Freedom is a heady drug. But it can also be a sour blessing. In the aftermath of independence, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania successfully applied to join the European Union. As a condition of membership, the new Baltic governments came under intense and unwelcome pressure to ‘document and clarify’ crimes against humanity committed on their territory during the Second World War. This necessarily implied exposing the role of collaborators – whose participation in mass murder was already well documented by scholars. The Latvian government has always insisted that historians in the west are excessively preoccupied with the Holocaust and overlook Soviet crimes. They insist that their nations had suffered equally under Soviet and German occupation. The near destruction of Latvian Jews should never be accorded an elevated moral status overshadowing the fate of other Latvians. Thus German and Soviet crimes became morally equal – and it is this historical relativism that encourages some Latvians to sanction the commemorative rituals of the ‘Latvian Legion’. These veterans did not fight for Hitler – ‘they defended Latvia against the Soviet army.’8
Shortly after I arrive in Riga, I meet Michael Freydman in the ‘Peitava-Shul’, the single Riga synagogue to survive the German occupation, which has recently been restored. Squeezing into a tiny, hemmed-in lot on Peitavas Street, the synagogue is exquisite. As I look for the entrance an edgy police officer watches me warily. Inside, Mr Freydman points out the Hebrew dedication from the Psalms, above the Ark: ‘Blessed is Jehovah who hath not given us/A prey to their teeth.’ Mr Freydman has no time for the moral sophistry that not just forgives but honours men who swore oaths of loyalty to Adolf Hitler as Waffen-SS recruits. He points out that in Latvian schools, students rarely hear the word Holocaust – instead they are taught about ‘the three occupations’. This ‘occupation obsession’ has now become the mantra of amnesia. But the few survivors of the Latvian Holocaust cannot forget that many thousands of their fellow citizens proved all too eager to volunteer as executioners for the Reich. In 1935, some 94,000 Jews lived in Latvia – about 4 per cent of the population. After 1941, the German occupiers and their Latvian collaborators murdered at least 70,000 Latvian Jews in camps, ghettoes and in the countryside; 90 per cent of Latvia’s Jews died as ‘prey to their teeth’. The Legionaries made a choice – and it was the wrong one.
On the afternoon before Legion Day, I catch a train to a tiny station just outside Riga, called Rumbula. Between the railway line and the main road to Riga, there is a silent and enclosed glade of trees. Twisting paths link low concrete rimmed mounds. These are mass graves. Here, at the end of November 1941, SS general and police chief Friedrich Jeckeln and his Latvian collaborators, led by the notorious Victors Arājs, slaughtered more than 27,800 Jews in two days. Himmler thoroughly admired Jeckeln as a highly proficient mass murderer. He knew he would ‘get the job done’ quickly and efficiently. Jeckeln had invented a ‘system’ that he referred to, with grotesque cruelty, as ‘sardine packing’, which he had honed and refined at killing sites in Ukraine.‘Sardine packing’ allowed the SS men and their collaborators to ‘process’ many thousands of victims every hour, ransacking their possessions then dispatching them at the edge of a pit. At Rumbula, Jeckeln applied his highly regarded ‘system’ with industrial efficiency – and without mercy. After each day’s ‘work’, the SS men recycled their plunder. Clothes, jewellery, money even children’s toys ended up enriching the lives of supposedly needy German families.
I am the only visitor to the Rumbula memorial site that morning. A few hundred yards away, gleaming Mercedes race along the road to Riga or pull off into a glitzy new shopping mall. Mountains of litter have washed up along the edge of the memorial site. The only sounds are the wind in the trees and the distant rumble of traffic. Latvian historians like to emphasise the macabre fact that Himmler authorised recruitment for the Waffen-SS in Latvia after the majority of Latvian Jews had been murdered. It follows, they claim, that the ‘Latvian Legion’ had ‘nothing to do with the Holocaust’. This callous argument was put to me on a number of occasions during my visit – most forcefully by Ojārs Kalniņš, the eloquent Director of the Latvian Institute. The claim is a puzzling one. Many of the Latvian police auxiliaries who voluntarily took part in Friedrich Jeckeln’s ‘special action’ at Rumbula, as well as hundreds of other mass shootings of Jewish civilians, later enlisted in the ‘Latvian Legion’.
Tuesday, 16 March 2010. For Latvians, this has been the worst winter for thirty years and overnight temperatures have plummeted. Heavy snow falls and long lines of traffic crawl blindly across the Daugava bridges, generating a sickly yellow haze. A giant Baltic ferry squats in the iced-up river. Snow ploughs rumble through Riga’s old town towards the Dom, where the legion will begin its march to the Freedom Monument. Ice sheaths a red granite memorial to the Latvian ‘Red Rifleman’, recruited by the Russians at the end of the First World War to fight the German Imperial Army – a reminder that many Latvians backed the Soviets and fought against the Latvian SS divisions.9 Soon after dawn, police vehicles park close to the Dom, engines running to warm the police reserves still sheltering inside. From misted windows, they gaze into the swirling snow, gloomy and bored. Their comrades on duty outside in the blizzard are dressed in beetle-like black armour and helmets.
The thick snow shrouds the towering spire of the Dom, a monument to German Lutheranism. Outside the main entrance, journalists and film crews outnumber police. Cameras flash as elderly men, accompanied by wives, most clutching bunches of Easter flowers, hasten inside. The veterans are like phantoms who return here every 16 March, bringing a chill and unwelcome reminder of the past. On the corner of Doma Laukums square, a knot of old men huddle together, shivering and selling copies of a pamphlet about the ‘Latvian Legion’. A few old men stop to tell their stories, evidently knowing the routine: ‘Forget the SS: we fought for Latvia, for freedom.’When I arrived at Riga airport I was astonished to see that newspaper stalls sell weighty memoirs written by ‘Latvian Legion’ officers. Since 1991, the organisations that support the veterans have hammered out a shared historical narrative that explains and justifies joining the war on the side of Hitler’s Reich. Although I have contacted Daugavas vanagi, the veterans association, to request an interview, it becomes increasingly clear that these old men are conveyors of the party line, not historical testimony.
The journalists and photographers shivering outside the Dom expect trouble. Inside, camera crews and photographers already gather beneath the tall, plain nave. The Legionaries and their wives fill the front rows beneath the pulpit. A few sit with tears streaming down their cheeks; others glare angrily at the flashing cameras. Outside the Dom’s main entrance, snow is still falling thickly. A sinister honour guard begins to muster. Shaven-headed young men from the nationalist Klubs 415 stand in line beneath a canopy of billowing red and white Latvian flags. Standing to one side are young thugs who had travelled up from Lithuania to support the old Legionaries. They sport white arm bands – modelled on those worn by wartime Lithuanian death squads.
Soon the old Legionaries stumble from the Dom to join these guardians of Baltic national pride, who close ranks around them. The snowstorm at last begins to falter. A stern-faced young man with a shaven head takes up a position at the head of the legionary column. Right behind him stands the national leader of the ultranationalist Visu Latvijai (All for Latvia), Raivis Dzintars, and his wife, both clad in Latvian folk costume. The couple add a curious, even kitsch dash of colour – like morris dancers leading a march by a far-right British political party. But there is nothing pretty about Dzintars’ political views: Visu Latvijai aggressively promotes the cause of a mono-ethnic Latvia. Latvia for Latvians! It was this brand of aggressive chauvinism that led many nationalist Latvians to throw in their lot with the German occupiers in 1941.
By now, police battalions are lined up along the route of the march – they stretch like glistening black insects all the way from the Dom to the Freedom Monument, a mile or so away, where the march will end.
It is here that Latvians and others opposed to the march have been corralled. At the Dom, the old Legionaries finally set off, led by the peasant couple and the skinhead, his face set hard. Banners ripple in the cold wind. The elderly Legion veterans march briskly through Riga’s old town and then cross the bridge that leads to the Freedom Monument. As the column approaches, ethnic Russian communists shout obscenities: ‘Fuck off! Fuck off!’ As the legion veterans, now shielded by an impenetrable cordon of armed police, begin laying wreaths, high voltage arguments spark up among the crowds.
A short distance behind the police lines stands a smaller, silent group of older men and women – Latvian Holocaust survivors. Standing with them today is Ephraim Zuroff, the Director of the Simon Weisenthal Centre, who has fiercely denounced Legion Day, and Josef Koren, a former beekeeper and now leader of the LAK, Latvia’s Anti-Fascist Committee. When a Legion supporter screams at Koren that ‘A soldier is a soldier and all are equal!’he turns away. Another mantra of Legion defenders is that the volunteers were conscripts – compelled to join. But as Koren points out to journalists, ‘At least 25% of the “Latvian Legion” were volunteers, recruited from the Latvian police who were involved in the murder of Jews and other Latvians – and the SS Legion should not be permitted a celebration of itself in the centre of our city’.
Midday. Sunlight glitters on the Pilsetas canal. The old Legionaries and their honour guard begin to disperse. Soon they have vanished – the mute ghosts of history.
Now there is a carnival atmosphere. At the foot of the Freedom Monument, groups of young Latvians take pictures of each other beside the mass of wreaths and flowers. A young man tells a BBC reporter that for him the old Legionaries are heroes. They defended Latvia. Many thousands of Latvian SS men gave their lives for the freedom of Latvia. These young Latvians look prosperous and happy. They do not shave their heads or sport provocative armbands. But their enthusiasm for the legion is troubling – and unexpected. It would seem that the old Legionaries have become a symbol not of collusion with a murderous foreign occupier but of Latvian national freedom.
It is an outcome that SS Chief Himmler, who was profoundly hostile to the national aspirations of Latvians, could never have foreseen.
I remember the words of the great Latvian poet Ojārs Vācietis:
So all forests are not like this …
I stand and shriek in Rumbula –
A green crater in the midst of grainfields
Introduction
With Germans it is thus, if they get hold of your finger, then the whole of you is lost, because soon enough one is forced to do things that one would never do if one could get out of it.
Viktors Arājs, commander Latvian Arājs Commando1
I really have the intention to gather Germanic blood from all over the world, to plunder and steal it where I can.
Heinrich Himmler2
In the summer of 1944, a racial anthropologist serving with the SS, Oberscharführer Dr Bruno Beger, received an unusual assignment. He was ordered to travel to Bosnia–Herzegovina, then part of the puppet state of Croatia, to prepare a study of ‘races at war’. He would focus on Bosnian Muslims serving in a Waffen-SS division called the ‘Handschar’, meaning scimitar. Its official designation was the 13th Mountain Division of the SS (1st Croatian).3 More than 10,000 Bosnian Muslims had been recruited in the spring of 1943 with the connivance of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini – the Arab nationalist leader then resident in Berlin. The SS issued the Muslim recruits with standard uniforms but permitted them to wear fezzes bearing the death’s head and eagle of the SS. Himmler and the mufti recruited and trained divisional imams who preached the doctrine of ‘Jew hatred’ to the recruits. The following year, as the military situation in the Balkans deteriorated, Beger was transferred to another Muslim SS division based in northern Italy – the Osttürkischer-verband, recruited in the Caucasus. The SS ‘Handschar’ carved a bloody trail of murder and destruction across the Balkans in the final years of the Second World War. The German invasion of Yugoslavia that began in April 1941 had unleashed both massive repression and overlapping civil wars that continue to bedevil this fractured region. The atrocities committed by German sponsored militias like the Croatian Ustasha and Bosnian ‘Handschar’ have never been forgotten or forgiven.
But why did the elite Waffen-SS recruit Bosnian Muslims, an inferior south Slavic people according to Nazi doctrine, to join what Hitler called a ‘war of annihilation’? Why, for that matter, did they recruit Latvians, Ukrainians, Kossovar Albanians, Estonians and a multitude of other non-Germans? To be sure, the recruitment of foreign soldiers, pejoratively labelled mercenaries, has, of course, been a convention of most wars throughout recorded history. The armies mustered by the Persian ruler Xerxes in the fifth century BC, for example, sucked in fighting men from all over the ancient world, including Jews, Arabs, Indians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Phoenicians.4 In modern European history, Napoleon’s Grande Armée boasted divisions and brigades of German, Austrian Dutch, Italian, Croatian, Portuguese and Swiss troops recruited from all over the French Empire and its vassal or allied states.5
The ethnic diversity of the armed forces of the Third Reich far exceeded Napoleon’s Grande Armée. But that is not the principal reason why the recruitment of non-German troops by the Third Reich is surprising and paradoxical. The dogma and practice of the Third Reich was racism so radical that it culminated in mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Hitler characterised National Socialism as ‘a Völkisch and political philosophy which grew out of considerations of an exclusively racist nature.’6 The war launched by Hitler and his generals in September 1939 was intended to begin the task of ‘annihilating’ the racial enemies of the Reich, usually characterised as ‘Jewish-Bolsheviks’, and enslaving Slavic ‘sub-humans’. The outcome would, in theory, be the founding of a new German empire and the complete ‘Germanisation’ of vast tracts of Eurasia. In other words, the German imperial project was by definition a racial undertaking. The ambition of SS Chief Heinrich Himmler was to forge the Waffen-SS as the elite shock troops of this racial imperialism: the apostles of Germanisation. Why then did he recruit apparently non-Aryan Latvians, Ukrainians and Bosnians?
The majority of historians have explained SS recruitment strategy as an expediency that fatally compromised the elite status of the militarised SS. The most recent history of the SS by Adrian Weale asserts: ‘In 1940, [the Waffen-SS] had legitimately been able to claim that it was an elite … by June 1944 … in no military sense could [the bulk of the organisation’s combat units] ever be described as a corps d’elite.’7 This is the latest reformulation of a view that has been repeated ad nauseam by most historians of the SS. In short, they argue, Himmler simply needed bodies in SS uniforms to hurl at the advancing Soviet armies. It was a numbers game – a necessary evil.
In this book I propose a different explanation. The recruitment of non-Germans not only complied with Nazi-sponsored race theory as it evolved during the course of the war, but was a vital component in a master plan hatched up by secretive SS ‘think tanks’. Himmler was despised by many of the Nazi elite as an obsequious and petty-minded bureaucrat – a judgement echoed by many modern historians. This was a sham. Himmler’s imagination was secretive, lethal and boundless. His covert master plan was to build a German empire dominated not by Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP), but the SS. The construction of this SS ‘Europa’ required the complete physical liquidation of every racial enemy of the Reich. At the same time, Himmler and his cadre of SS experts proposed a root and branch re-engineering of European ethnicity. To enact this monstrous scheme, Himmler transformed the SS into a formidable militarised apparatus dedicated to blood sacrifice. SS police battalions and Waffen-SS divisions would become the armed agents of a perverted revolution whose outcome would be a racial utopia. Naturally, Himmler did not discuss these ideas openly, but he provided some tantalising clues about the SS plan in the course of a conversation with Avind Berrgrav, the Archb
ishop of Norway. SS recruitment, he makes clear, was not a matter of numbers – he wanted the best of the best, the pinnacle of the ‘Germanic’ peoples:
Hitler's Foreign Executioners Page 2
