Hitler's Foreign Executioners

The very broad scope of this book was challenging. I must thank first of all Simon Young who took time out from his busy schedule to provide invaluable advice and hands on assistance with a recalcitrant manuscript. Professor Michael Burleigh, William Niven and Nigel Jones read parts of the manuscript. Judith Lanio assisted with a mass of German language documents and texts with great efficiency. Christian Barse assisted with Danish materials. A number of historians generously responded to my many questions: Marko Attilla Hoare, Milan Hauner, Clemens Heni, David Cesarani, Andrew Ezergailis, Martin Dean, Wendy Lower, Martin Conway, Saul David, Adam Sisman, Timothy Snyder and Giles MacDonough all provided expert advice. Matthew Kott offered valuable insights into the German occupation of Norway, Latvia and the Baltic. At a critical stage, Ephraim Zuroff and Dovid Katz made valuable contributions. Detlef Siebert provided vital leads. I am grateful to Julian Hendy and Ray Brandon for generously sharing their insights and hard-won information about Ukrainian nationalism and the formation of the SS Division ‘Galizien’. George Lepre and Michael Melnyk, who have written accounts of the Bosnian ‘Handschar’ and the Ukrainian ‘Galizien’ SS divisions respectively, sent unique documentary materials. From these, I have drawn my own and no doubt different conclusions.

I spent many hours in some excellent libraries, above all the British Library and the Weiner Library in London. The National Archives in Kew was another important resource. I must also thank three German libraries: the German National Library in Leipzig, the State Library and the excellent Library of the ‘Topography of Terror’ in Berlin. I am especially indebted to the Bundesarchiv/Zentralle Stelle in Ludwigsburg. I discussed the problems of collaboration with Ojārs Ēriks Kalninš at the Latvian Institute and with historians at the Museum of the Occupation, Riga, the Riga Ghetto and Latvian Holocaust Museum and the Central State Archives in Kiev. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for any errors of fact and judgement.

I welcome corrections, comments and further research proposals through the website listed at the end of the Acknowledgements.

I thank Pimlico Books for permission to quote from Mihail Sebastian’s
Journal: 1935–1944
(2003) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for permission to use extracts from Frida Michelson’s remarkable memoir
I Survived Rumbuli
(1979).

Richard Johnson, Patrick Janson-Smith and Neil Blair backed the project at the beginning of a long haul. Simon Hamlet, Christine McMorris and Lindsey Smith at The History Press bravely took on a long manuscript. I must also thank some good friends: Laurence Peters, who read parts of the book and made valuable suggestions; Gerda Sousa; Karin Kaschner-Sousa; and David Robson, Sarah Dewis (and family), who provided varieties of nourishment and accommodation. My wife Diana Böhmer and our son Jacob put up with my periodic disappearances with fortitude: my love to them.

www.hitlersforeignexecutioners.com

     
Epigraph

     
Title Page

     
Acknowledgements

     
Note on Language

     
Preface: Riga, 2010

     
Introduction

Part One: September 1939–June 1941

  
1 The Polish Crucible

  
2 Balkan Rehearsal

  
3 Night of the Vampires

Part Two: June 1941–February 1944

  
4 Horror Upon Horror

  
5 Massacre in L’viv

  
6 Himmler’s Shadow War

  
7 The Blue Buses

  
8 Western Crusaders

  
9 The Führer’s Son

10 The First Eastern SS Legions

11 Nazi Jihad

12 The Road to Huta Pieniacka

Part Three: March 1944–April 1945

13 ‘We Shall Finish Them Off’

14 Bonfire of the Collaborators

15 The Failure of Retribution

     
Appendix 1 Maps

     
Appendix 2 Foreign Divisions Recruited by the Third Reich

     
Appendix 3 Officer Rank Conversion Chart

     
Appendix 4 Terms & Abbreviations

     
Notes

     
Sources

     
Bibliography

     
Index

     
Plate Section

     
Copyright

I have taken a pragmatic approach to German terms. Most specialised organisational terms are given in German to begin with and thereafter in English (Special Task Force for Einsatzgruppe, for example, although there is no ‘Special’ in the term), unless the original has become broadly accepted – ‘Der Führer’ for example. I have referred to SS ranks in German to distinguish them from army ranks.‘Die Wehrmacht’ in English language books has come to signify the German ground forces – strictly speaking Das Heer. After 1935, the term embraced all the armed forces in the Third Reich, including the army, navy and air force. For this reason I refer to the ‘German army’ rather than ‘the Wehrmacht’. I have treated place names on a case-by-case basis.

Imagine Whitehall on a dank, autumn morning. A far-right British political party leader steps towards the Cenotaph, jaw set, dark suited, clutching a wreath.
¹
Behind him stands the party elite sporting banners displaying back and white photographs of hard-faced men in grey military uniforms. A dense police cordon holds back jeering anti-fascists who have gathered in Parliament Square. He and his followers have come here to commemorate a handful of forgotten anti-communist martyrs who joined the German armed forces and fought against Stalin during the Second World War. After solemnly placing the wreath at the foot of Edwin Lutyen’s chaste memorial to the dead of the Great War, the party leader makes a short, angry speech denouncing the post-war British government for punishing these brave, far-sighted warriors as traitors. History has proved them right! As he finishes, an egg splatters on his immaculate black coat. Then the party men march up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square, closely pursued by protestors. Scuffles erupt, banners are trampled underfoot. Tourists and passers-by scratch their heads, puzzled. Who on earth were these ‘heroic’ anti-communists?

In August 1942, an odious public school dropout called John Amery and his companion Jeannine Barde arrived in Berlin masquerading as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Browne’. Amery was very well connected: his father was Secretary of State for India and his brother, Julian, an illustrious war hero.
²
John Amery’s hosts, the ‘England Committee’ at the German Foreign Office, hoped that his defection would provide them with a propaganda coup. They were grossly mistaken. Rebecca West, who witnessed Amery’s post-war trial for High Treason at the Old Bailey, concluded that he ‘was not insane … but his character was like the kind of automobile that will not hold the road’.
³
Although his odious personal ideology perfectly fitted the
German world view, John Amery was no great catch. His grandmother had been a Hungarian Jew who had found refuge in Britain, but the Amery clan were all diehard conservatives. Given this bigoted cradling, it is not surprising that John became a fervent anti-communist whose views, at least to begin with, mimicked those of his father and brother. But unlike them, he became an outspoken and virulent anti-Semite who was in thrall to the vicious ‘Jew hatred’ of French ultranationalist culture. John Amery spurned his well-to-do family and became a dedicated bohemian. He contracted syphilis at the age of 14 and by the time he arrived in Berlin was an alcoholic bigamist, burdened by massive debts. But Hitler and the German Foreign Office had a crass understanding of English social mores and it took them a long time to understand that John Amery had little to offer the Reich.

For a year, Amery and Jeannine boozed and rowed in the capital of the Reich, sending their bills to Hitler’s personal office. Amery made a few radio broadcasts and narrowly escaped a manslaughter charge when Jeannine choked to death on her own vomit. Then in January 1943, the French fascist leader Jacques Doriot, who had formed the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme (LVF), persuaded the German military authorities to give Amery access to British prisoners of war. Most gave Amery short shrift and he succeeded only in recruiting a tiny band of about thirty-eight turncoats, the majority of whom were former members of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). By the end of 1942, Amery’s bizarre antics had exhausted German tolerance and he was effectively sidelined by the England Committee. The baton passed to one Thomas Cooper, a former resident of Chiswick – who was already serving as SS Corporal Thomas Haller Cooper. Cooper had spent time as an SS camp guard in Sachsenhausen and fought on the Eastern Front. In early 1943, he was transferred to a British POW camp at Genshagen where he busily promoted the German cause. In September 1943 Gottlob Berger, the SS head of recruitment, formerly took over Cooper’s band of converts as the
Britisches Freikorps
(British Free Corps or BFC). At the end of April 1944, SS officer Hans Werner Roepke formally inspected Cooper’s dozen or so men and issued them with SS identification papers and side arms. The SS provided uniforms sporting heraldic leopards and a Union Jack shield.

The contribution of the BFC to the Reich’s ‘crusade against Bolshevism’ was not even trivial. SS General Felix Steiner reported that ‘they were suffering from an inner conflict … they were depressed’. Steiner refused to use them in combat – and last saw the sorry band shambling westwards along an autobahn. In May 1945 the relics of the BFC surrendered to American troops near Schwerin.
⁴
John Amery, who had inspired German recruitment of British prisoners, fled to Italy, to confer with Mussolini who was by then holed up in the fascist Republic of Salo. When
Amery arrived in nearby Como, he was captured by Italian partisans and handed over to British Military Intelligence. In November, Amery was repatriated, tried at the Old Bailey and, on 19 December 1945, hanged in Wandsworth prison. His distinguished father Leo Amery claimed that his son had been ‘inspired by a desire to save the British Empire’. Thomas Cooper, who had served in an SS Death’s Head unit, had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

Suppose that seventy years after John Amery’s fatal encounter with hangman Albert Pierrepoint, the leader of a far-right British political party proposed commemorating Amery and his ludicrous handful of followers as prescient Cold War warriors, who understood long before most British citizens that ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin was a tyrant infinitely more terrible than Adolf Hitler. Did not the crimes of the Soviet Union far outstrip those of Nazi Germany? Amery, this political party claims, was no treasonous villain, but a hero whose execution in a British prison was a travesty of justice. This counterfactual scenario is by no means unimaginable.