War crimes suggestion lingers over NZ troops

JAN CORBETT investigates the facts behind a German suggestion that New Zealand troops committed atrocities.

It has been a long time since New Zealanders thought of the Germans as the enemy and demonised them the way we now do Al Qaeda and the Taleban.

But then came this week's news that German Second World War historians are accusing New Zealand soldiers of war crimes in Africa.

The claim surfaced quietly in a review of volume six of the weighty academic tomes that are Germany's semi-official history of the Second World War - a war they started but lost.

Max Hastings, the reviewer and military expert and former editor of British broadsheet the Daily Telegraph, commented on the authors' "almost bloodless absence of national sentiment". Except when they wrote about "an episode in North Africa in June 1942 in which New Zealanders overran a German position and medical station, bayoneting to death every one of its 80 occupants, including doctors and wounded."

Even in war there are rules. And not killing the wounded and their doctors is one of them.

Hastings concluded that the German historians were delicately implying "that while Germany's wartime crimes were vast, Germany's enemies were not without moral blemish."

As Hastings noted, it is unlikely the average reader will ever see this German account of this incident at Minqar Qaim in Egypt in the sixth volume of Germany and the Second World War, published by Oxford as an academic title, at an academic price.

But in this country, the incident at Minqar Qaim is hardly a secret, and no one thinks it is worth making a fuss about.

John McLeod, now a colonel at Defence Headquarters in Wellington, wrote about it in his 1986 book Myth and Reality - the New Zealand Soldier in World War II.

McLeod described it "as an example of the willingness of New Zealanders to kill."

It was deep in the night of June 27, 1942. At Minqar Qaim, a place too insignificant to appear in any atlas, the 2(NZ) Division were in danger of being surrounded by Rommel's Army and either killed or captured. Things had been going particularly well for the Desert Fox at the time.

The great General Freyberg had been wounded, leaving Brigadier L.M. Inglis in charge. Inglis decided to break through the enemy lines that night, taking the Germans who were asleep in trucks or tending their wounded in the trenches, by surprise. The 19th battalion led the attack from the centre, the Maori battalion from the centre and the 20th battalion, including the legendary double Victoria Cross winner Charles Upham, were on the left.

McLeod describes how the German defensive laager soon became a blazing inferno, grenades being thrown into trucks with sleepy, dazed soldiers still inside and Germans being shot and bayoneted before they could climb from their trenches. The second and succeeding waves of New Zealand soldiers shot at bodies, just to make sure. Bayonets were stuck in everybody, dead or alive and it was hard to distinguish between friend and foe, according to accounts told to McLeod by the men who were there.

It turned out an advanced dressing station had been overrun. But as McLeod points out, dressing stations were in the trenches, they were not like Army hospitals clearly marked with red crosses.

He writes, "It was of little consequence whether the enemy were resisting, surrendering or fleeing. One member of 19 Battalion saw two Germans shot while attempting to surrender. Another saw wounded Germans picked up and tossed into burning trucks."

The gap made, the troops arrived at the point where trucks were waiting to pick them up, excited, exhilarated and still keen for the fight. "One eyewitness reported that the Maori, 'after testing blood, were eager to be up and at them ... Even telephone orderlies went out with the bayonet. Their officers tried to call them back'."

In their Afrika Korps War Diary the Germans recorded that their "111/104 rifle regiment which is being attacked by the New Zealanders suffers particularly heavy losses. During these actions, violation of International Law, such as slaughter of wounded, etc, occur."

The Germans were aggrieved enough at the time to lecture the New Zealand prisoners they took on their "disgraceful behaviour".

Stripped of personal belongings, they were made to stand in the hot Egyptian sun for several hours under threat of being shot. Among them was David Thompson, who went on to be a Minister of Defence in National governments of the 1970s.

McLeod records the Germans said "that the New Zealanders no longer fight like 'gentlemen' but fill themselves up with cognac and fight like Bolsheviks".

But McLeod writes in his book that "No criticism should be levelled at the New Zealanders for taking no prisoners and for killing or bayoneting anyone who obstructed their path. One soldier thought it was 'a blot on our moral code of war' but others agreed that there had 'to be a sense of reality about observing the rules of warfare in some situations'."

Joel Hayward is a senior lecturer in defence studies at Massey University and knows Horst Boog, one of the four German historians involved in producing volume six.

Hayward says he read it in the German form on its release 10 years ago. The incident at Minqar Qaim did not strike him as worthy of much consideration and says "I wouldn't like to see this blown out of proportion".

He agrees it was an atrocity. He says it was a war crime. "But it was the sort of thing that happens in the heat of battle." He discussed it with Boog who said this, and other atrocities committed by other allied forces, were included simply to make the point, as Hastings suggests, that the Germans were not the only criminals in the war. He says the Germans do not shrink from acknowledging that the calculated and systematic extermination of Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals was far worse than sporadic and spontaneous brutality under fire.

Boog, now in this 70s, worked as a translator at the Nuremburg trials. Had Germany won the war, says Hayward, it would have been the Allies in the dock. Prosecuting war crimes is the preserve of the victor.

Nevertheless, should New Zealand apologise?

"I don't think so," says Hayward. "Who would apologise? Would it be government to government? Would it be the grandchildren of the men who committed it? Is New Zealand going to be the only country to say sorry to Germany?"