He went on: ‘One with a Star of David died tonight, and another one walked past the barracks this morning with a bloody and bruised face. The Sturmmann says he will kill them all before New Year.’
Read that passage again. It is appropriate to beat Jews – but it is not right to expose them to sub-zero temperatures wearing inadequate clothing. Punishment is acceptable, but negligence – the bare legs – is wrong. Providing inadequate clothing is not worthy of SS men. Harald, who ‘doesn’t like Jews’, appears to at least entertain the idea that the German officer can be excused because he said his parents had been ‘killed by Jews’; Harald seems to believe this outlandish claim. He reports from a world in which bruised, beaten and frozen Jews pass by his barracks – their fate the whim of a German officer who will ‘kill them all before the New Year’.
Harald was not himself a beater of Jews. But in October 1943, he happened to be on leave in Copenhagen. By then Denmark was under German direct rule and its government no longer able to protect Danish Jews. Himmler insisted that the ‘Final Solution’ be fully applied, overriding the feeble objections of Ribbentrop, and ordered the new Reich Plenipotentiary Karl Werner Best to get on with job. A deportation order was issued to begin on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year at the beginning of October. Himmler dispatched Rolf Gunther, who was attached to Adolf Eichmann’s office, to Copenhagen with a special commando of SS officers. The Germans had lists of addresses where Danish Jews lived, but they needed assistance from the Danish police and SS men to find them. Many Danish police officers refused to assist the Germans. But SS volunteer Harald had no such scruples:
My team did not have any winnings [meaning arresting Jews]. Out of 4 teams in the car, one team had a winning with 2 old Jewish madams … The Jews were allowed to bring 2 blankets, food for 3–4 days along with the valuables they could carry in one suitcase. It was not a job that interested me, but an order has to be obeyed as long as you are in uniform. According to rumours the Jews had sailed to Danzig.
The Germans and their collaborators arrested about 450 Danish Jews, most of whom were transported to Theresienstadt concentration camp. Three days after the round-up, on 5 November, Harald reports: ‘Enjoyable days at home.’
His final entry reads: ‘[But] now everything is over with, and I am once again a free man. And I don’t regret the two and half years I have spent in the SS. I have seen and experienced much during this time.’Then he writes: ‘and, first and foremost, I got away with it, to date.’
After this, Harald stopped writing his diary, but he remained in German service working as a ‘sabotage guard’ at the weapons factory Nordværk, which manufactured parts for German fighter planes. On 5 May 1945 around 8 p.m., Harald surrendered to Danish resistance fighters. Earlier that day they had visited his home looking for him. In September 1945 a Danish court sentenced Harald to five years in prison for his wartime service in the SS, and his later employment by the German armaments company. In August 1947 he was released on parole and ‘Harald’ vanished from the historical record. He is unlikely to be still alive.
There are Frikorps Danmark veterans still living in Copenhagen. One man was prepared to discuss his experience. Kaj (his real name has been witheld) is 85 – and from his neighbours’ point of view is just a rather talkative old man with a fondness for beer. He used to work for the Tüborg Company. His neat and tidy, shared ownership flat is typical accommodation for a Danish pensioner. There is a lot of ageing furniture, cushions strewn everywhere and the accumulated matter of a lifetime. Kaj likes listening to very loud music – mainly German marching songs and Danish folk music. He was happily married for twenty years but, he confesses, left his wife for another woman. His second partner died of cancer years ago, but Kaj only keeps a picture of his first wife. He says he ‘made a mistake’. There were no children. But Kaj knows he does have children, three of them, including twins, who live somewhere in Germany. They were the outcome of casual liaisons with nurses in German hospitals; he has never made any effort to locate his offspring. He shows no emotion at all when he talks about this lost German family. The women he recalls only with cynicism. Kaj is not very likeable.
There is another room here, usually locked. Inside is a silent and gloomy shrine. Kaj unlocks the door. Inside, he points out photographs: there he is, arm in arm, smiling, with other Danish SS volunteers. He has only copies of his German medals – he sold the originals to a Danish collector. Most remarkable though is a photograph of a painting of Kaj in full SS uniform commissioned by a German officer. The painting itself no longer exists; it must have resembled one of those heroic propaganda images of noble SS volunteers marching against the Bolshevik foe. Kaj has collected a huge library of books about Hitler and the Third Reich, many in German, which Kaj says he reads. There is a recent picture of Kaj with some Hell’s Angels. Another photograph shows him and a few friends standing in front of a controversial memorial that was built to commemorate the Estonian SS division. Kaj is angry that Denmark refuses to do the same service for Danish SS veterans. As he settles down in his sitting room, Kaj rants about the new ‘Holocaust Memorial’ in Berlin, designed by Jewish-American architect Peter Eisenmann. It is very ugly, Kaj declares – although he says he has never travelled to Berlin. If he was able to make a visit, he declares that he would urinate on the big grey blocks. When Kaj talks about the Nazi genocide, he claims to feel sorry for the Jews – although he personally ‘disliked them’. His one regret, it seems, is that he ‘played for the wrong side’.
Kaj (b. 1922) like Harald was born into a working-class family – one of nine children. He was not cherished. He fled home when he was barely a teenager and, failing to get an apprenticeship, ran away to sea. He served on transatlantic merchant ships and still has ‘USA’ tattooed on his arm. He saw his family on rare occasions: ‘No, we didn’t speak much with one another.’33 It was only much later that he had any contact: ‘They were notified when I was wounded, when I was in the hospital … that was in ’41.’
Men find different ways of coping with abandonment. Many deny pain and find solace in ‘hard’ occupations that provide the company of other equally hard men. They acquire a kind of internal crust – protective yet brittle. The job becomes the family. Comrades become brothers. Such men wait for wars. And for Kaj, it came soon enough. In 1939, he got a job on a ship that plied the North Sea importing coal to Poland. In 1940, the German navy blockaded Danish ports and Kaj found himself out of work. After an idle summer, Kaj and his friends heard that Danes could get work in Germany: ‘One could go to Germany to work … they advertised with that, and then with some friends, we signed up. And then we travelled to Germany, we travelled with the first team that ever was sent to Germany.’ By the autumn, Kaj had found a job in Hamburg. He claims he took little interest in German life; he had heard only about the 1936 Olympics and then the invasion of Poland: ‘I didn’t know anything. I knew that there was a guy called Hitler. But otherwise, I didn’t have a clue about National Socialism.’
Kaj says that he was just not interested. In Hamburg, he says people shouted ‘Heil Hitler’ and he shouted back ‘Heil – what was his name again?’ This is one of Kaj’s many jokes – he had what might, generously, be described as a special sense of humour. One day, Kaj’s friends noticed posters urging young men to join the Waffen-SS. He appears to have volunteered almost by accident – thanks to his friend Hansen, who could speak German:
And we are going out of course, and I am with one who – he could speak perfect German – and then he sees that they are looking for people for the Waffen SS. Then we go in there [the recruiting office]. And he knew German, I didn’t know a word. Every time they asked something I just said ‘ehmm’. But then we went … we were told to go to the changing room, undress and come back in again. Then we were brought in front of different doctors right, all the way around just like the [tests] … And then we were approved.
Seven decades after the war, it appears to be very important for Kaj to make us bel
ieve he did it for the adventure: ‘It was adventure – all that shit.’
Did he know much about the SS? What it stood for? ‘No no no no. I didn’t have any idea of what it was. I thought it said 44, when it actually said SS.’
I am not inclined to believe him. Memory is fallible but many SS veterans peddle this kind of front story. In any case, Kaj and his German-speaking friend began their SS careers at the SS ‘Westland’ barracks in Langenhorn, but were soon transferred to Klagenfurt in Austria. SS training was tough even for someone who had served on Atlantic cargo ships; Kaj uses a rather colourful phrase to describe the rigours of SS training: ‘[my] tongue hung out like a red tie.’ He had the impression that the German officers regarded him as an equal, but that is almost certainly because his German was so poor. For the same reason, he cannot recall any ideological training; there was, he says, ‘no propaganda’. Kaj disliked men like Harald, DNSAP members who got privileged treatment, and, he says, even sent on leave whenever their division was sent to the front line. Kaj ended up on the Eastern Front:
I can remember we were lying in a forest when the Russian artillery came down on us. The entire forest was bombarded within an hour. … God damn it many fell there. They didn’t just fall, there were legs and heads and arms that had been ripped of … Bloody hell, there were things flying through the air. It was bloody tough.
Interviewing Kaj is not a comfortable experience. He wants us to believe that he has no regrets – and that he volunteered only for the adventure. Research carried out immediately after the war into the motivations of SS volunteers from the Netherlands implies that Kaj may be telling a partial truth. Dutch psychologist A.F.G. van Hoesel investigated 450 Dutch volunteers and uncovered a significant diversity of motivation.34 In the case of the Danish volunteers, one of the Frikorps commanders carried out his own study. He came up with the following estimate:
A. Professional military interest 2–5%
B. War-adventurer 5–10%
C. Dissatisfied with home life 3–5%
D. Anticommunist beliefs 20–25%
E. Conservative or nationalist beliefs 10–15%
F. Favoured new European political order 15–20%
G. National-Socialist family or member 30–35%35
These figures are striking. Ideology motivated at least a quarter of the Dutch volunteers – and we should bear in mind that ‘anti-communism’ implied anti-Jewish sentiments. Kaj certainly fits within A, B or C; but was he immune to more abstract reasoning? He would like us to think that. To be sure, he was a poorly educated young man. Put him in a time machine and he might be a neo-Nazi in Dresden, a nightclub bouncer in Solihull or a US troop in Baghdad. Politics, the calamitous events of the 1930s, the rise of the dictators – they appear to have passed him by. Kaj had almost certainly heard about the Berlin Olympics because they were reported on the sports pages.
But Kaj remains an actor in history. I am not convinced that he was the simpleminded thrill-seeker he plays. For somehow – and we may never know how and why – Kaj grasped the rudiments of SS doctrine. He claims that he knew nothing about the Holocaust. He denies all knowledge of the famous Danish rescue of the Jews. But pushed to say more, he raises his voice:
Kaj: Not a God damned thing! We first found out about it [the rescue] once we came home, about the Danish Jews who had been taken, and many other places too. But there are some who forget to tell how the Jews were, and how they still are. You can see in Europe today, they direct the whole thing.
Question: In America they have a lot of power?
K: Yes, and also in Germany and in Denmark. Many people don’t know that.
[Kaj refers again to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.]
K: It is completely wrong that it is down there now. The big memorial they have built in Berlin for the Jews – it’s completely wrong.
Q: It’s completely wrong?
K: Yes, it’s completely wrong. Every time I pass it down there [sic] I say ‘I just have to take a piss on those rocks’ because it is completely wrong that they have build something like that. We couldn’t even raise a stone for our fallen comrades at home …
Q: So you do know Berlin?
K: Oh sure …
Danish police arrested Kaj in 1945 and he served a few years in prison. How does he feel today about volunteering? ‘I feel bloody fine about it.’
The majority of the Danish volunteers like Harald and Kaj fought on the Eastern Front and some served in the German concentration camps. The letters and diaries written by the Danish volunteers provide evidence that the recruits received the same ideological training as German recruits, mainly at the Bad Tölz Junkerschule in Bavaria, which had close connections with the concentration camp at Dachau. Camp inmates lived in cells constructed beneath the school and carried out maintenance and other menial tasks. In the Junkerschulen, SS officers rammed home the cult values of the SS and made sure the new recruits understood that their job was to master and then destroy the Untermenschen they would combat in the east. Bayonet practice was carried out using ‘Jewish’ caricatures. Some Danes joined the Death’s Head SS units which were headquartered in German camps. Not only that, but Himmler authorised a number of lethal medical experiments that were carried out at Auschwitz and Buchenwald by Danish doctors.36
The Danish rescue of 1943, a central plank in Goldhagen’s thesis about German ‘exceptionalism’, is just one thread in a more complex weave. Hatred of Jews is a recurrent theme in many of the service diaries and letters collected by Christensen and his colleagues. The Danish SS volunteers accepted without question that the campaign in Russia would be fought against a ‘Jewish enemy’. Here is von Schalburg again, writing to his wife, in August 1941: ‘The Jewish rule [in the USSR] was far greater than even I believed.’ The Russians, Schalburg complains, were ‘too damned passive’. If the Jews had been ‘cut down’, ‘many lives would have been saved’; he concludes: ‘I think that will come.’37 His poisonous sentiments were echoed by lower ranks: ‘Yes we’ll eradicate these Jews from the surface of the earth, because while there are Jews there is also war. Now I can imagine that some who would say that the Jews are humans too. My answer would be that rats are also animals.’38
These remarkable testimonies by Danish SS volunteers underline the value of documentary evidence, some recorded without benefit of hindsight. The war ended seven decades ago, and the men and women who collaborated with the Third Reich and remain alive have had plenty of time to prepare cases for the defence. In 1945, no one talked about the Holocaust and many of those who served in SS police battalions and Waffen-SS units slipped through the judicial net and went unpunished. Since the emergence of a special historiography devoted to the German destruction of European Jewry, many former collaborators have trimmed their personal stories to suit new times. Many who served the Reich have refashioned themselves as prescient anti-communists. They fought the Bolsheviks – and should surely be judged now in the light of what historians have revealed about crimes of the Soviet Union. Whatever these veterans testify now must be treated with caution; we must read between the lines.
At the end of 2007, I flew to Norway to interview a veteran of the SS ‘Norske’ Legion, Bjørn Østring (b. 1917). Mr Østring is prepared to talk openly about his service in the SS – in fact, he relishes publicity. He and his supporters have been campaigning for the Norwegian government to recognise his former comrades who died fighting on the Leningrad front as national heroes. Østring runs the Kaprolat Committee to identify and return the remains of Norwegian soldiers that still lie in the hills of Russian Karelia using DNA samples from their living relatives. Mr Østring (who is married to the daughter of Gerhard von Mende, who served in Alfred Rosenberg’s wartime Ostministerium) is an alert nonagenarian who lives very comfortably in an Oslo suburb. But make no mistake – Bjørn Østring is a propagandist. He wants us to believe that the Norwegian SS volunteers were ‘soldiers like any other’. Early in our interview, both the Østrings made it very clear ho
w much they resent the new Oslo Holocaust study centre opened in 2006; the researchers there want Østring to hand over his records of Norwegians who served in the SS. The Østrings have refused to provide any assistance.
The new Centre for the Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities is based in the Villa Grande on the Bygdøy – a peninsula on the western side of Oslo. For most Norwegians, the villa is a shameful reminder of the German occupation. It was the wartime residence of Vidkun Quisling, who founded the Norwegian Nasjonal Samling Party and was appointed the puppet ruler of occupied Norway. During the war, Mr Østring knew the building, then called ‘Gimle’ after a character in Norse mythology, well: he spent a few years serving in Quisling’s personal bodyguard, the Føregarden. Østring is a staunch admirer of Quisling, and even suggests that I photograph him standing next to a portrait of his hero.
Mr Østring and his collaborators insist that Norwegians heroically served the cause of anti-communism on the Leningrad front. But the 900-day siege of Leningrad, commemorated as the ‘Blokada’, was an act of military barbarism and fitted with German genocidal plans in the east. Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to ‘erase the city from the face of the Earth’.39 When I meet the Østrings, they are preoccupied with a recent news story: ‘Someone’, he tells me, has recalled that during the war the Østrings took over an apartment in Dunkers Street that was owned and formerly occupied by the family of Håkon Laksov, a lawyer deported to Auschwitz in 1942.40 In fact, many Norwegians who had volunteered to serve in the Waffen-SS received property as a reward for services rendered left empty by deported Norwegian Jews. Østring denies that he knew anything about the former occupants of his new home, but the Oslo National Archives show that he was himself active in the ‘Liquidation Board’ set up under the Quisling regime to distribute Jewish property and chattels to Aryan Norwegians. It was, in short, state-sanctioned looting.
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