Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  The Soviet army had effectively destroyed the SS ‘Galizien’. Out of 11,000 men trapped in the Brody pocket less than 3,000 escaped alive; an additional 7,400 were recorded as missing in action. Yet more defected to the Ukrainian insurgents, the UPA, or hid in Ukrainian villages. Himmler summoned the SS ‘Galizien’ commander, Fritz Freitag, to Berlin. To Freitag’s astonishment, Himmler wanted the ‘Galizien’ division reformed as soon as possible. He airily dismissed Freitag’s complaints about the Ukrainians’ mediocre performance in battle, pointing out that German divisions too had failed to repel the Soviet assault. On 19 October, a reluctant Freitag announced: ‘We all wish to renew our vow to the Führer, that we will pursue unto victory, our joint battle against the Bolshevist hordes and their Jewish-Plutocratic helpers.’

  The Germans assigned the reformed SS ‘Galizien’ to Slovakia where a revolt had broken out against the pro-German Hlinka regime. The Ukrainians would serve alongside Dr Dirlewanger’s criminal brigade that had recently been transferred from Warsaw. ‘You can be absolutely certain,’ Himmler made clear, ‘that I will never reprove anyone for excess.’18 Independent research carried out by Julian Hendy sheds light on the role played by the SS ‘Galizien’ in Slovakia.19 Hendy discovered that, on 15 October, the German commanders of the ‘Galizien’ raised a Kampfgruppe to liquidate partisans who taken part in the uprising. The unit would be led by Friedrich Wittenmayer, a career police officer who had extensive experience of ‘anti-bandit’ operations. According to reports made by German intelligence, and held in the Czech State Archives in Prague, the battle group cleared railway tracks and roads and captured enemy weapons. But Himmler’s ‘bandit war’ consistently punished civilians and this campaign by SS ‘Galizien’ men in Slovakia was no different from other German anti-partisan operations. On 26 October, a German commander reported that ‘Battle Group Wittenmeyer in process of occupying Nizna Boca (10km south of Krl. Lehota). Road between Rosenberg and Poprad therefore now free of the enemy. The Ukrainian volunteers of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS used in the operation fought excellently.’20 It is alleged that in the village of Nizna Boca the Ukrainian SS men carried out summary executions of male villagers. Hendy interviewed a Slovakian historian who stated:

  They took part in terrorist operations and reprisals against Uprising fighters … I will be very specific: In the Smerycany area and in Nizna Boca/Maluzina it specifically attacked the civilian population. In Smerycany, the Wittenmayer unit from the Division burnt the village down using artillery and mortar fire. The civilian population was driven out of the village and 80% of the 120 houses were burnt down. During the raid on Nizna Boca, five people died. These are just the most telling examples of when this unit struck.21

  The Nizna Boca killings were not on the same scale as the massacre in Huta Pieniacka. This was a relatively small-scale action at the tail end of a bigger operation directed at Slovakian ‘rebels’. But we must bear in mind that the attack was just one more instance of ‘bandit warfare’ and such tactics would have been mimicked in other villages in Slovakia where Himmler’s SS executioners were deployed.

  Meanwhile, the Soviet war machine penetrated ever deeper into the lands Hitler imagined would become a German ‘Garden of Eden’. On 1 August 1944, Otto von Wächter, the former Gauleiter of the Galicia district who had first proposed recruiting a Ukrainian SS division back in March 1943, sent a secret telex to Himmler. He explained that the Soviets had overrun the General Government, and his position as district governor had thus been abolished. He requested a transfer to the Waffen-SS. Himmler readily agreed; he appointed Wächter head of the Military Administration in Italy under SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. Wächter would, Himmler wrote, be of ‘immense use’ in this ‘interesting and difficult field’.22 The SS dominated the German occupation of northern Italy and, after 1943, Himmler dispatched there some of his most experienced génocidaires, including the odious Odilo Globocnik.

  In the Balkans, Josip Broz Tito’s partisan armies had seized the initiative in the summer, and desertions from the SS ‘Handschar’ had begun to escalate. Berger was forced to plead with Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, to intercede with the loyal German trained Imams who served with the division. El-Husseini did as he was told but his cadre of Imams had only a modest impact on plummeting morale. The turning point came in September 1944. As German garrison armies started withdrawing from Greece through the Balkans, the RAF’s multinational ‘Balkan Air Force’ launched Operation Rat Week to disrupt road and rail links along the line of retreat. Tito’s partisans backed the operation on the ground, successfully cutting supply lines to the ‘Handschar’. As the division’s mutinous ‘penal battalion’ struggled to get the railways running again, they came under repeated attack from the partisans, who could wreck 15 miles of track in a night. The Germans used their foreign SS units as buffers between retreating German armies and attacking Allied forces. As the chaos generated by Operation Rat Week got a grip, Tito ordered a final assault on the battered and demoralised SS battalions. Then on 6 September, the Chetnik leadership that had fought with Tito’s insurgents so bitterly finally turned against the Germans and the ‘Handschar’. As military conditions deteriorated sharply that month, Bosnian Muslims deserted in droves: in the first three weeks of September at least 2,000 men vanished into the mountains. Most took their weapons and equipment with them. To hasten the disintegration of the hated SS division, Tito announced an amnesty for all deserters from German forces.

  On 18 September, as the crisis deepened, the ‘Handschar’s commander Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig flew to Berlin to meet Himmler. According to Sauberzweig’s report, the SS chief reprimanded him ‘in the sharpest and most disgraceful manner’ and accused him of ‘defeatism and incompetence’. But there would be no escape: Sauberzweig was ordered to return to Bosnia and somehow plug the leaks. In Berlin, he called on the Grand Mufti at his Tiergarten villa. El-Husseini was no fool: he had no illusions left about the likely fate of his Muslim armies; neither his nor Hitler’s war could be won. But he promised the distraught Sauberzweig that he would fly to Sarajevo as soon as it could be arranged and would rally the shattered ‘Handschar’ men. The Mufti never returned to Sarajevo.

  The German commanders of the ‘Handschar’ had few options left. On 21 October one of the Imams, Adulah Muhasilovic, deserted, taking with him more than a hundred other ‘Handschar’ men. The rebels fled in German vehicles equipped with anti-aircraft guns and drove north and surrendered to Tito’s XVIII Croatian Brigade. When news of this latest calamity reached Berlin, an enraged Himmler ordered Sauberzweig to immediately disarm ‘unreliable elements’ and hand them over for labour service in Germany. Sauberzweig was once again summoned to Berlin and sacked. Sauberzweig was suffering from chronic exhaustion and Himmler had him admitted to the Charité Hospital in Berlin and then, when that proved ineffective, dispatched him to the Hohenlychen Clinic, where Albert Speer had been treated after suffering a nervous collapse.

  By the autumn of 1944, Hitler’s armies had been severely damaged. The Soviet army had overrun Romania and part of Hungary. After Romania’s defection, Stalin swallowed sixteen Romanian divisions and in October fourteen Bulgarian divisions joined the Allies. The Soviets then linked up with Tito’s partisan armies to drive German Army Group Serbia from eastern and north-eastern Yugoslavia, the region that would become modern Serbia. On 2 August, when Muslim Turkey broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, the Bosnians who had enlisted in Hitler’s war shed every last illusion. An exultant Marshall Tito seized Belgrade on 20 October.23 By then, the relics of the ‘Handschar’, which was now mainly ‘German’, had been transferred to Hungary in time to join the pell-mell flight of German forces. Although the new German commander of the SS ‘Handschar’ did not formally surrender until May, 1945, Himmler’s Persian warriors had long before deserted the Reich. After the German surrender the following year, the new Yugoslav government requested Sauberzweig’s extradition to Belgrade to s
tand trial with other captured German SS ‘Handschar’ officers. On the eve of his departure, ‘Speedy’ Sauberzweig swallowed a cyanide capsule.

  The majority of historians have interpreted the recruitment of non-Germans by the SS as a symptom of desperation. In other words, Himmler and his recruitment chief, Gottlob Berger, simply wanted as many bodies in SS uniforms as possible to hurl at the Soviet army. This book has demonstrated that foreign recruitment served a crucial ideological purpose: the ‘Germanisation’ of specific European ethnic groups and the dissolution of national identities through blood sacrifice. The collapse of Himmler’s master plan can be dated not to the main period of non-German recruitment between the summer of 1942 and the spring of 1943, but to 12 November 1944. For it was on this date that the SS ‘Galizien’ ceased to exist: Himmler approved its renaming as the 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Ukrainische no 1). He accepted that the ‘Galizien’ was no longer a valid term because ‘the division became a melting pot for Ukrainian men from all regions of the Ukraine’. German statements naturally tried to spin the demise of the ‘Galician project’. The ‘Ukrainische no 1’ was ‘intended as the future military home for all Ukrainians’ and its formation represented the ‘escalation of the battle against Bolshevism by the entire Ukrainian people’. Himmler authorised a new oath: ‘in the battle against Bolshevism, and for the liberation of my Ukrainian people and Ukrainian homeland, I will give absolute obedience to the Commander in Chief of the German armed forces and all fighters of the young European nations against Bolshevism, Adolf Hitler.’24 The new Ukrainian SS division was permitted to display the blue and gold national flag and its orchestra was allowed to play the Ukrainian national anthem. At the end of 1944, Himmler finally abandoned any pretence that Ukrainians recruited in the old Austrian province of Galicia represented a distinct semi-Germanised elite. As Otto von Wächter, the SS architect of the ‘Galizien’, had belatedly realised, ‘Galicia’ was a redundant territorial concept, which in any case incorporated as much ‘Polish blood’ as German. Himmler’s Galicians had finally become Ukrainians.

  In the spring of 1945, as the Ukrainians fled west to escape Stalin’s NKVD agents, Wächter made his final exit. As a leading German administrator, in short a mass murderer, there was a price on his head. Now he fled across the Alps into Italy and followed the Vatican ‘rat line’ to Rome. In the Eternal City, Wächter was hidden away by the pro-Nazi Austrian Bishop Alois ‘Luigi’ Hudal (who had once preached that Hitler represented the ‘new Siegfried of Germany’s greatness’) and, with new identification papers, became ‘Alfredo Reinhardt’ – a final homage to the assassinated SD leader, Reinhard Heydrich. He died a few years later in Hudal’s arms.

  On 12 January 1945, Soviet marshalls Koniev and Zhukov launched the last winter offensive of the war. They concentrated their main attack on the central sector of the Eastern Front just to the east of Kraków and Łódź. In Hungary, the Germans clung desperately to Budapest. Hitler had spurned every proposal to withdraw and Soviet forces had encircled the city as Arrow Cross fanatics rampaged through the Jewish quarter. Hitler had stripped other sectors of the front in a futile effort to break the siege. Now the weakened German forces holding the residue territory of the General Government faced a titanic assault. Before dawn, expendable Soviet punishment battalions moved forward to ferret out the German positions – and then at 10 a.m., a stunning bombardment from Russian heavy mortars (350 for every kilometre of front) and the deadly Katyushas and Ivan Grozny rocket launchers began pounding the German lines, making the ground shake and blasting tanks, men, concrete, earth and rock high into the freezing air. As the blazing deluge tore open gaping wounds all along the German front, tank armies clanked forward into the mangled breaches. On 17 January, the First Polish Army captured Warsaw, and on the same day, Hitler fled his Rastenburg headquarters for the last time and took refuge in the Reich’s Chancellery in Berlin.

  ‘Shrivelling up like an old man’, Speer recalled, Hitler never appeared in public again. On 30 January, he made a last radio broadcast to mark the twelfth anniversary of his appointment as Reich Chancellor. ‘His voice sounded shrill with despair,’ recalled one German listener. ‘How heavy must be the burden he bears!’ wrote another.25 Hitler’s state of mind, according to a small brigade of loyal memoirists, veered from suicidal despair to agitated optimism. As Hitler exercised his dog, Blondi, in the ruined gardens of the Chancellery, Russian armoured divisions raced towards the old German borders on the River Oder, often eating up over 300 miles every day. The Soviet armies smashed, split, encircled or simply swept past the shattered relics of Hitler’s war machine. On the Western Front, the last German offensive in the Ardennes had finally fizzled out. A massive steel trap began to close around Hitler’s Berlin fortress.

  Now the Reich would be defended by old men, boys of the Hitler Youth and the last relics of Himmler’s foreign legions. Many SS veterans have had nearly seventy years to rehearse their story and prepare their defence. But one French volunteer who survived the last days of the Reich, ‘Pierre’, tells his story with unvarnished rawness. For many decades after the liberation of France, Pierre naturally chose to remain silent about his service in the French Waffen-SS. But since his retirement, he has sought out other veterans; now, he says, they have little to lose by openly discussing their experiences. They do not discuss ideology and share a robust contempt for the patrician Christian de la Mazière, the SS ‘Charlemagne’ volunteer who made a highly publicised confession in the celebrated French documentary about wartime collaboration, The Sorrow and the Pity. Born into a lower middle-class Parisian family in 1920, Pierre attended mainly Catholic schools. The Catholic Church had always maintained close bonds with the anti-Semitic right. In the bitter aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, the Catholic founder of the Ligue antisémitique de France, writer and journalist Édouard Drumont (1844–1917) accused Jewish bankers and speculators of destroying the traditions of French Christianity. Voltaire had denounced Jews as wicked relics of antiquity, but for Drumont they were heralds of a corrosive modernity. His vitriol spilled into the pages of the Catholic newspaper La Croix, which persisted smearing the name of Alfred Dreyfus long after he had been exonerated. When Pierre turned 14, he joined the French Blueshirts (Mouvement Françiste), founded by another poison-tongued hack, Marcel Bucard. He says that he was inspired to join by one of his school teachers, who had taught him a ‘profound anti Bolshevism: a real threat to western civilisation’. Bucard banned Jews and Freemasons from joining the Blueshirts and his party was generously supported by the reactionary perfume magnate François Coty, as well as the Abwehr. In common with many young radicals in the 1930s, Pierre revered Adolf Hitler and was thrilled by his rise to power. Then in 1939, came the shattering news that the Germans had done a deal with the hated Bolsheviks. Pierre explains: ‘The German-Soviet friendship treaty which led to the occupation of Poland by the Germans and the Bolsheviks was a big disappointment to me: at least, it led me to join the [French] army without any ulterior motive and with a free mind.’

  Pierre was 18 when he joined up. In May 1940, as the German advance pushed his unit back across Belgium, he was captured along with six other French soldiers by an infantry convoy of the German 7th Panzer Division. Pierre points out that ‘the six of us represented three different regiments – so you will have an idea of the chaotic circumstances following our retreat from Belgium’. The Germans herded their prisoners into trucks:

  my Germanic ‘cousin’ asked me whether I was hungry. I answered in the affirmative and he offered me a piece of bread and three pieces of sugar, apologizing and explaining at the same time that they had made such a fast progress that their supply of food had not been able to follow them! That was my first encounter!26

  Pierre was taken to the POW camp Stalag VIIIC, close to Sagan in Upper Silesia. It was here, at evening roll call on 22 June 1940, that he heard the stunning news that the French had signed an armistice at the railway siding in the Compiègne Forest, where the
Germans had formally capitulated in 1918:

  Like myself, the people of my shack were filled with consternation and were absolutely quiet; that was not so in the [German] barracks where the news was received with cries of joy! I was equally happy and unhappy: happy because the horrors of war had ended for all the French civilians who were fleeing on all French roads and unhappy about the defeat of my country and its army.

  As Pierre’s comrades struggled to adjust to life behind barbed wire, many had difficulty coming to terms with the shame of the French surrender. Pierre shared their humiliation. Like other young Frenchmen, he had a ready explanation for the catastrophe. France had been brought to her knees by ‘certain dark forces’. The French Prime Minister Léon Blum had led France to defeat. And no wonder: Blum was a Jew! He called himself a ‘socialist’ but the truth was he was a ‘Bolshevik’ and in league with the Russians. Since the Nazi-Soviet Pact remained in force when Hitler invaded Scandinavia and Western Europe, Pierre reconciled taking up arms against Germany with his fierce hatred of Bolshevism. But, he went on: ‘The German attack on Russia in 1941 made me once again change my frame of mind. Without participating, I had become an “interested spectator”.’