Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  ‘Take the regiment Nordland [SS division] as an example,’ Himmler says, ‘Do you believe that we need these men as soldiers? We can do without them! But we mustn’t block these men from freely pursuing their desires. I can assure you that they will return as free and committed supporters of our system.’8

  This was not Hitler’s plan. While Himmler dreamt of a future SS ‘Europa’, Hitler clung to the petty-minded ideas of the barrack-room bigot. He admired, grudgingly, the British Raj and its subjugation of dark-skinned masses. He despised the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, who fled to Berlin to seek German assistance against the British, and dismissed his Indian Legion, recruited by the German army, as ‘a joke’. Whilst Himmler regarded Bose and his Indian recruits as members of an ‘Aryan brotherhood’. He sponsored a German ‘scientific expedition’ to Tibet to look for racial connections between European peoples and Tibetan aristocrats. SS ‘Europa’ was just the beginning. Writing in 1943, Himmler looked forward a few decades to when ‘a politically German – a Germanic World Empire will be formed’. To begin with, Himmler’s master plan embraced only the Nordic peoples of Western and Central Europe. Just as Hitler did, he viewed the east as the murky domain of Slavic hordes whose degenerate blood was a mortal threat to European survival. The experience of war changed his mind – and led to a radical rethinking of long-term SS strategy.

  At the end of June 1941, Hitler’s armies swept into the Soviet Union. Millions of Soviet soldiers fell into German hands, and were incarcerated in vast open camps built hurriedly in occupied Poland. These camps became instruments of mass murder. More than 2 million Soviet prisoners would perish from disease, deliberate starvation or at the hands of execution squads, many because they ‘looked Jewish’.9 But for German anthropologist Wolfgang Abel, who was attached to an SS agency called the Race and Settlement Office (RuSHA), these hellish camps provided a pseudoscientific treasure trove. Inside this German camp, Abel and his team could examine and measure hundreds of living ‘specimens’ culled from every corner of the Soviet Empire. They soon made some startling discoveries. Abel’s meticulous anthropometric examinations revealed that Germanic blood lines had penetrated far into the east through the Baltic, Ukraine and beyond. In the ‘General Plan East’, hatched up after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, SS scholars had proposed the complete Germanisation of conquered eastern territories. In crude terms, they envisioned liquidating native peoples and importing German settlers. The findings of the ‘Abel Mission’ significantly complicated matters. The simplistic distinction between Germanic and Slavic peoples began to look a lot more intricate.10 These anthropological findings implied that some ‘Eastern’ peoples might possess sufficient ‘Germanic’ blood to qualify as future citizens of the Reich. Later, Himmler would reconsider the racial status of Balkan peoples like the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosniaks.

  But how could these ‘Germanic bloodstreams’ (a phrase used in an SS instructional pamphlet) be exploited? Could this ‘lost blood’ somehow be returned to the Reich, where it belonged? In the perverse logic of German racial ideology, this Germanic blood was merely a latent quality. It was a potent substance, to be sure, but did not necessarily guarantee that its bearers would loyally serve the future Reich. Himmler had a radical solution. He would ‘harvest’ this lost Germanic blood through martial service and blood sacrifice. Himmler revered the pseudoscientific ideas of anthropologists like Hans F.K. Günther, who interpreted race in strictly biological terms. But he also admired ideas promoted by Günther’s rival, the psychologist Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, and his followers. In books like Rasse und Seele, published in 1926, Clauss had developed a somewhat heretical theory that different races possessed different ‘souls’. Germans, for example, manifested the attributes of a noble Nordic soul; Jews were cursed by their materialistic ‘Semitic’ souls. The details of this gaseous speculation need not detain us here. But the idea of a ‘racial soul’ detached from merely physical attributes implied that race was to some degree malleable. For Himmler, racial identity was also a matter of will, capable in special circumstances of reshaping biological inheritance. According to this cowardly soldier manqué, the supreme manifestation of will was the warrior’s acceptance of the need to kill and be killed. Himmler called the Waffen-SS the ‘assault force for the new Europe’. He believed that military service, sacrifice and, above all, the zealous destruction of the racial enemies of the Reich, could provide the means to remould the racial ‘souls’ of non-German recruits – opening the door to membership of the greater Germanic community.

  This master plan did not only apply to the Waffen-SS – the armed SS. The rapid expansion of Himmler’s empire and its security division, the SD (later renamed the RSHA), had begun in the mid-1930s with the takeover of the German police services. For Himmler, there was no fundamental difference between a Reich policeman and a Waffen-SS soldier. Whether a recruit donned the green uniform of the German police or the asphalt grey of the Waffen-SS, he was a warrior dedicated to upholding the security of the Reich; his ‘combat spirit’ (Kampfgeist) would be dedicated to the ‘ruthless annihilation of the enemy’.11 Likewise, after 1939, the first wave of foreign SS recruitment drew in non-Germans as police auxiliaries – Schutzmannschaften (known as Schuma). Commanded by German SD officers, these men unleashed a campaign of mass murder directed at their fellow citizens. From the summer of 1942, Himmler began authorising the recruitment of non-German Waffen-SS units. Many former Schuma men transferred to the new divisions. Himmler’s master plan had astounding consequences. In the summer of 1942, Himmler authorised the formation of an Estonian SS division – then began recruiting Latvians the following year. In 1943, at least 15,000 Bosnian Muslims were admitted to the Waffen-SS. Just over a year later, by the summer of 1944, over 50 per cent of Himmler’s Waffen-SS soldiers had not been born in Germany; every SS division had foreign recruits and nineteen were dominated by non-German recruits.12 At the end of the war, the SS absorbed over a million Soviet Osttruppen (eastern troops), many of them Muslims. Indians, Arabs, Albanians, Croats, Ossetians, Tadjiks, Uzbeks, Bosnians, Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis and even Mongolian Buddhists eventually joined Himmler’s foreign legions.

  At the end of April 1945, as Hitler ended his life in the Führerbunker beneath the Berlin Reich Chancellery, a few hundred yards away French, Belgian and Latvian SS men fought alongside German Volksstum and Hitler Youth brigades, vainly struggling to hold back the irresistible deluge of Stalin’s armies. At the same time, at least 10,000 Ukrainian SS men fled west hoping to surrender to the Allies and evade arrest by vengeful Soviet NKVD battalions. All over Europe, the foreign legions of the Reich had to confront the brutal reality of defeat. They cast a long shadow.

  SS foreign recruitment appears to challenge Daniel Goldhagen’s hypothesis that German ‘exterminatory anti-Semitism’ provided the motor of the Holocaust, the systematic mass murder of the Jews of Europe. Goldhagen’s celebrated Hitler’s Willing Executioners was published in 1996. Like Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, published four years earlier, Goldhagen focused on the German police battalions that had carried out mass shootings of Jews in occupied Eastern Europe. Goldhagen argued that the men who served in these battalions had been typical Germans, saturated in anti-Semitic hatred which made them ‘willing executioners’. He implied that any German provided with the same opportunity to kill would have done the same as the policemen he studied.

  According to Goldhagen, the Holocaust was thus a German crime: ‘the outgrowth … of Hitler’s ideal to eliminate all Jewish power.’13 Hitler proclaimed that he wished to kill all Jews – and set about achieving this goal with the enthusiastic connivance of German citizens. Goldhagen claimed that the majority of Germans in the 1930s and 1940s sympathised with Hitler’s plan; the Holocaust was, in this sense, a ‘national project’. Goldhagen characterised so-called ‘good Germans’ as ‘lonely, sober figures in an orgiastic carnival’. He concluded that this ‘set of beliefs’, shared by the majority of Germans, w
as ‘as profound a hatred as one people has likely ever harboured for another’.14

  No other book about the Third Reich has provoked such fierce debate – and, when it was translated and published in the newly unified Germany, so much soul searching. When Goldhagen embarked on a tour of Germany, an army of journalists and photographers pursued him wherever he travelled. It was said he ‘looked like Tom Hanks’ and became a trophy guest on the most prestigious television talk shows. A new generation of Germans seemed to want to wallow in the guilt of their grandparents. But after the grand tour and media commotion came sober analysis. Goldhagen the historian was soon discovered to have feet of academic clay. He was accused of misinterpreting research carried out by other historians, notably Browning, and ignoring any data that did not fit his theory. Historian Eberhard Jäckel called this son of Holocaust survivors a ‘Harvard punk’ and denounced Hitler’s Willing Executioners as ‘simply bad’. But after more than a decade of impassioned debate, Goldhagen’s ‘big bang’ idea still stubbornly refuses to go down quietly. Hitler’s Willing Executioners forced historians to think seriously about the perpetrators of genocide as well as the terrible fate of its many millions of victims.

  The question I want to ask in this book is quite simple. Does Goldhagen’s theory of ‘German exterminatory anti-Semitism’ account for the mass killing of Jews and other enemies of the Reich in Croatia, Romania, the Baltic, Belorussia and Ukraine and many other regions of Eastern Europe after 1939 at the hands of local militias? How does it explain for the eagerness with which hundreds of thousands of young non-German men rushed to join the armed forces of the Reich, above all the Waffen-SS after June 1941? Were these foreign collaborators not also willing executioners? Was the Holocaust not a German crime at all but a European phenomenon? In the case of Eastern Europe, the first major pogrom of the war took place in Romania in the city of Iaşi. As German armies swept into the Baltic nations, Belorussia and Ukraine, followed by the SD Einsatzgruppen murder squads, Lithuanians, Latvians and Ukrainians seized the chance to murder their Jewish neighbours in an orgy of seemingly spontaneous mass killings. Eastern Europe was consumed by a spasm of violence that consumed the lives of more than 5 million Jews, while in France, Belgium, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, collaborating militias betrayed, arrested and deported their Jewish fellow citizens to German camps. Many Holocaust perpetrators were not German. Surely, then, we must conclude that these non-German men and women too were Hitler’s willing executioners?

  It would appear that Goldhagen simply got it wrong. You did not have to be German to become what French historians call a génocidaire. Many of these foreign collaborators had been reared in national cultures equally infused with anti-Jewish loathing as Germany. Now, the motivations of many tens of thousands of auxiliary policemen and Waffen-SS soldiers are necessarily diverse and hard to define. For every fanatic there is an opportunist or thrill seeker. Apologists for the Waffen-SS foreign volunteers argue that they were soldiers ‘like any other’. Military historians tend not to be interested in ideology – and in the case of the Second World War appear loath to discuss the Holocaust. But combat in the armies of the Third Reich, whether the regular army, the Wehrmacht or the SS police battalions and Waffen-SS, meant signing up to fight in a war that was not at all ‘like any other’, before or since. General Erich Hoepner summed up German military ethics as follows: ‘[the war] is the age old struggle of the Germanic people … the repulse of Jewish-Bolshevism … and must consequently be carried out with unprecedented severity … mercilessly and totally to annihilate the enemy … no sparing of the upholders of the current Russian-Bolshevik system.’15 The enemy was defined not as a body of hostile armed men but as ‘upholders of a system’. According to the perverse ideology of the Reich, any Jew somehow ‘upheld’ the Bolshevik ‘system’ simply by being Jewish. These ‘ethics’ necessarily sanctioned ‘collective forcible measures’ – meaning, in practice, the mass murder of non-combatants whose continued existence threatened the well-being of the Reich. According to the ethics of annihilation, the killing of unarmed civilians, men, women and children was no longer to be considered ‘collateral damage’ but an integral part of military strategy. The foreign volunteers who joined the various agencies of the Reich clearly understood the ethics of the German war.

  As Hitler’s armies swept into the Soviet Union, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS security service, began deploying ‘native’ police auxiliaries to carry out the ‘self cleansing’ of their homelands. By this he meant mass murder of Jews and communist officials. German SD men and their native collaborators tore through the ancient Jewish communities of the east with unrelenting savagery. As Heydrich and his subordinates understood well, Eastern European nationalists regarded their Jewish neighbours as agents of Bolshevism. This irrational merging of the Jew and the Bolshevik, which was shared by the Germans and their collaborators, was a death sentence for millions. By the end of 1941, German police and Schuma battalions had shot at least a million Jews in Eastern Europe and the occupied regions of the Soviet Union. In the course of the following year, another 700,000 perished by shooting or in the so-called Reinhardt extermination camps. Millions died in lonely, unmarked forests and meadows in the east as well as in Auschwitz.16 And their killers were not only German SS men and soldiers, but Latvians, Ukrainians and other Slavic servants of the Reich. As killing centres like Treblinka, Sobibór and Auschwitz-Birkenau (which was also a labour camp) took over the business of genocide, the native Schuma battalions ran out of work. It was during this transitional period that Himmler authorised, for the first time, the formation of eastern Waffen-SS legions or divisions. When they became soldiers rather than policemen, these men did not stop murdering Jews.

  War is, by definition, a bloody business – so men in uniform tend to be excused a few ‘excesses’. As Ian Kershaw puts it, historians have a ‘tendency to separate the military history of the [1939–45] war from the structural analysis of the Nazi state’.17 A new cadre of historians, led by Omer Bartov, have begun to dismantle artificial firewalls that have been built between politics, ideology and mass murder. The war in the east, Bartov argues, ‘called for complete spiritual commitment, absolute obedience, unremitting destruction of the enemy’.18 ‘Unremitting destruction’ succinctly defines the war Germany fought between 1939 and 1945 – and fighting it irrevocably and profoundly corroded the moral decency of its practitioners whether they were German, French, Latvian or Bosniak.

  This book is not a general history of the SS or the Waffen-SS, nor does it set out to provide an exhaustive ‘catalogue’ of every non-German police battalion or combat division. Instead, it analyses in some detail specific case histories that illuminate the recruitment of non-German collaborators as agents of genocide. Part One begins with the German invasion of Poland and the simultaneous development of both a new doctrine of warfare and an ‘armed SS’ charged by Hitler with maintaining security in conquered territory. In Nazi doctrine, security depended on the liquidation of the racial enemies of the Reich. From the very beginning of the war, Himmler used SS police battalions and armed SS units as the vanguard agents of systematic mass murder. During the short Polish campaign, the Germans made only limited use of non-German forces – mainly ethnic Germans and Ukrainians. After the invasion of the Balkans in spring 1941, German-backed native militias like the Ustasha in Croatia and the Iron Guard in Romania embarked on lethal campaigns directed at Jewish citizens. For the Germans, these pogroms provided crucial lessons about the deployment of non-German executioners, strongly implying that a murderous solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ had been hatched up, at least partially, before the summer of 1941.

  The Balkan pogroms provided a rehearsal for genocide – and encouraged the SS to cultivate ultranationalist factions in the Baltic and Ukraine. We discover in Part Two that this meant that just days after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on 22 June 1941, Himmler’s Special Action squads began recruiting suitable Lithuanians, Latvians and Ukr
ainians to assist in the arduous tasks of mass murder. At the same time, German military intelligence under Wilhelm Canaris formed two Ukrainian combat battalions known as the ‘Roland’ and ‘Nachtigall’, which also took part in mass killings of Ukrainian Jews. Although the Germans quickly disbanded the two battalions, they demonstrated that combat battalions could also be deployed as mass murderers of unarmed civilians classified as enemies of the Reich.

  Eastern Europe was a geographical locus of the worst genocide in history. This is where the SD murder squads were deployed; this is where the Germans built their camps. As a consequence, Eastern European collaborators took a direct role in mass murder, under the auspices of SS commanders. However, the western SS volunteers from France, Belgium and the Netherlands, for example, espoused the same ideological commitment to the destruction of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. Recruitment of these ‘Germanics’ had begun in 1940, but gathered pace after the invasion of the Soviet Union. I examine in some detail the case of the notorious Belgian collaborator Léon Degrelle to expose the complex motivations of these ‘crusaders against Bolshevism’. In the summer of 1942, Himmler began authorising recruitment of non-German Waffen-SS divisions in the east, starting in Estonia. This new phase of recruitment accelerated after the destruction of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad – but also reflected a step change in SS thinking about race. By then Himmler had begun to view recruitment as a means to facilitate ‘Germanisation’. As Soviet partisans, pejoratively referred to as ‘Banditen’, began to successfully challenge German security in the occupied east, Himmler mainly used these eastern legions as anti-partisan units. Since the Germans referred to Jews as ‘bandits’, it also meant that the foreign SS divisions continued murdering Jews who had, through whatever good fortune, survived the SD murder squads and Operation Reinhardt.