Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  Canaris did not get or even seek Hitler’s approval to begin negotiations with the Ukrainians, and he and the other Abwehr officers involved dealt exclusively with Bandera’s more radical faction, OUN-B. The German officers insisted that the agreement be kept secret and Hans Koch warned Vary that, realistically, still developing German policy in the east might well end up thwarting their political goals.16 There were risks – but ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’. It was imperative that Canaris keep the Russians in the dark, for the Non-Aggression Pact remained in force. He feared that Ribbentrop, the German architect of the pact, might betray the Abwehr plot. His protracted negotiations with Molotov had been the crowning achievement as Hitler’s Foreign Minister and he had no desire to see his great scheme unravel so swiftly. It is almost certain that Heydrich and Himmler both knew what was afoot and it is not inconceivable that Canaris intended that the two Ukrainian brigades take the same ‘self-cleansing’ role as the LAF militias recruited in Lithuania.

  The Ukrainians called the battalions ‘Druzhyny ukraïnskykh nationalistiv’ (Units of Ukrainian Nations) or DUN. The Abwehr awarded them romantic sounding code-names: Organisation Roland (for the medieval French knight who died in battle against the Saracens) and Sonderformation Nachtigall (apparently the recruits enjoyed singing). Both were disguised as ‘labour divisions’ and trained in Austria and Silesia by Abwehr officers. Canaris assigned the ‘Nachtigall’ recruits to the ‘z.b. V800 Brandenburg’ – Special Task Forces or K troops, first deployed in Poland. Many ‘Brandenburg’ officers were Sudeten Germans or Polish Volksdeutsche. At the end of the Polish campaign, Canaris reformed the K troops as 1st Training Company (German company for special missions) based in Brandenburg an der Havel – hence ‘Brandenburgers’. The ‘Brandenburg’ resembled a German foreign legion or the British SAS and has acquired a spuriously romantic post-war reputation. Canaris recruited lower ranks from the Baltic, Romania, the South Tyrol, Africa, Palestine and even Australia.‘Brandenburg’ commander Theodor von Hippel had fought with General Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa during the First World War. In 1914, the Germans had recruited tens of thousands of African mercenaries known as ‘Askaris’ (Arabic for soldier) – a term that would now be applied to Ukrainian and other Eastern European recruits. Hippel boasted that the ‘Brandenburgs’ ‘could snatch the devil from hell’.17

  Thousands of Ukrainian exiles had washed up in Vienna. It was in the old capital of the Austrian Empire that Vary found his ‘Roland’ recruits. Abwehr officers then transferred recruits to Saubersdorf in Austria for training. In Kraków, Roman Shukhevych, head of Bandera’s military section, rounded up some 300 Ukrainians for training at Neuhammer in Silesia. According to the Aufgaben für Ukrainer-Organisationen, the task of the two battalions was to aid in establishing ‘the marching security for German troops on grounds not occupied by the German military, especially by disarming Russians’.18 The Ukrainians had been encouraged to believe that if they fought well, the two battalions might be amalgamated. The Abwehr issued the ‘Roland’ men with Czech uniforms that resembled those worn by Ukrainian soldiers in 1918. The ‘Nachtigall’ received Wehrmacht feldgrau uniforms with a blue and yellow shoulder badge. Vary, when he negotiated with the Wehrmacht, had insisted that Ukrainians recruits would swear allegiance not to Hitler, but to Ukraine and the OUN. Canaris had secretly recognised Ukrainian autonomy, in the service of the Reich.

  Although Canaris’ plans remained secret, Gottlob Berger, Himmler’s opportunist recruitment chief, had also spotted an opening. By the end of April 1941 Berger had recruited ethnic Germans, Flemish, Dutch, Danish and Norwegian volunteers. Why not, he thought, grab pro-German Ukrainians too? On 28 April 1941 he wrote to Himmler proposing that a few hundred Ukrainian émigrés who spoke both German and Ukrainian might be recruited by the Waffen-SS. Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s secretary, replied with a terse note a week later: ‘The Reichsführer is not willing at this stage to take any action regarding the combat training of these men.’19 Himmler’s response has been interpreted to imply that he was repelled by the idea of recruiting ‘Slavic sub humans’. This is mistaken. Himmler was a keen student of history so it can hardly have escaped his attention that Galicia had been an Austrian Kronland and that some ‘Ruthenians’ must therefore have acquired an infusion of Nordic blood. Germans called the principal Galician city Lemberg. Modern-day L’viv was popularly known as ‘Little Vienna of the East’ and was home to more than 50,000 proud German language speakers. We can be certain that Himmler did not turn down Berger’s proposal on racial grounds. But like Rosenberg, he was suspicious of the OUN – above all, Bandera’s radical wing, though he sympathised with its rabid chauvinism. Brandt’s qualification ‘at this stage’ is frequently overlooked. Less than two years after he rejected Berger’s proposal in 1941, Himmler would authorise an SS recruitment drive in Galicia.

  Far from playing the part of passive collaborators, the leadership of OUN-B harassed the German government throughout the period leading up to 22 June with memoranda that insisted on the primacy of Ukrainian interests and warned of the consequences if these were ignored.20 Himmler’s priorities had to do with police operations and pacification; as Heydrich made clear in a letter to the HSSPF, the extermination of ‘undesirable’ elements had to be pursued with ‘ruthless vigour’.21 In central and northern Ukraine, this would fall to Einsatzgruppe C. Like the commanders of Einsatzgruppe A in the Baltic, the SD commanders assigned to Ukraine had received Heydrich’s instructions to incite local pogroms and to use local activists ‘to attain our goals’. It was on this point that German and Ukrainian interests converged. At an OUN gathering in Kraków, Bandera proposed:

  The Jews in the USSR constitute the most faithful support of the ruling Bolshevik regime, and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine. The Muscovite-Bolshevik government exploits the anti-Jewish sentiments of the Ukrainian masses to divert their attention from the true cause of their misfortune and channel them in time of frustration into pogroms on Jews. The OUN combats the Jews as the prop of the Musovite-Bolshevik regime and simultaneously it renders the masses conscious of the fact that the principal foe is Moscow.22

  Then two weeks before the scheduled date for the invasion of the Soviet Union, Bandera’s ‘moderate’ rival Melnyk sent a telegram to Hitler, asserting that he alone could best represent German interests in Ukraine. Like so many other nationalist supplicants who banged on the door of Hitler’s Reichs Chancellery, Melnyk received no reply. On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, he made a second appeal demanding to march shoulder to shoulder with the Wehrmacht, to build a new Europe ‘free of Jews, Bolsheviks and plutocrats’.23 An opportunity to begin fulfilling that rabid dream would come soon enough. On 18 June, its training completed, the ‘Nachtigall’ battalion crossed the territory of the General Government and arrived in Przemyśl, which, before the German invasion, was split between the Reich and the Soviet Union by the San River, which flowed through the middle of the city. That summer, the waters ran low and sluggish between muddy banks that glittered in the mid-summer sunlight.

  On the night of 22 June, the Ukrainians crossed the San into Soviet territory, meeting no opposition, and began marching towards L’viv. The ‘Nachtigall’ was commanded by OUN leader Roman Shukhevych – but his orders came from German Abwehr Oberleutnant Dr Hanz-Albrecht Herzner Oberländer. Shukhevych said later that he felt ‘like an ordinary recruit’ not a commander-in-chief. In the ‘Nachtigall’s’ wake came Pochidne hrupy (in German Marschketten, marching groups) – paramilitary units that Bandera had recruited from fanatical young nationalists to take over police, press and administrative tasks in ‘liberated Ukraine’. Also moving fast in the same direction were two Einsatzgruppe C commandos. Bandera had every reason to be confident that within days he would be acting president of a sovereign Ukrainian state, albeit confined to Galicia. The 330 Ukrainian Abwehr recruits pounding their way towards L’viv, desperate to stay ahead of German armies bearing down behind, car
ried a heavy burden of expectation.

  In the early morning of 22 June, dense waves of Luftwaffe bombers and Stuka dive bombers throbbed in the cloudless skies above the western Ukraine. German intelligence had reported that cities like L’viv and Ternopol had been fortified and might hold up the German advance. The Luftwaffe attack was designed to soften them up.24 The thunderous sound of the German attack struck terror into the hearts of the 160,000 Jews who lived in L’viv, many of them refugees from occupied Poland. Inside the city, the Soviet authorities were taken by surprise and began to organise evacuation. They had grossly inadequate resources, and German bombing raids disrupted road and rail links. The Russians prioritised Communist Party officials and technical experts. In order to make it easier for Russians and Poles to escape, the panic-stricken Soviet authorities issued orders forbidding Jews to leave their homes. Any Jewish refugees who fled the city were turned back. The Jewish Council estimated that Russian obstruction trapped 150,000 Jews in L’viv as the German forces and their Ukrainian battalions bore down from the west.

  As the ‘Nachtigall’ crossed the Soviet border, Bandera had sent couriers ahead armed with flyers: ‘Destroy the enemy, people! Know this! Moscow, Poland, the Hungarians, the Jews – these are your enemies – destroy them.’ According to Geheime Feldpolizei (Secret Military Police) reports, their Ukrainian interpreters accepted without question that ‘every Jew must be killed’. Another OUN-B leader informed Bandera that ‘We are setting up a militia that will help remove the Jews’.25 As the German front line rolled east, a ‘pogrom mood’ raced like bushfire through the villages and cities of east Galicia. And thanks to Stalin and his NKVD apparatchiks, this conflagration would become a furnace. For, as they fled, the Russians left in their wake the gruesome relics of political terror.

  During the Soviet occupation, the NKVD had crammed the prisons of east Galicia, including Brygidki and Zolochiv in L’viv, with Jews, Poles and Ukrainians– all accused of being ‘enemies of the people’ or saboteurs. On 24 June, as fast-moving German forces swung round to encircle Major-General Vlasov’s 4th Mechanised Corps which had been hastily assigned to defend this section of front, Lavrenti Beria, head of the Soviet secret service, sent instructions to his regional chiefs to shoot all ‘political prisoners’: those arrested for ‘counter revolutionary activities’, economic and political sabotage and ‘anti-Soviet activities’. With some justification, Stalin feared that a German-sponsored ‘Fifth Column’ was about to wreak havoc in the western Ukraine. Not every prisoner in the Soviet prisons was an OUN activist by any means; many were Jews. But Bandera’s plan was indeed to launch uprisings against the Soviet oppressor with German backing and to aid German forces.26 As soon as they received Beria’s orders, NKVD men rushed to murder thousands of prisoners, shooting some, bludgeoning others with hammers or throwing hand grenades into cells. The dead piled up; a handful saved themselves by smearing their faces with blood and hiding beneath their dead comrades. The Russians buried some of their victims but piled many others in the prison yard. Among them was the ‘Nachtigall’ commander Roman Shukhevych’s brother Yuri. In Ukraine, the summer of 1941 was hot; Brygidki became a stinking charnel house.

  In 1975, American lawyer Alfred-Maurice de Zayas stumbled on the unexamined records of the WUSt ‘Wehrmacht Untersuchungsstelle’ (War Crimes Bureau), a specialised department of the OKH which investigated breaches of the law and customs of war by the Allies. In 1941, WUSt reported on massacres in L’viv and other locations in the east by agents of the NKVD.27 De Zayas’ Wehrmacht ‘sources’ are by definition grossly biased – and, writing in 2000, he refers to the ‘Jewish dominated NKVD’. This anti-Semitic slander, which according to de Zayas explains the ferocity of the L’viv pogrom, profoundly compromises the value of his research. His findings have predictably been exploited by anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers.28 Nevertheless, many of the eyewitness statements collected by WUSt agents provide an unadorned account of the horrors encountered in the NKVD prisons:

  We discovered … in the first four cellars a considerable number of bodies, the upper layer being relatively fresh and the lower layers in the pile already in advanced decomposition. In the fourth cellar the bodies were covered by a thin layer of sand. In the first courtyard we found several stretchers stained with blood. On one of the stretchers I saw the body of a male who had been killed by a bullet through the back of the head … I ordered that the cellars should be immediately cleared, and in the course of the next three days 423 corpses were brought out to the courtyard for identification. Among the bodies there were young boys aged 10, 12, and 14 and young women aged 18, 20, and 22, besides old men and women.

  ‘The NKVD men rushed from cell to cell and shot down the detainees … then I heard “Come quickly to the courtyard, the cars are ready to go”.’

  During the night of 29 June the last NKVD detachments fled L’viv, harassed by fanatical OUN-B insurgents. It need hardly be pointed out that the Jewish citizens of L’viv bore no responsibility for these hideous atrocities.

  At 4.30 the following morning, the ‘Nachtigall’ battalion marched singing into L’viv and, following orders, seized strategic sites, including the radio station on Vysoky Hill in the centre of the city. The ‘Brandenburg’ regiment and other German 1st Mountain Division and the 49th Army Corps arrived soon afterwards. It did not take long for the Germans to find in Brygidky prison the remains of the NKVD prisoners. One German eyewitness, cited by de Zayas, describes ‘bringing out’ 423 corpses from Brygidky and hundreds more from the former OGPU Samarstinov prison. Many of the bodies had badly decomposed and, without proper masks or oxygen, the stench was unspeakable. As the German ‘Wochenschau newsreel’ (filmed by an army cameraman) shows, the German troops then rounded up Jews and forced them to continue excavating the bodies and bringing corpses loaded on wagons into the city.29 It was the typical German trick of guilt by association – a theatrical sleight of hand that compelled Jews to display and stand beside the bloated and mutilated corpses brought from the charnel houses of the prisons. It was a crude but horribly effective way to pin blame on every Jew in L’viv for the crimes of the NKVD. At some point, Einsatzgruppe C units drove into L’viv led by SS-Brigadeführer Dr Otto Rasch. They later reported that ‘the Russians, before withdrawing, shot 3000 inhabitants. The corpses piled up and buried at the GPU prisons are dreadfully mutilated. The population is greatly excited: 1000 Jews have already been driven together.’ In other words, righteous retribution would now be meted out to any Jew who fell into the hands of the vengeful people of L’viv. There was talk that OUN activists and relatives of men in the ‘Nachtigall’ battalion had also been murdered. The Germans exhibited photographs of the mutilated dead in shop windows and attached descriptions that blamed their murder on Jews.

  The myth that all Bolsheviks were Jews, Golczewski points out, was thus turned on its head: all Jews were Bolsheviks, murderous agents of Moscow. According to the Einsatzgruppe report, Rasch ‘formed a local Ukrainian militia’ (presumably he co-opted Bandera’s men), and between 30 June and 3 July, the Germans and Ukrainians rampaged through L’viv. They beat Jews to death or dragged them into Brygidki prison to remove more bodies and wash down the walls and floors. As soon as the ‘purification of the prisons’ had been at least partially completed, the Ukrainians locked Jews inside. Philip Friedman, who survived the Ukrainian genocide, remembered: ‘the newly organized Ukrainian militia began to roam through Jewish houses to remove men – and frequently women also … Eyewitnesses relate that the courtyard and walls of the Brigidky prison were spattered with flesh blood up to the second floor and with human brains.’ Dr Rasch reported to RSHA in Berlin that ‘the Ukrainian population took praiseworthy action against the Jews’, not only in L’viv but further east in Dobromil, Tarnopol and Sambor. One OUN-B man made his intentions plain: ‘We don’t want the Polish and Jewish landowners and bankers to return to Ukraine. Death to the “Moskales” [Muscovites], the Jews and other enemies of the Ukraine.’30
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br />   Some Ukrainian historians continue to deny that the ‘Nachtigall’ battalion took part in the L’viv pogrom, or to defend the L’viv attacks as a ‘reaction’ to the discovery Soviet atrocities. At the end of the war, a representative of the OUN issued a statement:

  While withdrawing … the Bolsheviks killed 383 citizens. Mainly Jews took part in the extermination. The reaction of the population [my italics] after the flight of the Reds was very firm. All Jews were slaughtered [my italics] in the city and after the arrival of the Germans the people refused to bury their bodies.31

  The statement acknowledges that Ukrainians accepted German propaganda that the atrocities had been carried out ‘mainly by Jews’. The statement further accepts that ‘all Jews were slaughtered’ and that ‘the population’ took ‘firm action’. ‘The population’ is a very vague term indeed. Did the Abwehr recruits join in the slaughter? This has proved a tricky question to resolve because witness statements, unreliable at the best of times, do not clearly identify who took part in the slaughter, except as Ukrainians wearing some kind uniform. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the Abwehr issued the ‘Nachtigall’ recruits with German feldgrau uniforms. The ‘Roland’ men, who wore old Czech uniforms, would have been easier to identify.

  Evidence has recently come to light that conclusively implicates the ‘Nachtigall’ men and has solved many of the puzzles associated with the L’viv pogrom. In the mid-1950s, the East German Die Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes – Bund der Antifaschistinnen und Antifaschisten (VVN-BdA e.V. or simply VVN) began to investigate the wartime activities of Dr Theodor Oberländer, who had by then become a prominent political figure in the West German Adenauer government. The VVN investigation and trial was, to be sure, politically motivated but it does not necessarily follow that the evidence it gathered has no historical import. It will be recalled that Oberländer had played a leading part in negotiations with OUN-B representatives concerning the formation of a Ukrainian battalion and was then appointed an ‘advising officer’ to the ‘Nachtigall’. In 1960, the East German court sentenced Oberländer to life imprisonment in absentia; the sentence was rescinded after German unification in 1993.32