Hitler's Foreign Executioners (37 page)

In Riga, Lange and Kirste liaised with Arājs and other Latvian SD recruits. On 27 November, Jeckeln invited all units to police headquarters in Riga to finalise the liquidation schedule. This may have been the first time he met Arājs and the other Latvian commanders. So far he had avoided having any contact. It was essential, Jeckeln declared, that everyone ‘obtain and maintain a German character’: the action had to be carried out in an orderly manner. He had calculated that with only seven hours of daylight available, his men would have to march the ghetto Jews in columns of 1,000 and ‘process’ at least 12,000 people every single day. Two days later, Jeckeln called another meeting at the Ritterhaus. He insisted that all Germans stationed in Riga must come to Rumbula to observe the action; it was a patriotic obligation. Anyone who refused would be considered a deserter.
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On 28 November, the Germans issued a ‘resettlement order’ and dispatched Latvian police to enter the ghetto to begin preparations. The news of ‘resettlement’ ‘hit like a thunderclap’, survivor Frida Michelson recalled.
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For Latvian Jews, the Riga ghetto had become a fragile refuge. Now they would be moved out the next day for an unknown destination. That night snow fell on the ghetto and on the Ritterhaus, where Jeckeln and his officers made last-minute refinements to their plans. The snow fell too on trains pulling into Skirotava Station near Rumbula and bringing ‘Reich Jews’ from Germany. German SD squads killed them all while it was still dark.

At 4 a.m. on 30 November, a hundred Arājs men led by Herberts Cukurs and Arājs himself entered the ghetto accompanied by a small, unsuspecting Jewish guard unit. The Latvians were already intoxicated. Arājs and his men strutted through the ghetto streets, ordering the terrified Jews to be ready to leave in half an hour. Some refused. Shooting broke out in houses and on stairwells. Soon enough, Frida Michelson watched an ‘unending column’ filing through the ghetto; she could see young women, women with infants in their arms, handicapped people assisted
by their neighbours, young children – ‘all marching, marching’. A German guard began firing an automatic weapon into the crowd. As confusion spread, Latvian guards cried ‘Faster! Faster!’ People began trotting, running, stumbling … falling.

By noon, the Latvian commandos had already killed between 600 and 1,000 Jews inside the ghetto walls. The frozen ground was streaked with blood. Corpses, suitcases, toys, furniture and prams lay scattered. The road that led from the ghetto to Rumbula led past small wooden houses in which ethnic Latvians were enjoying a quiet Sunday morning. A few ‘noble’ citizens dashed into the road and began beating Jews. Those who walked too slowly or collapsed were shot. Many abandoned suitcases in front gardens. The road to Rumbula was fast becoming a scene of carnage. ‘We were no longer people, only shadows,’ Ella Medale wrote. ‘Everything around us reminded us of a butchery.’ Herberts Cukurs appeared on horseback. He reached down from the saddle to seize small children and kill them on the spot. Michelson went on: ‘a German SS man started firing with an automatic gun point blank into the crowd. People were mowed down by the shots, and fell on the cobblestones … The Latvian policemen were shouting “Faster, faster” and lashing whips over the heads of the crowd.’

At 9 a.m. the head of the first column reached the execution site. ‘At the entrance,’ Frida Michelson recalled, ‘stood a large wooden box. An SS man armed with a club stood next to it and shouted over and over “Drop all your valuables and money in this box!”’ Now the Jews filtered through a succession of human funnels that stripped them of their clothes and finally their lives. Standing at the highest point overlooking the pits, Jeckeln watched, impassive. Alongside him stood his officers and honoured guests, including the Commissar Hinrich Lohse and Franz Stahlecker who had returned to see the Jeckeln’s ‘sardine packing’ system in action. Ella Medale remembered that people ‘overcome by a sense of irreversibility and inescapability rushed forward in a quick stream without protestation’. It was this stripping of both dignity and human will that was most cunning about Jeckeln’s industrialised killing system. ‘Mechanically I took off my coat,’ Ella wrote. When all hope seemed to be lost ‘the head executioner Arājs fastened his eyes on me. His face was disfigured, beast like, and he swayed back and forth, horribly drunk. A shriek broke out of me: “I am not a Jew!” … Arājs waved me away. “Here are only Jews! Today Jewish blood must flow”.’

Jeckeln halted the slaughter on 8 December. He reported to Berlin that his men had used up over 22,000 rounds of ammunition. If we add to that figure the Jews killed inside the ghetto and on the road to the execution site, as well as the numbers of ‘Reich Jews’ killed on the first morning, the Germans and their Latvian auxiliaries murdered at least 24,000 people. A report issued by the RSHA in Berlin
stated flatly: ‘The number of Jews who remained in Riga – 29,500 – was reduced to 2,500 as a result of the
Aktion
carried out by Higher SS and Police Leader Ostland.’
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On 12 December, as heavy snow fell steadily on the mutilated earth of the Rumbula Pines, Himmler issued secret instructions to his SS commanders. He had become concerned that the ‘heavy duty’ of mass murder might ‘brutalise’ SS men. He recommended organising ‘comradely evenings’: hard-working SS killers should ‘sit around the table and eat in the best German domestic tradition’. Officers must organise music and special lectures to ‘introduce our men into the beautiful domains of German spiritual and emotional life’.

As Jeckeln and his guests enjoyed the gruesome spectacle unfolding at Rumbula, Japanese aircraft attacked the American Pacific Fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor. On 11 December, Hitler declared war on the United States – and the following day reiterated a warning first uttered in 1939, that a global war would provoke the destruction of world Jewry. Pitted against the most powerful capitalist nation, Germany now faced certain defeat. Few of the men fighting Hitler’s war understood the catastrophic implications of his decision – least of all SS Chief Heinrich Himmler and his busy collaborators in the east.

By the end of 1941 the Arājs Commando had, as Ezergailis puts it, ‘run out of work’. A stunning frenzy of killing had extinguished the lives of all but a few thousand Jews in the former Baltic nations. Jeckeln may have briefly contemplated ‘sardine packing’ Arājs and the Latvian Schuma leaders to silence them. Instead, they made Arājs an SS-Hauptsturmführer and transferred his core staff, now called the Latvian Security Police and SD Auxiliary Force, Riga, to the Military Academy of Latvia. Soon afterwards, Himmler agreed to send small groups of Schuma veterans to the SD training school in Fürstenberg. Early in 1942, the head of the SD school arrived at the Military Academy to select the first class of Latvians; about 300 men travelled to Fürstenberg for a two-month course in ‘intelligence, counter intelligence and national socialist ideology’. When the first graduates returned to Riga, Dr Lange welcomed them back: ‘After the liberation of Riga, you fought shoulder to shoulder with the German security police for further liberation [sic] and cleansing the land from the remnants of Bolshevism.’

Now Hitler’s foreign executioners would be moulded into true SS warriors.

Historians of the Second World War tend to split German occupation strategy into eastern and western modes. Each mode of occupation produced different species of collaborator. There are good reasons to make this distinction between east and west. The Germans deliberately situated the apparatuses of mass murder in the east and, as we have seen with the Rumbula massacre, deported Jews from Western Europe to the killing grounds of the east. Security forces that collaborated with the German occupiers in France and the Netherlands, for example, rounded up and arrested French Jews for deportation. They did not, in strategic terms, murder them in situ as their Lithuanian and Latvian counterparts did. In other respects, German occupation plans in both Eastern and Western Europe shared fundamental common grounds. In the long term, the German architects of the New Order looked forward to abolishing the older European national entities just as they planned to do with more recent manifestations of nationalism in the east. When it came to the ethnic restructuring of Europe, German planners simply regarded Norwegians or Netherlanders as having a racial head start over say their Estonian counterparts. In the long term, all Europeans would be remoulded as Germanics. This meant that, as we will see in this chapter, the recruitment of Western Europeans by the SS was driven by the same racial imperative.

In Western Europe, German foreign recruitment had been launched in 1940 with high hopes but negligible results. On 20 April, the SS ‘Nordland’ regiment was established ‘from Danish and Norwegian volunteers’, and on 25 May the ‘Westland’ began recruiting Dutch and Belgian-Flemish volunteers. Waffen-SS recruitment chief Gottlob Berger set up offices in Oslo, The Hague, Copenhagen and Antwerp – and turned an old French barracks in Sennheim, Alsace, into a training centre. Himmler had high hopes. He was fascinated by the Nordic races and had cultivated the far right in the Netherlands and Flanders. But on 6 June 1941 an abject Berger reported to Himmler that only about 2,000 foreign volunteers had so far been ‘harvested’ by the Waffen-SS.
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The German attack on the Soviet Union changed everything. Hitler’s war was recast as an international crusade against Bolshevism. After 22 June, Goebbels’ propaganda machine began churning out a torrent of newsreels and newspaper stories about the ‘pan-European war of liberation’. Hitler could muster tremendous forces to throw against Stalin’s armies, but he still needed coalition allies and the veneer of legitimacy. Operation Barbarossa would appear to be a joint European action against the ‘World Enemy’; a war waged by civilised peoples against barbarians.
Krieg als Kreuzzug
, war as crusade, was for Hitler mere window dressing, a hoax designed to entice unwilling allies. But Hitler’s public statements did not completely mask German intentions. As historian Jürgen Förster points out,‘the propaganda attempted to exploit feelings of being under threat, the desire for revenge, ethnic prejudices, and ideological resentment’.
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Hitler described Bolshevism as ‘the bestial degeneration of humanity’ – and in 1941 there were many other Europeans who fervently agreed with the German Chancellor. They understood too that when Hitler referred to Bolshevism he implicitly meant a Jewish political ideology. The equation that added together ‘Jews’ and ‘Bolshevism’ provided the lingua franca for European ultranationalists.

The crusade swindle worked. After 22 June, as German troops and armoured divisions threw back Stalin’s armies, German consuls and other agencies reported a flood of requests to join Hitler’s assault on Bolshevism. Berger had already established recruitment offices in occupied Europe and Scandinavia – and the post-invasion flood of eager western crusaders caught the German Foreign Office and the Wehrmacht on the back foot. They feared, rightly, that Himmler would exploit the foreign volunteers to massively expand the Waffen-SS. On 30 June, representatives of the Foreign Office, the foreign department of the German High Command (OKW) and Berger’s SS met to thrash out guidelines for what one delegate termed ‘crusade foreign legion-gathering’.
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A few days later, the OKW issued ‘Guidelines for the employment of foreign volunteers in the struggle against the Soviet Union’.
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This first effort to categorise and regulate foreign volunteers distributed recruits crudely between ‘Germanics’ like the Danes, Flemings and Dutch, who would be allocated to the SS, and ‘non-Germanics’ like the French, Croats and Spaniards, who would be allocated to the German army. Although, as we have seen, Himmler was already intrigued by ethnic diversity in the east, there is no suggestion yet that Eastern Europeans would be recruited by either the German army or Waffen-SS.

Pragmatic German army generals viewed and treated their foreign recruits simply as mercenaries. They took no interest at all in their ethnic origin and blithely rejected any kind of cultural sensitivity. They had no respect for their recruits’ political convictions, if they had any, and despised them as opportunists, adventurers or simply men who liked ‘to be looked after’.
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Instinctively, the German recruiters recognised that an entire generation had been psychologically blighted by the First World War and its aftermath. This lost generation was ripe for exploitation. The new campaign proved a modest success. By the end of 1941, 24,000 Frenchmen, Croats, Spaniards and Walloonian Belgians had signed up to join the Wehrmacht. Less than half that number of ‘Germanic volunteers of non-German nationality’ had joined the Waffen-SS: 2,399 Danes, 1,180 Finns, 1,571 Flemings, 4,814 Dutchmen, 1,883 Norwegians, 39 Swedes, 135 Swiss and Liechtensteiners, as well as 6,200 ethnic Germans from Alsace, Romania, Serbia and Hungary.
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It is tempting to interpret the division of human spoils as Himmler’s last word on racial types he regarded as suitable Waffen-SS material. But we should bear in mind that the SS was already recruiting Schuma battalions in the east; and as we will shortly discover, German race scientists were about to embark on a fundamental rethinking of the geographical extent of ‘Germanic’ ethnicity.

The national elites that sanctioned German recruitment expected rewards for their sacrifice. They bargained honour for power. The men they offered to the Reich would become, they hoped, the currency of influence in Hitler’s New Order. The largest foreign Wehrmacht unit was the Spanish División Azul (Blue Division). On the day German forces crossed the Soviet borders, the anti-communist Spanish Foreign Minister Ramón Serrano Súñer persuaded Francisco Franco to permit the formation of Falange volunteer units to join Hitler’s crusade against Bolshevism. Serrano Súñer had made the offer to the German ambassador Eberhard von Storrer some weeks before invasion began. Hitler had eagerly agreed. Relations between the German dictator and the ‘Caudillo’ Franco had been soured by Spain’s refusal to take part in a proposed joint attack on Gibraltar, but Foreign Minister Ribbentrop still hoped to bind the hesitant Franco closer to the Axis. For his part, the Spanish dictator assumed that he could placate Hitler and avoid joining the German war in the east by offering up a Spanish volunteer division. At the same time, he could
rid Spain of a few thousand discontented radical Falangists who, conversely, hoped that service in Hitler’s ‘Grand Armée’ would give them political leverage when they returned victorious to Spain. Many thousands of Spanish Falangist volunteers enlisted. By the beginning of September 1941 the Azul men were fighting and dying near Minsk in Belorussia. German officers despised these ‘gypsy’ Spanish soldiers. They disparaged them as lazy and naturally undisciplined. Although Hitler often belittled the Azul, calling it a ‘dilapidated’ division, he had to acknowledge that they fought ‘pluckily’.
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