Hitler's Foreign Executioners (29 page)

On the night of 22 June, the Ukrainians crossed the San into Soviet territory, meeting no opposition, and began marching towards L'viv. The ‘Nachtigall' was commanded by OUN leader Roman Shukhevych – but his orders came from German Abwehr Oberleutnant Dr Hanz-Albrecht Herzner Oberländer. Shukhevych said later that he felt ‘like an ordinary recruit' not a commander-in-chief. In the ‘Nachtigall's' wake came
Pochidne hrupy
(in German
Marschketten
, marching groups) – paramilitary units that Bandera had recruited from fanatical young nationalists to take over police, press and administrative tasks in ‘liberated Ukraine'. Also moving fast in the same direction were two Einsatzgruppe C commandos. Bandera had every reason to be confident that within days he would be acting president of a sovereign Ukrainian state, albeit confined to Galicia. The 330 Ukrainian Abwehr recruits pounding their way towards L'viv, desperate to stay ahead of German armies bearing down behind, carried a heavy burden of expectation.

In the early morning of 22 June, dense waves of Luftwaffe bombers and Stuka dive bombers throbbed in the cloudless skies above the western Ukraine. German
intelligence had reported that cities like L'viv and Ternopol had been fortified and might hold up the German advance. The Luftwaffe attack was designed to soften them up.
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The thunderous sound of the German attack struck terror into the hearts of the 160,000 Jews who lived in L'viv, many of them refugees from occupied Poland. Inside the city, the Soviet authorities were taken by surprise and began to organise evacuation. They had grossly inadequate resources, and German bombing raids disrupted road and rail links. The Russians prioritised Communist Party officials and technical experts. In order to make it easier for Russians and Poles to escape, the panic-stricken Soviet authorities issued orders forbidding Jews to leave their homes. Any Jewish refugees who fled the city were turned back. The Jewish Council estimated that Russian obstruction trapped 150,000 Jews in L'viv as the German forces and their Ukrainian battalions bore down from the west.

As the ‘Nachtigall' crossed the Soviet border, Bandera had sent couriers ahead armed with flyers: ‘Destroy the enemy, people! Know this! Moscow, Poland, the Hungarians, the Jews – these are your enemies – destroy them.' According to Geheime Feldpolizei (Secret Military Police) reports, their Ukrainian interpreters accepted without question that ‘every Jew must be killed'. Another OUN-B leader informed Bandera that ‘We are setting up a militia that will help remove the Jews'.
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As the German front line rolled east, a ‘pogrom mood' raced like bushfire through the villages and cities of east Galicia. And thanks to Stalin and his NKVD apparatchiks, this conflagration would become a furnace. For, as they fled, the Russians left in their wake the gruesome relics of political terror.

During the Soviet occupation, the NKVD had crammed the prisons of east Galicia, including Brygidki and Zolochiv in L'viv, with Jews, Poles and Ukrainians– all accused of being ‘enemies of the people' or saboteurs. On 24 June, as fast-moving German forces swung round to encircle Major-General Vlasov's 4th Mechanised Corps which had been hastily assigned to defend this section of front, Lavrenti Beria, head of the Soviet secret service, sent instructions to his regional chiefs to shoot all ‘political prisoners': those arrested for ‘counter revolutionary activities', economic and political sabotage and ‘anti-Soviet activities'. With some justification, Stalin feared that a German-sponsored ‘Fifth Column' was about to wreak havoc in the western Ukraine. Not every prisoner in the Soviet prisons was an OUN activist by any means; many were Jews. But Bandera's plan was indeed to launch uprisings against the Soviet oppressor with German backing and to aid German forces.
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As soon as they received Beria's orders, NKVD men rushed to murder thousands of prisoners, shooting some, bludgeoning others with hammers or throwing hand grenades into cells. The dead piled up; a handful saved themselves by smearing their faces with blood and hiding beneath their dead comrades. The Russians buried
some of their victims but piled many others in the prison yard. Among them was the ‘Nachtigall' commander Roman Shukhevych's brother Yuri. In Ukraine, the summer of 1941 was hot; Brygidki became a stinking charnel house.

In 1975, American lawyer Alfred-Maurice de Zayas stumbled on the unexamined records of the WUSt ‘Wehrmacht Untersuchungsstelle' (War Crimes Bureau), a specialised department of the OKH which investigated breaches of the law and customs of war by the Allies. In 1941, WUSt reported on massacres in L'viv and other locations in the east by agents of the NKVD.
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De Zayas' Wehrmacht ‘sources' are by definition grossly biased – and, writing in 2000, he refers to the ‘Jewish dominated NKVD'. This anti-Semitic slander, which according to de Zayas explains the ferocity of the L'viv pogrom, profoundly compromises the value of his research. His findings have predictably been exploited by anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers.
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Nevertheless, many of the eyewitness statements collected by WUSt agents provide an unadorned account of the horrors encountered in the NKVD prisons:

‘The NKVD men rushed from cell to cell and shot down the detainees … then I heard “Come quickly to the courtyard, the cars are ready to go”.'

During the night of 29 June the last NKVD detachments fled L'viv, harassed by fanatical OUN-B insurgents. It need hardly be pointed out that the Jewish citizens of L'viv bore no responsibility for these hideous atrocities.

At 4.30 the following morning, the ‘Nachtigall' battalion marched singing into L'viv and, following orders, seized strategic sites, including the radio station on Vysoky Hill in the centre of the city. The ‘Brandenburg' regiment and other German 1st Mountain Division and the 49th Army Corps arrived soon afterwards. It did not take long for the Germans to find in Brygidky prison the remains of the NKVD prisoners. One German eyewitness, cited by de Zayas, describes ‘bringing out' 423 corpses from Brygidky and hundreds more from the former OGPU Samarstinov prison. Many of the bodies had badly decomposed and, without
proper masks or oxygen, the stench was unspeakable. As the German ‘Wochenschau newsreel' (filmed by an army cameraman) shows, the German troops then rounded up Jews and forced them to continue excavating the bodies and bringing corpses loaded on wagons into the city.
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It was the typical German trick of guilt by association – a theatrical sleight of hand that compelled Jews to display and stand beside the bloated and mutilated corpses brought from the charnel houses of the prisons. It was a crude but horribly effective way to pin blame on every Jew in L'viv for the crimes of the NKVD. At some point, Einsatzgruppe C units drove into L'viv led by SS-Brigadeführer Dr Otto Rasch. They later reported that ‘the Russians, before withdrawing, shot 3000 inhabitants. The corpses piled up and buried at the GPU prisons are dreadfully mutilated. The population is greatly excited: 1000 Jews have already been driven together.' In other words, righteous retribution would now be meted out to any Jew who fell into the hands of the vengeful people of L'viv. There was talk that OUN activists and relatives of men in the ‘Nachtigall' battalion had also been murdered. The Germans exhibited photographs of the mutilated dead in shop windows and attached descriptions that blamed their murder on Jews.

The myth that all Bolsheviks were Jews, Golczewski points out, was thus turned on its head: all Jews were Bolsheviks, murderous agents of Moscow. According to the Einsatzgruppe report, Rasch ‘formed a local Ukrainian militia' (presumably he co-opted Bandera's men), and between 30 June and 3 July, the Germans and Ukrainians rampaged through L'viv. They beat Jews to death or dragged them into Brygidki prison to remove more bodies and wash down the walls and floors. As soon as the ‘purification of the prisons' had been at least partially completed, the Ukrainians locked Jews inside. Philip Friedman, who survived the Ukrainian genocide, remembered: ‘the newly organized Ukrainian militia began to roam through Jewish houses to remove men – and frequently women also … Eyewitnesses relate that the courtyard and walls of the Brigidky prison were spattered with flesh blood up to the second floor and with human brains.' Dr Rasch reported to RSHA in Berlin that ‘the Ukrainian population took praiseworthy action against the Jews', not only in L'viv but further east in Dobromil, Tarnopol and Sambor. One OUN-B man made his intentions plain: ‘We don't want the Polish and Jewish landowners and bankers to return to Ukraine. Death to the “Moskales” [Muscovites], the Jews and other enemies of the Ukraine.'
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Some Ukrainian historians continue to deny that the ‘Nachtigall' battalion took part in the L'viv pogrom, or to defend the L'viv attacks as a ‘reaction' to the discovery Soviet atrocities. At the end of the war, a representative of the OUN issued a statement:

The statement acknowledges that Ukrainians accepted German propaganda that the atrocities had been carried out ‘mainly by Jews'. The statement further accepts that ‘all Jews were slaughtered' and that ‘the population' took ‘firm action'. ‘The population' is a very vague term indeed. Did the Abwehr recruits join in the slaughter? This has proved a tricky question to resolve because witness statements, unreliable at the best of times, do not clearly identify who took part in the slaughter, except as Ukrainians wearing some kind uniform. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the Abwehr issued the ‘Nachtigall' recruits with German
feldgrau
uniforms. The ‘Roland' men, who wore old Czech uniforms, would have been easier to identify.

Evidence has recently come to light that conclusively implicates the ‘Nachtigall' men and has solved many of the puzzles associated with the L'viv pogrom. In the mid-1950s, the East German
Die Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes – Bund der Antifaschistinnen und Antifaschisten
(VVN-BdA e.V. or simply VVN) began to investigate the wartime activities of Dr Theodor Oberländer, who had by then become a prominent political figure in the West German Adenauer government. The VVN investigation and trial was, to be sure, politically motivated but it does not necessarily follow that the evidence it gathered has no historical import. It will be recalled that Oberländer had played a leading part in negotiations with OUN-B representatives concerning the formation of a Ukrainian battalion and was then appointed an ‘advising officer' to the ‘Nachtigall'. In 1960, the East German court sentenced Oberländer to life imprisonment in absentia; the sentence was rescinded after German unification in 1993.
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In his review of the evidence, the DDR public prosecutor concluded definitively that: ‘individual Ukrainian soldiers of the ‘Nachtigall' took part in the raids against Jews in the city centre. To sum up, it can be concluded that a Ukrainian unit of 2nd Company of the ‘Nachtigall' battalion committed violent acts against Jews rounded up in the NKVD prison.' One former ‘Nachtigall' recruit, interviewed by the German investigators, admitted ‘During our march we saw victims of the Jewish-Bolshevik terror [sic] with our own eyes, which increased our hatred against Jews. And after that we shot all the Jews we could find in two villages.'
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His confession makes it unlikely that the ‘Nachtigall' men did not join in the slaughter of Jews in L'viv, where the Germans had displayed the victims of ‘Jewish-Bolshevik terror'.
Terrible pogroms engulfed many villages and towns in East Galicia. On the night of 1 July, Złoczów suffered a massive Luftwaffe bombardment – and early in the morning the German 9th Tank Division rolled into town. Hordes of young OUN members wearing blue and yellow armbands flooded into the streets, waving Ukrainian flags and embracing the German soldiers. It was reported that the ‘the Ukrainians were ecstatic … They came from the villages, dressed in Ukrainian national costumes, singing their Ukrainian songs'.
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The Germans soon discovered the heaped-up remains of individuals executed by the NKVD. As in L'viv, local Jews were rounded up, forced at gunpoint to excavate the corpses, many of them blackened and bloated, and lay them out in orderly rows. The Germans invited villagers view the bodies to identify their friends and kin. Ten Ukrainian policemen and two SS men took up positions nearby. Although the real perpetrators had long fled east, revenge was demanded. The killing erupted with terrifying speed. The SS men began machine-gunning the Jewish men who had been forced to stand next to the row of corpses. By then, units of the Waffen-SS ‘Viking' division had arrived in Złoczów and they eagerly joined the OUN fanatics and other SS units to murder Jewish men, women and children. The frenzy raged for four days; Wehrmacht General Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, commander of the 17th Army observed the unfolding catastrophe impassively and made no effort to intervene.