Hitler's Foreign Executioners (40 page)

Schalburg was a monster. He had been born in St Petersburg; his father was Danish and his mother an aristocratic. When Christian was 11, the family became caught up in the Russian Revolution and fled to Denmark. From his parents, especially his Russian mother, Schalburg inherited a visceral hatred of communists and Jews – in his mind, one and the same. In Denmark, the Schalburgs gravitated towards the DNSAP. Christian was devoted to DNSAP leader Clausen, who appointed him leader of the youth wing. After leaving school, Schalburg joined the elite Danish Royal Guards (Den Kongelige Livgarde); in an official report he was described as ‘dangerous and unstable’ – mere Jewish slander, responded Schalburg. When the Winter War broke out between the Finns and the Soviet Union, Schalburg took a brigade of DNSAP youth members, the ‘Blood Brothers’, to fight alongside the Finns. It was on the Finnish front line that Schalburg and his comrades heard that Denmark had capitulated to the Germans. He said later that he was ashamed. But in September 1940 Schalburg volunteered to join the Waffen-SS and, by the time the German invasion of the Soviet Union began the following summer, he had been promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer. As Harald had intuited, the no-nonsense, politicised Schalburg proved to be the right man to whip the Danish SS into shape. This he proceeded to do with characteristic ruthlessness.

Harald’s diary entries, which inevitably became shorter and less frequent, show that he was increasingly confused about serving with the Frikorps Danmark. From the spring of 1943, Harald began to submit requests for a discharge. His diary reveals that he was frustrated by the harsh, sometimes frightening life of a soldier – but there were also other discontents. Harald remained an ardent National Socialist. The second wave of SS recruiting after June 1941 had attracted a different class – more bourgeois, less fanatical. Here is one vitriolic diary entry from September, 1941:

Harald had also become disillusioned with Clausen: ‘When I joined the Waffen-SS, I was an ardent Fritz Clausen supporter, today I am an ardent Frits Clausen opponent.’ Harald explains why he had turned against Clausen:

Harald’s diary provides some evidence that he knew a good deal about German racial ‘eliminationism’. The ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’ had its roots in the treatment of mentally ill patients in German clinics and hospitals who were systematically murdered by euthanasia specialists both in Germany and later on the Eastern Front.
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This escalation is reflected in Harald’s experience. In Treskau, the Danish Frikorps were allocated a barracks that had formerly been a psychiatric hospital. In November 1939, German SS soldiers removed some 900 of the 1,000 remaining patients, marched them into a nearby forest and executed every one. The Waffen-SS then occupied the empty building.

Here is Harald’s comment on those events:

It is hard to believe that Harald did not know about the fate of those 1,200 patients. But in any case he has no interest: ‘it doesn’t matter’. Per Sørensen, another Danish SS volunteer, certainly knew all about those executions: ‘The barracks [in Treskau] was once a “loony bin” and apart from that a former monastery: when the Germans moved in here they shot all the idiots and converted the asylum into a very nice SS barracks.’
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Harald noted other casual brutalities:

Sørensen had a more visceral response: ‘The other day I saw a column of Russian war captives, they looked disgusting, such fanatical criminal types that one defends oneself against believing that these are white people, well, they also looked more Asian than European.’
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Like the Germans, the Danish SS volunteers regarded Russians as ‘
Untermenschen
’. Here another volunteer writes home in June 1942:

In a letter written to his young son at the end of 1941, SS Commander von Schalburg passed on his poisonous thinking: ‘Your parents have fought the Tartars, the yellow cross-eyed ones. The holy [Tsar] Alexander beat them and kept them away from the Russians, so they could not destroy their houses. We fight today against the Jews, who took the houses and churches and the bread from the Russians.’
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In the autumn of 1941, when Harald was in Treskau, he witnessed a German SS officer beating Jewish forced labourers:

He went on: ‘One with a Star of David died tonight, and another one walked past the barracks this morning with a bloody and bruised face. The Sturmmann says he will kill them all before New Year.’

Read that passage again. It is appropriate to beat Jews – but it is not right to expose them to sub-zero temperatures wearing inadequate clothing. Punishment is acceptable, but
negligence
– the bare legs – is wrong. Providing inadequate clothing is not worthy of SS men. Harald, who ‘doesn’t like Jews’, appears to at least entertain the idea that the German officer can be excused because he said his parents had been ‘killed by Jews’; Harald seems to believe this outlandish claim. He reports from a world in which bruised, beaten and frozen Jews pass by his barracks – their fate the whim of a German officer who will ‘kill them all before the New Year’.

Harald was not himself a beater of Jews. But in October 1943, he happened to be on leave in Copenhagen. By then Denmark was under German direct rule and its government no longer able to protect Danish Jews. Himmler insisted that the ‘Final Solution’ be fully applied, overriding the feeble objections of Ribbentrop, and ordered the new Reich Plenipotentiary Karl Werner Best to get on with job. A deportation order was issued to begin on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year at the beginning of October. Himmler dispatched Rolf Gunther, who was attached to Adolf Eichmann’s office, to Copenhagen with a special commando of SS officers. The Germans had lists of addresses where Danish Jews lived, but they needed assistance from the Danish police and SS men to find them. Many Danish police officers refused to assist the Germans. But SS volunteer Harald had no such scruples:

The Germans and their collaborators arrested about 450 Danish Jews, most of whom were transported to Theresienstadt concentration camp. Three days after the round-up, on 5 November, Harald reports: ‘Enjoyable days at home.’

His final entry reads: ‘[But] now everything is over with, and I am once again a free man. And I don’t regret the two and half years I have spent in the SS. I have
seen and experienced much during this time.’Then he writes: ‘and, first and foremost, I got away with it, to date.’

After this, Harald stopped writing his diary, but he remained in German service working as a ‘sabotage guard’ at the weapons factory Nordværk, which manufactured parts for German fighter planes. On 5 May 1945 around 8 p.m., Harald surrendered to Danish resistance fighters. Earlier that day they had visited his home looking for him. In September 1945 a Danish court sentenced Harald to five years in prison for his wartime service in the SS, and his later employment by the German armaments company. In August 1947 he was released on parole and ‘Harald’ vanished from the historical record. He is unlikely to be still alive.

There are Frikorps Danmark veterans still living in Copenhagen. One man was prepared to discuss his experience. Kaj (his real name has been witheld) is 85 – and from his neighbours’ point of view is just a rather talkative old man with a fondness for beer. He used to work for the Tüborg Company. His neat and tidy, shared ownership flat is typical accommodation for a Danish pensioner. There is a lot of ageing furniture, cushions strewn everywhere and the accumulated matter of a lifetime. Kaj likes listening to very loud music – mainly German marching songs and Danish folk music. He was happily married for twenty years but, he confesses, left his wife for another woman. His second partner died of cancer years ago, but Kaj only keeps a picture of his first wife. He says he ‘made a mistake’. There were no children. But Kaj knows he does have children, three of them, including twins, who live somewhere in Germany. They were the outcome of casual liaisons with nurses in German hospitals; he has never made any effort to locate his offspring. He shows no emotion at all when he talks about this lost German family. The women he recalls only with cynicism. Kaj is not very likeable.

There is another room here, usually locked. Inside is a silent and gloomy shrine. Kaj unlocks the door. Inside, he points out photographs: there he is, arm in arm, smiling, with other Danish SS volunteers. He has only copies of his German medals – he sold the originals to a Danish collector. Most remarkable though is a photograph of a painting of Kaj in full SS uniform commissioned by a German officer. The painting itself no longer exists; it must have resembled one of those heroic propaganda images of noble SS volunteers marching against the Bolshevik foe. Kaj has collected a huge library of books about Hitler and the Third Reich, many in German, which Kaj says he reads. There is a recent picture of Kaj with some Hell’s Angels. Another photograph shows him and a few friends standing in front of a controversial memorial that was built to commemorate the Estonian SS division. Kaj is angry that Denmark refuses to do the same service for Danish SS veterans. As he settles down in his sitting room, Kaj rants about the new ‘Holocaust
Memorial’ in Berlin, designed by Jewish-American architect Peter Eisenmann. It is very ugly, Kaj declares – although he says he has never travelled to Berlin. If he was able to make a visit, he declares that he would urinate on the big grey blocks. When Kaj talks about the Nazi genocide, he claims to feel sorry for the Jews – although he personally ‘disliked them’. His one regret, it seems, is that he ‘played for the wrong side’.

Kaj (b. 1922) like Harald was born into a working-class family – one of nine children. He was not cherished. He fled home when he was barely a teenager and, failing to get an apprenticeship, ran away to sea. He served on transatlantic merchant ships and still has ‘USA’ tattooed on his arm. He saw his family on rare occasions: ‘No, we didn’t speak much with one another.’
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It was only much later that he had any contact: ‘They were notified when I was wounded, when I was in the hospital … that was in ’41.’

Men find different ways of coping with abandonment. Many deny pain and find solace in ‘hard’ occupations that provide the company of other equally hard men. They acquire a kind of internal crust – protective yet brittle. The job becomes the family. Comrades become brothers. Such men wait for wars. And for Kaj, it came soon enough. In 1939, he got a job on a ship that plied the North Sea importing coal to Poland. In 1940, the German navy blockaded Danish ports and Kaj found himself out of work. After an idle summer, Kaj and his friends heard that Danes could get work in Germany: ‘One could go to Germany to work … they advertised with that, and then with some friends, we signed up. And then we travelled to Germany, we travelled with the first team that ever was sent to Germany.’ By the autumn, Kaj had found a job in Hamburg. He claims he took little interest in German life; he had heard only about the 1936 Olympics and then the invasion of Poland: ‘I didn’t know anything. I knew that there was a guy called Hitler. But otherwise, I didn’t have a clue about National Socialism.’