Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  no obstacle is to be placed in the way of the Selbstreinigungsbestrebungen (self-cleansing efforts) of the anti-Communist and anti-Jewish circles in the newly occupied areas. Rather, they are to be intensified, when required, without a trace, and channelled onto the proper path, without giving these local ‘self defence circles’ any opportunity later to claim that they acted on orders or were given political assurances.22

  The point about ‘political assurances’ makes clear that ‘self-cleansing’ could be a prelude to independence.

  Heydrich went on to make a second sometimes overlooked point. He insists that reports must ‘make clear that it was the local population that spontaneously took the first steps against the Jews’. Why? Because ‘it was preferable, that at least at the beginning, the cruel and unusual means, which might upset even German circles, would not be too conspicuous’. In other words, the inciting role of the German murder squads needed to be as covert as possible. In an especially telling aside, Heydrich recommended that the Special Task Force commanders film or photograph any ‘spontaneous pogroms’. This meant that SS propagandists would be able to show the world that Jews and other undesirables had somehow invited their own chastisement at the hands, not of Germans, but of their fellow Lithuanians or Latvians or Ukrainians. The ‘spontaneous’ slaughter of Jews by native executioners became, in a perverse twist, justification for persecution. Since it was Lithuanians who first carried out these slaughters, the victims surely deserved their fate. Germans merely facilitated natural justice.

  Like Himmler, Heydrich was also preoccupied with the ‘nationalism problem’. As we have seen, he insisted that ‘self-defence circles’ must not be provided with any ‘political assurances’. In other words, mass murder could not be rewarded with promises of nationhood. This was tricky because authorising any kind of native militia as the Germans planned implied the de facto recognition of statehood. It was a dilemma that would plague SS efforts to exploit eastern peoples until the very end of the war. Stahlecker was well aware of the quandary: ‘The security of [Riga] has been organised with the help of 400 [Latvian] Hilfspolizei (auxiliary police) … care has been taken to assure that these troops would not become a Latvian militia … two further independent units have been established for the purpose of carrying out pogroms. All synagogues have been destroyed.’(My italics.)23

  This then was the German dilemma: how to encourage ‘self-cleansing efforts’ without igniting nationalist agitation. What of the other side? As we have seen in the Balkans and Romania, the arrival of German armed forces acted like a catalyst on the peculiar mosaic of each national culture and the nature of the ruling elite. The destruction of Yugoslavia offered Croatian fascists the opportunity to strike decisively at Serbs. Alongside this civil war, the Ustasha regime also targeted Jews – partly to satisfy Croatian chauvinism but also to reinforce its bond with the Reich. In Romania, Germany promoted a radical ultranationalist and anti-Semitic regime led by Ion Antonescu to secure vital economic resources and the services of the Romanian army. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Germans and Romanians colluded in the destruction of Romanian Jewry. Hitler made no claim to ‘living space’ in puppet states like Croatia or Slovakia and he had no wish to undermine the national integrity of Romania so long as Antonescu stayed on side.

  The Baltic nations and Ukraine had a very different significance in German imperial plans. The purpose of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, was to seize living space for the German people and to smash the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ state. German radical imperialism, founded on the blood right of Germans to exploit the east as (in Hitler’s words) a ‘garden of Eden’ or territorial tabula rasa, had no room for nation states. Since the twelfth century, Germans had sought hegemony in the Baltic region. The Teutonic Knights, armed with the ‘cross and the sword’ brought Christianity – and serfdom. In Riga, founded by a Bishop of Bremen, and Reval (Tallinn), Hansa merchants dominated commerce and trade. In rural areas, big German baronial estates, which resisted any attempt to abolish feudal relations between master and serf, remained largely intact until the end of the First World War. Serfdom retarded national aspiration, and while Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians spoke distinct languages and nourished different cultures, it was only the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that had ever achieved genuine statehood. In the seventeenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth swallowed up much of the Baltic region, including what is now modern Latvia and Estonia which were mere duchies. Catholic Lithuania had successfully resisted ‘Germanisation’ by the knights and their feudal successors while Lutheran Latvia and Estonia had succumbed. But at the end of the eighteenth century, the Commonwealth had been dismembered and Lithuania was split between the Russian empire and Prussia. This turbulent history meant that the Baltic national movements that bubbled up from the wreckage of the Russian and German empires after 1918 had grown the shallowest of roots. The Baltic States suffered bloody and traumatic birth pains. Even in defeat, Germany was unwilling to give up its Livonian fiefdoms, and the Freikorps ‘Iron Brigade’ and Baltische Landeswehr exploited the threat of a Red Army incursion to make a last ditch attempt to establish a German state. Allied intervention eventually drove out both the Freikorps and the Russians – and in 1920, recognised three new sovereign states.

  The rebirth of Lithuania had been especially painful. Lithuanians squabbled with Poland over Vilnius and laid claim to Klaipèda – the German Memel. The new Lithuania was a feeble reiteration of the old grand duchy – a mere buffer state between Germany and the Soviet Union. This inspired a kind of national siege mentality and a succession of authoritarian governments. From 1926, Antanas Smetona ruled Lithuania as a virtual dictator. Latvia and Estonia, the other Baltic nations, proved equally rickety and followed much the same path. In Latvia, Kārlis Augusts Vilhelms Ulmanis seized power in a coup in 1934; he banned Latvian political parties, locked up his opponents and closed newspapers, including those published in Yiddish. That same year Kontantin Päts introduced martial law in Estonia. These regimes were authoritarian rather than fascist in a strict sense. Ulmanis, who liked to compare himself with Oliver Cromwell, openly rejected any kinship with Italy. At a political congress in 1935, Lithuanian president Smetona denounced what he tartly called Nazi ‘zoological nationalism’ – and on the surface, there was little overt evidence of ‘eastern’ anti-Semitism. The Lithuanian Minister of National Defence, Balys Giedraitis, even passed legislation forbidding attacks on Jews.

  This fragile tolerance reflected the long history of Jewish settlement. Since the eighteenth century, the Russian Pale of Settlement had included Lithuania (but not the territory of the other more Germanised Baltic States). And while many Jews who lived in the Shtetls of the Pale endured both poverty and frequent pogroms, Jewish social and cultural institutions flourished: Vilnius was celebrated as the Jerusalem of Lithuania, and Jews made up nearly half the city’s population. Tolerance was the public face of the regime. Dig deeper and a rather different picture takes shape however. The coup that brought Smetona to power had been engineered by an extremist faction of Lithuanian army officers called Geležinis vilkas – the Iron Wolf. This was the guard movement attached to Smetona’s Tautininkai Party, headed by Augustin as Voldemaras, who became prime minister after the coup. Voldemaras was a charismatic, brilliant radical nationalist (educated in St Petersburg) who soon fell out with Smetona. The president was honorary head of the Iron Wolf, but feared the fanatical young army officers who gravitated to Voldemaras’ extremist camp. The Iron Wolf, for their part, viewed Smetona as too moderate, especially with regard to the alleged ‘influence’ of Lithuanian Jews. In 1934, Iron Wolf officers tried to oust Smetona and replace him with Voldemaras. But the coup faltered and Smetona had his rival arrested.

  The Iron Wolf never became a mass movement as Codreanu’s Legion of St Michael did in Romania, but its anti-Jewish agenda reflected the secret views of many Lithuanians. From the mid to late 1920s, organised anti-Semitism became incr
easingly evident. Gangs defaced Yiddish street signs; attacks on Jewish shops and individual Jews in cinemas, restaurants and other public places began to rise noticeably. As the world depression deepened, attacks on ‘Jewish influence’ in the press became increasingly venomous. Driving this up-swelling of anti-Semitism was the Tautos valia (Will of the Nation) newspaper which began appearing in October 1926 and the Union of Lithuanian Business (LVS), whose paper Verslas (Business) agitated for the Lithuanisation of the national economy.

  Smetona had been thoroughly rattled by the Iron Wolf and now tried to buttress his power by tapping into the new chauvinism. He abolished the Ministry of Jewish Affairs (established in 1918), stripping Jews of effective political representation at a stroke. After conferring with gentile business leaders, Smetona introduced a series of measures designed to smash Jewish enterprise. The new legislation denied Jews access to cheap credit, forcing many businesses to declare bankruptcy. In the countryside (where so many thousands of Jews would be killed in 1941) the hoary myths of Jew hatred revived. In 1935, a rural newspaper reported that in the village of Plunge two Christian children had vanished and insinuated they had been abducted by local Jews. In deeply traditional Lithuanian villages, there was no need to spell out the old ‘Blood Libel’ – the medieval myth that Jews used the blood of Christian children to bake matzo bread. Soon after the newspaper report appeared, a rash of flyers urged ethnic Lithuanians to take revenge. The children had not yet been found and feelings ran high and ugly. At a Jomarkas (open-air market), an angry mob attacked Jewish traders. Another child disappeared a few months later – and again, mobs attacked Jewish homes and vandalised synagogues. A gang of young men ambushed some Jewish travellers who were watering their horses by a stream. The local police, already under attack for failing to find the missing children (or their remains) carried out a few token arrests, but this merely provoked a fresh surge of anti-Semitic leafleting.

  This was not an isolated incident. The disappearance of any child provoked the same kind of hysteria in other villages and towns. Anti-Jewish feeling in rural areas was reinforced by state legislation. All over the old Pale, Jews traditionally made a living as agricultural middlemen, trading corn and other produce between country and city. If they did well, gentile peasants and merchants resented their success and accused them of sharp practice. In the mid-1930s, the LVS promoted the idea of rural co-operatives in effect to take over the services performed by Jewish merchants. Smetona became an enthusiastic convert to the co-operative movement and its rapid success bankrupted many rural Jewish businesses. Many middle-class Lithuanian Jews admired Smetona. He appeared to respect the bastions of Jewish culture and faith in Vilnius and Kaunas. But his apparently benevolent dictatorship pushed them to the margins of Lithuanian society, where they would be exposed to terrible peril. A younger generation, deeply impressed by Zionism, felt differently. Lithuania, they rightly suspected, was no longer safe. One young journalist wrote on the eve of war that: ‘Jews and Lithuanians lived alongside one another … on the same street and often in the same building. That should have brought them closer to one another but that never happened.’ The Lithuanian liberal elites failed to notice the groundswell of hatred, openly expressed on the streets and in the farms, until it was too late.24

  In the republic of Latvia, anti-Semitic agitators spoke louder and wielded greater influence. Latvian Jews had made a vital contribution to the independence movement, but President Ulmanis was a fanatical nationalist who promoted ‘Latvia for the Latvians’ (meaning ethnic Latvians) and privately resented Jewish business expertise. We associate anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe with the pogrom and the mob. But in Latvia, as in Romania, an influential intelligentsia had been radicalised by student fraternities, the Korporacijas. These elitist reactionary student associations slavishly mimicked the German fraternities, the Burschenschaften. Like their German counterparts, the Korporacijas, such as the Lettonia and Selonija, cultivated a broad network of contacts in government and business. Membership provided a fast track to business and state elites. But not for every Latvian citizen. All the Korporacijas refused to admit Jewish students and promoted a heady brand of radical nationalism. Many graduates of the Lettonia, like Arveds Bergs, turned to journalism and he, it was said, educated an entire generation. Stirred by Bergs’ rhetoric, Gustavs Celmiņš, another Lettonia graduate, set up a new ultranationalist party, Ugunskrusts – inspired by the Romanian Iron Guard – that proclaimed ‘Latvia to the Latvians, bread and work to the Latvians!’ Recruits donned quasi military uniform (dark grey shirt, beret, trousers with knee high boots) adorned with swastikas – and staged impressive public drills and organised mass meeting at rural camps.

  Celmiņš claimed that by 1933 he had 12,000 members – almost certainly an exaggeration, but he made enough noise to rattle the Ulmanis government and the Ugunskrusts was banned. Undeterred, Celmiņš simply changed the name to Pērkonkrusts (Thunder Cross). His programme was not especially complex: ‘The sovereign power in Latvia belongs to the Latvians and not to the people of Latvia.’ This slogan alluded to Latvian Jews, but also to Baltic Germans. ‘Already now our Germans, anticipating the arrival of their messiah Hitler, feel like half-masters in our house … If today the general struggle is against Jews, it does not mean that we shall not purge Latvia of the pitiful baronial detritus.’25 By the time Hitler seized power in Germany, Latvia had become infested with nationalist factions like the Pērkonkrusts that promoted radical nationalist agendas and threatened to destabilise the young Latvian republic.

  The crisis suited Ulmanis who, like his presidential neighbour in Lithuania, had grown weary of democracy. And like Smetona, the Latvian president had powerful backers. At the end of the First World War, Latvian vigilantes formed Aizsargi (defence units) to fight off incursions by Soviet troops or German Freikorps. By 1922, the Aizsargi had voluntary armed units in every township in Latvia and attracted tens of thousands of recruits. Like the German SA Brownshirts, the Aizsargi unnerved the regular Latvian army. But Ulmanis strenuously cultivated the Aizsargi leadership. In 1934, they duly proclaimed him ‘Vadonis’ – Führer. To defend his seizure of power, Ulmanis claimed that Latvia was threatened by dangerous nationalist agitators – and Celmiņš organised a few outrages to help him make his case. Once Ulmanis had tightened his grip, he had the Pērkonkrusts banned and deported Celmiņš, who, like legions of other exiled radicals, found his way to Germany, where he offered his services to the Reich. In Latvia, Pērkonkrusts radicals went underground, organising secretive cells inspired by the Iron Guard to continue Celmiņš’ crusade. For the next six years, Ulmanis resisted all efforts by the Latvian army to demobilise his Aizsargi benefactors and instead used them as a private militia.26

  It is tempting to draw a simple causal line between the Baltic radical nationalists and the explosion of mass murder after June 1941. That would be misleading. We cannot ignore the psychological impact of an event that profoundly destabilised civic relations, however fragile, in the Baltic States. On 23 August 1939 Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, and his Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav signed a ‘Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union’. This pact contained ‘secret protocols’ that divided Eastern Europe between German and Soviet ‘spheres of influence’. The protocols sealed the fate of the Baltic States by ceding them to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Stalin did not rush to take advantage of the pact. Soviet troops moved up to the borders of Latvia and Lithuania in October 1939, but full-scale occupation did not begin until 15 June 1940.27 Nevertheless by the middle of July, the Baltic presidents and their governments had been forced to resign, and newly installed puppet regimes voted for incorporation into the Soviet Union. By the end of 1940, the three former states had been digested by the Soviet Union as the ‘Pri-Baltic Military District’. Immediately after these rigged elections, Soviet NKVD units rounded up 15,000 ‘hostile elements’ and police tribunals were set up to try ‘enemies of the people’. On 21 Janu
ary 1921 General Ivan Serov, Deputy People’s Commissioner of State Security of the Soviet Union (NKVD), signed Order No 001223: ‘On the procedure of carrying out the Deportation of anti-Soviet Elements from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia’. Historian Edgars Dunsdorfs, author of The Baltic Dilemma, estimates that, between June 1940 and June 1941, the number of Baltic citizens executed, conscripted or deported after the Soviet annexation was at least 125,000 men, women and children, including heads of state and ministers and allegedly dissident members of the intelligentsia. Stalin’s definition of ‘enemies of the people’ threw a net over both individuals and economic classes (for example, large landlords and factory owners), as well as specific professions, including prostitutes and clerics. According to Order No 001223 fitting punishments included ‘confiscation of their property, arrest and incarceration in camps for a term of five to eight years, and after serving their term in camps, to settlement in remote areas of the USSR’. The great forced migrations set in motion by the Nazi Soviet agreements continued in the Baltic. At railway terminals, NKVD battalions herded many thousands into cattle wagons, often left standing for days, before they began the long journey east. Only a few of the deportees ever returned home.28

  In Latvia and Lithuania, Soviet deportations hit Jewish communities harder, proportionally, than any other ethnic or religious group. It is estimated that between 1939 and 1941 the Soviets arrested and exiled 100,000 Jews – which was about 5 per cent of the Jewish population in the annexed territories. The fact that the Soviets deported Jews in such large numbers had no impact on how other Latvians or Lithuanians perceived the ‘terror’. As in Romania, Soviet aggression was instinctively attributed to Jews or some unspecified ‘Jewish’ agency. In short, the Jews were to blame. Soviet aggression galvanised and refashioned age-old hatreds.