Hitler's Foreign Executioners (3 page)

The journalists and photographers shivering outside the Dom expect trouble. Inside, camera crews and photographers already gather beneath the tall, plain nave. The Legionaries and their wives fill the front rows beneath the pulpit. A few sit with tears streaming down their cheeks; others glare angrily at the flashing cameras. Outside the Dom’s main entrance, snow is still falling thickly. A sinister honour guard begins to muster. Shaven-headed young men from the nationalist Klubs 415 stand in line beneath a canopy of billowing red and white Latvian flags. Standing to one side are young thugs who had travelled up from Lithuania to support the old Legionaries. They sport white arm bands – modelled on those worn by wartime Lithuanian death squads.

Soon the old Legionaries stumble from the Dom to join these guardians of Baltic national pride, who close ranks around them. The snowstorm at last begins to falter. A stern-faced young man with a shaven head takes up a position at the
head of the legionary column. Right behind him stands the national leader of the ultranationalist Visu Latvijai (All for Latvia), Raivis Dzintars, and his wife, both clad in Latvian folk costume. The couple add a curious, even kitsch dash of colour – like morris dancers leading a march by a far-right British political party. But there is nothing pretty about Dzintars’ political views: Visu Latvijai aggressively promotes the cause of a mono-ethnic Latvia. Latvia for Latvians! It was this brand of aggressive chauvinism that led many nationalist Latvians to throw in their lot with the German occupiers in 1941.

By now, police battalions are lined up along the route of the march – they stretch like glistening black insects all the way from the Dom to the Freedom Monument, a mile or so away, where the march will end. It is here that Latvians and others opposed to the march have been corralled. At the Dom, the old Legionaries finally set off, led by the peasant couple and the skinhead, his face set hard. Banners ripple in the cold wind. The elderly Legion veterans march briskly through Riga’s old town and then cross the bridge that leads to the Freedom Monument. As the column approaches, ethnic Russian communists shout obscenities: ‘Fuck off! Fuck off!’ As the legion veterans, now shielded by an impenetrable cordon of armed police, begin laying wreaths, high voltage arguments spark up among the crowds.

A short distance behind the police lines stands a smaller, silent group of older men and women – Latvian Holocaust survivors. Standing with them today is Ephraim Zuroff, the Director of the Simon Weisenthal Centre, who has fiercely denounced Legion Day, and Josef Koren, a former beekeeper and now leader of the LAK, Latvia’s Anti-Fascist Committee. When a Legion supporter screams at Koren that ‘A soldier is a soldier and all are equal!’he turns away. Another mantra of Legion defenders is that the volunteers were conscripts – compelled to join. But as Koren points out to journalists, ‘At least 25% of the “Latvian Legion” were volunteers, recruited from the Latvian police who were involved in the murder of Jews and other Latvians – and the SS Legion should not be permitted a celebration of itself in the centre of our city’.

Midday. Sunlight glitters on the Pilsetas canal. The old Legionaries and their honour guard begin to disperse. Soon they have vanished – the mute ghosts of history.

Now there is a carnival atmosphere. At the foot of the Freedom Monument, groups of young Latvians take pictures of each other beside the mass of wreaths and flowers. A young man tells a BBC reporter that for him the old Legionaries are heroes. They defended Latvia. Many thousands of Latvian SS men gave their lives for the freedom of Latvia. These young Latvians look prosperous and happy. They do not shave their heads or sport provocative armbands. But their enthusiasm for the legion is troubling – and unexpected. It would seem that the old Legionaries
have become a symbol not of collusion with a murderous foreign occupier but of Latvian national freedom.

It is an outcome that SS Chief Himmler, who was profoundly hostile to the national aspirations of Latvians, could never have foreseen.

I remember the words of the great Latvian poet Ojārs Vācietis:

In the summer of 1944, a racial anthropologist serving with the SS, Oberscharführer Dr Bruno Beger, received an unusual assignment. He was ordered to travel to Bosnia–Herzegovina, then part of the puppet state of Croatia, to prepare a study of ‘races at war’. He would focus on Bosnian Muslims serving in a Waffen-SS division called the ‘Handschar’, meaning scimitar. Its official designation was the 13th Mountain Division of the SS (1st Croatian).
³
More than 10,000 Bosnian Muslims had been recruited in the spring of 1943 with the connivance of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini – the Arab nationalist leader then resident in Berlin. The SS issued the Muslim recruits with standard uniforms but permitted them to wear fezzes bearing the death’s head and eagle of the SS. Himmler and the mufti recruited and trained divisional imams who preached the doctrine of ‘Jew hatred’ to the recruits. The following year, as the military situation in the Balkans deteriorated, Beger was transferred to another Muslim SS division based in northern Italy – the Osttürkischer-verband, recruited in the Caucasus. The SS ‘Handschar’ carved a bloody trail of murder and destruction across the Balkans
in the final years of the Second World War. The German invasion of Yugoslavia that began in April 1941 had unleashed both massive repression and overlapping civil wars that continue to bedevil this fractured region. The atrocities committed by German sponsored militias like the Croatian Ustasha and Bosnian ‘Handschar’ have never been forgotten or forgiven.

But why did the elite Waffen-SS recruit Bosnian Muslims, an inferior south Slavic people according to Nazi doctrine, to join what Hitler called a ‘war of annihilation’? Why, for that matter, did they recruit Latvians, Ukrainians, Kossovar Albanians, Estonians and a multitude of other non-Germans? To be sure, the recruitment of foreign soldiers, pejoratively labelled mercenaries, has, of course, been a convention of most wars throughout recorded history. The armies mustered by the Persian ruler Xerxes in the fifth century
BC
, for example, sucked in fighting men from all over the ancient world, including Jews, Arabs, Indians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Phoenicians.
⁴
In modern European history, Napoleon’s
Grande Armée
boasted divisions and brigades of German, Austrian Dutch, Italian, Croatian, Portuguese and Swiss troops recruited from all over the French Empire and its vassal or allied states.
⁵

The ethnic diversity of the armed forces of the Third Reich far exceeded Napoleon’s
Grande Armée
. But that is not the principal reason why the recruitment of non-German troops by the Third Reich is surprising and paradoxical. The dogma and practice of the Third Reich was racism so radical that it culminated in mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Hitler characterised National Socialism as ‘a Völkisch and political philosophy which grew out of considerations of an
exclusively racist nature
.’
⁶
The war launched by Hitler and his generals in September 1939 was intended to begin the task of ‘annihilating’ the racial enemies of the Reich, usually characterised as ‘Jewish-Bolsheviks’, and enslaving Slavic ‘sub-humans’. The outcome would, in theory, be the founding of a new German empire and the complete ‘Germanisation’ of vast tracts of Eurasia. In other words, the German imperial project was by definition a racial undertaking. The ambition of SS Chief Heinrich Himmler was to forge the Waffen-SS as the elite shock troops of this racial imperialism: the apostles of Germanisation. Why then did he recruit apparently non-Aryan Latvians, Ukrainians and Bosnians?

The majority of historians have explained SS recruitment strategy as an expediency that fatally compromised the elite status of the militarised SS. The most recent history of the SS by Adrian Weale asserts: ‘In 1940, [the Waffen-SS] had legitimately been able to claim that it was an elite … by June 1944 … in no military sense could [the bulk of the organisation’s combat units] ever be described as a corps d’elite.’
⁷
This is the latest reformulation of a view that has been repeated
ad nauseam by most historians of the SS. In short, they argue, Himmler simply needed bodies in SS uniforms to hurl at the advancing Soviet armies. It was a numbers game – a necessary evil.

In this book I propose a different explanation. The recruitment of non-Germans not only complied with Nazi-sponsored race theory as it evolved during the course of the war, but was a vital component in a master plan hatched up by secretive SS ‘think tanks’. Himmler was despised by many of the Nazi elite as an obsequious and petty-minded bureaucrat – a judgement echoed by many modern historians. This was a sham. Himmler’s imagination was secretive, lethal and boundless. His covert master plan was to build a German empire dominated not by Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP), but the SS. The construction of this SS ‘Europa’ required the complete physical liquidation of every racial enemy of the Reich. At the same time, Himmler and his cadre of SS experts proposed a root and branch re-engineering of European ethnicity. To enact this monstrous scheme, Himmler transformed the SS into a formidable militarised apparatus dedicated to blood sacrifice. SS police battalions and Waffen-SS divisions would become the armed agents of a perverted revolution whose outcome would be a racial utopia. Naturally, Himmler did not discuss these ideas openly, but he provided some tantalising clues about the SS plan in the course of a conversation with Avind Berrgrav, the Archbishop of Norway. SS recruitment, he makes clear, was not a matter of numbers – he wanted the best of the best, the pinnacle of the ‘Germanic’ peoples:

This was not Hitler’s plan. While Himmler dreamt of a future SS ‘Europa’, Hitler clung to the petty-minded ideas of the barrack-room bigot. He admired, grudgingly, the British Raj and its subjugation of dark-skinned masses. He despised the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, who fled to Berlin to seek German assistance against the British, and dismissed his Indian Legion, recruited by the German army, as ‘a joke’. Whilst Himmler regarded Bose and his Indian recruits as members of an ‘Aryan brotherhood’. He sponsored a German ‘scientific expedition’ to Tibet to look for racial connections between European peoples and Tibetan aristocrats. SS ‘Europa’ was just the beginning. Writing in 1943, Himmler looked forward a few decades to when ‘a politically German – a Germanic World Empire will be formed’. To begin with, Himmler’s master plan embraced only the Nordic peoples
of Western and Central Europe. Just as Hitler did, he viewed the east as the murky domain of Slavic hordes whose degenerate blood was a mortal threat to European survival. The experience of war changed his mind – and led to a radical rethinking of long-term SS strategy.

At the end of June 1941, Hitler’s armies swept into the Soviet Union. Millions of Soviet soldiers fell into German hands, and were incarcerated in vast open camps built hurriedly in occupied Poland. These camps became instruments of mass murder. More than 2 million Soviet prisoners would perish from disease, deliberate starvation or at the hands of execution squads, many because they ‘looked Jewish’.
⁹
But for German anthropologist Wolfgang Abel, who was attached to an SS agency called the Race and Settlement Office (RuSHA), these hellish camps provided a pseudoscientific treasure trove. Inside this German camp, Abel and his team could examine and measure hundreds of living ‘specimens’ culled from every corner of the Soviet Empire. They soon made some startling discoveries. Abel’s meticulous anthropometric examinations revealed that Germanic blood lines had penetrated far into the east through the Baltic, Ukraine and beyond. In the ‘General Plan East’, hatched up after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, SS scholars had proposed the complete Germanisation of conquered eastern territories. In crude terms, they envisioned liquidating native peoples and importing German settlers. The findings of the ‘Abel Mission’ significantly complicated matters. The simplistic distinction between Germanic and Slavic peoples began to look a lot more intricate.
¹⁰
These anthropological findings implied that some ‘Eastern’ peoples might possess sufficient ‘Germanic’ blood to qualify as future citizens of the Reich. Later, Himmler would reconsider the racial status of Balkan peoples like the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosniaks.

But how could these ‘Germanic bloodstreams’ (a phrase used in an SS instructional pamphlet) be exploited? Could this ‘lost blood’ somehow be returned to the Reich, where it belonged? In the perverse logic of German racial ideology, this Germanic blood was merely a latent quality. It was a potent substance, to be sure, but did not necessarily guarantee that its bearers would loyally serve the future Reich. Himmler had a radical solution. He would ‘harvest’ this lost Germanic blood through martial service and blood sacrifice. Himmler revered the pseudoscientific ideas of anthropologists like Hans F.K. Günther, who interpreted race in strictly biological terms. But he also admired ideas promoted by Günther’s rival, the psychologist Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, and his followers. In books like
Rasse und Seele
, published in 1926, Clauss had developed a somewhat heretical theory that different races possessed different ‘souls’. Germans, for example, manifested the attributes of a noble Nordic soul; Jews were cursed by their materialistic ‘Semitic’ souls. The
details of this gaseous speculation need not detain us here. But the idea of a ‘racial soul’ detached from merely physical attributes implied that race was to some degree malleable. For Himmler, racial identity was also a matter of will, capable in special circumstances of reshaping biological inheritance. According to this cowardly soldier manqué, the supreme manifestation of will was the warrior’s acceptance of the need to kill and be killed. Himmler called the Waffen-SS the ‘assault force for the new Europe’. He believed that military service, sacrifice and, above all, the zealous destruction of the racial enemies of the Reich, could provide the means to remould the racial ‘souls’ of non-German recruits – opening the door to membership of the greater Germanic community.