Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  Ever since the German blitzkrieg of May 1940, Degrelle had been strenuously wooing Hitler’s Reich. Now, at last he would fight shoulder to shoulder alongside the brutalised heroes of theWehrmacht. At the start of their campaign, Degrelle and the Walloon leaders worshipped the German High Command. But for their part, the Germans had only the vaguest idea what to do with the legion. By the time Degrelle reached the city of Pervomaisk on the southern Bug River, he and his men began to suspect that all was not well. It was late October and temperatures had started to fall. The German front line had reached a place many hundreds of miles from the Polish border and the German supply lines had become massively overstretched. After the hot, dry summer, the drenching rains of the autumn months had turned roads to mud. Ukrainians call the rainy season Rasputiza: the time without roads. Here the German invaders had already discovered Stalin’s secret weapon: the mud front.

  Before the winter freeze sets in, it is said that mud becomes ‘Tsar of the steppe’ – and in 1941 Rasputiza had come early. The famous black soil of Ukraine, which German troops had plundered and sent west on freight trains in 1918, is impregnated with oil. It has a uniquely viscous quality and resembles black glue rather than the hospitable mud of an English riverbank. Hitler and his generals had struck a very hard blow against Stalin and sent the Soviet Army reeling back towards Moscow. But Wehrmacht planners had not foreseen that this oily black sponge that seized hold of German boots, hooves, wheels and tank tracks could foil their best laid plans.

  Along the Bug, the Soviets had destroyed all the bridges. German offices ordered Degrelle and the Walloon legionaries to disembark. They stumbled down to the muddy river edge, waded waist high through the surging torrent, then had to climb for hours up through a viscous wall of sludge to board another train that waited hissing and sighing on the opposite bank. They now steamed ponderously on by night – and for the first time rifle fire crackled and bullets pinged against the side of the wagons. It was colder by the day. In the mornings, the legionaries awoke from troubled dreams to discover that the track had been encased by thick ice which they broke up and heated to make drinking water. Frequently they saw dead Russian soldiers entombed in great icy slabs. The legionaries now began to descend towards the Dneiper, now a broad blue flood nearly a mile wide. A few days later, the Walloonian legionaries had their first experience of real war.

  They made camp near the city of Dnipropetrovsk, south-east of the Ukrainian capital city of Kiev. Stalin had built giant apartment buildings here for miners who laboured in the coal fields of the Donets Basin, the Donbass. A savage battle had been fought to secure the city – and Special Task Force commandos had murdered many thousands of Ukrainian Jews here as they had in Kiev. Karl Marx Prospect had been renamed Adolf Hitler Avenue. Stalin’s new modernist blocks had become dilapidated and, Degrelle writes, were awash with human waste. The German bombardment had wrought havoc with basic services, but Degrelle concluded that this excremental horror exposed the lie of the Bolshevik dream.

  In his memoir, Degrelle says nothing about the bitter quarrels that had erupted in the legionary ranks between Rexists and other Belgian factions. These feuds steadily worsened as the rain poured down and morale slithered downwards. The divisional commander General Maximilian Fretter-Pico concluded that the Walloon battalion was ‘worthless in military terms’, but wanted to ‘avoid a row’ for political reasons.28 The operations section of the German 17th Army reported:

  Difficulties with the Walloon Battalion. On one hand, the battalion complains about unfair treatment by the German command to OKW, yet on the other extreme, reports of Group ‘von Schwedler’ (IV Corps) on behaviour of troops bordering on treason … Use of the Walloon Battalion remains restricted depending upon its cohesion [inneren Festigung].29

  After three days, the legion men finally crossed the mighty Dneiper River that slices Ukraine into two vast chunks. The advance began at midnight. The men had to cross a long wooden bridge that creaked and wobbled above a rushing torrent. Flak began to explode on every side. Huge, groaning icebergs glided slowly past in the dark, scraping loudly against the hulks of sunken vessels. On the other side of the Dneiper was the Front. Tremendous artillery barrages rumbled. Shells wailed overhead like banshees. ‘We had dreamed of dazzling battles.’ Degrelle wrote later, ‘Now we were to know the real war, the war against weariness, the war of the treacherous, sucking mire, of sickening living conditions, of endless marches, of driving rain and howling winds.’ Cold and sickness, rather than combat, wore down the Walloon ranks to just 650 men. The unsympathetic Germans further humiliated the Walloons by confiscating mortars and heavy machine guns. The Germans reassigned the legion to anti-partisan duty close to Dnipropetrovsk along the Samara River sector. Here they would discover some brutal truths about Hitler’s war.

  As the driving advance of the Wehrmacht slowed, Russian stragglers began to harass the overstretched German troops. These were the first badly organised partisan fighters. ‘Partisan’, or more correctly ‘bandit’, was, as we have seen, an elastic term that more often than not referred to Jews as well as Soviet guerrillas fighters. SS-Gruppenführer Bach-Zelewski insisted, ‘Where the partisan is, the Jew is’. As Degrelle and the Walloonian volunteers followed the Samara River east, they received orders to target a group of ‘bandits’ who had taken refuge in a grove of firs a few hundred yards from the line of advance. ‘These cunning assailants,’ Degrelle wrote, ‘had to be caught and wiped out.’ It is telling that Degrelle provides few details about what happened next. After a deluge of words, his account abruptly falls silent. No veteran of the Légion Wallonie ever confessed to taking part in anti-Jewish actions. But those ‘cunning assailants who had taken refuge in a grove of firs’ would have included women and children, and any Jews who had so far survived the German advance. Degrelle’s crusaders had become Hitler’s ‘bandit hunters’. And for Degrelle, the German ‘war of annihilation’ soon brought rich rewards as he had hoped. When the Walloons ‘cleared’ the village of Gromovayabalka, he was wounded – and promoted to sergeant. Soon he would be recommended for the Iron Cross. German reports began to take note of Degrelle’s ‘special personal bravery’. He had already witnessed the fanaticism of Waffen-SS troops and made a friend of SS General Felix Steiner. Soon he would begin lobbying Himmler to embrace the Légion Wallonie as part of the elite Waffen-SS.

  10

  The First Eastern SS Legions

  You may feel sorry for the Balts because they are a nice reliable people who are frightened of Russia, but when you work for them over here, you realize that they are at least 90% collaborationist. They all worked for the Germans.

  Charity Grant, UNRRA, 20 January 1946

  In October 1941, when German victory still seemed certain, Professor Wolfgang Abel of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology Human Heredity and Genetics led a team of race examiners (Eignungsprüfer) lent by the SS Race and Settlement Office (RuSHA) to occupied Poland to conduct studies of some of the millions of Soviet POWs held in sprawling, open-air German camps. It was a journey into hell. Historians now believe that the German army killed 2.8 million prisoners through starvation, gross neglect and execution. This barely remembered slaughter has been called the Forgotten Holocaust. Historian Karel Berkhoff argues:

  I submit that the shootings of the Red Army commissars and other Soviet POWs, along with the starvation of millions more, constituted a single process. It was a process that started in the middle of 1941 and lasted until at least the end of 1942. I propose to call it a genocidal massacre. It was a massacre because it was ‘an instance of killing of a considerable number of human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty.’1

  This genocidal massacre was also a turning point in the evolution of German racial pseudoscience.

  After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers surrendered to the Germans. Any identified as Jews or ‘Bolshevik Commissars’ were immediately executed according to Hitler’s notori
ous Commissar Order. They also killed Muslims and ‘Asiatics’ who were discovered to be circumcised and mistaken for Jews. Completely indiscriminate killing ended in September, when Nazi officials ordered that North Caucasians, Armenians and Turkic peoples, as well as Ukrainians and Belorussians, should be spared. After this spasm of killing, German troops and SS units began marching the Soviet captives to temporary camps known as ‘Dulag’ and then on to permanent ‘Stalag’ camps. During these forced marches, prisoners received minimal rations or none at all; guards often shot dead civilians who tried to supply food as the pitiful columns of starving, brutalised men passed through villages and towns. The Germans executed any stragglers who fell behind, even by a few metres. The survivors finally ended up penned inside an archipelago of vast, windswept camps enclosed by rudimentary barbed wire fences. Inside this cruel world, chaos ruled. Or seemed to: German policy was perfectly clear. In the words of Field Marshall Keitel, the purpose of this murderous internment was the ‘destruction of a Weltanschauung’ – meaning the Bolshevik world view that allegedly infested the minds of the prisoners.

  According to the ethos of the German camp system, providing more than a few ladles of watery lentil soup was theft from the German people. Starvation was camp policy. Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner (who had negotiated the ‘Einsatzgruppe agreement’ with RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich) insisted that the prisoners ‘should starve’. Provision of food, according to Keitel, was ‘wrongheaded humanity’. This German army policy reflected a radical ministerial strategy that had been formulated by SS-Obergruppenführer Herbert Backe which assumed that ‘the war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia’. As a consequence, ‘there can be no doubt that tens of millions of people will die of starvation’.2 One Ukrainian official was told bluntly: ‘The Führer has decided to exterminate Bolshevism, including the people spoiled by it.’ Mortality rates varied from camp to camp, but, taken as a whole, were shockingly high. In some camps, over 2,500 prisoners died every day. This was the realm of hunger. To live a few days longer, starving, lice-tormented prisoners would eat anything, including bark. Some resorted, inevitably, to cannibalism. Alexander Solzhenitsyn provided this account of a German camp in The Gulag Archipelago: ‘around the bonfires, beings who had once been Russian officers but had now become beastlike creatures who gnawed the bones of dead horses, who baked patties from potato rinds, who smoked manure and were all swarming with lice. Not all these two-legged creatures had died as yet.’3 There was just one way out: to be selected for service in the auxiliary police or for labour service, digging mass graves or rebuilding roads and bridges in the most gruelling conditions. Few Germans who discovered what was taking place in the camps protested – with one surprising exception. The German ‘eastern expert’ Alfred Rosenberg sent letter after letter to Keitel complaining about the murderous treatment of Soviet POWs. He recognised that Germany was squandering a reservoir of potential good will since many Soviet minorities hated Stalin. Now they were dying like flies in German camps. Rosenberg’s appeals fell on deaf ears.4

  Now in October, the prisoners who remained alive in the hellish German camps would be preyed on by German scientists led by anthropologist and SS officer Wolfgang Abel. Although the camp administrators referred to the prisoners as ‘Russians’, they came from every corner of the Soviet Empire; for Abel, the gulag was a tainted human treasure trove. The ‘Abel mission’ examined more than 42,000 prisoners from many different ethnic groups, which included Russians, Turkic peoples, Mongolians and various Caucasians. Abel’s team measured, photographed and blood tested their subjects. Then they returned to their spacious offices in Berlin. When they processed their data, Abel was astonished. Their captive subjects revealed that the ‘Slavic Untermenschen’ of the east exhibited a markedly higher level of ‘Germanic’ characteristics than he and his colleagues had anticipated. The new findings troubled Abel and other RuSHA race experts. His findings provided powerful evidence that ‘Asiatic peoples’ had, during periods of German expansion, been ‘strengthened by Germanic blood’; the colonisers, to put it another way, had enjoyed sexual congress with the colonised. History, as geneticist Steve Jones puts it, ‘is made in bed’ – or the wheat field. The troubling consequence, Abel realised, was a kind of biological theft: German blood had been stolen from its rightful bearers.5

  The findings of the Abel mission echoed Himmler’s remarks about ‘harvesting Germanic blood wherever it might be found’. Now he had scientific backing. Traditionally many German anthropologists had regarded the mixing of races or miscegenation as a weakening process. That was certainly the view of Adolf Hitler. But a number of German race experts came to more nuanced conclusions. One was Alfred Ploetz, who argued that racial mixing of peoples ‘not too far apart’ was a means of ‘increasing fitness’: he cited the Japanese as an example. Head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, Professor Eugen Fischer had come to similar conclusions when he had studied the so-called ‘Rehobother Bastards’. Fischer recommended that the offspring of unions between Aryans and Jews or Africans should be compulsorily sterilised. But in cases where the two parents had closer ethnic bonds, then their offspring might be treated more leniently. This implied that, as Himmler put it, Germanic blood lines in non-Aryan peoples were a resource that might be ‘harvested’. When the Abel mission published its conclusions, the existence of far flung Germanic blood reservoirs had scientific backing. The time had come to exploit these prized corpuscles. The Abel mission to the German gulag would soon have a decisive impact on Waffen-SS recruitment strategy. For Himmler and the SS recruitment experts the question was where to start.6

  In 2004, in the Estonian town of Lihula, Mayor Tiit Madisson dedicated a memorial statue to Estonians who had served in the Waffen-SS. The memorial depicts an Estonian in German uniform holding a machine gun; the Estonians who had enlisted in the Waffen-SS had, said Madisson, ‘chosen the lesser of two evils. They had experienced the Soviet occupation and did not want to return to it.’ Madisson, who heads the Eesti Rahvususlikliit (ER, Estonian National Union) has authored a book called The New World Order that argues, with some originality, that Hitler was brought to power by Jews and Freemasons – and that the Holocaust never happened. When the Estonian government ordered the removal of the memorial, which had become an international embarrassment, hundreds of local people protested forcing the police to use batons and pepper gas. The memorial ended up at the private Museum of the Fight for Estonian Freedom, established in Parnu by an apologist for the Estonian division called Leo Tammiksaar.7 In 2004 300 veterans of the Estonian 20th SS Division paraded through Tallinn, and in 2007, representatives of the veterans demanded the removal of a new synagogue in Tallinn claiming its existence was an ‘insult’. Until that year, Estonia had been the only country in Europe without a single synagogue. Since 2007, SS veterans have staged reunions at Siminäe, the site of clashes between Soviet and German armies in the summer of 1944.8 In 2009, the Estonian publishing house Grenader Grupp published a calendar illustrated with German propaganda images of Estonian SS men. It sold out within three days.

  According to publisher Aimur Kruuse: ‘The members of the legion tried to bring freedom to Estonia, or to give their families time to escape to the west before the Red Army returned to kill them or send them to Siberia.’9

  Freedom fighters or war criminals? Or both at the same time? In 2004, wealthy Estonian farmer Lembit Someril sponsored yet another memorial, this one dedicated to SS-Standartenführer Alfons Rebane. A bronze statue of Rebane was built on private land, but the unveiling was attended by Estonian MP and former Foreign Minister Trivimi Velliste. The ceremony was condemned by Jewish organisations but many Estonians regard SS Volunteer Rebane as a national hero. British intelligence agency MI6 once held him in high regard too: Rebane escaped to the west after the German defeat and was recruited by British intelligence. He played an important role as one of the co-ordinators of Operation Jungle, which backe
d anti-communist resistance in the Baltics. Rebane died in Germany in 1976, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, his body was taken back to Tallinn and interred with full military honours. Five hundred people attended the ceremony including the commander of Estonia’s defence forces, Lt Gen. Johannes Kert.10

  Who was Alfons Rebane? According to Soviet documents, Rebane’s career as a collaborator began when he commanded the 658th Eastern Police Battalion that took part in attacks on villages near the town of Kingisepp and the village of Kerstovo in the Leningrad region (where many of the Baltic battalions were deployed).11 German-controlled Schuma police battalions recruited in Eastern Europe took part in the mass murder of Jews and other civilians. Rebane was a practiced ‘bandit hunter’ before he joined the Waffen-SS. In the Baltic states and Ukraine, Himmler used his ‘Eastern Legions’ as vanguard troops in the German ‘war on bandits’, as well as fighting against the advancing Soviet armies. This means that men like Rebane fought both as agents of genocide and as ‘freedom fighters’. The debate provoked by the rash of Baltic memorials is a false one. The ‘freedom fighter’ and the killer of civilians may be one and the same.