The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  What happened there was by no meansunique. In Józefów, too, some local Poles had helped the Germans to round up the town’s Jews. The same happened in the village of Radzilow, where the Poles prevented their Jewish neighbours from fleeing, as well as in Oleksin. In Kraków some Poles eagerly joined in the German-led looting of Jewish stores and public beatings of Jews, and readily seized the opportunity to acquire Jewish property at bargain-basement prices. It is simply not credible to attribute all such violence toactive German encouragement. Nor was this phenomenon peculiarly Polish. In Lwów in July 1941, Jews were massacred by Ukrainians on the ground that they had collaborated with the NKVD. There were similar though smaller-scale reprisals in Kremets. In other Ukrainian towns like Stanyslaviv, Tarnopol, Skalat and Kosiv, local people initiated pogroms, digging mass graves for their victims without any need for German direction. In the Latvian capital, Riga, there was a ferocious pogrom on the night of July 1, directed not by the Germans but by local Thunder Cross members. Boris Kacel, who had grown up in a ‘middle-class neighbourhood’ of the city where ‘the variousethnic groups… were friendly to each other’ was astonished by what he witnessed:

  The Latvians expressed their hatred of the Jews through physical acts and angry words. They accused the Jews of being Communists and blamed them for all the ills to which they had been subjected during Soviet rule. In my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined the hidden animosity the Latvians had for their Jewish neighbours. Trucks arrived carrying small vigilante groups of ten to fifteen armed Latvians, who wore armbands in their national colours of red, white, and red. These men intended to kidnap Jews off the street and take away their personal belongings. The prisoners were then forcibly loaded onto the trucks, taken to the woods, and killed. It was terrifying to go outside, as one had to be aware of the vigilante groups that drove around the streets. The mobile killing squads… were in full command of the city, and nobody challenged their presence or their unconscionable killings. I did not expect such a severe assault; after all, the Jews had lived with the Latvians for many years. The two groups had always tolerated each other and had lived together in a friendly, harmonious atmosphere… The greatest tragedy was that these crimes were committed not by strange, invading forces, but by local Latvians, who knew their victims by their first names… The Jews soon had to seek German protection from the vicious Latvian hordes.

  Similar scenes were played out in Latgale and Daugavpils, where more than a thousand Jews were murdered before a single German had materialized. One German observer described what he saw in Latvia as ‘monstrous’. There was little difference to the south in Lithuania, where nationalist underground posters proclaimed ‘the fateful and final hour… to settle our account with the Jews’. In Kaunas, German soldiers merely stood and watched as locals beat Jews to death in the streets. Between half and two-thirds of the Jews there were killed not by Germans but by other Lithuanians. In Borisov, across the border in Byelorussia, it was drunken policemen who rounded up, stripped and shot the Jews. In parts of Romania, too, the Jews were killed before the Germans had even arrived. On the night of January 21, 1941, ninety-three Jews were stripped naked and shot in the Jilava forest, near Bucharest; others were slaughtered at the Stralueti abattoir, their bodies hung on meat hooks with labels reading ‘Kosher Meat’. Five months later 4,000 Jews were killed in Iasi in a week-long orgy of violence witnessed by Curzio Malaparte, correspondent for the Corriere della Sera:

  Hordes of Jews pursued by soldiers and maddened civilians armed with knives and crowbars fled along the streets; groups of policemen smashed in house doors with their rifle butts; windows opened suddenly and screaming dishevelled women in nightgowns appeared with their arms raised in the air; some threw themselves from windows and their faces hit the asphalt with a dull thud. Squads of soldiers hurled hand grenades through the little windows level with the street into the cellars where many people had vainly sought safety; some soldiers dropped to their knees to look at the results of the explosions with in the cellars and turned laughing faces to their companions. Where the slaughter had been the heaviest the feet slipped in blood; everywhere the hysterical and ferocious toil of the progrom filled the houses and streets with shot, and weeping, with terrible screams and cruel laughter.

  Far from disappearing after Corneliu Codreanu’s execution (see Chapter 7), the Iron Guard had grown in power; indeed, after the overthrow of the monarchy, General Ion Antonescu had appointed Codreanu’s successor, Horia Sima, as his Vice-Premier and proclaimed a ‘National Legionary State’. As loyal allies, Romanian troops were also responsible for some of the worst anti-Semitic violence after the invasion of the Soviet Union, notably in Odessa. Some Hungarians also betrayed their Jewish neighbours, if only by denouncing them once the Germans had occupied their country.

  In short, while the ‘final solution’ was unmistakably German in design, it is impossible to overlook the enthusiasm with which many other European peoples joined in the killing. Nor did the anti-Semitic violence of the early 1940scome as a bolt from the blue. It had been prefigured by the escalating persecutions of the 1930s. It did not take much to move some Poles from prejudice to discrimination to violent exclusion and finally, as in Jedwabne, extermination. Yet the point about Jedwabne is that it is simply an extreme, and now well documented, case of a Europe-wide phenomenon. Collaborators could be found not only in countries that allied themselves with Germany – Italy, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria – but also in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Soviet Union, countries the Germans invaded and occupied. Some were undoubtedly motivated by a hatred of the Jews as violent as that felt by the Nazi leadership. Others were actuated by envy or base greed, seizing the opportunity afforded by German rule to steal their neighbours’ property. Self-preservation also played its part. There were even Jewish collaborators, like the uniformed men of the Office to Combat Usury and Profiteering who policed the Warsaw ghetto, or the leaders of the various Jews’ Councils who helped organize the liquidation of the ghettos, or the concentration camp prisoners who accepted a measure of delegated authority in the (usually vain) hope of saving themselves.

  The experience of Jedwabne typifies the way German rule also fomented civil war. It was as if even the approach of German troops encouraged conflict to erupt in multi-ethnic communities. Poles were not the only killers, Jews not the only victims. Germans themselves could fall victim to this kind of violence. Between four and five thousand ethnic Germans were murdered in Poland in September 1939 as Poles took revenge for their country’s invasion. They then retaliated by forming ‘self-protection’ groups, which were ultimately subordinated to SS leadership. By the time that had happened, however, these groups had already massacred more than four thousand Poles. As a philologist, Victor Klemperer was struck by the way the Nazis delighted in euphemistic neologisms like Volkstumskampf (ethnic conflict) and Flurbereinigung (fundamental cleansing). This daily subversion of the German language, he believed, was far more effective than the more overt kinds of propaganda. Sanitized language also made the cycle of ethnic violence easier to live with.

  The Ukraine was perhaps the most blood-soaked place of all. In Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), egged on by the Germans, massacred between 60,000 and 80,000 Poles. Whole villages were wiped out, men beaten to death, women raped and mutilated, babies bayoneted. In the Polish village of Leonowka, Dominik Tarnawski was shot by Ukrainians but managed to escape; his family was not so fortunate. His friend Tadeusz Piotrowski describes their fate:

  First, they raped his wife. Then, they proceeded to execute her by tying her up to a nearby tree and cutting off her breasts. As she hung there bleeding to death, they began to hurl her two-year-old son against the house wall repeatedly until his spirit left his body. Finally, they shot her two daughters. When their bloody deeds were done and all had perished, they threw the bodies into a deep well in front of the house. Then, they set the house
ablaze.

  This was not an isolated atrocity. Waldemar Lotnik, a Polish teenager who escaped from a German labour camp and joined a Polish ‘Peasant Battalion’, was just about to rape a girl when he realized he knew her family and remembered her as a child. As another Pole recalled, ‘Stories abounded of Polish mothers being held by the Ukrainian Nationalists and forced to watch as their families were dismembered piece by piece; of pregnant women being eviscerated; of vivisected pregnant women having cats sewn into their bleeding abdomens; of Ukrainian husbands murdering their own Polish wives; of Ukrainian wives murdering their own Polish husbands; of Ukrainian fathers murdering their own sons in order to prevent them from murdering their own Polish mothers; of sons of Polish-Ukrainian heritage being sawn in half because, the Nationalists said, they were half Polish; of children being strung up on household fences; of helpless infants being dashed against buildings or hurled into burning houses.’ Here was ethnic conflict not merely between neighbours, but within families. The internecine war in the Ukraine only grew more ferocious as the war progressed, with some Ukrainians fighting for the Axis, some for the Allies and others for an independent Ukraine.

  In the Balkans, too, there were multiple civil wars along ethnic, religious and ideological lines. Yugoslavia had fallen apart in the wake of the German invasion of April 1941. Seizing the moment, the Croatian leader Ante Pavelić had pledged to side with Hitler. In the ensuing chaos, his Ustašas waged a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against their Serbian neighbours in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, torturing and killing hundreds of thousands of them. The populations of entire villages were packed into their churches and burned to death, or were transported to be murdered at camps like Jasenovac. Serbian Četniks and Partisans repaid these crimes in kind. Of the million or so people who died in Yugoslavia during the war, most were killed by other Yugoslavs. This included nearly all of Bosnia’s 14,000 Jews. In Greece the German occupation was the cue for bitter conflict. There, as in Yugoslavia, a three-cornered war raged – between the foreign invaders and nationalists, but also between nationalists and indigenous Communists. When Bulgaria annexed southern Dobruja from Romania, tens of thousands of people were expelled from their homes on either side of the new border.

  Most empires purport to bring peace and order. They may divide in order to rule, but they generally rule in pursuit of stability. The Nazi empire divided the peoples of Europe as it ruled them – though, ironically, the divisions that opened up in Central and Eastern Europe generally had as much to do with religion as with race (most obviously in the conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians or between Croats and Serbs). But the ‘skilful utilization of inter-ethnic rivalry’ the Germans consciously practised did not lead (in the words of one German officer) to the ‘total political and economic pacification’ of occupied territory. On the contrary, in many places their rule soon degenerated into little more than the sponsorship of local feuds; the institutionalization of civil war as a mode of governance.

  HITLER’S MELTING POT

  There was, it must be said, an irony in all of this. For the more the Germans relied on foreign allies and collaborators the more multiethnic their empire necessarily became.

  The first symptom of this unintended transformation was the changing complexion of Hitler’s armed forces. The army that invaded the Soviet Union included 600,000 Croats, Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks and Spaniards. In addition to fighting alongside troops from allied countries, German soldiers also increasingly saw foreigners wearing German uniforms. Franco had declined to join Hitler’s war in the West, but he permitted the formation of a Spanish ‘Blue Division’ (named after the blue shirts of its Falangist volunteers) to fight against the Soviet Union; it served with distinction between October 1941 and December 1943, when it was reduced to a rump ‘Legion’ to maintain the credibility of Spanish neutrality. French volunteersalso fought, in the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchevisme, as part of a Wehrmacht infantry division. Other foreigners generally wore the uniform of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the SS, a reflection of Himmler’s enthusiasm for broadening the available pool of ‘Nordic’ blood, as well as the Wehrmacht’s reluctance to surrender large numbers of Germans of military age to the SS.

  Formally, some of these foreigners were not supposed to be foreign at all; they were Volksdeutsche, like the 17,000 Croatian Germans recruited or conscripted into the Prinz Eugen division, the 1,300 Danish Germans who volunteered to serve in the Wiking division and the Hungarian Germans who served in the Horst Wessel and Maria Theresa divisions. Residents of Alsace, Lorraine or Luxembourg who could claim two or more German grandparents were also offered Reich citizenship if they joined the Waffen-SS. From an early stage, however, non-Germans were also recruited, beginning with Dutchmen, Belgian Flemings, Danes and Norwegians in the summer of 1940. These nations were supposedly ‘Germanic’ or ‘Nordic’ in character, though there were also Waffen-SS recruits from Latin countries, notably Belgian Walloons. In all, these West European countries produced at most 117,000 men, not counting the tiny British Free Corps, made up of around fifty prisoners of war. Recruiting proved easier in Eastern Europe. May 1941 saw the formation of a Finnish legion, which proved to be a highly effective fighting force, followed by Latvian and Estonian divisions. The Waffen-SS also accepted Ukrainians, Slovaks and Croats. With every passing month after Stalingrad, the criteria for Waffen-SS membership grew more elastic, forcing Himmler to cite the multinational structure of the old Habsburg army as a precedent. Ukrainians were recruited; so were Hungarians, Bulgarians and Serbs. In February 1943 the first of three divisions was formed of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims, who wore fezes decorated with SS runes and were led in their prayers by regimental imams notionally under the supervision of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Out of all forty-seven Waffen-SS divisions, twenty were formed wholly or partly out of non-German recruits or conscripts and a further five out of Volksdeutsche Towards the end of the war, in fact, there were more non-Germans than Germans serving in Himmler’s army. At a meeting with the Chief of Staff of the Latvian Legion, Himmler himself offered a rationale for this seeming paradox:

  Every SS officer, regardless of nationality… must look to the whole living space of the family of German nations [Himmler specified the German, Dutch, Flemish, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Baltic nations]. To combine all these nations into one big family is the most important task at present. It is natural in this process that the German nation, as the largest and strongest, must assume the leading role. [But] this unification has to take place on the principle of equality… [Later] this family… has to take on the mission to include all Roman nations, and then the Slavic nations, because they, too, are of the white race. It is only through unification of the white race that Western culture can be saved from the danger of the yellow race. At the present time, the Waffen-SS is leading in this respect because its organization is based on equality. The Waffen-SS comprises not only German, Roman and Slavic but even Islamic units… fighting in close togetherness.

  Also fighting on the German side as auxiliaries – usually known as ‘Hiwis’ (short for Hilfswillige, literally ‘those willing to help’) or Osttruppen – were a variety of different groups from the occupied Soviet Union: not only ethnic Germans from ‘Transnistria’, the Romanian-occupied area between the lower reaches of the rivers Dnestr and Bug, but also Ukrainians. Six months after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, six new national legions were formed from former Soviet peoples identified as racially and politically reliable: Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, North Caucasians, Turkestanis and Volga Tatars. By late 1942 there were fifteen battalions of such troops; by early 1943 an additional six had been created. Don and Kuban Cossack defectors and deserters were also employed, not only on the Eastern Front but also in the Balkans and even in France. At Stalingrad, Paulus’s 6th Army had around 50,000 such auxiliaries attached to its front-line divisions, over a quarter of its total strength, rising to around a half in the case of t
he 71st and 76th infantry divisions. When the 6th Army was encircled, between 11 and 22 per cent of those still fighting were non-German. After Stalingrad as many as160 battalions of Soviet PoWs fought on the German side, numbering as many as a million men. ‘Does this mean you will kill your own people?’ one group of these unfortunates was asked. ‘What can we do?’ they replied. ‘If we run back to the Russians, we would be treated as traitors. And if we refuse to fight, we’ll be shot by the Germans.’ As this suggests, most of those Soviet citizens who fought for the Germans were non-Russians.* But even some ethnic Russians were, after much debate, permitted to bear arms on the German side. Variousanti-Soviet forces had in fact sprung into being in the immediate aftermath of Barbarossa, including a Russian National Army of Liberation and the Russian People’s National Army, though the Germans had been very reluctant to legitimize such spontaneous organizations. Only in the final stages of the war did they sanction the creation of a Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia and an anti-Communist Russian Liberation Army under General Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov, who had been taken prisoner by the Germans in July 1942 after an unsuccessful bid to raise the siege of Leningrad. Though sent to the front in March 1945, Vlasov’s army saw action only briefly before refusing to follow German orders and joining Czech nationalists in Prague in their revolt against the SS.