Even Latvians or Estonians who are embarrassed by the old veterans who march through their streets every year vehemently deny that the Baltic SS legions had any involvement with German war crimes. The web site of the Latvian government devotes a great deal of bandwidth to refuting such allegations. Their case appears to be buttressed by one incontrovertible and terrible fact: in the Baltic, the Germans and their native collaborators like the Arājs Commando and scores of other Schuma battalions did their work with pitiless diligence. By the end of 1941, all but a handful of Estonian Jews had perished: only 50,000 remained alive in Latvia and Lithuania, most of them quarantined inside ghettoes. By mid-1942, when Himmler authorised the formation of the first eastern SS division, the majority of Baltic Jews had been murdered. How then, the apologists argue, could the SS legions, which were formed after this period, have any connection to the Holocaust? In The Holocaust in Latvia, Andrew Ezergailis concludes that ‘The Latvian Legion is outside the scope of this study [of the Latvian Holocaust]’. He goes on: ‘no single event has ever been adduced associating the [‘Latvian Legion’] with atrocities against civilians.’
Ezergailis’ account of the German occupation is in many respects exemplary. He provides a wealth of detail about Latvians, such as Viktors Ārajs, who collaborated with the German occupiers and refuses to pull punches. But his argument that the formation of the Latvian SS divisions in 1943 had no connection with the events of 1941–42 is simply wrong. The different strategies of SS recruitment in occupied territories reflected the changing needs of Himmler and the SS in the occupied Soviet Union. During the first so-called ‘wild’ genocide, or the ‘Holocaust by bullets’, the SS recruited mobile Schuma police battalions, such as the Arājs Commando, that carried out ‘special actions’ close to where their victims resided. In 1942, the Germans began systematically transporting Jews to specialised extermination centres: the Reinhardt camps in the General Government and Auschwitz-Birkenau. To facilitate this new strategy, the SS began recruiting guard units known as ‘Trawniki men’– mainly Ukrainians like Ivan Mykolayovych Demyanyuk, now better known as John Demjanjuk, but also Latvians and Estonians. At the same time, from the summer of 1942, Himmler simultaneously authorised recruitment of Waffen-SS non-German combat divisions in occupied Eastern Europe. Many of these Waffen-SS recruits had previously served in the Schuma units and now took part in so-called anti-bandit operations, which in many cases served to liquidate any Jews who had somehow survived the ‘Holocaust by bullets’. Since the recruitment of Schuma battalions and foreign Waffen-SS legions or divisions formed part of the same evolving genocidal strategy, it is quite wrong to argue, as Ezergailis and others have, that the combat divisions have no connection with the Holocaust.
Take the case of Latvian Juris Šumskis, cited by Ezergailis as a typical ‘Latvian Legion’ recruit. Šumskis was a young man (b. 1925) with a mediocre education who joined the infamous Arājs Commando. He said later that a friend had told him that pay and service conditions were good. Many of the first recruits who joined Arājs in the summer of 1941 were ideologically driven students and intellectuals. Šumskis, who volunteered on 29 April 1942, was typical of later batches. Few of these men had been to university and when questioned after the war offered quite banal reasons for their decision. As part of his training, which was conducted under German supervision,Šumskis was shown how to use light weapons and had ‘political lessons’ four or five times a week. That meant he was introduced to the doctrine of National Socialism and the evils of Bolshevism which had no doubt been merely instinctual before he joined up. Šumskis was not considered well educated enough to be sent to the SD school at Fürstenberg in Germany. But even before he had completed his training, Šumskis participated in special actions: in June, he took part in the slaughter of several hundred mentally ill patients at the Sarkandaugava Hospital in a neighbourhood of Riga. Some of the patients had difficulty walking on their own, and Šumskis was forced to carry one elderly woman on a stretcher to the execution site, where she was shot by a German officer. When all the patients had been liquidated, the SD commander Rudolf Lange made his Latvian auxiliaries swear an oath of secrecy. At the barracks,Šumskis and the other men who had taken part in the Sarkandaugava action received 500g of vodka.
For Šumskis, life as an SD auxiliary settled into a routine of tiresome guard duty – and routine murder. At the end of the year, he was assigned to a Latvian anti-partisan unit. Bandit warfare meant attacking villages suspected of harbouring partisans and setting them alight. If partisans had killed German troops, then a proportionate number of villagers would be shot. After this period, Šumskis’ activities are poorly documented. We know that in October 1943 he was assigned to dig a mass grave in sand dunes at Liepaja, well known as an execution site. He escorted a party of political prisoners to the grave and helped execute them. In March the following year, he took part in another mass killing. In April, Šumskis was in Riga, where he joined a border guard battalion, which was absorbed by 15th Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS in June. Not long afterwards, he was captured by the Russians. By the autumn of 1944, most of Arājs’ men had been assigned to different units of the Latvian Waffen-SS divisions.12 In short, there was an evolutionary relationship between the SD Schuma battalions and police auxiliaries and the combat SS divisions. With mass killing assigned to the extermination camps like Sobibór and Auschwitz-Birkenau, Himmler no longer needed field executioners, but ‘bandit hunters’. The SS inaugurated this second stage of their foreign recruitment strategy in Estonia – the most privileged region of the occupied Ostland.
According to German racial theory, Estonians had a special status in German plans. This partly reflected the influence of the Eastern Minister, Alfred Rosenberg, who had been born in Tallinn (Reval). Fresh data accumulated by German race experts implied that racially desirable characteristics were more strongly represented in Estonia than in Latvia and Lithuania. This implied, naturally, that Estonians could be more readily ‘Germanised’ than other Baltic peoples and this had a decisive impact on occupation policy and Waffen-SS recruitment. In the occupied east, the many different Reich agencies and potentates appointed by Hitler waged internecine war with their rivals. But in the Ostland, which incorporated the Baltic nations and Belorussia, Rosenberg’s Eastern Ministry was able to exercise a more powerful influence than in Ukraine, where Hitler consistently backed the despotic Commissar Erich Koch. Estonia is, of course, the most northerly Baltic state and in 1942 the German forces besieging Leningrad still straddled the old border with the Soviet Union. The presence of German Wehrmacht on Estonian soil meant that that the SD was forced to share jurisdiction with the army. In the confusing world of German occupation strategy this bolstered the power of Rosenberg’s Estonian representative SA-Obergruppenführer Karl-Siegmund Litzmann, who frequently challenged the authority of his superior Hinrich Lohse. It helped that Hitler revered Litzmann’s father – a general who had served in the German Imperial Army in the First World War. He was also on very good terms with Himmler and used his well-oiled connections to shore up his Estonian fiefdom. Both Rosenberg and Litzmann regarded Estonians as blood kin (literally in Rosenberg’s case) and the ‘light touch’ manner of Litzmann’s administration favoured ambitious Estonians who wanted to carve out their own little empires under German administration.13
Estonia had been the last Soviet domain in the Baltic to be conquered by the Wehrmacht. The gap between Soviet withdrawal and German occupation had therefore been somewhat longer than in Latvia and Lithuania. This gave many patriotic Estonians time to escape into the forests and organise militias called Waldbrüder (Forest Brothers). When the Wehrmacht crossed the Estonian border, the Waldbrüder sent resistance units called Omakaitse (home guards) to harass the retreating Russians. Just as in Lithuania and Latvia, an SD Special Task Force commander, in this case Dr Martin Sandberger, then took over the Estonian units and, once the Soviet forces had been pushed back across the River Narva, began deploying Estonian auxiliaries t
o carry out ‘cleansing’ operations against ‘hostile elements’. Under German tutelage, these Omakaitse would be expanded to become a formidable pseudo-national militia that could muster up to 40,000 men. They were mainly recruited from farm workers who had become accustomed, over many centuries, to taking orders from Germans.
As the Wehrmacht pushed on towards Leningrad, Himmler appointed Dr Sandberger as ‘Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD Estland’. The 30-year-old Sandberger (1911–2010) was an SD high flyer. Like many of his Special Task Force colleagues, he had a doctorate in jurisprudence. He had made his mark as an NSDAP student activist in Tübingen in southern Germany, risen fast through SD ranks and bagged a top legal job in Württenberg by tirelessly exploiting his party connections. After the destruction of Poland, Himmler appointed Sandberger to head the Central Immigration Office North-East (Einswandererzentralstelle Nord-Ost) to racially ‘evaluate’ ethnic German migrants. At his post-war trial in Nuremberg, Sandberger testified that before the invasion of the Soviet Union he had attended a meeting called by RSHA departmental head Bruno Streckenbach outlining Hitler’s order to liquidate Jews, gypsies and Russian ‘commissars’. At the beginning of July, the Special Task Force A commander Stahlecker dispatched Sandberger to carry out the ‘Führer order’ in Estonia. To do this, he would turn to the Estonian Omakaitse.14
According to Anton Weiss-Wendt, ‘three million Polish Jews make one thousand Estonian Jews a drop in the sea of sorrow’.15 Perhaps so – but this ‘drop in the sea’ was the majority of Estonian Jews, who perished between 1941 and the end of the war at the hands of the German SD and their Estonian collaborators. The Germans concluded that of out all the territories they occupied, Estonia had the highest levels of active collaboration and the lowest levels of resistance. No Estonian ever took up arms against the German occupiers. In contrast to Lithuania, actual pogroms were rare. Instead, the Estonian ‘self-government’ agencies set about ‘self-cleansing’ through standard police procedures, arrests, hearings and sentencing. Estonians put Jews to death as ‘individuals subversive to the current regime’.16 In fact, over half their victims were women, children and the elderly: the Estonian ‘subversion rationale’ was evidently a smoke screen. Overt anti-Semitism was broadly absent from newspapers and official pronouncements. Nevertheless, the German administration spoke openly about what ‘had to be done’. The German commandant of the Narma concentration camp put it: ‘I fought a duel with the Jews.’ Estonians quietly backed German racial policy. And yet it is believed that some 11,000 European Jews died in Estonian camps. It has been called ‘murder without hatred’. Why was Estonia a special case? And why did Himmler authorise an Estonian SS Legion in the summer of 1941?
Special Task Force commander Dr Sandberger believed firmly in ‘Sympathiegewinnung in der Bevölkerung’: winning the sympathies of the Estonian people. He regularly invited Estonian officers to German dinner parties – an exceptional gesture in the occupied east. He later testified that ‘from the beginning, great store was set by establishing close personal ties, in a comradely spirit, to promote mutual trust. These personal relationships facilitated smooth co-operation, and enable us to direct the large Estonian security apparatus with the help of only a few officers.’ This was the ‘British India model’ that Hitler often claimed to admire. Estonian SD men wore the same uniforms as their German counterparts and Sandberger sent the most diligent to Germany for ideological training. He insisted that junior German officers treat Estonians of senior rank with respect and he forbade expressions of German racial arrogance.17 Sandberger handed his Estonian security police an astonishing level of autonomy, as well as comradely friendship. Eager collaboration deserved reward. After the war, Sandberger tried to blame his former comrades in arms for the murder of Estonian Jews.
German immigrants had moulded Estonian society and culture for half a millennium. As a consequence, Jews had not settled here in such large numbers as they had in Lithuania and Latvia. In 1939, according to historian Eugenia Gurin-Loov, Estonia had just 4,500 Jewish citizens.18 Approximately half had settled in the capital Tallinn, but there were significant communities in Tartu and Pärnu. Poorer Jewish families ended up in small towns and villages. In 1941, the Russians deported 400 Jews to Siberian camps. Most would survive the war. On 10 July, Wehrmacht forces arrived in Tartu, and the onslaught of Estonian Jews began. Accompanying the German troops was an Estonian Omakaitse unit, the Southern Estonian Forest Brothers, commanded by Friedrich Kurg. The Estonians rounded up and arrested Jews then locked them up in the local Kuperjanov barracks, which was rapidly turned into an improvised internment camp. Five days later, Sanderberger and his Special Commando 1a arrived in Tartu; they immediately transferred the Jewish families incarcerated at Kuperjanov to another barracks which was soon designated as the ‘Death Barracks’. From here, the Estonian Forest Brothers, led by a few German officers, took their captives to the Tartu–Riga Road. Close to the road, the Russians had constructed an anti-tank ditch which now provided a convenient execution site. Other shootings, probably of the women and children, took place close to Tartu’s Jewish cemetery.
Sandberger’s Einsatzkommando and their Forest Brothers then moved on to Pärnu; here more executions took place close to the local station and at sites in the forest close to the town. Sandberger raced on towards Tallinn. Here in the capital city, Omakaitse officers had already prepared lists of ‘Jewish communists’ and other suspects. When Sandberger arrived, the Estonians arrested at least 200 men and a smaller number of women; all were murdered immediately. According to Gurin-Loov, the sequence of events after this first spasm of shootings is unclear. According to a prison guard Karl Tagasaar, who was interrogated after the war, large-scale executions by Omakaitse and Sandberger’s SD men certainly took place inside Tallinn prison in September. The SD also built a camp at Harku where they held Jewish women and children until the end of 1941. On 5 June 1942 an Einsatzgruppe report concluded: ‘Today, there are no more Jews in Estonia.’19 Denunciations and executions continued even after that report had been submitted and in 1943 the SS began transporting Jews from other countries to Estonia, where they were incarcerated and then murdered by Estonian guards. When Himmler closed the Estonian camps, Sandberger ordered Estonians to carry out mass shootings of the prisoners who remained alive.20
Today Estonians are loath to accept that their nation had any involvement with the Holocaust at all. In national myth, the Forest Brothers and Omakaitse are celebrated as freedom fighters, not murder squads.
Estonians were the first Eastern Europeans permitted to serve not just as policemen but as soldiers in the Waffen-SS. Before the summer of 1942, when recruitment began in Estonia, Himmler had appeared reluctant to authorise the formation of combat divisions in the occupied east. Historians assume that he regarded the Eastern Europeans as Slavic Untermenschen and that his allegedly reluctant decision to authorise recruitment in the east was a desperate response to the collapse of the German war effort.
This argument does not stand up to serious scrutiny. In the summer of 1942, when the first eastern legion was authorised, neither the Germans nor the subject peoples of occupied Europe had any expectation that the Reich might be defeated. The Wehrmacht had, to be sure, suffered its first serious set back when Operation Typhoon had failed in the winter of 1941–42, but Hitler’s formidable war machine was bruised, not mortally wounded. Nor, as we have seen, did Himmler regard Eastern Europeans as a homogeneous sub-racial mass. His own fascination with the diversity of eastern ethnic groups had been reinforced by the ‘scientific’ findings of the Abel mission. What led Himmler to hesitate was not race, but nationalism. SS recruitment was an instrument of racial domination – of Germanisation. Himmler feared that authorising national militias would be interpreted as a precondition of political demands which would have worked against the onward flow of Germanisation. After June 1941 recruitment of Schuma battalions and other kinds of police auxiliaries channelled nationalist passions into the mass murd
er of shared racial enemies. By the summer of 1942, that gruesome process had run its course. The ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’ would be enacted mainly through different means. The crucial significance of the Estonian case is that it demonstrated to Himmler that as both police and Waffen-SS recruitment could be managed in a way that neutralised nationalist sentiments and permitted the realisation of SS racial ambitions.
After all, the idea of an Estonian SS legion had come from an Estonian. At the beginning of August 1941 Professor Edgar Kant, the acting rector of Tartu University, wrote to the German military administration. He claimed that many Estonian students backed Hitler’s ‘crusade against Bolshevism’ and urged the German authorities to consider recruiting an Estonian legion or some other kind of military unit.21 Shortly afterwards, General Otto-Heinrich Drechsler met members of the Latvian ‘Land Self-Administration’ who also urged him to consider recruiting Baltic legions. When Drechsler reported his discussions to SS headquarters in Berlin, he received very short shrift from Recruitment Chief Berger, who dismissed the proposal as a ‘political trick’ – meaning that it was a step too far towards genuine Latvian self-rule. Commissar Lohse too was hostile to any kind of native autonomy and joined in the attack on Drechsler’s proposal. He sent Rosenberg a fifty-one-page memorandum arguing that all administrative power should forthwith be concentrated in the office of commissar, namely himself, and that the office should be made hereditary. It will be recalled that Lohse yearned to found his own dynasty and was nicknamed Herzog or duke. Thanks to Lohse, the Latvian proposal to form national legions was thwarted – for now.22
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