Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  Sometime after September 1940, Umbrich tells us, ‘three tall, handsome SS men’ appeared in Belleschdorf. Their bearing was proud and erect, their uniforms were crisply pressed, their long leather boots polished and shining. The SS men politely requested to speak to a village leader and were directed to the Umbrich household, where they spoke with Friedrich’s father. They brought a message: ‘Der SS-Röntgenzug ist unterwegs!’ (‘The SS x-ray train is coming!’) The SS had come to show off German medical prowess and, as Friedrich later understood, to check their physical suitability to serve in the SS. The ‘day of the x-rays’ was a festive occasion – and the SS men praised the Saxons’ excellent German and gobbled down their food and slurped their best schnapps. Sixteen-year-old Friedrich was impressed by the intimidating German machines and the strapping SS men who set them up in the village church; it was the beginning of a spectacular feat of seduction. Two years later, Friedrich was fighting Serbian partisans in the Balkans.

  Many of SS recruitment chief Gottlob Berger’s kin were ethnic Germans scattered all over Europe. In Romania, where he launched his recruitment drive, he had close kin among the Transylvanian Saxons. Andreas Schmidt, the head of the German minority, was Berger’s son-in-law. Schmidt was a radical Nazi and a Volksgruppenführer with close ties to the NSDAP in Berlin. At the end of the 1930s, Schmidt had brought together the ethnic German group of Romania, the GEGR and the local NSDAP. He was a brutish fanatic and wholeheartedly devoted to the Nazi cause. He enthusiastically embraced his father-in-law’s campaign to recruit for the Waffen-SS in Romania. But Romanian leader Ion Antonescu insisted that his government would regard service in a foreign army as desertion. So Schmidt and his father-in-law smuggled more than a thousand ethnic German Waffen-SS recruits, disguised as labourers, across the border for training in Prague.50

  It was a logical next step to look beyond the ethnic German world to the Nordic nations like Denmark and Norway that had been overwhelmed by the German army in 1940. It was becoming increasingly evident that the expansion of the Waffen-SS would depend on Berger’s foreign recruitment drive. It was a strategy that had been forced on the SS by the Wehrmacht but Himmler embraced it with a passion. In occupied Europe, the ‘Almighty’ Berger would need to negotiate some thorny obstacles. To entice foreign recruits into the Waffen-SS, he would have to overcome natural scruples about serving an occupying power. The Hague Convention, still accepted by Germany, made conscription illegal in any occupied nation; any SS recruits thus had to be ‘volunteers’.51 Even some of the European pro-German radical nationalist movements like the Dutch National Socialists (NSB) were bitterly divided between those who longed to serve Hitler’s Reich and others who, rightly, feared that their own national cultures would be extinguished. Berger nevertheless set to work and set up SS recruiting offices in Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Recruiting criteria were identical for both foreign and German applicants: Dutch and Flemish men who joined the SS ‘Westland’ and ‘Nordland’ regiments, for example, had to be over 17 and under 40, possess ‘Aryan racial characteristics’, be in good health and meet the minimum SS height requirement of 165cm. But Berger’s first efforts yielded very modest results. By the summer of 1941, the new SS Standarte ‘Nordland’ and ‘Westland’ had, between them, attracted only a few hundred Danish, Norwegian, Dutch and Belgian volunteers.52 But Himmler was not discouraged. He was increasingly obsessed with building a pan-European army – and by the end of that fateful year, the tally of ‘Germanic’ volunteers would look very different.

  The German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 would draw in tens of thousands of foreign collaborators who, as SS police or Waffen-SS volunteers, would play a vile part in the destruction of European Jewry. These ‘willing executioners’ shared a common ideological language with the Reich: a political Esperanto founded on a lethal hatred of a completely mythic entity, the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’. Hitler’s declaration of a ‘Crusade against Bolshevism’, which concomitantly implied a war on Jewry, welded together a broad alliance of radical nationalists who pledged allegiance to the Reich.53 They would take on what Himmler called the ‘hardest task’ of mass execution. In return for this service, he would promise some of them a place at the Nordic table of honour. This shadow war fought by Hitler’s foreign executioners would ravage the shtetls, fields and forests of the east – a region Hitler claimed would become Germany’s ‘garden of Eden’.54 But the tragedy of this ‘Holocaust by bullets’ had already been rehearsed before 22 June 1941 – in the ‘Forgotten Holocaust’ that overwhelmed Romania and the Balkans.

  2

  Balkan Rehearsal

  We are not going to wait for any declarations of loyalty by the new government but to carry out all preparations for the destruction of the Yugoslav armed forces and of Yugoslavia itself as a national unit … It is especially important, from the political point of view, that the blow against Yugoslavia should be carried out with the utmost violence.

  Hitler, War Directive 251

  The shadow cast by Hitler’s foreign executioners is a long one. On 4 March 1999 an elderly man called Dinko Šakić stood in a Zagreb courtroom accused of war crimes. He had been tracked down in Argentina by Ephraim Zuroff, Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem. A senior lieutenant in the wartime Ustasha militia, Šakić was accused of murdering and torturing prisoners incarcerated in the Jasenovac concentration camp established in Croatia in August 1941. Jasenovac was the third largest camp in Europe during the Second World War and it remains the least understood. During his trial, Šakić often laughed loudly when witnesses testified about his gruesome activities. The prosecutors, who had worked for years to gather evidence, faced powerful public hostility. For many young Croatians, the sneering old man in the dock was a patriot, a national hero. Every day, hundreds of noisy supporters crowded into court to provide him with ‘moral support’. Šakić was eventually convicted and imprisoned – a landmark judgement in Croatia. But his many admirers refused to give up his cause. In 2007, at a huge concert by Croatian singer Marko Perković, young Croatians turned up wearing Ustasha uniforms to honour Šakić – and when this convicted murderer died in prison the following year, he was publicly buried in his Ustasha uniform. His priest eulogised him an ‘example to all Croatians’.2 The Ustasha militias served the Croatian puppet regime set up by the German Third Reich in the spring of 1941 after the destruction of Yugoslavia. Later that year, in August, the Germans authorised the establishment of a camp system on the banks of the Sava River at Jasenovac. Inside, Ustasha men like Šakić tortured, raped and murdered without restraint. At least half a million Jews and Serbs died at Jasenovac. One survivor recalled:

  Victims would wait in the Main Warehouse or in some other building or out in the open … the Ustasha would strip them naked. Then they would tie their hands behind their backs with a wire … A victim would be forced to his knees … they would hit the victim with a mallet, a sledgehammer or with the dull side of an axe on the head. They would often cut their stomachs open with a butcher’s knife and dump them into the Sava.3

  On the morning of 6 April 1941, Palm Sunday, wave after wave of heavily laden Luftwaffe Ju52 heavy bombers and Stuka dive bombers roared into the air from Romanian airfields and set a course for Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, the fractious national kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. This airborne assault was the opening move of Operation Punishment – chastisement for the Serb coup that had scuttled Hitler’s plans for a Balkan pact. The bombardment lasted three days and killed between 5,000 and 10,000 undefended people. Hitler’s attack caught the Yugoslavian army on the back foot. Lightning raids smashed the air force and shredded lines of communication. Mobilisation had just begun and Yugoslavian troops were still crisscrossing the country to reach their units. Croatian fascists known as Ustasha undermined the resolve of Croatian units. Many soldiers deserted and reservists failed to report. On board his special train Amerika, halted in the foothills of the Alps close to the entrance of the Asp
angbahn tunnel in case of air assault, Hitler followed the progress of Operation Punishment in the map room attached to his command coach.4 Three German armies, backed by the SS ‘Grossdeutschland’ and ‘Das Reich’ divisions, advanced rapidly towards Belgrade. The Yugoslavs fought back hard, but demoralised Croatian soldiers deserted en masse and turned against Serb regiments. The Germans reached the old Croatian capital of Zagreb on 10 April then followed the Drava and the Danube south towards Belgrade, seizing the Avalla Heights overlooking the city two days later. On the night of 13 April, SS-Hauptsturmführer Fritz Klingenberg led advance units of the SS ‘Das Reich’ across the Danube – and Belgrade fell into German hands.

  It is often remarked that the German onslaught on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Balkans was ‘improvised’ by an enraged Hitler, and that it delayed the German attack on the Soviet Union, which had been planned for the spring. To be sure, Hitler never contemplated acquiring ‘living space’ in south-eastern Europe, preferring to exploit Balkan mineral resources instead. But Hitler’s invasion may not be quite as impulsive as it appeared. As soon as victory was secure, Hitler shredded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and set up a compliant regime in Croatia dominated by anti-Semitic, Serb-hating fascists under dictator Ante Pavelić. The conquest of the Balkans allowed German military occupiers and SS administrators to broaden their racial war against Jews and in this case the South Slavic Serbs. The occupation of Yugoslavia and Greece provided a rehearsal for the ‘war of annihilation’ that would soon engulf the Soviet Union. As they had in the puppet state of Slovakia, the Germans encouraged indigenous native militias to slaughter the ethnic enemies of the Reich. The murderous activities of the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia, the Ustasha in Croatia and the Iron Guard in Romania provided a model of lethal collaborations which would just months later be applied in the Baltic States and Ukraine.

  Contingency, fate and luck all played their parts. It was ever thus. Until the end of 1940, Hitler left the Mediterranean and the Balkans to his Axis partner Benito Mussolini. Germany was fixated with Romania’s rich Ploieşti oilfields, needed to power and lubricate the planned attack on Russia. And, fearing that either the British or his Soviet allies planned to disrupt the flow of oil to Germany, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht special forces to secure the oilfields at the beginning of October 1940. He informed Mussolini the day after, provoking a tremendous temper tantrum. At a heated summit with his Foreign Minister Ciano, Mussolini bellowed that he had had enough of Hitler’s fait accompli and ‘would pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the papers that I have occupied Greece.’ It was an eccentric kind of revenge: Ioannis Metaxas, the Greek dictator, regarded himself as a friend of Fascist Italy. But the seizure of the Ploieşti oilfields and Mussolini’s angry retort set in motion a chain of events that culminated with German occupation of the Balkans and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. Mussolini’s attack on Greece soon turned into a humiliating catastrophe, forcing Hitler to come to the aid of his volatile Axis partner. In the meantime, the British began landing troops in southern Greece and attacked the Italian navy. They occupied Crete and, in North Africa, crushed an Italian army at Sidi Barrani. Once Hitler had digested the scale of the swiftly deteriorating Italian engineered catastrophe in the Mediterranean, he had no doubt that Mussolini’s impetuous adventurism had put at risk his plans for Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union, then scheduled for the second half of May. Once the British had access to Greek airbases, they could in theory launch attacks on the precious Romanian oilfields. In broader strategic terms, it would be foolhardy to strike east against Russia if Germany’s south-eastern flank was, thanks to Mussolini’s ineptness, in shreds and tatters and the Mediterranean wide open to the Royal Navy. The time had come to sort out the mess and rescue the Italians before it was too late.

  On New Year’s Eve, Hitler wrote to Mussolini promising military support. He sent General Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps to Tripoli and began planning Operation Marita, the invasion of Greece. Its success would depend on the co-operation of other Balkan nations like Romania, Bulgaria and, of course, Yugoslavia. At the end of March 1941 German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop bullied Yugoslavian leaders led by Prince Paul to sign up to a Three Power Pact leaving the way clear for Operation Marita. Hitler was convinced that there would be ‘no more surprises’. But he had reckoned without the Serbs. Proclaiming that the deal with Hitler was a Croatian plot, anti-Nazi army commander Dušan Simović staged a coup, backed by a wave of widespread public revulsion about the pact. American citizen Ruth Mitchell (the only foreigner who ended up fighting with Chetnik insurgents) recalled: ‘Belgrade lay silent in a paralysis of horror, of shame, of slowly kindling fury. Then the storm broke … university students were demonstrating fiercely, shouting: “Down with the traitors! Better war than the pact!” ’5

  When news of these impertinent mass protests reached Berlin, Hitler exploded with rage. Goebbels commented in his diary, ‘The Führer does not let himself be messed around in these matters.’The coup leaders soon fell out and the coup looked increasingly fragile. As the Serbs and Croats bickered in Belgrade, Hitler ranted that Yugoslavia must now be regarded as an enemy. He had after all always regarded the kingdom as an illegitimate ‘Versailles state’. His swiftly formulated ‘Directive 25’ and ordered Wehrmacht (army and air force) commanders ‘to smash Yugoslavia militarily and as a state form … with merciless harshness’. On the afternoon of 29 March, Major General Friedrich Paulus (who less than two years later would surrender to Soviet armies at Stalingrad) presided over detailed planning for a two-pronged ground thrust closely co-ordinated with an aerial assault on Belgrade. Goebbels prophesied that ‘the problem of Yugoslavia will not take up too much time … The big operation then comes later: against R’.6

  Goebbels was right. In just three days, Operation Punishment had been wrapped up and Hitler’s generals could turn their forces against Greece – and the Anglo-Greek forces deployed along its borders. Three days after the destruction of Yugoslavian forces, the German 12th Army rumbled into the northern Greek port of Salonika and then began pushing south towards Athens. When British forces sent a message to the northern city of Jannina they received the cheeky reply: ‘The German army is here.’ Operating way ahead of the fast-moving front line, German bombers targeted city after city, stopping only when they closed in on Athens. Hitler had forbidden any bombing of the Greek capital; this was, he believed, the birthplace of Aryan culture. On 27 April, a little after 8 a.m., the German 6th Armoured division rumbled into the ancient city’s drab northern suburbs. On the same day, Walther Wrede, a young German archaeologist, recalled: ‘A police official … tells us that German troops are making their way to the Acropolis … I spring to the lookout post on the upper floor. Correct! From the mast of the Belvedere of the city shines the red of the Reich’s flag.’ German forces soon chased out the last British troops (in fact Australians and New Zealanders) from the southern tip of the Peloponnese. On 4 May, Axis troops (Italians and Germans) staged a victory parade on Athens. A beaming Wrede delightedly escorted a flood of ‘war tourists’ led by Field Marshall Walther von Brauchitsch around the Acropolis. Himmler toured the Greek monuments a few weeks later. On 20 May, German airborne forces surprised the complacent British defenders of Crete – and in North Africa, Rommel recaptured territory lost by the Italians.

  In the Balkan campaign, the Wehrmacht had smashed military nuts with sledgehammers: Hitler sent twenty-nine divisions against just six weak enemy ones. But as it turned out, just ten German divisions saw action for six days. This new blitzkrieg provided another demonstration that the ‘German soldier can do anything’. Now it was high time to make the same brutal point to his Soviet ally, and as soon as the Balkan war had been wrapped up, Hitler ordered the bulk of his forces to rejoin their comrades massing along the Soviet border.

  According to Hitler, what one philhellenic German general called the ‘lofty culture of Hellas’ had once been the ancestral homeland of
the Aryan Master Race. But these sentiments did not protect the modern inhabitants of the region whose once noble ancestral bloodlines, many Germans suspected, had been contaminated centuries ago by Semitic Phoenicians and by Slavs. Greece would not become another Poland but such pseudo-scholarly balderdash would have appalling consequences for the people of the Balkans. ‘The Germans,’ wrote novelist Giorgos Ioannou,‘suddenly introduced … all the abysmal medieval passions and idiocies of Gothic Europe.7