Biberstein was a member of the Einsatzgruppen and was tried in the NMT in Nuremberg.
First, here is a little about the partisan war in the Soviet Union behind the frontline after the people surrendered, without going to deep into details:
The Partisan War in the East 1941-1944
The Russian partisan war started right at the beginning by committing acts of sabotage and cruelties behind the front.
According to Bernd Bonwetch the number of Soviet partisans were as follows:
End of 1941: 90,000
Beginning 1942: 80,000
Middle 1942: 150,000
Spring 1943: 280,000
to 1944: up to 500,000 (these numbers are based on Soviet and German sources).
The material destruction caused by the partisans is considered as a significant factor for the defeat of the Wehrmacht in the East.
The losses of lifes of German soldiers and civilians Bonwetsch estimated at 1.5 Million based on Russian sources and 35,000-45,000 according to the Germans.
According to Boris Semjonowitsch Telpuchowski:
“In three war years the White Russian partisans killed about 500,000 German soldiers and officers, 47 generals, dynamited 17,000 military transports of the enymy and 32 tank trains, destroyed 300,000 railroad tracks, 16,804 motor vehicles and also a gigantic amount of other war material of all kinds.”
Partisans are now called terrorists. And watching TV here in the US I don’t get the feeling that these modern partisans/terrorists are treated very kindly either, the pictures of the US prisoners on Guantanamo come to mind, who are considered neither as criminals nor POW’s, they just have no rights.
Biberstein is quoted:
"Mr. President, one does not cast pearls before swine."
How would you react if as a soldier after your comrade was caught by the partisans, mutilated, genitals cut off and then killed?
Biberstein explained to his sentence:
I had to assume that these were atheists. There are people who do not believe in God, who have turned away from God; and if I tell such a man a word of God, I run the danger that the person will become ironic.
And at the end of his NMT defense he said:
"Your Honors, I have nothing to add to the deliberation of my defense counsel. As to all charges of the prosecution I do not feel guilty before God and my conscience. "
Biberstein was thoroughly demonized about his religion.
He was sentenced to death by hanging, but his death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
The prosecution of the NMT used all sorts of ways to get confessions and statements out of the German prisoners: Mock trials with sham death sentences to make the prisoners talk, threats to send them or their families to the Soviet Union, and physically kicking the prisoners testicles. Nine out of ten had their testicle permanently damaged. When asked about this by newspaper men, colonel A.H.Rosenfeld answered:
We couldn’t have made those birds talk otherwise […] It was a trick and it worked like a charm
fge
