* 31 October 1905 –
Stralsund, Pomerania
† 16 March 1994 –
Bad Nauheim, Hessen
Wolf Ewert was the son of a Prussian officer; starting at age 11 he attended a military boarding school. He experienced the German defeat in the First World War and the following unrest as traumatic. In 1924, aged nearly 19, he joined the Reichswehr, serving in an infantry regiment in Northern Germany. He became an officer in 1929.
He participated in the final days of the invasion of France. The first time he led a battalion was during the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
His initial contact with partisan warfare was likewise in the east – Ewert was a witness to the Wehrmacht’s brutal retaliation measures in Charkov in 1941. After being wounded in close combat and subsequent recuperation, he took over Grenadier Regiment 274 of the 94th Infantry Division, deployed in Italy.
After heavy fighting, in May 1944 the regiment withdrew to Lake Trasimeno and Arezzo. In mid-July 1944, mass shootings took place in Ewert’s sector – in San Polo, San Severo, and the Badicroce farmstead near Arezzo. In 1967, the Gießen prosecutors opened an investigation of Ewert and other members of his regiment on account of the massacre at San Polo. The proceedings were terminated in 1972.
Ewert kept a diary covering the entire period of the war.
Investigation of the Gießen prosecutor’s office 1967; terminated 1972
Training and experiences of war
Training
Wolf Ewert was born in 1905 in Stralsund (Pomerania), into an old Junker-family. His father was a Prussian officer; his mother came from old Swedish lineage and was the daughter of a district physician. Ewert attended the school in Offenburg, Baden, since his father had been transferred there in 1913. In 1914, he joined the ‘Wandervogel’ youth movement, highly popular in the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1916 at the age of 11, in line with his wishes he joined the cadet corps in Naumburg (Saale), as he recounted later in his memoirs. In 1919, his family returned to Stralsund; and in March 1921 his father died.
For Ewert, his father’s return from the First World War and disappointment at the German defeat was a traumatic experience, as was the upheaval in the country’s first months of peace. This forms a context for his decision to embark on an officer’s career like his father. In 1924, he joined the Reichswehr, serving in an infantry regiment in Northern Germany. In 1929, he was promoted to lieutenant. Following his receipt of the officer’s commission, he became engaged to the daughter of a Saxon general, the marriage taking place in 1932. The couple had three daughters and a son. Ewert’s military career proceeded smoothly – at the end of the 1930s he was company chief in the Berlin Guard Regiment, and then in the ‘Großdeutschland’ Infantry Regiment, which saw to ceremonial tasks in the capital.
On the Eastern Front
Despite repeated applications for transfer to a fighting unit, Ewert only participated marginally in the Wehrmacht’s first campaigns. His regiment only moved to the front at the end of military action in France; shortly afterwards it was transferred to Poland for occupation duty. Ewert experienced his first fighting deployment on 22 June 1941 when the invasion of the Soviet Union began, as commander of a battalion in Grenadier Regiment 196 of the 98th Infantry Division.
During his time on the Eastern Front, Ewert experienced partisan warfare on several occasions. In Charkov in Nov. 1941, he experienced the explosion of some time-delay bombs set up by the Red Army in the city’s main buildings before its withdrawal. Many officers and ordinary soldiers in his division were killed in this way, among them the division’s commander, General Georg Braun. In retaliation, the troops seized 1,200 civilians, including Jews and Communist Party members, hanged 50 of these persons in the city centre, gunned down another 100, and deported the rest to various Concentration camps and killing centres. Ewert was aware of these events. He wrote about them in his diary, inserting photos of the hanged persons. He was deployed on the Eastern Front until late 1943, assuming leadership of the regiment and being promoted to first lieutenant. In Nov. 1943, he was wounded in close combat during a counter-attack north of Kiev.
Participation in mass killings
Transfer to Italy
After his recuperation, Ewert was transferred to the Italian Front. On 6 Feb. 1944, he took over command of Grenadier Regiment 274 of the 94th Infantry Division, which was deployed on the Garigliano Front south of Cassino. After the regiment became caught up in heavy fighting against North African troops of the French Expeditionary Corps in May 1944, Ewert withdrew with his remaining troops through Latium and Umbria to the heights of Perugia and Lake Trasimeno. His heavily damaged regiment was placed under the command of the 305th Infantry Division, led by General Friedrich-Wilhelm Hauck. Intense fighting broke out in this sector of the front as well. Because he had blocked an Allied effort to break through in the vicinity of Perugia, Ewert was awarded the Knight’s Cross. In early July 1944, the regiment withdrew north of Perugia through the Tuscan and Umbrian hills and reached the area around Arezzo.
‘Palazzo del Pero. Persistent incidents with bandits, murder of German soldiers causes me to take severe action against captured partisans.’
In withdrawing from Perugia, Oberst Ewert encountered Italian partisans for the first time. As he described things later in his diary, they attacked him on 30 June while he reconnoitred for a new emplacement for his regiment. Although dramatically described, the encounter passed without bloodshed. His auto was damaged and his cap hit by a bullet; but he was uninjured. This event appears to have given impetus to the radicalization that reached its highpoint in the massacre of captured partisans and male civilians in San Polo near Arezzo on 14 July 1944. The files collected by the La Spezia military prosecutor show Ewert’s central role in the chain of command. He ordered the mistreatment of both the captured partisans and the civilians, for the sake of forcing statements from them. Ewert had been ‘in an extremely excitable mood’ and responded to the prisoners’ arrival correspondingly: ‘Away with the pigs, kill them all.’ A number of witnesses indicated that the order to gun these persons down came from him as well. After consulting with General Hauck, the massacre was authorized and carried out.
In mid-July 1944, civilians were also killed in other places in the deployment-area of Ewert’s regiment near Arezzo, for example in a farmstead in Badicroce and in San Severo. At the time of the massacre, Ewert wrote as follows in his diary: ‘very disruptive partisan actions, which were however successfully combatted.’
On the Western Front
Wolf Ewert left Italy in Sept. 1944 with the rank of Oberst. In the war’s last phase, he was deployed on the Western Front, where he took command of the 716th Infantry Division in Dec. 1944. In Jan. 1945, he was named Kommandeur of the 338th Infantry Division. Promoted to Generalmajor on 1 March 1945, he was taken prisoner by US troops in mid-April.
In the first months following the German capitulation, Ewert was interned in a POW camp near Marburg. In 1946, he was active in the US army’s Historical Division, writing reports on his division’s operations in France and on the Rhine, as well as on the tactics of smaller Red Army units. In the summer of 1947, he was released from the camp, then moving with his family to Bad Nauheim in northern Hesse. In his vita, Ewert would describe himself as employed as a worker until 1950. Afterwards, he indicated, he was active for some years in an ‘American agency’ (no further details furnished), and then, from 1956 until retirement in 1966, as the ad director for a car showroom.
In the postwar period, Ewert was active in the milieu of right-wing political parties. Between 1952 and 1956, he was chairman of the National Party of Germany, a splinter grouping in northern Hesse (not to be confused with the better-known, extreme right-wing National Democratic Party of Germany – the NPD – founded in 1964). On the basis of a neutralist and pacifist position, this party brought together a small, mainly Protestant political circle with conservative, nationalist tendencies. This political party was short-lived; rumours circulated that it received funding from the Soviet Union, which further reduced the already small level of sympathy for it.
‘I am of the opinion that the value of a confession gained through strong mistreatment and great pressure is no different from that of a voluntary confession.’
Investigations of the Gießen prosecutor’s office on account of the massacre at San Polo
In 1967, the Gießen prosecutor’s office initiated an investigation of Wolf Ewert, Klaus Konrad, and other regiment members on account of the massacre at San Polo. The proceedings were inconclusively ended in 1972, the office maintaining that Ewert’s complicity in the murders could not be proven, even in the form of aiding and abetting. Ewert had admitted ordering the shootings, but only, he indicated, after the superior command had reported not being in a position to take over responsibility for the prisoners. This was possibly a self-serving assertion, since in the summer of 1944 the gunning down, under martial law, of imprisoned partisans and suspicious civilians in the front-region lay in Ewert’s own area of responsibility.
Ewert also indicated he had not participated in the killings themselves, rather entrusting the action to a no-longer known leader of the execution-command. When he was interrogated in March 1969, he made the following statement regarding the torture inflicted in the cellars of the Villa Mancini: ‘I am of the opinion that the value of a confession gained through strong mistreatment and great pressure is no different from that of a voluntary confession.’
In 2021 in Stralsund, at the request of the Green Party faction, a memorial plaque for Ewert located in a cemetery was removed by the city authorities. ‘A war criminal merits no commemoration’, commented district-parliament member Arnold von Bosse.
Ewert’s memoirs
There is extensive information on Ewert’s life until 1947 in both his personnel files and his memoirs, published by his nephew Malte Ewert in 2012. These sources allow a close reconstruction of the different phases in his training and military career. By contrast, we have few details concerning the time between the postwar years and his death in 1994.
Ewert’s memoirs mirror a complex and ambivalent personality: voluntary departure from the family, aged 11, to enter the cadet school 500 kilometres away; perception of Germany’s 1918 defeat – and of the subsequent social unrest as a ‘revolt of the rabble’; the father’s death shortly after the end of World War I; a military career in the Reichswehr and intensive experience as an Eastern Front Kommandeur. Ewert shared such biographical details with many officers of his generation. The brutality he showed to the partisans should likewise be seen in a context of views and behaviour shared with coequal officer-comrades. At the same time, Ewert had a classical education. He had a knowledge of Latin and Greek, as well as modern languages that included Russian. He had an artistic propensity – in pauses from fighting he painted landscape-watercolours and scenes from military life that revealed some talent. In his diary he expresses no anti-Italian resentment but rather admiration for the Mediterranean world and its culture. Before setting out for Italy, he attended a Berlin performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly with his wife.
Sources
Wolf Ewert’s diary and his memoirs were published by his nephew in 2012 (see literature). References to the events in San Polo on pp. 298f. His personnel files from the time of military service are kept in the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg (German Federal Archives - Military Department in Freiburg) (BArch, PERS 6/1221). References to deployment of Ewert’s combat group within the 305th Infantry Division in: BArch, RH 26-305/26, commands for separation of subordinate units, 11 Jan.-8. July 1944. Information on Ewert’s concrete role in the massacre at San Polo is found in the extensive documentation of the La Spezia military prosecutor’s investigation, archive of Rome military court (PP n. 261/04 RNR, San Polo). This comprises all the important files of the British, German, and Italian investigative authorities.
The British files are also located in the National Archives in Kew (London), War Office (WO), WO 204/11482; WO 310/109; WO 311/349 and WO 170/515. The files of the investigation of the Giessen prosecutor are kept in the Hauptstaatsarchiv Darmstadt (HStAD H 13 Giessen Nr. 4884/1-17). The records in the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen in Ludwigsburg (Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg) (BArch, B 162/18194, Erschießung italienischer Zivilisten in San Polo / Provinz Arezzo (Italien) am 14.7.1944 durch Angehörige des Grenadierregimentes 274 der 94. Infanteriedivision 1967-1972) are not accessible at present.
Literature
Carlo Gentile, Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im Partisanenkrieg: Italien 1943-1945, Paderborn, Schöningh, 2012, pp. 371-374.
Carlo Gentile, Le stragi nazifasciste in Toscana 1943-45. Vol. 4. Guida archivistica alla memoria. Gli archivi tedeschi, foreword by Enzo Collotti, Rome, Carocci, 2005, pp. 46, 99-102, 127, 135, 137-142.
Malte Ewert, Ein deutscher Offizier. Kriegserinnerungen 1940-1945 aus der Sicht des Bataillons-, Regiments- und Divisionskommandeurs Generalmajor Wolf Ewert, Meime, Education & Art Publ. Ewert, 2012.
Gerhard Schreiber, Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen in Italien. Täter, Opfer, Strafverfolgung, München, C.H. Beck, 1996, p. 177.
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