured Benghazi and a few months later the Afrika Korps led by Rommel was sent to Libya and began the deportation of the Jews of Cyrenaica in the concentration camp of Giado and other smaller towns in Tripolitania. This measure was accompanied by shooting, also in Benghazi, of some Jews guilty of having welcomed the British troops, on their arrival, treating them as liberators."


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Jews from all around Cyrenaica and Benghazi were deported into Italy for forced labour. At the Giado concentration camp, a survivor by the name of Sion Burbea testifies that he witnessed Erwin Rommel inspecting their work at the camp.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Some historians directly connect Rommel with the war crimes of the Wehrmacht in North Africa. According to German historian Wolfgang Proske, Rommel forbade his soldiers from buying anything from the Jewish population of Tripoli, used Jewish slave labour and commanded Jews to clear out minefields by walking on them ahead of his forces. Proske also claims that Jews in Tripoli were later sent to Concentration Camps.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The Wehrmacht's persecution of Jews continued into 1942. According to the publication Jewish Communities of the World edited by Anthony Lerman, in 1942 during the German occupation, the Benghazi quarter that housed the Jewish population was plundered and 2000 Jews were deported across the desert, out of which circa a fifth of them had perished. Jews in Benghazi were also victims of a pogrom in 1942 The Moment Magazine reports: "on orders from the German military commander, the Axis forces, in 1942, plundered Jewish shops and deported 2,600 Benghazi Jews to Giado".


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Robert Satloff writes in his book Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands that as the German and Italian forces retreated across Libya towards Tunisia, the Jewish population became victims upon which they released their anger and frustration. According to Satloff, Afrika Korps soldiers plundered Jewish property all along the Libyan coast. This violence and persecution only came to an end with the arrival of General Montgomery in Tripoli on January 23, 1943. German historian Clemens Vollnhals writes that the use of Jews by Afrika Korps as forced labour is barely known, but it did happen alongside persecution of Jewish population (although on smaller scale than in Europe) and some of the labourers were worked to death.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The persecution of Jews by the Wehrmacht continued into Tunisia. According to several historians, allegations and stories that associate Rommel and the Afrika Korps with the harassing and plundering of Jewish gold and property in Tunisia are usually known under the name "Rommel's treasure" or "Rommel's gold". Other historians, however, state that Rommel had nothing to do with the treasure, and that "Rauff's treasure would be a more appropriate name.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: When the Wehrmacht entered Tunisia, they ordered the establishment of a Judenrat and Jews were subject to forced labour. 2,000 Jewish men were forcefully conscripted, and a few thousand more would be conscripted later on. This forced labour was used in extremely dangerous situations near targets of bombing raids, facing hunger and violence.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: German soldiers used to brand the bodies of captured partisan women – and other women as well – with the words "Whore for Hitler's troops" and rape them. Following their capture some German soldiers vividly bragged about committing rape and rape-homicide.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Susan Brownmiller argues that rape played a pivotal role in the Nazis' aim to conquer and destroy people they considered inferior, such as Jews, Russians, and Poles. An extensive list of rapes committed by German soldiers was compiled in the so-called "Molotov Note" in 1942. Brownmiller points out that Nazis used rape as a weapon of terror.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: It is estimated that over a million children were born to Russian women, fathered by German soldiers.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Author Ursula Schele, estimated in the Journal ""Zur Debatte um die Ausstellung Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944"" that one in ten women raped by German soldiers would have become pregnant, and therefore it is probable that up to ten million women in the Soviet Union could have been raped by the Wehrmacht.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Other sources estimate that rapes of Soviet women by the "Wehrmacht" range up to 10,000,000 incidents, with between 750,000 and 1,000,000 children being born as a result.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In Soviet Russia rapes were only a concern if they undermined military discipline. Since 1941, rape was theoretically punishable with the death sentence, although rapes were rarely prosecuted in practice and rapes by Germans of non-German women were not taken seriously, nor was it punishable by death, especially in the eastern European territories. In October 1940 the laws on rape were changed, making it a "petitioned crime" – that is a crime for which punishment had to be requested. Historian Christa Paul writes that this resulted in "a nearly complete absence of prosecution and punishment for rape". There were rape cases in the east where the perpetrators were sentenced if the rape were highly visible, damaging to the image of the German Army and the courts were willing to pass a condemning verdict against the accused.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: According to the historian Regina Mühlhäuser, the "Wehrmacht" also used sexual violence and undressing in numerous cases of interrogations. Mühlhäuser adds that the number of illegitimate children born in the occupied regions did not exceed the prewar time. She comes to the conclusion that rapes on the Eastern front were not singular cases but has to admit that the state of source material is very poor.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: There were rapes committed by soldiers of the "Wehrmacht" forces against Jewish women and girls during the Invasion of Poland. Rapes were also committed against Polish women and girls during mass executions carried out primarily by the "Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz", which were accompanied by "Wehrmacht" soldiers and on territory under the administration of the German military, the rapes were carried out before shooting the female captives.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Only one case of rape was prosecuted by a German court during the military campaign in Poland, the case of gang rape committed by three soldiers against women of the Jewish Kaufmann family in Busko-Zdrój; however, the German judge sentenced the guilty for "Rassenschande" – shame against the [German] race as defined by the racial policy of Nazi Germany – and not rape.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Rape, while officially forbidden, was allowed in practice by the German military in eastern and southeastern Europe, while northern and western countries were relatively spared. In Occupied Denmark, which initially agreed to collaborate with Nazi Germany, rapes were not widespread, and German officials promised to punish them. By contrast thousands of Soviet female nurses, doctors and field medics fell victim to rape when captured, and were often murdered afterwards.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In France, there were some rapes in 1940 immediately after the invasion and then very few cases until 1944, when the number of cases spiked. The German command initially worked to reduce the number of rapes committed, because rapes during World War I had harmed the reputation of the German army. In 1944 the rapes were increasingly tolerated by the German hierarchy and occurred alongside massacres and looting, typically during anti-partisan operations. A photograph of a woman being gang-raped was included in the "Hitler's Crimes" exhibit displayed in Paris in 1945.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Birgit Beck, in her work "Rape: The Military Trials of Sexual Crimes Committed by Soldiers in the Wehrmacht, 1939–1944", describes the leniency in punishing sex crimes by German authorities in the East, at the same time pointing out heavy punishments applied in the West. If a soldier who committed a rape was subsequently convicted by a court-martial, he would usually be sentenced to four years in prison The German penal code was also valid for soldiers in war. Until 1944 5,349 soldiers of the Wehrmacht on all fronts were sentenced because of indecency offence "Sittlichkeitsvergehen" or rape "Notzucht". Historian Mühlhäuser believed that sexual assault was not an exception but common, and that the actual number of rapes committed by German soldiers are without question much greater.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Under the German occupation, a widespread system of sexual slavery (forced prostitution) was instituted. The "Wehrmacht" also ran brothels where women were forced to work. The reason for establishing these brothels was the German officials' fear of venereal disease and onanism (masturbation). The "Oberfeldarzt der Wehrmacht" (Chief Field Doctor of the Wehrmacht) drew attention to "the danger of [the] spread of homosexualism".


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: On 3 May 1941, the Foreign Ministry of the Polish Government in Exile in London issued a document describing the mass raids carried out in Polish cities with the aim of capturing young women, who were later forced to work in brothels attended by German officers and soldiers.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In the Soviet Union women were kidnapped by German forces for prostitution; one report by the International Military Tribunal stated that "in the city of Smolensk the German Command opened a brothel for officers in one of the hotels into which hundreds of women and girls were driven; they were mercilessly dragged down the street by their arms and hair."


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The Nuremberg trials did not prosecute anyone for rape or other sexual violence; rape was defined as a crime against humanity, but prosecutors deemed that such crimes had "no nexus to war".


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Throughout the war Germany engaged in numerous experiments on human prisoners and POWs. The "Wehrmacht" had full knowledge of those experiments, and performed some of its own. It provided assistance regarding:


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In many cases the test subjects, even if they survived, were murdered afterwards to study any changes within their bodies that happened during the experiment.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: During the war members of the "Wehrmacht" attempted to influence Hitler's decision to study biological warfare only regarding defense. The head of the Science Division of the "Wehrmacht", Erich Schumann, urged the Führer that ""America must be attacked simultaneously with various human and animal epidemic pathogens, as well as plant pests."" Laboratory tests were prepared for the use of plague, anthrax, cholera and typhoid. The possibility of using foot and mouth disease against Britain was also studied.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: High-ranking "Wehrmacht" officers stood trial for war crimes. The "Oberkommando der Wehrmacht" (OKW) commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and chief of operations staff Alfred Jodl were both indicted and tried for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg through 1945–1946. They were convicted of all charges, sentenced to death and executed by hanging, although Jodl was acquitted post-mortem seven years later. While the tribunal declared that the "Gestapo", "SD" and "SS" (including the "Waffen-SS") were inherently criminal organizations, the court did not reach the same conclusion with the "Wehrmacht" General Staff and High Command.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The Nuremberg Trials at the end of World War II initially considered whether the "Wehrmacht" high command structure should be tried. However, the "Oberkommando der Wehrmacht" (OKW – High Command of the Armed Forces) was judged not to be a criminal organization under the legal grounds that because of very poor co-ordination between the German Army, Navy and Air Force high commands, which operated as more or less separate entities during the war, the OKW did not constitute an "organization" as defined by Article 9 of the constitution of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) which conducted the Nuremberg trials. This matter of legal definition has been misconstrued by German World War II veterans and others to mean that the IMT ruled that the OKW was not a "criminal organization" because the Wehrmacht committed no war crimes.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The prosecution of war crimes lost momentum during the 1950s as the Cold War intensified; both German states needed to establish armed forces and could not do so without trained officers and soldiers that had served in the "Wehrmacht". German historiography in the 1950s viewed war crimes by German soldiers as exceptional rather than ordinary; soldiers were seen as victims of the Nazi regime. Traces of this attitude can still be seen in some German works today, which minimize the number of soldiers who took part in Nazi crimes. This was especially the case as the German public in the immediate post-war period were more interested in seeing themselves rather than others as victims. Thus the subject of Red Army atrocities against German civilians in 1944–45 received vastly more popular and historical interest in the 1950s than did the subject of Wehrmacht atrocities against Soviet civilians in 1941–44.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Beyond that, Operation Barbarossa had been portrayed in Germany as a "preventive war" forced on Germany by Soviet attack alleged to be planned for July 1941. This claim was widely believed in the "Reich" during the war, and indeed was so popular that as late as the 1950s some West German historians were still arguing Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war". As a result of this view of Operation Barbarossa, for many Germans, violence inflicted by the Wehrmacht on Soviet civilians and POWs was seen as something that the Soviets had brought down on themselves, hence the absence of any guilt on the part of many Germans. Cold War priorities and taboos about revisiting the most unpleasant aspects of World War II meant that the "Wehrmacht"s role in war crimes was not seriously re-examined until the early 1980s.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In their memoirs, German Army generals claimed that the war had been a "clean war" on their part with the Army fighting because of the noble Prussian-German traditions, patriotism and a deep sense of honour and duty and that National Socialism had virtually no influence on the Army. In this version, almost all German war crimes were the work of the SS and any "excesses" committed by the Army were only the product of a long and bitter war and were no different from Allied war crimes. Very typical were the claims of one Infantry commander, who stated in his memoirs that all of the battles fought by his men were "always fairly conducted, though tough and bitter." Such claims were widely believed not only in Germany but abroad, with the British military historian Captain Basil Liddell Hart writing that "the German Army in the field on the whole observed the rules of war better than in 1914–18".


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: On 11 December 1979, the West German television show "Report" aired a documentary entitled "Crimes of the Wehrmacht in World War Two". The public's reaction was almost overwhelmingly negative, with World War II veterans leading a campaign to have the producer of "Report" fired for the "defamation" of German soldiers. This despite the fact – as the German historian Jürgen Förster was to write in 1989 – that the producers of the documentary had gone out of their way to be fair and unbiased.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In 1986, the German historian Hans Mommsen wrote about the role of the Wehrmacht under National Socialism:The leadership of the Wehrmacht rather willingly made themselves into accomplices in the policy of extermination. It did this by generating the "criminal orders" and implementing them. By no means did they merely passively support the implementation of their concept, although there was a certain reluctance for reasons of military discipline and a few isolated protests. To construct a "causal nexus" over all this amounts in fact to steering away from the decisive responsibility of the military leadership and the bureaucratic elites.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: British historian Ian Kershaw wrote that the genocide and extreme brutality used by the Nazis was their way of ensuring the "Lebensraum" ("living space") for the people who met the strict requirements of being part of Hitler's Aryan "Herrenvolk" ("Aryan master race") and the elimination of the Slavic people:


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In 1989, the British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that right from the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht fought a genocidal war of "extreme brutality and barbarism". Evans noted that the Wehrmacht officers regarded the Russians as "sub-human", were from the time of the invasion of Poland in 1939 telling their troops that war was caused by "Jewish vermin", and explained to the troops that the war against the Soviet Union was a war to wipe out what were variously called "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans", the "Mongol hordes", the "Asiatic flood" and the "red beast".


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Such views helped to explain why 3,300,000 of the 5,700,000 Soviet POWs taken by the Germans died in captivity. In 1992, Omer Bartov noted that the three leaders of the "new revisionism" in German history that sparked the "Historikerstreit" of the late 1980s were all in some ways seeking to promote the image of the Wehrmacht as a force for the good, and seeking to portray the Wehrmacht as a victim of the Allies rather the victimizer of the peoples of Europe, writing of "the bizarre inversion of the Wehrmacht's roles proposed by all three exponents of the new revisionism, whereby overtly or by implication the Army is transformed from culprit to saviour, from an object of hatred and fear to one of empathy and pity, from victimizer to victim". Specifically, Bartov noted that:


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Bartov wrote that all three historians had in varying ways sought to justify and excuse Wehrmacht war crimes by depicting the Wehrmacht as engaging in a heroic battle for Western civilization, often using the same language as the Nazis such as referring to the Red Army as the "Asiatic hordes". Bartov ended that these sorts of arguments reflected a broader unwillingness of the part of some Germans to admit to what their Army did during the war. In 1998, the historian Jürgen Förster wrote that for too long most people have accepted at face value the self-serving claims made by generals like Erich von Manstein and Siegfried Westphal whose memoirs promoted the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, the notion the Wehrmacht had been a highly professional, apolitical force and its generals were victims of Adolf Hitler rather than his followers.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In reality, the Wehrmacht played a key role in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and other war crimes. The claims promoted after the war that the Wehrmacht had been an "untarnished shield" with the Army somehow standing apart from the regime it served so loyally was a myth that no serious historian had taken seriously since the 1980s.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In 2019 the historian David W. Wildermuth noted that while the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht" has been largely dispelled among historians, it retains a following with the general public. He suggested that a reason for this is that few case studies have been published which identify specific units which were involved in war crimes.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: In his 2004 essay "Celluloid Soldiers" about post-war German films, the Israeli historian Omer Bartov wrote that German films of the 1950s showed the average German soldier as a heroic victim: noble, tough, brave, honourable and patriotic, while fighting hard in a senseless war for a regime that he did not care for. The "08/15" film trilogy of 1954–55 concerns a sensitive young German soldier named Asch (Joachim Fuchsberger). No mention is ever made of the genocidal aspects of Germany's war in the East with instead the German soldiers being shown as the victims of a war that they can not fathom the reasons for. Bartov commented that given the intense indoctrination in the Wehrmacht about how the war against the Soviet Union was a war to destroy "Judeo-Bolshevism" that Asch would most definitely have known what they were fighting for.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The war on the Eastern Front was portrayed in a manner that suggested that all who fought in the war were equally victims, but since the focus in the "08/15" films is on the unit commanded by Asch inevitably the impression is given that it was German soldiers who were the primary victims of the war. The term 08/15 refers to a type of German machine gun used in World War I that was manufactured in such quantities that "08/15" () became German Army slang for anything was standard issue, which implied that Asch and the soldiers under his command were Everyman characters of the war on the Eastern Front. In "Der Arzt von Stalingrad" ("The Doctor from Stalingrad") of 1958, dealing with German POWs in the Soviet Union, the Germans are portrayed as more civilized, humane and intelligent than the Soviets, who are shown for the most part as Mongol savages who brutalized the German prisoners.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Bartov wrote that the portrayal of the Soviet guards as mostly Asian shows disturbing affinities to war-time Nazi propaganda, where the Red Army was often described as "the Asiatic horde". A recurring theme in "Der Arzt von Stalingrad" was that the German soldiers were being punished for crimes that they had not committed. In the 1959 film ("Dogs, do you want to live forever?"), which deals with the Battle of Stalingrad, the focus is on celebrating the heroism of the German soldiers in that battle, who are shown as valiantly holding out against overwhelming odds with no mention at all of what those soldiers were fighting for, namely National Socialist ideology or the Holocaust. Bartov noted that the clear impression that these films give is that the average German soldier who fought on the Eastern Front was a hero worthy of the highest admiration.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: This period also saw a number of films that depicted the military resistance to Hitler. In "Des Teufels General" ("The Devil's General") of 1954, Bartov commented that in this film, the German officer corps is shown as a group of fundamentally noble and honourable men who happened to be serving an evil regime made up of a small gang of gangsterish misfits totally unrepresentative of German society, which served to exculpate both the officer corps and by extension German society.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Bartov also wrote that German film-makers liked to show the heroic last stand of the 6th Army at Stalingrad, but none has so far showed the 6th Army's massive co-operation with the "Einsatzgruppen" in murdering Soviet Jews in 1941 during its march across the Ukraine. Likewise, Bartov commented that German films tended to dwell on the suffering of the 6th Army during the Battle of Stalingrad and its aftermath without reflecting on the fact that it was the Germans who invaded the Soviet Union and that the Russians were fighting to defend their country.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Only with "Jenseits des Krieges" (released in the US as "East of War") in 1996, a documentary directed by Ruth Beckermann dealing with the public's reaction to the exhibition "War of Extermination" in Vienna in 1995, did a German film admit to "Wehrmacht" war crimes being commonplace instead of an exception to the rule. Some veterans in "Jenseits des Krieges" denied that the German Army committed any war crimes at all while others express relief at long last that the truth has been told. One critic wrote of the veterans in "Jenseits des Krieges" that "Some are sorry for their brutality, while others rationalize such acts as shooting POWs, raping women and butchering Jewish people as part of what soldiers were expected to do".


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The "Wehrmachtsausstellung" () was the name for two exhibitions focusing on war crimes of the Wehrmacht committed on the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1944. They ran from 1995 to 1999 in the original form, and 2001 to 2004 in a revised form. The exhibitions were arranged by Hannes Heer and travelled to over 33 German and Austrian cities. They were instrumental in breaking down the Myth of the clean Wehrmacht in Germany.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The "Wehrmachtsausstellung" only covered the German presence in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945 and excluded the German occupation of Poland after September 1939. The Polish exhibition ""Größte Härte ... Verbrechen der Wehrmacht in Polen September/Oktober 1939"", a cooperative effort of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance and the German Historical Institute Warsaw was presented on 1 September 2004, in Poland. A German version was presented in 2005. It was scheduled to be shown in Nuremberg at the Documentation Center of the Nazi Party Rallying Grounds from 1 September 2007 to early 2008.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The attitude of German soldiers towards atrocities committed on Jews and Poles in World War II was also studied using photographs and correspondence left after the war. Photographs serve as a valuable source of knowledge; taking them and making albums about the persecution of Jews was a popular custom among German soldiers. These pictures are not the official propaganda of the German state but represent personal experience. Their overall attitude is antisemitic.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: German soldiers as well as police members took pictures of Jewish executions, deportations, humiliation and the abuse to which they were also subjected. According to researchers, pictures indicate the consent of the photographers to the abuses and murders committed. "This consent is the result of several factors, including the anti-Semitic ideology and prolonged, intensive indoctrination". Archival evidence as to the reaction to policies of racial extermination can also be traced in various letters that survived the war. Many of these archived letters from "Wehrmacht" soldiers often reflect the intensive indoctrination soldiers underwent. The following quote is from a letter written by a noncommissioned officer in the Wehrmacht who wrote home from the Russian front in 1941:


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel state that this type of writing and opinion was very common in correspondence left by German soldiers, especially on the Eastern Front.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Other samples of German soldiers' letters were sent home and copied during the war by a special Polish Home Army cell that infiltrated the German postal system. These letters have been analyzed by historians and the picture they paint is similar to views expressed by Levin and Uziel. Many soldiers wrote openly about the extermination of Jews and were proud of it. Support for ""untermensch"" and "master race" concepts were also part of the attitude expressed by German soldiers. Presented examples reflecting this trend include samples such as:


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: Much more evidence of such trends and thoughts among "Wehrmacht" soldiers exists and is subject to research by historians.


title: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

text: The historians responsible for the exhibition assume that the anti-Semitic climate and propaganda in Nazi Germany had an immense impact on the entire population and emphasize the importance of the indoctrination.


title: Micelle

text: A micelle () or micella () (plural micelles or micellae, respectively) is an aggregate (or supramolecular assembly) of surfactant amphipathic lipid molecules dispersed in a liquid, forming a colloidal suspension (also known as associated colloidal system). A typical micelle in water forms an aggregate with the hydrophilic "head" regions in contact with surrounding solvent, sequestering the hydrophobic single-tail regions in the micelle centre.


title: Micelle

text: This phase is caused by the packing behavior of single-tail lipids in a bilayer. The difficulty filling all the volume of the interior of a bilayer, while accommodating the area per head group forced on the molecule by the hydration of the lipid head group, leads to the formation of the micelle. This type of micelle is known as a normal-phase micelle (oil-in-water micelle). Inverse micelles have the head groups at the centre with the tails extending out (water-in-oil micelle).


title: Micelle

text: Micelles are approximately spherical in shape. Other phases, including shapes such as ellipsoids, cylinders, and bilayers, are also possible. The shape and size of a micelle are a function of the molecular geometry of its surfactant molecules and solution conditions such as surfactant concentration, temperature, pH, and ionic strength. The process of forming micelles is known as micellisation and forms part of the phase behaviour of many lipids according to their polymorphism.


title: Micelle

text: The ability of a soapy solution to act as a detergent has been recognized for centuries. However, it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that the constitution of such solutions was scientifically studied. Pioneering work in this area was carried out by James William McBain at the University of Bristol. As early as 1913, he postulated the existence of "colloidal ions" to explain the good electrolytic conductivity of sodium palmitate solutions. These highly mobile, spontaneously formed clusters came to be called micelles, a term borrowed from biology and popularized by G.S. Hartley in his classic book "Paraffin Chain Salts: A Study in Micelle Formation". The term "micelle" was coined in nineteenth century scientific literature as the "elle" diminutive of the Latin word "mica" (particle), conveying a new word for "tiny particle".


title: Micelle

text: Individual surfactant molecules that are in the system but are not part of a micelle are called "monomers". Micelles represent a molecular assembly, in which the individual components are thermodynamically in equilibrium with monomers of the same species in the surrounding medium. In water, the hydrophilic "heads" of surfactant molecules are always in contact with the solvent, regardless of whether the surfactants exist as monomers or as part of a micelle. However, the lipophilic "tails" of surfactant molecules have less contact with water when they are part of a micelle—this being the basis for the energetic drive for micelle formation. In a micelle, the hydrophobic tails of several surfactant molecules assemble into an oil-like core, the most stable form of which having no contact with water. By contrast, surfactant monomers are surrounded by water molecules that create a "cage" or solvation shell connected by hydrogen bonds. This water cage is similar to a clathrate and has an ice-like crystal structure and can be characterized according to the hydrophobic effect. The extent of lipid solubility is determined by the unfavorable entropy contribution due to the ordering of the water structure according to the hydrophobic effect.


title: Micelle

text: Micelles composed of ionic surfactants have an electrostatic attraction to the ions that surround them in solution, the latter known as counterions. Although the closest counterions partially mask a charged micelle (by up to 92%), the effects of micelle charge affect the structure of the surrounding solvent at appreciable distances from the micelle. Ionic micelles influence many properties of the mixture, including its electrical conductivity. Adding salts to a colloid containing micelles can decrease the strength of electrostatic interactions and lead to the formation of larger ionic micelles. This is more accurately seen from the point of view of an effective charge in hydration of the system.


title: Micelle

text: Micelles form only when the concentration of surfactant is greater than the critical micelle concentration (CMC), and the temperature of the system is greater than the critical micelle temperature, or Krafft temperature. The formation of micelles can be understood using thermodynamics: Micelles can form spontaneously because of a balance between entropy and enthalpy. In water, the hydrophobic effect is the driving force for micelle formation, despite the fact that assembling surfactant molecules is unfavorable in terms of both enthalpy and entropy of the system. At very low concentrations of the surfactant, only monomers are present in solution. As the concentration of the surfactant is increased, a point is reached at which the unfavorable entropy contribution, from clustering the hydrophobic tails of the molecules, is overcome by a gain in entropy due to release of the solvation shells around the surfactant tails. At this point, the lipid tails of a part of the surfactants must be segregated from the water. Hence, they start to form micelles. In broad terms, above the CMC, the loss of entropy due to assembly of the surfactant molecules is less than the gain in entropy by setting free the water molecules that were "trapped" in the solvation shells of the surfactant monomers. Also important are enthalpic considerations, such as the electrostatic interactions that occur between the charged parts of surfactants.


title: Micelle

text: The micelle packing parameter equation is utilized to help "predict molecular self-assembly in surfactant solutions":


title: Micelle

text: where formula_2 is the surfactant tail volume, formula_3 is the tail length, and formula_4 is the equilibrium area per molecule at the aggregate surface.


title: Micelle

text: The concept of micelles was introduced to describe the core-corona aggregates of small surfactant molecules, however it has also extended to describe aggregates of amphiphilic block copolymers in selective solvents. It is important to know the difference between these two systems. The major difference between these two types of aggregates is in the size of their building blocks. Surfactant molecules have a molecular weight which is generally of a few hundreds of grams per mole while block copolymers are generally one or two orders of magnitude larger. Moreover, thanks to the larger hydrophilic and hydrophobic parts, block copolymers can have a much more pronounced amphiphilic nature when compared to surfactant molecules.


title: Micelle

text: Because of these differences in the building blocks, some block copolymer micelles behave like surfactant ones, while others don't. It is necessary therefore to make a distinction between the two situations. The former ones will belong to the "dynamic micelles" while the latter will be called "kinetically frozen micelles."


title: Micelle

text: Certain amphiphilic block copolymer micelles display a similar behavior as surfactant micelles. These are generally called dynamic micelles and are characterized by the same relaxation processes assigned to surfactant exchange and micelle scission/recombination. Although the relaxation processes are the same between the two types of micelles, the kinetics of unimer exchange are very different. While in surfactant systems the unimers leave and join the micelles through a diffusion-controlled process, for copolymers the entry rate constant is slower than a diffusion controlled process. The rate of this process was found to be a decreasing power-law of the degree of polymerization of the hydrophobic block to the power 2/3. This difference is due to the coiling of the hydrophobic block of a copolymer exiting the core of a micelle.


title: Micelle

text: Block copolymers which form dynamic micelles are some of the tri-block Poloxamers under the right conditions.


title: Micelle

text: When block copolymer micelles don't display the characteristic relaxation processes of surfactant micelles, these are called "kinetically frozen micelles". These can be achieved in two ways: when the unimers forming the micelles are not soluble in the solvent of the micelle solution, or if the core forming blocks are glassy at the temperature in which the micelles are found. Kinetically frozen micelles are formed when either of these conditions is met. A special example in which both of these conditions are valid is that of polystyrene-b-poly(ethylene oxide). This block copolymer is characterized by the high hydrophobicity of the core forming block, PS, which causes the unimers to be insoluble in water. Moreover, PS has a high glass transition temperature which is, depending on the molecular weight, higher than room temperature. Thanks to these two characteristics, a water solution of PS-PEO micelles of sufficiently high molecular weight can be considered kinetically frozen. This means that none of the relaxation processes, which would drive the micelle solution towards thermodynamic equilibrium, are possible. Pioneering work on these micelles was done by Adi Eisenberg. It was also shown how the lack of relaxation processes allowed great freedom in the possible morphologies formed. Moreover, the stability against dilution and vast range of morphologies of kinetically frozen micelles make them particularly interesting, for example, for the development of long circulating drug delivery nanoparticles.


title: Micelle

text: In a non-polar solvent, it is the exposure of the hydrophilic head groups to the surrounding solvent that is energetically unfavourable, giving rise to a water-in-oil system. In this case, the hydrophilic groups are sequestered in the micelle core and the hydrophobic groups extend away from the center. These inverse micelles are proportionally less likely to form on increasing headgroup charge, since hydrophilic sequestration would create highly unfavorable electrostatic interactions.


title: Micelle

text: It is well established that for many surfactant/solvent systems a small fraction of the inverse micelles spontaneously acquire a net charge of +q or -q. This charging takes place through a disproportionation/comproportionation mechanism rather than a dissociation/association mechanism and the equilibrium constant for this reaction is on the order of 10 to 10, which means about every 1 in 100 to 1 in 100 000 micelles will be charged.


title: Micelle

text: Supermicelle is a hierarchical micelle structure (supramolecular assembly) where individual components are also micelles. Supermicelles are formed via bottom-up chemical approaches, such as self-assembly of long cylindrical micelles into radial cross-, star- or dandelion-like patterns in a specially selected solvent; solid nanoparticles may be added to the solution to act as nucleation centers and form the central core of the supermicelle. The stems of the primary cylindrical micelles are composed of various block copolymers connected by strong covalent bonds; within the supermicelle structure they are loosely held together by hydrogen bonds, electrostatic or solvophobic interactions.


title: Micelle

text: When surfactants are present above the critical micelle concentration (CMC), they can act as emulsifiers that will allow a compound that is normally insoluble (in the solvent being used) to dissolve. This occurs because the insoluble species can be incorporated into the micelle core, which is itself solubilized in the bulk solvent by virtue of the head groups' favorable interactions with solvent species. The most common example of this phenomenon is detergents, which clean poorly soluble lipophilic material (such as oils and waxes) that cannot be removed by water alone. Detergents clean also by lowering the surface tension of water, making it easier to remove material from a surface. The emulsifying property of surfactants is also the basis for emulsion polymerization.