Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  At the beginning of 1943, German Trawniki recruiters arrived in East Galicia, a district of the General Government then ruled by the Austrian Baron Otto Gustav von Wächter. Galicia was also the stronghold of the Ukrainian ultranationalist movement, the OUN. It was at this time that Mychailo Fostun, who was almost certainly Dr Swiatomyr M. Fostun of Wimbledon, Surrey, joined up as a Trawniki man. 14 Fostun, like many of new Trawniki recruits, came from the Tlumacz district. His identity documents include the required undertaking to serve the Germans for the duration of the war and confirm that he denied any Jewish ancestry and had never been a member of the Soviet Communist Party. From February until April 1943, after completing training, guard 3191 Fostun, served at the Jewish slave labour camp attached to the training camp at Trawniki. Fostun must have proved himself a diligent camp guard. On 17 April, the Germans selected Fostun and 350 other Trawniki men to take part in a special assignment. It would be commanded by one of Himmler’s favourite SS generals.

  When American troops broke into the empty villa in Wiesbaden, formerly occupied by SS-Gruppenführer and Generalleutnant der Waffen-SS und Polizei Jürgen Stroop in 1945, they stumbled on one of the most chilling of all accounts of mass murder. The Stroop Report is compilation of communiqués and photographs, bound together with an elegant cover that is emblazoned in gothic lettering: ‘Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr’ (The Warsaw Jewish ghetto is no more). Stroop’s proud and meticulous report spells out in detail how Hitler’s foreign executioners, trained at the Trawniki camp and including Mr Fostun and other Ukrainian volunteers who would later serve in the SS ‘Galizien’, liquidated the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943.

  Since the 1990s, trials of some of the SS auxiliaries who took part in the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto have revealed many details about the role played by the Trawniki men; it is evident that they were kept busy at every stage of Stroop’s attack, from the first encirclement to the final deportations. At assembly points, they guarded the prisoners on the trains, beat and humiliated them – and on arrival at Treblinka, herded them into the gas chambers. Witness statements by survivors refer frequently to the black-uniformed Trawniki men, who usually spoke Russian or Polish. As well as Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians also took part in Stroop’s ‘Grand Action’. His report claims that his men ‘destroyed’ 56,065 Jews, 7,000 being killed immediately during fierce street and house to house battles. An unquantifiable number died in buildings razed by SS flamethrowers or destroyed by artillery shelling. The Trawniki men deported 6,929 ghetto prisoners to Treblinka, where all were gassed on arrival.

  Stroop described his foreign executioners as ‘nationalists and anti-Semites but the best soldiers. Young, mainly without education, wild at heart and with a tendency towards base things. But nevertheless obedient.’15

  The following year, 1944, Swiatomyr Fostun and many other Trawniki men enlisted in the 14th SS Division ‘Galizien’.

  Many historians of the Second World War regard Himmler’s decision to recruit a ‘Ukrainian’ SS division as a last resort – an act of desperation. It is assumed that he abandoned any pretence that the Waffen-SS was an elite Aryan corps. This view is quite wrong and demonstrates a misunderstanding of German racial ideology and the way the ideas of race scientists changed as the war unfolded. I have shown that following Professor Abel’s studies of Soviet POWs, Gottlob Berger’s SS recruitment office was persuaded to broaden the catchment area where Germanic blood might be, as Himmler put it, ‘harvested’. As the SS empire expanded in mid-1942, Berger turned first to ‘Germanic’ Estonians and then ‘suitable’ Latvians to bolster his military divisions. Himmler next turned to the Bosnian Muslims, having been convinced that Bosniaks were a ‘Gothic’ people descended from Persians. Did the SS recruitment of Slavic Ukrainians fit the same evolving pattern? And if so how?

  The most important clue is the name of the new SS division: the ‘Galizien’. In just about every document concerning the SS ‘Galizien’, Himmler insisted that the division was not Ukrainian but Galician. This was not semantic window dressing. It will be recalled that the former Kingdom of Galicia was annexed by the Austrian Hapsburgs in 1772 and become the most easterly province of their sprawling empire. Today, the Galician region occupies part of eastern Poland and the western edge of independent Ukraine. This is a liminal territory that stretches, in memory at least, from the regional capital L’viv, formerly Lemberg, south towards Chernivtsi in Bukovina; the Carpathian Mountains form a western border while its eastern margin flows along the Zbruch River. For modern Ukrainians, as historian Omer Bartov discovered, poor, muddy, backward Galicia remains ‘somewhat foreign and suspect’. Indeed Galicia is not very Ukrainian, especially its western half. All over Galicia, cities and villages still show traces of a history that has drawn together Poles, Jews, ethnic Germans as well as ethnic ‘Ruthenians’. This was the birthplace of a rich Jewish culture that flourished for centuries alongside chauvinist Ukrainian nationalism. For the Hapsburg emperors in Vienna, this most remote territorial possession was an exotic backwater huddled on the western edge of the Russian Empire. Galicia has always been a volatile borderland, often prey to the slings and arrows of territorial upheaval. At the end of the First World War, as the Austrian Empire collapsed and Russia was engulfed by revolution and civil war, Galicia became a battleground. At the Paris Peace Conference, the victorious powers had frustrated Ukrainian demands for independence and the Soviets held on to much of their disputed homeland, while leaving Galicia up for grabs. Poles had, in any case, always dominated the western part of the old Austrian province – and in 1923, a resurgent Polish nation annexed the east as well, renaming it ‘Eastern Little Poland’.

  In the period before the First World War, the light-touch rule of the Hapsburgs had encouraged Ukrainian nationalism to flourish in Galicia. Conversely, in eastern Ukraine, any expression of national separatism had been ruthlessly stamped out by the tsars through a policy that would be maintained by Lenin and then Stalin. As a consequence, Ukrainian nationalists tended to be both pro-German and, especially after 1917, aggressively anti-Semitic, since they identified Bolshevism with Jews. Ironically, Polish-ruled Galicia and its cultural hub, the city of Lwów (formerly Austrian Lemberg, now L’viv), became the crucible of a radical Ukrainian nationalism that was both anti-Semitic and dedicated to the destruction of Poland.

  In 1939, the Germans and Soviets once again split Galicia according to the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Then after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler assigned Galicia to the General Government as the ‘Distrikt Galizien’. The eastern region (Ostgalizien) would be ruled by an Austrian SS professional, Otto von Wächter, who in 1943 would become the main architect of the SS ‘Galizien’. Wächter’s fiefdom bordered the vast Reichskommissariat Ukraine that was ruled by former Gauleiter Erich Koch. Koch was a gluttonous despot who waged an unending turf war with his nominal boss, the despised Eastern Minister, Alfred Rosenberg.

  For both Himmler and the Austrian-born Hitler, Galicia had a special historical significance as a reservoir of Germanic blood. This was reinforced by Himmler’s RuSHA race experts, who claimed that about 25 per cent of the ‘Ruthenian’ population (i.e. Ukrainians) possessed a significant quantity of Germanic blood. Galicia was thus ripe for ‘Germanisation’, which provided the underlying logic of Waffen-SS recruitment. We have evidence that Galicians fitted the SS recruitment plan in the records of an extraordinary meeting that took place at Hitler’s ‘Werewolf’ headquarters near Vinnitsa in Ukraine. The purpose of the meeting was to resolve the unending battle between Reich Commissar Erich Koch and his superior, the Eastern Minister Rosenberg. Rosenberg had complained bitterly and often that Koch ruled his fiefdom with excessive cruelty, thus damaging his efforts to exploit Ukrainian anti-Bolshevik and nationalist aspirations. Most pointedly, he accused Koch of inciting attacks by Ukrainian partisans which was for the Germans a very sore point in the spring of 1943. Hitler turned to Rosenberg. H
e reminded him that Wehrmacht attempts to recruit eastern troops (Osttruppen) in the occupied Soviet Union had usually ended in calamity. He would not permit recruitment of Ukrainians in the Reich Commissariat. But the people of Galicia, he pointed out, had lived for more than a century under Austrian rule. They had close connections with the old Hapsburg Empire. ‘It is therefore possible,’ he concluded, ‘for the SS to set up a Ukrainian division in Galicia.’16 Historians who have interpreted Himmler’s decision to recruit a Ukrainian division in 1943 as an expedient response to German losses on the Eastern Front have failed to take account of this crucial distinction he made between the broad mass of the Ukrainians and those born and bred in ‘Austrian’ Galicia.

  For the Germans, there was just one stumbling block. As we have seen, the main Ukrainian nationalist faction the OUN had made its autonomist aspirations all too plain at the end of June 1941, when OUN leaders had rashly declared independence after occupying the Galician capital L’viv. It was this impertinent gesture that had led Himmler to reject the idea of a ‘Ukrainian’ SS militia when it was proposed by Berger in 1941. Even after the Galician region was absorbed into the General Government, on Hitler’s orders, Himmler refused to consider recruiting an SS division – although, as we have seen, thousands of Ukrainians served in the Schuma battalions. In Himmler’s view, the nationalist OUN, albeit devoutly anti-Semitic, had a stranglehold on Galician political culture. Then in the early spring of 1943, the Governor of East Galicia, SS-Gruppenführer Otto von Wächter, decided that the time had come to try a new approach. Wächter would become the main driving force behind SS recruitment.

  At the beginning of March 1943 Wächter flew from his headquarters in L’viv to Hochwald in East Prussia to meet Himmler, who was headquartered at a railway siding in his official train, Heinrich. They had much to discuss. The minutes taken at the meeting refer to progress with ghetto clearances and similar matters to do with the ‘Final Solution’. For the Nazi governors of the occupied east, this was business as usual. Much more pressing was the increasingly precarious state of the German front line. For Wehrmacht commanders and the Nazi elite in Berlin, the destruction of the 6th Army and the loss of half a million men at Stalingrad was ‘the most catastrophic hitherto experienced in German history’. ‘Imagine it,’ one Russian soldier wrote to his wife, ‘the Fritzes are running away from us.’17 Closeted inside his military headquarters at Rastenburg, Hitler raved about the cowardice of his generals, while Goebbels tried to spin the bad news, telling the German people that the 6th Army had been ‘annihilated’ so that ‘Germany might live’.18

  Stalingrad had shown that the ‘invincible’ Germans could lose a battle; it did not, as some historians claim, ‘decide the war’. Shortly before Wächter met Himmler at Hochwald, Field Marshall Erich von Manstein had launched a successful strike against Soviet forces at Kharkov and captured the city by 11 March. Manstein’s formidable panzer armies restored the German front to more or less the same line reached in December 1941. Hitler’s war machine had by no means lost its offensive capabilities and that summer his commanders would muster enormous forces at Kursk to unleash the last great offensive of the war in the east, Operation Citadel. As it turned out it was the rout of German armies at the cataclysmic Battle of Kursk that was fought months later in July 1943 that truly signalled the beginning of the end for the German campaign.

  Early in March, what focused the minds of Himmler and Governor Wächter was a different kind of crisis. By the spring of 1943, Soviet backed partisan units had become a serious threat to the German rear areas in the Balkans and on the Eastern Front. In the early months of the German attack, Hitler had used the ‘partisan threat’ to rationalise his radical conception of war in the east. He told a meeting of senior aides: ‘The struggle we are waging against the partisans resembles very much the struggle in North America against the Red Indians.’ For both pragmatic and ideological reasons, Hitler made Himmler’s SS responsible for pacifying German army rear areas and waging war on ‘bandits’. To begin with, as we have seen, Himmler used Bandenbekämpfung (bandit warfare) as a cover for the liquidation of Jewish civilians and communist officials. This equivalence of Jews and bandits would continue to shape Himmler’s ‘bandit war’. Field reports submitted by the German army, as well as by Himmler’s chief bandit hunter HSSPF Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, frequently included a count of any Jews who have been killed whether or not they were considered to be actual partisans.19 Now in the spring of 1943, the partisan war had become a lot more menacing. According to Goebbels: ‘The activity of partisans has increased noticeably … The partisans are in command of large areas … and are conducting a regime of terror.’20 Later that year Hitler would reiterate Himmler’s responsibility for the Bandenkampf und Sicherheitslage (Bandit Fight and Security Situation). For Himmler, the reaffirmation of SS security management was another step towards complete domination of German occupation strategy. But it was also an overwhelming responsibility, which carried a tremendous risk of failure. This gave Governor Wächter a distinct advantage. He could claim with facts and figures to back him up that his own fiefdom, the ‘Distrikt Galizien’, was, so far, relatively free from ‘bandit activity’. But, he warned Himmler, he had recently noted a troubling rise in the number of ‘bandit attacks’ – and he blamed the insurgent Ukrayins’ka Povstans’ka Armiya, the UPA. Wächter had a radical solution to propose. He wanted Himmler to authorise the formation of a new SS division to be recruited in East Galicia. This would, he argued, siphon off support for the UPA and reinforce security in this strategically vital borderland region.

  It was remarked that Wächter ‘understood Ukrainians’.21 This is generous. As an Austrian, Wächter retained a national memory of Galicia as a former Hapsburg province. Like the administrators of the Austrian Empire, he toyed with Ukrainian aspirations but according to very strict rules. It was a family tradition. Gustav Otto von Wächter was born in July 1901 in Vienna. His father General Josef Freiherr was a Sudetendeutscher (an ethnic German from the Sudetenland) who had fought in the western Ukraine during the First World War. Described in his SS file as ‘highly intelligent’, Wächter like so many of Himmler’s top SS managers had a doctorate in jurisprudence. A tall, trim man with curiously Slavic eyes, he soon became a big player in the Austrian Nazi movement and fled to Germany in 1934 in the chaotic aftermath of the abortive putsch. Following a short period of detention, Wächter began cultivating the SS elite with his usual energy and cunning. His subsequent ascent was, as his personal file records, rapid: March 1935 Untersturmführer; 1 June Obersturmführer; 9 November Hauptsturmführer; 20 April 1936 Sturmbannführer; 30 January 1937 Obersturmbannführer; 30 January 1938 Standartenführer.22 In March 1938, after German troops had marched into Austria, the new Governor Artur Seyß-Inquart appointed Wächter head of the police in Vienna. The ‘Wächter Commission’ took charge of expropriating Jewish property and ‘cleansing’ the Austrian bureaucracy by removing all Jews from public office.

  Wächter was a zealous bureaucrat. In 1939, Hitler appointed him Gauleiter of the Kraków district in the new General Government, a region that would become one of the epicentres of the Holocaust. Governor General Hans Frank, who, it will be recalled, had been Hitler’s personal legal advisor, welcomed Wächter’s appointment hoping that he could use him to work against Himmler. Kraków was the administrative and communications hub of occupied Poland and, after 1939, was thoroughly ‘Germanised’. Wächter set about removing all traces of Polish culture and began deporting Jews. He believed that Jews had ‘no native place’ and often discussed ways of achieving ‘total Jewish extermination’. According to one of his subordinates, ‘I have to say that my impression is that [Wächter] represented the point of view of the Master Race, that is the SS point of view towards the so-called Fremdvölkischen (foreigners). He was a high SS leader, constantly running around in his SS uniform.’23 The Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte, who witnessed the German-inspired pogroms in Romania, provides us with a vivid
portrait of Wächter in his book Kaputt.24 In one chapter Malaparte describes an evening at the venal court of the ‘King of Poland’, Governor Hans Frank. In the course of a lavish dinner, Wächter and his wife refer to the ‘filthy state’ of Polish Jews. Later, Malaparte listens to Frank’s critique of the massacres in Iasi: ‘the Romanians are not a civilised people,’ he grumbles. ‘We must be surgeons, not butchers.’ Wächter concurs: ‘Germany is called upon to carry out a great civilising mission in the East.’