By the time the Walloons reached the front, the Soviet army had penetrated to a position a hundred miles west of Kiev, biting deep into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. As the Russians prepared to cross the Dnieper, German forces clung to a chain of strong points on the opposite bank. One was located in the industrial region of Cherkassy and defended by the SS ‘Wiking’ division, reinforced by the Estonian SS ‘Narva’ and the Flemish SS Sturmbrigade Langemarck. The ‘Wallonien’ reached the Cherkassy salient at the end of November. The supremely pompous Degrelle was immediately at loggerheads with his commanding officer Lippert, but the front line offered few opportunities for political skulduggery. Through December and into early January 1944 the ‘Wallonien’, fighting against overwhelming forces in sub-zero temperatures, suffered ‘fearful losses’. Lippert’s natural caution was frequently undermined by the reckless Degrelle, who was desperate to bolster his standing with Himmler.11 By the beginning of February, some 250 SS ‘Wallonien’ men who had survived this relentless attrition had become trapped inside the ‘Korsun-Cherkassy pocket’ by the relentless Soviet advance. On 13 February, Lippert was killed by an explosive shell, a moment Degrelle recalled in grisly detail. Lippert, he wrote, uttered ‘the superhuman scream of a man whose life is suddenly torn from him’, but he still possessed ‘the extraordinary lucidity to pick up his kepi from the ground and put it back on his head so as to die fittingly’.12
By then, armadas of Soviet T-34 tanks, backed by roaring batteries of ‘Stalin Organs’ relentlessly tightened the trap around the German forces. The new ‘Wallonien’ commander Jules Mathieu ordered Degrelle and the surviving Belgians to ‘break out’ towards the south-east, where they could rendezvous with German reinforcements. At dawn on the morning of 17 February, Degrelle joined a ‘fantastic jumble’ of tanks, mechanised and horse-drawn vehicles, Ukrainian refugees and even Soviet POWs all trying to reach a narrow corridor of escape before the Russians slammed it shut. ‘It was no lark,’ Degrelle recalled. Ahead, German panzers, driven by their ‘marvellous warriors’ forced open a breach just a few hundred metres wide. As the Belgians, hauling their dead commander on a sled, raced after the tanks, thick snow began to fall making it almost impossible to see further than a few metres, but shielding the retreating troops from Soviet aircraft. Degrelle led his battalion deep into a ravine, where he halted, uncertain what to do next. At any moment, he feared, the Soviet ‘Mongols’ would discover them and start hurling down grenades. But somehow Degrelle extricated his men and they trudged painfully west, past twisted tank wrecks and the ‘hot intestines of horses spilled on the bloodied snow’.
A day later, the fleeing German forces reached the east bank of the Gniloi-Tikitsch River. Huge blocks of ice crusted the rushing torrent, swollen by the spring melt. Every bridge had been destroyed. Close behind, Degrelle recalled, Soviet tanks had begun spilling over the ridge he had just descended – and he and the retreating Belgians had no choice but to take their chances in the icy river. Many vanished forever in the swirling torrent. Soldiers who made it to the other bank, some ‘naked and as red as lobsters’, huddled together by the frozen bank, but there was no time to spare. As the Russian tanks began firing from the opposite bank, Degrelle and his comrades made a dash for the forest. Looking back, he could see unceasing ‘human streams’ of German soldiers gushing from the woods, desperately dodging Soviet fire and throwing themselves into the freezing water.
For Degrelle, the ‘Cherkassy breakout’ was the zenith of his career as a collaborator. At the beginning of 1944, the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin battled with a relentless inundation of catastrophic news from the east. Goebbels seized on the Tcherkassykämpfer and turned a shambolic retreat into a spectacular triumph. Its most prominent hero was, of course, Léon Degrelle, who was summoned to the ailing Hitler’s military headquarters and, in front of Germany’s delighted press corps, awarded a Knight’s Cross. Buoyed up on a wave of fatuous euphoria, Degrelle was flown back to Belgium in triumph on 22 February. In Brussels, Degrelle’s most devoted supporters staged a rally at the Palais des Sports. Diehard Rexists filled the hall and applauded as the Chef reaffirmed his faith in Hitler and the Reich.
Degrelle squeezed every last drop of acclaim from his triumphal progress. On 5 March, he arrived in Paris and harangued a pro-German gathering at the Palais de Chaillot in SS uniform. On the platform with Degrelle stood the crème de la crème of the French collaborationist movement, among them Marcel Déat, Jacques Doriot and Joseph Darnand, the commander of the French SS ‘Charlemagne’ division. After the Rally, German ambassador Otto Abetz, who had long promoted Degrelle’s cause, threw a party at the German Embassy. At the beginning of April, Degrelle returned to Brussels and, riding in an armoured half-track with his children, and led the ‘Wallonien’ men to yet another rally. The Bourse had been decorated with SS Sig runes and swastika flags which proclaimed ‘Honneur a la Légion!’ As the round of celebrations and parties continued, and expensive champagnes and cognac flowed at Degrelle’s lavish home in the Drève de Lorraine, the Chef de Rex waited impatiently for the call from Hitler promoting him from war hero to Belgian Staatsführer.
The German military governor, Eggert Reeder, observed the triumphant spectacle with alarm. Reeder had long had the measure of Degrelle and despised him as a vainglorious fantasist. ‘It is the case,’ he reported:
every time, that Degrelle can be judged to be erratic, easily influenced, clumsy in his actions and occasionally unreliable when it comes to political matters … Due to his temper and a number of other weaknesses, Degrelle often tends to drift into the realms of political fantasy and a self aggrandisement which has nothing to do anymore with proper optimism or realistic political judgement.13
The call from Hitler never came. For the Nazi elite, Degrelle was a merely a short-breathed propaganda windfall.
Even Degrelle could not compete with Himmler’s phantasmagorical optimism. A remarkable snapshot of the SS chief in early 1944 can be found in the memoirs of Arturs Silgailis, a colonel in the Latvian 15th Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS, which had been dispatched to the front in November 1943. Relations between the German officers and their Latvian recruits, many of them conscripts, had come perilously close to collapse and Silgailis had confronted the division’s German commander SS-Brigadeführer Carl Graf von Pückler-Burghaus at his billet on a Latvian farm. Pückler-Burghaus claimed to sympathise with the Latvians and introduced Silgailis to his good friend, Hermann Fegelein, the priapic husband of Eva Braun’s sister and a veteran of the SS Cavalry Brigade ‘Florian Geyer’ that had led the attack on Jewish villages in the Pripet Marshes in 1941. Fegelein had been appointed SS liaison officer at Hitler’s military headquarters at Rastenburg, and he offered to arrange a meeting between Silgailis and Himmler. So it was that at the beginning of February 1944, Latvian collaborator Silgailis found himself at Himmler’s headquarters, sited less than 10 miles from the Wolf’s Lair.
Himmler entered, flanked by two aides and another SS officer, and immediately launched into a tirade about Pückler-Burghaus who had, he believed, ‘mishandled’ the Latvians. Himmler invited Silgailis to lunch and they sat down to consume a lavish meal, while Himmler (Silgailis claims) listened attentively to his complaints about the treatment of the Latvian troops. He proposed that the SS set up a military academy to train Latvian recruits. Himmler rejected that idea: a ‘Latvian’ academy would blinker its students. To rub in his point, he placed his elbows on the dinner table and covered his eyes. He went on: ‘every SS officer, regardless of nationality, should politically look far beyond the boundaries of his country: he must envision the whole living space of the family of German nations’ (my italics). By these, Himmler explained, he meant the Germans, the Dutch, the Flemish, the Anglo-Saxons, the Scandinavians and the Baltic peoples. The most important task of the present time was to combine all these nations ‘into one big family’: a union founded on equality, the separate identity of each nation and its economic independence ‘adjusting the latter
to the interest of the whole German living space’. Naturally, since it was the ‘largest and strongest’ nation Germany would take the leading role. Later, when the war was over, ‘all German nations would be leading’ – a point Himmler clarified by pointing to the current ‘Grossdeutschland’ comprising ‘many Germanies’ in which each one had an equal place. He went on: ‘Germanic’ nations produced hardier peoples because they had to contend with harsh northern climates. The softer ‘Roman’ peoples would have to acquire the same qualities through unification with Germany. After that had been accomplished, the Slavic nations would have to be tackled. Even they must be persuaded to join ‘the family of white races’. All ‘white people’ faced a terrible menace: the increasing numbers of ‘yellow people’ whose ‘born fanaticism – the disdain for death and belief in Nirvana’ encouraged them to reproduce with fecund abandon. By promoting patriotism and large families, the white races would defend Europe against the ‘Asiatic’ menace. The Waffen-SS led the way, Himmler went on, by recruiting German, Roman and Slavic peoples – even Islamic units: ‘every unit has maintained its national identity while fighting in close togetherness’. Returning finally to Silgailis’ suggestion to form a Latvian military college, Himmler pointed out that in order to embrace this racial battle against the ‘yellow peoples’ all SS officers must be trained at the same college – in Germany. By receiving the same education, every SS officer would embrace the cause of equality among the white races.
This meeting is one of the very few documented encounters between Himmler and a representative of the SS foreign legions. Himmler speaks as if the rapid advance of the Soviet army presented merely a short-term setback: his faith in the basic principles of the ‘General Plan East’ remained intact. It is curious that Himmler refers to the threat posed by ‘yellow peoples’, but Hitler too often lashed out at ‘yellow Asiatics’ and in anti-Semitic tracts Jews are often characterised as an ‘Asian’ race. Himmler was, of course, attempting to bind Silgailis to the Reich by promising the Latvians a place at the high table. He appears to have succeeded. Silgailis and his fellow collaborators wrung a few concessions from their SS masters and fought on for the Reich. But that lunchtime lecture smacks of Himmler’s perverted idealism. His master plan could somehow still be made to work. Closeted inside his eastern headquarters hundreds of kilometres from the blood and ice of the front, Himmler drew on his last mental resources and the magic fingers of Dr Kersten to blunt the catastrophe that was engulfing the Reich.
By now every telex brought bad news. In Riga, Commissar Hinrich Lohse had suffered a breakdown; in Minsk, a chambermaid had inserted a land mine into the bed of HSSPF Wilhelm Kube – with fatal consequences. The Russians had finally overrun the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, and its despotic ruler Erich Koch had replaced the unfortunate Lohse. Koch had no intention of spending much time in Riga. Instead, he ruled the fast-shrinking Ostland from a lavish suite in Berlin’s Adlon Hotel, a short distance from Rosenberg’s Eastern Ministry. Koch liquidated the Baltic ‘self-administrations’ and began deporting tens of thousands of Latvians from northern Latvia (Vidzeme) to East Prussia as forced labour. Hitler, however, ordered Koch to hold the Kurland (Courland, also known as Kurzeme) in western Latvia. The Kurland protrudes deep into the Baltic, west of the Gulf of Riga. For the Latvian commanders like Silgailis and Bangerskis, the ‘defence of the Kurzeme’ offered a way to convince their wavering recruits that would be ‘defending Latvia’ against the Soviets. But the Kurland had a very different significance for the Germans; Latvian blood would be shed to serve only German interests. As the Soviet armies crossed into the Baltic, Admiral Karl Dönitz had met with Hitler and convinced him that new generation U-boats, which had the capacity to stay submerged longer, would soon become available and could be deployed to cut off the Allied forces in Europe. To launch this second ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, the Kriegsmarine would require the ice-free Baltic ports of Liepaja and Ventspils, both located on the Kurzeme coast. For Hitler, invariably entranced by the phoney promise of ‘Wunderwaffen’, Kurland was merely a bridgehead to launch another illusory front.14 The Latvian SS men would be mere cannon fodder. So Hitler renamed the old Army Group North as ‘Army Group Kurland’ and ordered the ‘Baltic fortress’ must be defended at any cost. There would be no surrender.
As the Germans turned the Kurland into a fortress, 200 Soviet divisions swung south towards Riga, pushing the rest of the German forces back through Lithuania towards the East Prussian border. As they abandoned the Ostland, German civilian administrators seized what plunder lay to hand. Convoys steamed from Baltic ports, stuffed full of livestock, machinery and Latvian slave workers. Inland, the retreating Germans troops torched grain fields and hacked down forests. They dismantled factories and even ‘Germanic’ villas and churches which they regarded as property of the Reich. East of Riga, they blew up the Kegums hydroelectric power station on the Daugava, flooding farmland and drowning villages. The German barons had always regarded their Latvian peasants as expendable.
In the meantime, soldiers of the Latvian 19th Waffen Granadier Division of the SS dug in along an 8-mile segment of the 150-mile western Kurzeme front – destined to be the last German outpost in the east.15 On the other side of the fragile fortress walls were up to 200 Soviet divisions of the three Baltic fronts and the Leningrad front. In the Baltic, which formed the western bulwark of ‘Festung Kurland’, torpedo boats of the Soviet Red Banner Fleet preyed on German convoys that steamed between the Kurzeme ports and what was left of Hitler’s Reich. As well as the Latvians, Festung Kurland would be defended by half a million German troops: thirty divisions of the 16th and 18th Armies, commanded by the foul-tempered Generaloberst Ferdinand ‘the bloody’ Schörner. Schörner and his officers had little time for their Latvian allies and most did little to hide their contempt. Any soldier caught ‘shirking’ or trying to desert would be swiftly and brutally punished. Inside Festung Kurland punitive executions became a frequent occurrence. One German commander tried to make amends by proclaiming that the Latvian recruits would be celebrated as ‘Latvia’s next historic men’, but desertions mounted daily.
Seventy years later, Latvian apologists claim that the two Latvian Waffen Granadier Divisions of the SS defended Latvia against Soviet assault. Their argument makes no sense at all from a strategic point of view since the Latvian legionaries allied themselves with the army of a power doomed to defeat. ‘Defending the Latvian nation’ in Waffen-SS uniform in any case conceals a hidden agenda. Many soldiers who served in the Latvian Waffen-SS divisions had served in the SS Schuma battalions that had liquidated the majority of Jews in the Baltic nations. One of these mass killers was Standartenführer Voldemārs Veiss, who had offered his service to the Reich when Special Task Force A, led by Franz Walther Stahlecker, had arrived in Riga in July 1941. Like Viktors Arājs, Veiss (who had once served as Latvian military attaché in Finland) proved himself a dedicated killer. He had been rewarded with a leading role as Director General of the Interior in the puppet Latvian ‘self-administration’. The ‘self-administration’ was riddled with radical nationalists who had long wanted a ‘Latvia for Latvians’ cleansed of any ‘foreign’ interlopers. This ethnic cleansing had been successfully achieved by Latvians who voluntarily participated in German managed operations against Latvian Jews. When this murderous onslaught had been completed, with the destruction of the vast majority of Baltic Jews, it was the compliant Latvian ‘self-administration’ that took a leading role recruiting many thousands of young Latvian men to fight in what would become a Latvian civil war, since many other Latvians also served in the Soviet army and were equally determined to liberate Latvia from its German occupiers. In every German-occupied region, in the Balkans, Ukraine, France and Belgium, collaboration provoked deadly civil conflict.
On 15 October 1944 the Soviet onslaught began with a massive artillery barrage. The German commanders made sure the Latvians bore the brunt; some Latvian battalions fled en masse, and Soviet armoured forces broke
through at several points. As the Germans struggled to stabilise the line, they pulled out the worst performing Latvian units and deported them to Danzig and Gotenhafen (Gdyna). At a training camp in Sophienwalde, SS officers refitted and retrained the shell-shocked legionaries, bulking up numbers with Latvian dissidents who had been imprisoned in Stutthof concentration camp, and other Baltic citizens on labour service. As the Soviet army shattered German divisions on the East Prussian border and poured into Pomerania, the Germans attached the Latvians to the Third Panzer Army to defend the Oder-Vistula canal. Here too the Russian assault was crushing. The German commander of the ‘Latvian Legion’ was killed and the Latvians again fled the battlefield. The 15th Waffen Latvian Division had also suffered terrible losses and the ‘Latvian Legion’ had ceased to be an effective combat unit in any meaningful sense: in the spring of 1945, battered German divisions cannibalised any survivors to defend the last citadels of the Reich; so much for defending Latvia.
In every battered sector of the disintegrating German line, the Soviet meat grinder began consuming Himmler’s foreign legions. In the spring of 1944, the Soviets had trapped the relics of the SS ‘Galizien’ and a German division inside a snail-shaped pocket near the city of Brody that was under continuous artillery and air attack. Marshall Ivan Konev refused to delay his advance across Ukraine and assigned a Special Task Force to mop up any remnant enemy troops. These Soviet soldiers hated the SS and loathed the traitorous foreign legions ‘der SS’; so tremendous firepower was focused on the SS ‘Galizien’ soldiers known to be hunkered down in the south-east tail of the Brody pocket. Some of the German troops occupied their time shooting Russian prisoners, including some elderly Ukrainian men who had sons fighting with the ‘Galizien’. One Ukrainian officer remembered hearing screaming: ‘Kamerad, Kamerad nicht schiessen!’ (don’t shoot, comrade!) As the German soldiers finished off the prisoners with the customary shot to the back of the head, a Ukrainian officer said (in German), ‘That’s the reason why the Germans have to leave Galicia … That’s why you’re losing the war.’16 For their part, Wehrmacht officers turned their frustration on their Ukrainian comrades. General Lange reported to Berlin: ‘As was anticipated, the Galicians in no way showed themselves to be the fanatical defenders of their homeland against Bolshevism.’ He grumbled that German weapons had been wasted on a ‘totally undisciplined, disordered mob’.17 A few German troops and the Ukrainians eventually managed to break out of the Brody pocket, but with appalling losses. Among those who never returned was the vile anti-Semite Dmytro Paliiv.
Hitler's Foreign Executioners Page 50
