Hitler's Foreign Executioners (41 page)

Kaj says that he was just not interested. In Hamburg, he says people shouted ‘Heil Hitler’ and he shouted back ‘Heil – what was his name again?’ This is one of Kaj’s many jokes – he had what might, generously, be described as a special sense of humour. One day, Kaj’s friends noticed posters urging young men to join the Waffen-SS. He appears to have volunteered almost by accident – thanks to his friend Hansen, who could speak German:

Seven decades after the war, it appears to be very important for Kaj to make us believe he did it for the adventure: ‘It was adventure – all that shit.’

Did he know much about the SS? What it stood for? ‘No no no no. I didn’t have any idea of what it was. I thought it said 44, when it actually said SS.’

I am not inclined to believe him. Memory is fallible but many SS veterans peddle this kind of front story. In any case, Kaj and his German-speaking friend began their SS careers at the SS ‘Westland’ barracks in Langenhorn, but were soon transferred to Klagenfurt in Austria. SS training was tough even for someone who had served on Atlantic cargo ships; Kaj uses a rather colourful phrase to describe the rigours of SS training: ‘[my] tongue hung out like a red tie.’ He had the impression that the German officers regarded him as an equal, but that is almost certainly because his German was so poor. For the same reason, he cannot recall any ideological training; there was, he says, ‘no propaganda’. Kaj disliked men like Harald, DNSAP members who got privileged treatment, and, he says, even sent on leave whenever their division was sent to the front line. Kaj ended up on the Eastern Front:

Interviewing Kaj is not a comfortable experience. He wants us to believe that he has no regrets – and that he volunteered only for the adventure. Research carried out immediately after the war into the motivations of SS volunteers from the Netherlands implies that Kaj may be telling a partial truth. Dutch psychologist A.F.G. van Hoesel investigated 450 Dutch volunteers and uncovered a significant diversity of motivation.
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In the case of the Danish volunteers, one of the Frikorps commanders carried out his own study. He came up with the following estimate:

These figures are striking. Ideology motivated at least a quarter of the Dutch volunteers – and we should bear in mind that ‘anti-communism’ implied anti-Jewish sentiments. Kaj certainly fits within A, B or C; but was he immune to more abstract reasoning? He would like us to think that. To be sure, he was a poorly educated young man. Put him in a time machine and he might be a neo-Nazi in Dresden, a nightclub bouncer in Solihull or a US troop in Baghdad. Politics, the calamitous events of the 1930s, the rise of the dictators – they appear to have passed him by. Kaj had almost certainly heard about the Berlin Olympics because they were reported on the sports pages.

But Kaj remains an actor in history. I am not convinced that he was the simpleminded thrill-seeker he plays. For somehow – and we may never know how and why – Kaj grasped the rudiments of SS doctrine. He claims that he knew nothing about the Holocaust. He denies all knowledge of the famous Danish rescue of the Jews. But pushed to say more, he raises his voice:

Danish police arrested Kaj in 1945 and he served a few years in prison. How does he feel today about volunteering? ‘I feel bloody fine about it.’

The majority of the Danish volunteers like Harald and Kaj fought on the Eastern Front and some served in the German concentration camps. The letters and diaries
written by the Danish volunteers provide evidence that the recruits received the same ideological training as German recruits, mainly at the Bad Tölz Junkerschule in Bavaria, which had close connections with the concentration camp at Dachau. Camp inmates lived in cells constructed beneath the school and carried out maintenance and other menial tasks. In the Junkerschulen, SS officers rammed home the cult values of the SS and made sure the new recruits understood that their job was to master and then destroy the
Untermenschen
they would combat in the east. Bayonet practice was carried out using ‘Jewish’ caricatures. Some Danes joined the Death’s Head SS units which were headquartered in German camps. Not only that, but Himmler authorised a number of lethal medical experiments that were carried out at Auschwitz and Buchenwald by Danish doctors.
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The Danish rescue of 1943, a central plank in Goldhagen’s thesis about German ‘exceptionalism’, is just one thread in a more complex weave. Hatred of Jews is a recurrent theme in many of the service diaries and letters collected by Christensen and his colleagues. The Danish SS volunteers accepted without question that the campaign in Russia would be fought against a ‘Jewish enemy’. Here is von Schalburg again, writing to his wife, in August 1941: ‘The Jewish rule [in the USSR] was far greater than even I believed.’ The Russians, Schalburg complains, were ‘too damned passive’. If the Jews had been ‘cut down’, ‘many lives would have been saved’; he concludes: ‘I think that will come.’
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His poisonous sentiments were echoed by lower ranks: ‘Yes we’ll eradicate these Jews from the surface of the earth, because while there are Jews there is also war. Now I can imagine that some who would say that the Jews are humans too. My answer would be that rats are also animals.’
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These remarkable testimonies by Danish SS volunteers underline the value of documentary evidence, some recorded without benefit of hindsight. The war ended seven decades ago, and the men and women who collaborated with the Third Reich and remain alive have had plenty of time to prepare cases for the defence. In 1945, no one talked about the Holocaust and many of those who served in SS police battalions and Waffen-SS units slipped through the judicial net and went unpunished. Since the emergence of a special historiography devoted to the German destruction of European Jewry, many former collaborators have trimmed their personal stories to suit new times. Many who served the Reich have refashioned themselves as prescient anti-communists. They fought the Bolsheviks – and should surely be judged now in the light of what historians have revealed about crimes of the Soviet Union. Whatever these veterans testify now must be treated with caution; we must read between the lines.

At the end of 2007, I flew to Norway to interview a veteran of the SS ‘Norske’ Legion, Bjørn Østring (b. 1917). Mr Østring is prepared to talk openly about his service in the SS – in fact, he relishes publicity. He and his supporters have been campaigning for the Norwegian government to recognise his former comrades who died fighting on the Leningrad front as national heroes. Østring runs the Kaprolat Committee to identify and return the remains of Norwegian soldiers that still lie in the hills of Russian Karelia using DNA samples from their living relatives. Mr Østring (who is married to the daughter of Gerhard von Mende, who served in Alfred Rosenberg’s wartime Ostministerium) is an alert nonagenarian who lives very comfortably in an Oslo suburb. But make no mistake – Bjørn Østring is a propagandist. He wants us to believe that the Norwegian SS volunteers were ‘soldiers like any other’. Early in our interview, both the Østrings made it very clear how much they resent the new Oslo Holocaust study centre opened in 2006; the researchers there want Østring to hand over his records of Norwegians who served in the SS. The Østrings have refused to provide any assistance.

The new Centre for the Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities is based in the Villa Grande on the Bygdøy – a peninsula on the western side of Oslo. For most Norwegians, the villa is a shameful reminder of the German occupation. It was the wartime residence of Vidkun Quisling, who founded the Norwegian Nasjonal Samling Party and was appointed the puppet ruler of occupied Norway. During the war, Mr Østring knew the building, then called ‘Gimle’ after a character in Norse mythology, well: he spent a few years serving in Quisling’s personal bodyguard, the Føregarden. Østring is a staunch admirer of Quisling, and even suggests that I photograph him standing next to a portrait of his hero.

Mr Østring and his collaborators insist that Norwegians heroically served the cause of anti-communism on the Leningrad front. But the 900-day siege of Leningrad, commemorated as the ‘Blokada’, was an act of military barbarism and fitted with German genocidal plans in the east. Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to ‘erase the city from the face of the Earth’.
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When I meet the Østrings, they are preoccupied with a recent news story: ‘Someone’, he tells me, has recalled that during the war the Østrings took over an apartment in Dunkers Street that was owned and formerly occupied by the family of Håkon Laksov, a lawyer deported to Auschwitz in 1942.
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In fact, many Norwegians who had volunteered to serve in the Waffen-SS received property as a reward for services rendered left empty by deported Norwegian Jews. Østring denies that he knew anything about the former occupants of his new home, but the Oslo National Archives show that he was himself active in the ‘Liquidation Board’ set up under the Quisling regime to distribute Jewish property and chattels to Aryan Norwegians. It was, in short, state-sanctioned looting.

This plunder reflected Himmler’s ambitious plans for Norway, which had surprising connections with SS strategy in the Baltic. Himmler was obsessed by Norway. He admired the Viking tradition and liked inspecting restored longboats. Norway had an especially prominent place in Himmler’s vision of a Greater Germanic Reich. He hoped that Norwegians, with their pure Nordic blood, would play a leading role colonising the east. It is noteworthy that Dr Konrad Meyer, the author of the Generalplan Ost, was chosen to launch the SS recruitment drive in Oslo. Many Scandinavians had embraced the idea of Nordic racial superiority long before 1933. The Swedish count Eric von Rosen, who became Hermann Göring’s brother-in-law, was using the swastika as a personal emblem years before it was adopted by the German NSDAP. In the 1930s, von Rosen became a leading figure in Sweden’s National Socialist movement, the National Socialist Bloc. In Norway, Vidkun Quisling’s moderately successful Nasjonal Samling Party embraced the notion of Nordic superiority. Alfred Rosenberg championed Quisling’s cause in Germany, paving the way for his wartime collaborationist regime.

Himmler’s plan to transform Norway into a kind of northern fortress of SS values was directly linked to the destruction of Jews in Eastern Europe.
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As we have seen, Danes and other Scandinavian volunteers served in the murderous SS brigades that, under the leadership of SS generals like Friedrich Jeckeln and Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, participated in the mass shootings in Ukraine and elsewhere. Following the occupation of Norway, Himmler began to infiltrate trusted SS emissaries into the German occupation apparatus – including Franz Walther Stahlecker. Stahlecker backed the Norwegian police chief Jonas Lie, who had already served in the Balkans with the Waffen-SS. Hitler had other plans – and in September 1940 appointed Lie’s rival, Quisling, to head a puppet Norwegian government. Hitler often stymied Himmler’s foreign policy initiatives. SS ambitions in Norway were further frustrated by the ambitious Commissar Josef Terboven. Stahlecker returned to Berlin, where Heydrich assigned him to take command of Special Task Force A in the Baltic.