In 1943, the Latvian SA had begun to fear that Germany could lose the war – but this did not necessarily mean that in early 1943 they had any reason to believe that they could negotiate from a position of strength. To be sure, the German front line was by then under intense pressure and the surrender of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad was a calamity. But Hitler and the Nazi elite did not believe the war was lost. Even after Stalingrad, Hitler’s generals continued to fight an offensive war and laid plans to launch a massive new spring offensive against the Soviet armies. The Latvian misperception of German vulnerability led them to fall for an old trick: the promise of future autonomy in exchange for recruitment. So while Hitler was supposed to be considering Latvian autonomy, Berger cynically pushed ahead with drafting Latvians with the connivance of the Latvian authorities. It is customary for historians to pour scorn on ‘chaotic’ German administrations in occupied territories. In practice, the multiplication of different, competing authorities often wrong-footed indigenous nationalists with a kind of confusing hard cop/soft cop routine. That may have been inadvertent, but the effect was to encourage compliance with the promise of a better deal to come. The Latvian collaborators had fallen for this kind of practice from the day German SD men marched into Riga.
Today, Latvians who defend the annual commemoration of the ‘Latvian Legion’ stress that Latvians were conscripted: service was not voluntary. At the same time, defenders of the legion argue that Latvians joined to defend their nation against a second Soviet occupation. They want it both ways: the SS recruits as both heroes and victims. In reality, at least 25 per cent of the Latvian recruits did volunteer. But even if we accept that the Germans drafted the majority of recruits, they fought in any case for a Latvia ‘cleansed’ of fellow Jewish citizens.39 In 1941–42, many of these conscripts, like the aforementioned Juris Šumskis, had taken part in the SD special actions against Jews and the mentally ill. In 1943, they took up arms against the Soviet Union – in defence of a Latvia founded on chauvinism.
The records show that in order to form the core units of a new SS division, Berger yoked together the Latvian Schuma and SD police battalions that had so impressed Himmler on the Leningrad front. Many of these men had not only murdered Jews in Riga and elsewhere, but also participated in ‘bandit operations’ in the Minsk region. As we saw in a previous chapter, the Arājs Commando had been militarised at the end of 1941 and deployed to fight partisans in Belorussia. The Schuma battalions had purged Latvia of unwanted Jews; it was logical to use their skills outside Latvian borders to continue their ‘work’.
In November 1941, the 18th Latvian Police Battalion took part in the liquidation of the Jewish ghettoes at Barisov and Slonim. In January the following year, Latvian Schuma men joined in a renewed round of slaughter that, according to an SS report, left over 20,000 unarmed civilians dead. The Latvians proved to be such effective ‘bandit hunters’ that Himmler doubled the number of Schuma battalions. In February 1942, the Latvian puppet self-administration willingly took over the management of the Schuma and appointed a ‘Committee of Latvian Volunteer Recruitment’, headed by Pērkonkrusts fanatic Gustavs Celmiņaks. It will be recalled that Celmiņaks had fled to Berlin before the war, then returned to Latvia with the German armies in June 1941. It is significant that he and the other committee members presided over the redeployment of the Latvian Schuma battalions outside national borders as ‘bandit hunters’.
In many areas behind the Eastern Front, as I have emphasised, SS anti-partisan actions frequently (but not consistently) provided opportunities to liquidate those Jews who had escaped from ghettoes or camps. If SS anti-bandit units captured Jews, it was customary to torture them in the vilest way before they were executed. Five Latvian battalions took part in one such ‘bandit operation’: Operation Swamp Fever under the notorious 2nd SS Infantry Brigade. Another operation led by HSSPF Jeckeln and known as ‘Winter Magic’ also deployed Latvian units that had been incorporated into the Kampfgruppe Jeckeln – and ‘cleared out partisans’ in a 55-mile-wide strip of territory along the Latvian border near Lake Osveya. A succession of search-and-destroy ‘sweeps’ led by these Latvian battalions invariably left burning villages and murdered civilians in their wake. In many cases, it is the officially reported ‘kill numbers’ that tell the real story. After one attack, the Germans reported that over 7,000 people had received ‘special treatment’ (i. e. immediate execution) and 3,300 Jews liquidated; the Germans lost two men.40 It was during Operation Winter Magic that Walther Stahlecker, the former Special Task Force commander who had recruited Arājs and Veiss, attacked the village of Sanniki with a battle group comprising Germans, Latvians and Estonians. In the course of the attack, Stahlecker was shot dead and his men sought revenge. They burnt Sanniki, and killed every villager, both Christian and Jew.
To begin with, the new 15th Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS undertook the same kind of tasks – as we find in a report filed by Lg.-Standartenführer Artūrs Apsītis on 17 November 1943. On 14 November his echelon, severely under-equipped, had been deployed to the south of Ostrov, where the Latvians received orders to ‘clear out partisans and possible Red Army units … from six villages’, then to proceed further south to ‘clear out a wider area occupied by partisans’.41
So let us be clear about the origins of the ‘Latvian Legion’ and their role in Hitler’s ‘war of annihilation’. In 1943, Himmler amalgamated a number of Schuma battalions serving on the Leningrad front into the 2nd Latvian Volunteer Brigade; this would become the core of the 15th Latvian Waffen-Granadier-Division. By mid-1944, many of the Schuma battalions had been transferred to the Waffen-SS divisions, at the same time as German Order Police battalions were being absorbed into the Waffen-SS. In 1944, the Arājs Commando was amalgamated with the 15th Latvian. So whatever the modern apologists for the legion claim, it is simply a matter of fact that men who had committed the most gruesome atrocities serving with the Arājs Commando and other Schuma battalions both in Latvia and later in Belorussia ended up serving in the two SS divisions known as the ‘Latvian Legion’. As the Nazi programme of mass murder focused on the extermination camps rather than the ‘rifle-and-ditch’ method of earlier phases, Himmler had no further use for Schuma brigades and diverted their activities to ‘bandit warfare’ and the front line.
From the spring of 1943, a succession of military setbacks in the Mediterranean as well as on the Eastern Front had a powerful impact on German decision making. Mounting losses of German troops, the surrender of the 6th Army at Stalingrad and the security crisis engulfing the occupied territories led cumulatively to increased levels of non-German recruitment by the German armed forces and especially the Waffen-SS. But in Himmler’s mind, the expansion of recruitment followed a completely logical path that was shaped by his racial creed. Foreign recruitment began with ethnic Germans in Romania, expanded to include Nordic Europeans in Scandinavia and Holland and then, in mid-1942, embraced Estonians who were considered a heavily Germanised Eastern European people. As the lessons of the Abel study of Russian POWs sank in, the potential pool of recruits broadened further still.
The mission’s findings had a decisive impact on German anthropological ideas about race and subsequently on Waffen-SS recruitment. In 1942, Berger’s recruitment office introduced a three-tier recruitment scheme based on Professor Abel’s reports. It split foreign recruits into three hierarchical categories as follows:
‘Klassische SS Divisionen’
SS Freiwilligen-Divisionen (Germanische Freiwillige)
SS Waffen-Divisionen (nicht-germanische Freiwillige)
Nicht-germanische here simply meant ethnic groups usually excluded from the Aryan family but that were, as Abel had showed, potential bearers of Germanic blood. In theory, there was no limit to the process of ‘Germanisation’, with the exception of Jews, Poles and Roma. In April 1944, Himmler delivered a lecture about how the selection process worked:
The European peoples, the Latvians and Estonians, the Galicians [Ukrai
nians], the Bosniaks [Bosnian Muslims], Croats and Albanians are joining us, the senior peoples of Europe. The Latvians and Estonians will form divisions, the so called ‘Waffen-Divisionen’ of the SS. Their youths will attend our Unterführerschulen; if they are racially equal to us, our Germanic Junkerschulen, and without wanting to hurt or insult them, Waffenjunkerschulen, if they are racially different.42
What this statement proves is that as late as spring 1944, Himmler was still thinking in terms of racial hierarchies. He continued to view Waffen-SS recruitment as a means to ‘gather Germanic blood’.
One last point is in order here. In late 1943, the Germans launched a campaign to recruit Lithuanians into the Waffen-SS. Dr Adrian von Lenteln, a Baltic German who had been appointed General Commissar for Lithuania, had every reason to expect success. Lithuanians had proved themselves eager executioners in the period following the German occupation in June 1941. As one American report put it: ‘The Lithuanian military police, Litauische Schutzmannschaften is organised into SS units … [and] used by the Germans to perform executions.’ But in 1943, as Estonians and Latvians rushed to join the SS legions, the Lithuanians balked. Efforts to establish a Lithuanian SS legion ran into the ground. In March 1943, Himmler and von Renteln travelled to Kaunas to persuade the Lithuanians to start recruiting but got nowhere. Lithuanians, Himmler complained, were ‘not worthy to wear SS uniform’. Today, Lithuanians celebrate this refusal as ‘heroic resistance’. It was nothing of the kind. It was merely a shrewd recognition that Germany was losing the war and there was no point going down with the Reich. Many of the bureaucrats who successfully fended off Himmler and von Renteln had been responsible either directly or indirectly for murdering tens of thousands of Jews. The Lithuanian refusal teaches a very different lesson. The Estonian and Latvian administrations had a choice. Reinforcing Hitler’s war and sacrificing the lives of tens of thousands of young men was not inevitable.43
As the tide of war turned relentlessly against Germany and the frontiers of the ‘Greater German Reich’ began to shrink, Himmler’s SS empire bloated. As the Wehrmacht began its long retreat to the borders of the old Reich, SS propaganda proclaimed that the Waffen-SS would be the ‘fire brigade of the Eastern Front’. The Nazi elite turned against what Goebbels called the ‘fat, big paunched majors in the Bendlerblock [German army headquarters in Berlin]’, but Himmler’s star began to ascend to its zenith. At a meeting in September 1943 Hitler informed his loyal paladins that ‘The best thing I leave to my successor is the SS’.44 Himmler would become the emperor of defeat.
11
Nazi Jihad
All Islam vibrated at the news of our victories. The Egyptians, the Iraqis and the whole of the Near East were all ready to rise in revolt. Just think what we could have done to help them, even to incite them.
Hitler, April 1945
The town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue sprawls along the banks of the l’Aveyron River that winds through the Mid-Pyrenees in south-west France. Clinging to the wooded slopes that rise steeply from the river is the little chapel of Calvaire St Jean d’Airgrement, which commands a broad view of the wide, flat plain that rolls northwards. In the early morning, the l’Aveyron valley is quiet, tranquil, even bucolic. A few farm vehicles putter along narrow rural roads. In 1943, this was ‘Maquis’ country – for the German occupiers, a region to be feared and mastered. In most of the villages and towns of the Mid-Pyrenees stand memorials to French resistance fighters who died here fighting the Nazi terror machine. But in September 2006, the town council of Villefranche-de-Rouergue unveiled a very different memorial. It is dedicated not to wartime French heroes, but ‘jeunes soldats de Croatie et de Bosnie-Herzégovinie tombés lors du soulévement du 17 Septembre 1943 à Villefranche-de-Rouergue contre leurs oppresseurs Nazis’.
Why and how did young men from Croatia and Bosnia come to die so far from home in this pretty French village? The memorial tells us some of their story. They served in an SS division known as the ‘Handschar’, which had been recruited in Bosnia. Most of the recruits were Muslims. Here in Villefranche, a handful rose up against their officers. For a few hours they held the might of the SS at bay. Himmler, enraged, meted out violent retribution. The mutineers were hauled in front of a kangaroo court then shot dead by an SS firing squad. The drama that unfolded seventy years ago in Villefranche-de-Rouergue provides a surprising insight into Himmler’s quest to harvest Germanic blood ‘wherever it might be found’. Few Bosnian Muslims regarded their people as ‘Germanic’ at all – and might never have enlisted in Hitler’s war had they not fallen under the malign influence of one of the most notorious of all wartime collaborators: the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini. It was el-Husseini who convinced these Bosnians to become SS men and join the Nazi Jihad against the ‘Jewish World Enemy’. Himmler’s pact with this malevolent Arab cleric poisons the battleground of Middle Eastern nationalist ideologies to this day.
Writing in his diary at the end of the war Albert Speer recalled:
I never saw Hitler so beside himself as when, as if in a delirium, he was picturing to himself and to us the downfall of New York in towers of flame. He described the skyscrapers turning into huge burning torches and falling hither and thither, and the reflection of the disintegrating city in the dark sky.
One of the longed-for miracle weapons imagined by Hitler at the end of the war was the ‘Amerikabomber’, a Daimler designed, four-engine giant that in theory could bring terror to faraway New York City. Hitler despised New York as the capital of world Jewry. His destructive fantasy was finally realised by Mohammed Atta and his fellow pilots when they flew their fuel laden aircraft into the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001. Might the Jihad of our own time have been inspired by plans hatched in Third Reich?1
On 29 April 1945 Hitler, his mind and body ruined by drugs and disease, hidden away beneath the ruined Chancellery in Berlin, ordered Traudl Junge, his favourite secretary, to accompany him to the conference room. Hitler, his limbs shaking uncontrollably, leant on the abandoned map table and began to dictate his ‘Last Testament’. Frau Junge struggled to keep pace with the torrent of poison. Hitler raged against the Jewish conspirators whom he claimed had brought down the Reich. He insisted time and again that he had wanted only to defend Germany against its sworn Jewish enemies in Moscow and Wall Street. Then, in an astonishing outburst, Hitler listed all the lost opportunities torn from his grasp by cowardly and treacherous subordinates:
All Islam vibrated at the news of our victories. The Egyptians, the Iraqis and the whole of the Near East were all ready to rise in revolt. Just think what we could have done to help them, even to incite them … We had a great chance of pursuing a splendid policy with regard to Islam.2
It is one of modern history’s most troubling counterfactuals: suppose, in 1941, Hitler had abandoned plans for the invasion of Russia and sent his forces to the Middle East instead. The German Wehrmacht could have easily have swatted aside the enfeebled, poorly equipped British forces based in Egypt and Palestine. Heydrich’s Special Task Forces would have rampaged through Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In Syria, the Vichy administration would have waved the German army through the border with Iraq while the Luftwaffe pounded British garrison forces there and swept on to the borders of the Raj. In Persia, Hitler’s war machine could have feasted on oil reserves as rich and deep as any in Romania or the Caucasus. It was a prospect Churchill feared. In his darkest moments, he imagined ‘Hitler’s hand’ stretching as far as the Indian border ‘beckon[ing] to the Japanese’. Churchill’s nightmare never became real, although Luftwaffe aircraft did bomb Baghdad. Hitler’s mind was fixated by the Bolshevik enemy and a future empire in the east. His vision of empire was brutal, but profoundly parochial. He spurned most efforts to undermine the British Raj or empower to dark-skinned, ‘inferior races’. But as Hitler’s Reich flexed its imperial muscles, the British Empire had long been in decline. In the pink regions of the world map, new nationalist movements demanded freedom from Br
itish rule. At home, the moral authority of the empire was no longer taken for granted. In India and Palestine, where the imperial crisis was most acute, some of those waging war on the British Empire turned to Hitler’s Reich to speed the collapse of foreign rule. For Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian nationalist who spent much of the war lobbying the German Foreign Office in Berlin to back his cause, it was a case of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Bose had few illusions about Hitler’s racist world view and, when he met the Führer at the Wolf’s Lair, had the guts to criticise his pejorative comments about Indians in Mein Kampf. Bose remained silent about Hitler’s hatred of Jews.
Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti, was very different species of collaborator. He too spent the war in Berlin. Unlike Bose, he fully embraced the Nazi racial vision and backed the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’. After 1945, el-Husseini escaped back to the Middle East. In the 1960s, the old man became a mentor to a young Palestinian called Mohammed el-Husseini, no relation, who would soon be better known as Yasser Arafat. From the ruins of the Third Reich, the Grand Mufti brought back to his lost homeland the virus of European anti-Semitism. If you seek his monument, then watch an Arab satellite channel like Al-Manar (the Beacon). Here is an extract from Diaspora, an ambitious twenty-nine-part ‘history’ series: ‘Listen!’ says a Rabbi to a young Jew. ‘We have received an order from above. We need the blood of a Christian child for the unleavened bread for the Passover feast.’ A petrified boy is seized, and, in a gloating close-up, his throat is cut and his blood drained into a metal basin.3 This wicked nonsense resurrects one of the most enduring and potent myths in western anti-Semitism: the ‘Blood Libel’. As Anthony Julius points out, this medieval fantasy has become one of the most virulent anti-Semitic myths in circulation in modern Islamic discourse.4 Al-Manar belongs to Hizbollah (Party of God). The Diaspora series, made with Syrian government backing, was shown for the first time during Ramadan in 2003. At least 10 million people a day tune in to Al-Manar’s roundthe-clock broadcasts recorded in Beirut.
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