On 3 August, SS General Bach settled into an abandoned Polish mansion at Ożarów, 8 miles west of Warsaw’s Old Town. From here, he would direct operations under the blank gaze of long-dead landowners, whose portraits still hung on the dirt-streaked walls. Bach reinforced Dirlewanger’s two battalions with an Azerbaijani regiment (the 111th) and added to this poisonous mix three Cossack regiments, two more Azerbaijani battalions, the 22nd SS Cavalry Brigade ‘Maria Theresa’, made up of Hungarian ethnic Germans, and the 29th Waffen Grenadier Division RONA, led by a Soviet deserter SS-Oberführer Bronislaw Kaminski. In Warsaw, the RONA men showed no mercy or restraint. How had these men and their brutish commander ended up serving in Himmler’s SS?
In a speech made to Waffen-SS troops in Stettin in July 1941, Himmler elaborated on the meaning of ‘struggle of races’: ‘beautiful, decent and egalitarian’, Germany faced ‘a mixture of races, whose very names are unpronounceable, and whose physique is such that we can shoot them without mercy or compassion’. He then spelt out his core argument: these races had been ‘welded into one religion, one ideology, that is called Bolshevism’ by Jews.11 In 1941, SS murder squads targeted Turkmen who had survived the Soviet liquidation of independent Turkestan. The Einsatzgruppe reports also refer to the execution of ‘Asiatics’ and in Kiev, German physicians used lethal injections to murder ‘Turkmen’ and ‘low grade Caucasians’.12
In Germany, powerful voices rose to protest against this plainly short-sighted and murderous policy. Not all ‘Asiatics’ were Bolsheviks and Jews, they insisted; many Central Asian peoples were devout Muslims who hated Stalin as much as any decent German. Gerhard von Mende was the most prominent member of this cabal and he would revolutionise German relations with the peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Like Alfred Rosenberg, von Mende was a Baltic German and an ardent anti-Bolshevik.13 When I interviewed Gerhard’s son Erling in 2007, he remembered a frequently absent father who dressed with dapper good taste and possessed a mordant sense of humour. Born in 1904 in Riga, Gerhard had seen his father shot dead by Bolshevik soldiers when he had just turned 14. The family escaped to Germany, where Gerhard struggled to get an education; he finally entered Berlin University at a mature 24. His fellow alumni remember a blonde, blue-eyed and strikingly scrawny young man with a wandering left eye. In Berlin, then the holy grail of ‘Oriental Studies’, Gerhard’s star rose fast. He was an able and hard-working scholar who spoke Latvian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish and different Turkic dialects. Germans had long been fascinated by the rich Muslim cultures threaded along the ‘Silk Road’ – a term that was invented by a German scholar. German ideologues like Rosenberg and scholars like von Mende despised the so-called ‘Muscovite’ centre, which had become, in their view, the headquarters of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ and looked instead to the more exotic and turbulent Muslim peripheries. For centuries, Imperial Russia had struggled to master their troublesome minority peoples – and the ‘nationalities question’ haunted Stalin’s nightmares. The tsars had bequeathed to their Soviet heirs two sprawling regions where Russians formed a minority. Central Asia, which we refer to today as ‘the ‘Stans’, comprised Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In the mid-twentieth century, geographers simply referred to the entire region as ‘Turkestan’ and its Muslim peoples as ‘Turkmen’. The Caucasus (known to linguistic historians as the ‘Mountain of Tongues’) had nurtured a profusion of ethnicities and distinct languages: from Christian Georgia and Armenia in the south to the Muslim enclaves of the north, inhabited by fractious and tribal-minded Dagestanis, Kalmyks, Chechens and Ossetians.
In 1936, von Mende published his magnum opus: Der Nationale Kampf der Rußlandtürken: Ein Beitrag zur nationalen Frage in der Sovjetunion. He argued that the Turkic peoples (by which he meant Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Tatars) might, with suitable guidance, provide a kind of reserve army of anti-Bolshevik forces. He argued that these fissiparous peoples were unlikely to turn into genuine nation builders. Furthermore, the Soviet Union would need to suffer a ‘severe shock’ before any Turkic peoples dared rise up against their ‘Muscovite’ oppressors. In 1933, von Mende had joined the Sturm Abteilung (SA) (simply because NSDAP membership lists had been temporarily closed as opportunist ‘March Violets’ rushed in their application forms) and began using his SA contacts to make friends with influential party members in the revamped German ministries. Although his son Erling von Mende vehemently denies the fact, his father was an unashamed anti-Semite, denouncing the ‘exceptional Jewification of … the Soviet Union’ in a pamphlet and passing on damaging information about a Jewish colleague who worked at the Reich Education Ministry.14 This contempt for Jews infected many of von Mende’s academic publications, and no doubt he shared these views with his many Turkic colleagues and friends. Von Mende formed a close bond with a community of Turkic exiles known as the Prometheus Movement – originally founded to rid the Russian Empire of Russians. Based in Paris and Warsaw, the Prometheans had reformed as an anti-Bolshevik faction. They referred to Mende as ‘Lord Protector’ – and even during the period of Nazi-Soviet rapprochement he helped his friends set up ‘national committees’ with ambitions to become governments in exile.
Immediately after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Gerhard von Mende was recruited by Alfred Rosenberg’s Eastern Ministry, where he took charge of the Caucasus division, working under Georg Leibbrandt, who later represented the Ministry at the Wannsee Conference. At the Eastern Ministry headquarters, located not far from his new home in prosperous Charlottenberg, von Mende recruited staff from among his Promethean circle of friends. One of these men was an Uzbek called Prince Veli Kayum Khan, who would become von Mende’s most important protégé.
At the end of 1941, von Mende received reports that described the treatment of Soviet POWs in the vast German camps constructed in the General Government. With Rosenberg’s backing, he sent Kayum Khan to investigate. Accompanied by Mustafa Chokai, Khan arrived in the Kraków district of the General Government at the end of the year. Inside vast, sprawling camps the Germans had caged more than 3 million Russian POWs.15 It was the dead of winter, and the German gulag was a perilous realm even for visitors. The unfortunate Chokai was struck down by typhus soon after he arrived. Kayum Khan battled on: he reported that he had discovered thousands of fellow Muslim Turkmen slowly starving to death in appalling conditions. Most of the prisoners had been forced to dig holes in the ground to use as pitiful shelters. Every day, he was informed, SS execution squads roamed the camps searching for prisoners who had been circumcised or had ‘slit eyes’. The SS squads removed these ‘subhumans’ and shot them in nearby woods. With von Mende’s backing, Kayum Khan successfully petitioned the German authorities to improve the conditions for ‘Turkic’ prisoners and had the better educated transferred to a training camp near Berlin. Here Kayum Khan began moulding these former Soviet citizens into an anti-Bolshevik army.16 He had another backer as well as Rosenberg: German army intelligence, the Abwehr, which set up Operation Tiger B to manage the training of the Turkmen.
Gerhard von Mende and Prince Veli Kayum Khan tried to re-educate the German Wehrmacht commanders, who regarded every Central Asian as a dangerous ‘Asiatic’. They had great success. In December 1941, the OKW authorised the formation of two Muslim units: the Turkestan Legion and the Caucasian Muslim Legion. Recruits exhibited striking diversity: Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Karakalpaks, Tajiks, Azeris, Dagestanis, Chechens, Ingusges and Lezgins all joined up.17 In early 1942, as Hitler’s forces thrust deep into the Crimea, Rosenberg and von Mende set up liaison offices to co-ordinate recruitment of other Osttruppen units. In the Crimea, the new campaign proved another triumph for von Mende: at least 20,000 Tatars volunteered, accounting for the entire male population aged 18–35 not already conscripted by the Soviets.
In early 1942, Hitler himself made a remarkable pronouncement at his military headquarters: ‘I consider,’ he said, ‘only the Mohammedans to be reliable. All the others [Caucasians] I conside
r unsafe. It can happen [to us] anywhere – one has to be incredibly careful. I consider setting up units of purely Caucasian peoples to be very unwise.’18 The new recruits offered another advantage: many were fiercely anti-Semitic. According to German diplomat Otto von Bräutigam, the Turkic recruits took a keen interest in attacking any Jews they encountered.19 Assisted by von Mende and Kayam Khan, Wehrmacht propaganda units enlisted the brightest and best Turkmen to staff liaison offices to churn out newspapers and pamphlets, many saturated by anti-Jewish sentiment.20 On 20 January 1942, Georg Leibbrandt, von Mende’s boss, took part in the Wannsee Conference to plan the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’. A week later, Leibbrandt called follow-up meetings at the Eastern Ministry – all attended by von Mende. The purpose was to discuss ‘the definition of the term “Jew”’ in the Eastern Territories’.21
In the second half of 1942, the German summer offensive Operation Blau brought the North Caucasus under German occupation, with Army Group A under Field Marshall Wilhelm List achieving deepest penetration in mid-November. German plans to recruit Soviet minorities were stepped up, alongside the destruction of entire Ashkenazim Jewish communities by Einsatzgruppe D and German army units.22 After the debacle of Stalingrad in early 1943, it became increasingly difficult for von Mende to convince his Turkic protégés like Kayum Khan that the Reich could guarantee them political independence. This dilemma worsened, naturally, when German forces began their long retreat and the Soviet Army advanced into formerly occupied regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus. This meant that von Mende increasingly emphasised the pan-Islamic identity of his eastern recruits. In 1943, he turned for help to the increasingly influential Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti, who was by then on excellent terms with SS Chief Himmler and his recruitment head, Berger. As we have seen, the Mufti regarded German anti-Jewish ideology as the vital common ground between Muslims and the Reich. Now he would help groom von Mende’s eastern warriors as Islamic crusaders. By the spring of 1943, no fewer than twenty-one Osttruppen battalions, commanded by thirty or more German officers, had been thrown against Stalin’s armies in the Caucasus. It was the evident eagerness of the Muslim recruits to shed blood for the anti-Bolshevik cause that especially intrigued Himmler. Now SS recruitment head Gottlob Berger began to covet the Wehrmacht’s Osttruppen.
A vile Austrian major called Andreas Mayer-Mader would play a leading part transferring the eastern battalions to the SS. Mayer-Mader had lived in Asia for many years before the war, and served in Chiang Kai-Shek’s Chinese National Army. His service record was not a distinguished one. Mayer-Mader was fascinated by the exotic peoples of Central Asia – and especially by Gerhard von Mende’s beloved Turkmen. The German Wehrmacht commander in the Caucasus assumed that Mayer-Mader’s ‘Asian expertise’ made him the perfect commander for the ‘Turkestani battalions’ that had been raised in the German POW camps in the General Government. Mayer-Mader’s military competence was minimal, but he soon forged a close relationship with Kayum Khan and the ‘Turkestan National Committee’. According to Wehrmacht reports, Mayer-Mader secretly backed Khan’s plan to turn the battalion into a ‘Turkestani National Army’, staffed mainly by Turkmen officers and organised in different ‘tribal’ units. Under Mayer-Mader’s command, the thuggish Turkmen troops had been let loose against Soviet partisans. They performed their duties with unremitting savagery, murdering unknown numbers of non-combatant civilians in the most sadistic manner. The lazy and venal Mayer-Mader appeared to have simply let his men run amok – and, for this, the Wehrmacht sacked him.
After his departure, Battalion 405 went to pieces, and in August 1942 the unit was disbanded and officers and men sent back to the Kalmyk steppe. Then at the end of 1943, the wily Mayer-Mader offered his services to Himmler. Mayer-Mader boasted that he could recruit at least 30,000 Turkmen to form a ‘Neu-Turkestan’ SS division, poaching most of them from Wehrmacht legions. In Berlin, Mayer-Mader, now an SS-Obersturmbannführer, conferred with the Mufti, who happily blessed his plan to form a Turkic-Muslim battalion and promised to promote recruitment – just as he had in Bosnia–Herzegovina. At the beginning of January 1944, Himmler amalgamated a batch of Wehrmacht ‘Turkestanische’ and ‘Azerbaijanische’ battalions with new Muslim volunteers as the ‘Ostmuselmanische SS Regiment’, numbering about 3,000 Turkmen, Azeri, Kyrgyzi, Uzbeki and Tadjiki volunteers.
A year earlier, in March 1943, Himmler had signed a far-reaching agreement with Rosenberg that assigned to the Waffen-SS responsibility for the ideological training of the eastern troops. The agreement referred to the ‘strong instinctive anti-Semitism of the eastern nations’.23 As he had with the SS ‘Handschar’, recruited in Bosnia, Himmler agreed to attach Imams to each SS Muslim battalion. The Mufti handpicked most of these trainee Imams and sent them to the German Imam schools in Dresden and Göttingen. Inspired by the Mufti and Mayer-Mader, Himmler spoke excitedly to his SS officers about creating an entire SS division from the Turkic tribes – and he began sending a few Muslim units to Trawniki for special training.
As the war turned against the Germans and it became evident that Stalin, not Hitler, would win the war, these eastern recruits began deserting in large numbers, either to the Soviet army or to one of the thousands of partisan units now causing havoc behind German lines. By March 1944, Mayer-Mader commanded a relic eastern army, which was demoted to become the 1st ‘Ostmuselmanische’ SS Regiment, or the 94th SS Regiment. In reports sent to Himmler by RSHA agents, Mayer-Mader was denounced as a poor commander who promoted equally lazy and ineffectual officers. But Himmler remained convinced that this new Muslim SS regiment would be ideal for the ‘bandit war’ he waged in the east: burning villages, rounding up civilians for labour service, mopping up any surviving Jews and destroying crops. So he ignored the RSHA warnings and dispatched Mayer-Mader to Belorussia, which was overrun with Soviet partisans who played havoc with German supply lines. Himmler assigned the 94th SS Regiment to HSSPF for Belorussia, Curt von Gottberg. Under the overall command of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Gottberg formed a new anti-partisan Kampfgruppe with the Turkic regiment, the Dirlewanger Brigade and the Kaminsky or RONA brigade. Gottberg had proved himself a ruthless anti-partisan commander, who in December 1942 had insisted to his officers that ‘Each bandit, Jew, Gypsy is to be regarded as an enemy’. In the course of Operation Nürnberg, Gottberg claimed a kill of 799 bandits, and at least 1,800 Jews.24 Now in the ‘Bandengebiet’ (partisan country) in the region near Minsk, Gottberg unleashed Mayer-Mader’s rabble, Dirlewanger’s gangsters and Kaminsky’s brutes against partisan forces. Once Mayer-Mader’s men had done their job a predictable chain of events took place. German officers attached to rival counter-insurgency forces reached Berlin, accusing Mayer-Mader of losing control of his forces. SS officers from Dirlewanger’s units took over command, and on 2 May Mayer-Mader was shot dead near the town of Hornowo-Wiercinski. He was the single reported German casualty that day and it is probable that Dirlewanger, acting on orders from Himmler, had ordered his assassination. Order had been restored – for the time being.
The relics of von Mende’s ‘Turkic Muslim division’ detrained on the outskirts of Warsaw at the end of July 1944, to wage war on the Polish home army at the side of the Russian Kaminsky Brigade (RONA) and the criminal troops of Dr Dirlewanger.
At the beginning of August 1944 Warsaw baked under cloudless, blue skies. The Vistula ran low and sluggish, a thin film of cracked mud forming on its banks. In Warsaw’s parks, the parched lawns yellowed and tree leaves rattled like parchment. Inside their oven hot bunkers or hidden behind paving stone barricades some 600 Polish companies now awaited the German assault. General Bór had, of course, no artillery or air force – and his fighters would confront Himmler’s SS forces with revolvers, antique rifles, a few hand grenades and homemade petrol bombs.
At the rail heads in the western suburbs of Warsaw, Himmler’s fearsome war machine rapidly put on muscle. As SS generals Reinefarth and Bach-Zelewski completed preparations, Sovie
t guns positioned on the eastern side of the Vistula abruptly fell silent and Russian fighter aircraft vanished from the skies above Warsaw. They would not be seen again for many weeks. Stalin’s mighty armies would not come to the assistance of the Polish home army.
Hitler's Foreign Executioners Page 47
