Bechtolsheim came from a family of officers and joined the Bavarian Army himself in 1907. He served as a captain in the First World War, then as a company commander and battalion commander in Bavarian Reichswehr units. After the First World War he was a member of the Epp Free Corps for a period of time. When the Wehrmacht was established in 1935 he was promoted to colonel and initially worked in training, before taking over an infantry regiment in 1939. In May 1941 he was appointed commander of the newly established 707th Infantry Division in Munich. Comparatively poorly equipped, this division was deployed as an occupation force in the Minsk area from September 1941 onwards, with Bechtolsheim himself being appointed Wehrmacht commander for White Ruthenia.
Bechtolsheim promptly issued radical orders for the murder of Jews and Rom*nja. When Reserve Police Battalion 11 was assigned to him at the beginning of October 1941, he ordered the murder of all Jews and Rom*nja in the rural areas of the Minsk region. 11,000 people were murdered within two weeks by Reserve Police Battalion 11 alone, with the help of the Lithuanian relief teams also under Bechtolsheim’s command. A further 10,000 people were killed by Bechtolsheim’s own units, in particular Infantry Regiment 727. Bechtolsheim did not stop his units carrying out mass murders until November 24, when these operations were to be taken over by the Security Police and Order Police. But even then Bechtolsheim commanded his units to carry out murders, for example in the anti-partisan operation ‘Bamberg’ south of Bobruysk in March/April 1942, which involved the shooting of 3,400 civilians without any significant fighting taking place. The division was then transferred to Army Group Center as a frontline reserve. Bechtolsheim was moved to the Führer Reserve in March 1943 and subsequently deployed as a substitute military inspector in Heidelberg.
In the early 1960s, criminal investigations were conducted primarily against the police units under Bechtolsheim’s command, but only briefly against Bechtolsheim himself as the actual commander. Proceedings against Bechtolsheim were discontinued at a relatively early stage.
