In his review of the evidence, the DDR public prosecutor concluded definitively that: ‘individual Ukrainian soldiers of the ‘Nachtigall’ took part in the raids against Jews in the city centre. To sum up, it can be concluded that a Ukrainian unit of 2nd Company of the ‘Nachtigall’ battalion committed violent acts against Jews rounded up in the NKVD prison.’ One former ‘Nachtigall’ recruit, interviewed by the German investigators, admitted ‘During our march we saw victims of the Jewish-Bolshevik terror [sic] with our own eyes, which increased our hatred against Jews. And after that we shot all the Jews we could find in two villages.’33 His confession makes it unlikely that the ‘Nachtigall’ men did not join in the slaughter of Jews in L’viv, where the Germans had displayed the victims of ‘Jewish-Bolshevik terror’. Terrible pogroms engulfed many villages and towns in East Galicia. On the night of 1 July, Złoczów suffered a massive Luftwaffe bombardment – and early in the morning the German 9th Tank Division rolled into town. Hordes of young OUN members wearing blue and yellow armbands flooded into the streets, waving Ukrainian flags and embracing the German soldiers. It was reported that the ‘the Ukrainians were ecstatic … They came from the villages, dressed in Ukrainian national costumes, singing their Ukrainian songs’.34 The Germans soon discovered the heaped-up remains of individuals executed by the NKVD. As in L’viv, local Jews were rounded up, forced at gunpoint to excavate the corpses, many of them blackened and bloated, and lay them out in orderly rows. The Germans invited villagers view the bodies to identify their friends and kin. Ten Ukrainian policemen and two SS men took up positions nearby. Although the real perpetrators had long fled east, revenge was demanded. The killing erupted with terrifying speed. The SS men began machine-gunning the Jewish men who had been forced to stand next to the row of corpses. By then, units of the Waffen-SS ‘Viking’ division had arrived in Złoczów and they eagerly joined the OUN fanatics and other SS units to murder Jewish men, women and children. The frenzy raged for four days; Wehrmacht General Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, commander of the 17th Army observed the unfolding catastrophe impassively and made no effort to intervene.
On 30 June, Bandera’s henchman Yaroslav Stetsko arrived in L’viv. The son of a Greek Catholic priest, Stetsko (b. 1912) was a hyperactive and ruthless young man. He had risen to the top of the OUN thanks to his fanatical dedication; he became a member of the Homeland Executive when he was 20 and was asked to join the Provid, or Leadership, seven years later. When Melnyk and Bandera split, Stetsko sided with Bandera. He had taken a lead role setting up Bandera’s network of cells and special action groups in Soviet-occupied Ukraine.
At the end of the day on 30 June, Stetsko summoned the local OUN action group and informed them that he would shortly proclaim ‘the restoration [sic] of the Ukrainian state’. He ordered OUN men who had seized the radio station to stand by. At 8 p.m. that evening, Stetsko called hundreds of Ukrainians to a public meeting at the Prosvita Society building in the old city. Wearing an army trench coat, Stetsko arrived late, accompanied by Abwehr officer Professor Koch and another officer. When Stetsko rose to speak, his spectacles glittering in the candlelight that provided the only illumination, he astonished his audience by proclaiming, as a representative of OUN-B, the birth of a ‘sovereign and united’ Ukrainian state. Stetsko then dashed to the radio station where he read out the proclamation again. His broadcast was picked up by the OUN in Kraków and soon afterwards in Berlin. Bandera and Stetsko caught Rosenberg and Abwehr chief Canaris, who had recruited the Ukrainian battalions, on the back foot. Preoccupied with the Wehrmacht’s exhilarating eastward rush, they had missed the nationalist plot that had been hatched up under their noses.
On 3 July, Stetsko sent a letter to Hitler, it began by congratulating ‘His Excellency the Führer and Reichschancellor’, prematurely as it would turn out, for defeating ‘Muscovite Bolshevism’. Stetsko informed Hitler that the Ukrainian people had a vital role to play as Germany extended ‘the construction of a New Europe to its eastern part’. The ‘sovereign state’ of Ukraine would take its place as a ‘fully fledged, free member of the European family of nations’.35 Stetsko’s letter did not reach the Reich Chancellery until two weeks later – by then Bandera’s free Ukraine was no more.
Stetsko’s rash declaration was a bolt from the blue. The Wehrmacht was then fighting its way towards Kiev and, for a week, there was little the German authorities could do to damp down the chaos in L’viv. In Kraków, however, the General Government under Secretary Ernst Kundt and other high officials of the General Government reacted swiftly. They summoned Bandera and other OUN-B leaders to a conference. Kundt informed Bandera in the most direct terms that Germany was a conquering nation not a liberating power. The Reich was not an ally of the Ukrainians because there was no such national entity as Ukraine. Only Hitler and the Wehrmacht high command had the natural right, as conquerors, to form a new government. When Hitler described Ukraine as a ‘Garden of Eden’, it meant that he viewed it as a tabula rasa, to be cultivated by German settlers. ‘In twenty years,’ he prophesied,‘the Ukraine will already be a home for twenty million inhabitants beside the natives. In three hundred years, our country will be one of the loveliest gardens in the world. As for the natives, we’ll have to screen them carefully.’
It is of course not difficult to understand why the Ukrainians believed they would get away with proclaiming an independent Ukraine. Canaris had appeared to endorse their demands for a free Ukraine. Rosenberg’s fickle ideas about a ‘free Ukraine’ had only been mooted in secret documents. But in the Nazi ‘Chaos State’, in which foreign policy was a many-headed monster, it is not difficult to understand that Bandera believed he could seize the initiative. At that humiliating meeting in Kraków, Kundt brutally disabused him. ‘Only Adolf Hitler,’ he bellowed,‘can determine what will happen [in the Ukraine].’36 On 5 July, the Germans arrested Bandera and other members of the Ukrainian National Committee. Although the OUN-B refused to withdraw the proclamation of independence, Ukraine had gone the way of the Carpatho-Ukraine.
As Stetsko read out his proclamation on the evening of 30 June, Germans and Ukrainians had begun killing Jews in the streets of L’viv and other cities in western Ukraine. This was not a coincidence. The proclamation and pogroms had the same ideological source. On 9 July, German security police dragged Stetsko off to Berlin, but then released him under house arrest. He spent his time composing a six-page apologia, or zhyttiepys, that he had translated into German. It would be hard to exaggerate its historical significance. It reveals OUN strategy and thinking in 1941 – without benefit of post-war rationalisation. Stetsko assumed that the Germans would grant to Ukraine the same ‘independent’ status as Slovakia or Croatia. In other words, client regimes committed to radical domestic policies and aggressive handling of the ‘Jewish problem’. Stetsko did not regard the proclamation as hostile to Germany. He emphasises that Hans Koch and some German army officers had attended his meeting – and one of them had read out a ‘greeting’.
In short, while Stetsko insisted on sovereignty, he worked hard to reassure the Germans that any Ukrainian state would provide military and economic support to the Reich. His zhyttiepys conveys an even more sinister promise: ‘I fully appreciate,’ he wrote,‘the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine.’ He went on: ‘I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.’ In Berlin, the German translator removed the words ‘destruction’ and ‘extermination’ and retained only the reference to ‘German methods’.37
OUN apologists point out that at its April 1941 conference in Kraków, Andrii Melnyk denounced pogroms (while insisting that the OUN ‘combats the Jews as the prop of the Muscovite-Bolshevik regime’). They stress that Stetsko wrote his zhyttiepys under house arrest: everything he said and wrote was read by German officials. But many other OUN briefing papers express identical senti
ments. The OUN-B ‘Guidelines’, for example, published in May 1941, state that liquidation of Polish, Muscovite and Jewish activists ‘is permitted’. Jews are characterised as the prop of the Soviet regime and the NKVD ‘both individually and as a national group’. ‘We will adopt any methods’, declared another OUN leader that lead to the ‘destruction’ of the Jews. One OUN policy document states that since Jews welcomed the Russians with flowers, the Ukrainians must greet the Germans ‘with Jewish heads’.
As soon as Hitler learned of events in L’viv, he acted promptly. Following Bandera’s humiliation in Kraków, the German military authorities withdrew the ‘Nachtigall’ and ‘Roland’ battalions from the front. Some recruits would end up in an SS Schuma battalion – No 201. Hitler had Bandera and Stetsko, the architects of the July declaration of independence, arrested and deported to the Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin, where they waited out the rest of the war. A furious Hitler reminded anyone who would listen that in 1918 the perfidious Ukrainians had murdered German General Hermann von Eichhorn in Kiev. OUN treachery reinforced Hitler’s conviction that all eastern peoples had to be treated with extreme caution. He ordered that only Germans be permitted to ‘bear arms’ – an edict that SS Chief Himmler would openly disobey.
Following a conference convened at his Rastenburg military headquarters on 16 July, Hitler exacted ‘territorial’ revenge on the OUN upstarts by attaching East Galicia to the General Government. Hitler assigned the Ukrainian rump, Volhynia and ‘Right Bank Ukraine’ to the Reich Commissariat Ukraine ruled by Commissar Erich Koch – who once remarked that ‘If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot’. German strategy would gut the Ukrainian lands of their mineral and agricultural riches; its peoples would be reduced to slavery. German administrators would be imported to form a new ruling elite as mayors, farm leaders, school directors and above all militia chiefs.
Although Hitler called the east ‘our India’, he would deprive Slavs of their schools and universities, even books, so that they would not become semi-educated nuisances. He had no time for Rosenberg’s proposal that suitable Ukrainians form an anti-Bolshevik national administration or that they be encouraged to take up arms against Stalin. ‘Even when it might seem expedient to summon foreign peoples to arms, one day it would prove our absolute and irretrievable undoing.’38 According to one of Rosenberg’s officials, Otto Bräutigam, Hitler explained to Rosenberg:
If I allow those people to take part in the abolition of Bolshevism with their own blood, they will one day want me to pay for it and I won’t be free in the political setup of the European East territories anymore. If they want to help the Germans, they should go and work in the German factories so that German soldiers are free to fight at the front.39
More than a million Ukrainians lost their lives under German rule between 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and 1944, when the Soviet army evicted the German occupiers.40 The victims included Ukrainian Jews and Roma prisoners of war, and many tens of thousands deported to Germany for brutal and merciless ‘labour service’. Karel Berkhoff writes that the Reichskommissariat Ukraine resembled, on a massively enlarged scale, a German concentration camp like Dachau. Terror, public beatings and executions, abuse, humiliation: these were the basic instruments of German rule. And yet many Ukrainians when they held positions of power zealously implemented Nazi policy – and rejoiced when their Germans conquerors deported and murdered Jews.
6
Himmler’s shadow War
Explicit order by the Reichsführer-SS: All Jews must be shot. Drive the female Jews into the swamps.
Order to SS cavalry brigade, 31 July 1941
As Reinhard Heydrich’s Special Task Forces swept into Lithuania and Ukraine, unleashing ‘a Holocaust by bullets’, Heinrich Himmler prepared his own SS onslaught. This shadow war began in early August 1941, in the vast Pripet Marshes (sometimes referred to as the Pinsk Marshes) that straddled northern Ukraine and southern Belorussia – a no-man’s-land that lay slap-bang across the middle of the fast-moving German front line and defied conventional military attack. This shadow war would be fought by specialised military divisions, the SS brigades, and their objectives and tactics would shape SS strategy for the duration of the war. Many non-German recruits served in the three SS brigades, including ethnic Germans and Danes. But these little-known SS brigades possess an even greater significance. Himmler’s secret war decisively influenced the part all non-German militias would play in this ‘Crusade against Bolshevism’. They would become the vanguard troops for a new kind of combat that Himmler called ‘bandit warfare’.
The Pripet campaign was assigned to SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s golden boy, and the SS cavalry brigade ‘Florian Geyer’. Himmler instructed his favourite: ‘hold fast to the great ideas of the Führer’ with ‘uncompromising severity, drastic action’. The Pripet action heralded a decisive escalation of the war against the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ enemies of the Reich. Himmler ordered Fegelein to treat all male Jews ‘as plunderers’ (meaning they could be summarily executed) and to drown their womenfolk in the marshes. For the first time, Himmler’s orders referred to all Jews, not only men. Himmler disguised this schwere Aufgabe (grave task) as an anti-partisan special action – and until the very end of the war, the SS ‘bandit war’ against partisans would be covert genocide.
Hitler had proposed using this deception at the summit meeting that took place on 16 July. ‘This partisan warfare,’ he told the Nazi leaders gathered at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in Rastenburg, ‘gives us an advantage by enabling us to destroy everything in our path. In this vast area, peace must be imposed as quickly as possible, and to achieve this, it is necessary to execute anyone who doesn’t give us a straight look.’1 Hitler did not refer explicitly to Jews, although in anti-Semitic literature they are often slandered as ‘shifty’. In any case, the German military doctrine of Bandenbekämpfung (bandit warfare) offered the Germans both a code of conduct and a cover story. The mythic figure of the deceitful bandit (‘who doesn’t give us a straight look’) was entwined with the equally mendacious Jew, who was in turn the representative of Bolshevism. In military reports, any use of the nobler term ‘partisan’ was forbidden. Himmler took up the idea with enthusiasm. After another meeting with Hitler, this time in Berlin, he made a note: ‘Jewish question / exterminate as partisans.2 This lethal equation that conflated the figure of the Jew with the ‘Bolshevik bandit’ dominated German strategic thinking. On the Eastern Front, army general Max Schenckendorff invited his colleague SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski and Einsatzgruppe commander Arthur Nebe to design a course of lectures to ‘exchange experience’ between the army and the SS; their core maxim was ‘Where the partisan is, the Jew is, and where the Jew is, the partisan is’.3
The Pripet action had another sometimes overlooked significance. Himmler could not deploy the Special Task Forces in the marshes because they were officially attached to the German army groups which skirted the marshes, punching into the Soviet Union to north and south of this huge trackless waste. Himmler turned instead to the elite Waffen-SS cavalry brigade, the ‘Florian Geyer’, which he believed was better suited to penetrate this marshy terrain and root out ‘bandits’. Himmler designed these SS brigades to rival Heydrich’s SD Special Task Forces – and they would prove to be equally as murderous. The SS brigades, like the Special Task Forces, became the vanguard troops of the ‘Final Solution’.4
Beginning in the mid-1930s, Himmler had adroitly engineered a succession of decrees that were designed to weld together German police forces and the armed SS. Himmler thus erased the distinction between combat and security; between SS policeman and SS warrior. Both would be devoted to fighting a National Socialist war. In May 1941 Himmler put the finishing touch to this plan by forming an executive body that would, in theory, yoke together the many different roles the SS would need to take on in the occupied east. Himmler assigned to this ‘Command Staff
of the Reichsführer’ (Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS or KSRFSS) a lynchpin role coordinating mass murder by police battalions, the SS brigades and different Waffen-SS units. To head the Command Staff, Himmler appointed a career army officer, the 56-year-old Kurt Knoblauch, who had joined the SS in 1935. Himmler hoped that this hardnosed ‘professional’ would smooth co-operation with the German high command, the OKH, that had proved so troublesome during the Polish campaign.5
Throughout the spring and early summer of 1941, while SD Chief Heydrich busied himself with his Special Task Forces, Himmler used the KSRFSS to recruit vanguard SS combat units. This ‘private army’ comprised just two SS infantry brigades and an SS cavalry brigade. The brisk growth of the KSRFSS in the spring of 1941 meant that when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa at the end of June, Himmler had under his direct command elite combat units, equipped to Wehrmacht standards and ready to wage war against the ‘Jewish-Marxist enemy’. To manage the deployment of these brigades, Himmler would rely on his Higher SS and Police Leaders (HSSPF) like SS General Bach-Zelewski who would, in July 1942, become Himmler’s chief ‘bandit hunter’. After the war, Bach-Zelewski confessed that ‘the fight against partisans was used as an excuse to carry out other measures, such as the extermination of Jews and gypsies, the systematic reduction of the Slavic peoples’.6 The Pripet Marshes action enabled the rise to power of this highly proficient killer, who was often called on to lecture Wehrmacht officers about ‘The Jewish Question, with Special Regard to the Bandit Movement’.7
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