Interview w/ German WW2 Veteran Julius A Haber 20th Panzer Division Panzergrenadier-Regiment 59

Interview with Julius A. Haber, member of 20th Panzer Division, Panzergrenadier-Regiment 59, Germany, 1999.

Julius:
"Hitler saved Germany, and he may have saved all of Europe from Bolshevism.....

After I was captured, I was forced, along with civilians, to watch the movies of the camps and what the SS did. I did not believe it, as I lived through it and saw with my own eyes what happened. The Allies made it impossible to make a life after the war if you disagreed with them. My comrades and I went along with the shame and guilt; there was no point in challenging their claims. However, because we were silent and did not speak I feel like we missed a huge opportunity to tell our side, which our silence only made us look guilty as charged. We just wanted to get on with life and love our families, whom we missed dearly. ..... I can address what I personally saw, and that was the conduct of the war by the German Wehrmacht. We had very strict orders to treat every civilian with compassion and respect. There was nowhere in the Wehrmacht's orders to harass or detain anyone, unless they were suspected of partisan activity or harassing military personnel. I never had to deal with this; everywhere Panzergrenadier-Regiment 59 went, we were treated well by the civilians.

In Russia, the people who stayed behind welcomed us as friends and liberators. We stopped outside of Minsk and our engineers helped rebuild a church that the Soviets had turned into a barn. The people thanked us with a huge feast including vodka and dancing. These stories that the Russians started telling at war's end, and still cling to today, make no sense. Everywhere I went the Russian population was left alone by us and welcomed us anytime. "