Hitler's Foreign Executioners (48 page)

As the Wehrmacht pushed on towards Leningrad, Himmler appointed Dr Sandberger as ‘Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD Estland’. The 30-year-old Sandberger (1911–2010) was an SD high flyer. Like many of his Special Task Force colleagues, he had a doctorate in jurisprudence. He had made his mark as an NSDAP student activist in Tübingen in southern Germany, risen fast through SD ranks and bagged a top legal job in Württenberg by tirelessly exploiting his party connections. After the destruction of Poland, Himmler appointed Sandberger to head the Central Immigration Office North-East (Einswandererzentralstelle Nord-Ost) to racially ‘evaluate’ ethnic German migrants. At his post-war trial in Nuremberg, Sandberger testified that before the invasion of the Soviet Union he had attended a meeting called by RSHA departmental head Bruno Streckenbach outlining Hitler’s order to liquidate Jews, gypsies and Russian ‘commissars’. At the beginning of July, the Special Task Force A commander Stahlecker dispatched Sandberger to carry out the ‘Führer order’ in Estonia. To do this, he would turn to the Estonian Omakaitse.
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According to Anton Weiss-Wendt, ‘three million Polish Jews make one thousand Estonian Jews a drop in the sea of sorrow’.
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Perhaps so – but this ‘drop in
the sea’ was the majority of Estonian Jews, who perished between 1941 and the end of the war at the hands of the German SD and their Estonian collaborators. The Germans concluded that of out all the territories they occupied, Estonia had the highest levels of active collaboration and the lowest levels of resistance. No Estonian ever took up arms against the German occupiers. In contrast to Lithuania, actual pogroms were rare. Instead, the Estonian ‘self-government’ agencies set about ‘self-cleansing’ through standard police procedures, arrests, hearings and sentencing. Estonians put Jews to death as ‘individuals subversive to the current regime’.
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In fact, over half their victims were women, children and the elderly: the Estonian ‘subversion rationale’ was evidently a smoke screen. Overt anti-Semitism was broadly absent from newspapers and official pronouncements. Nevertheless, the German administration spoke openly about what ‘had to be done’. The German commandant of the Narma concentration camp put it: ‘I fought a duel with the Jews.’ Estonians quietly backed German racial policy. And yet it is believed that some 11,000 European Jews died in Estonian camps. It has been called ‘murder without hatred’. Why was Estonia a special case? And why did Himmler authorise an Estonian SS Legion in the summer of 1941?

Special Task Force commander Dr Sandberger believed firmly in ‘
Sympathiegewinnung in der Bevölkerung
’: winning the sympathies of the Estonian people. He regularly invited Estonian officers to German dinner parties – an exceptional gesture in the occupied east. He later testified that ‘from the beginning, great store was set by establishing close personal ties, in a comradely spirit, to promote mutual trust. These personal relationships facilitated smooth co-operation, and enable us to direct the large Estonian security apparatus with the help of only a few officers.’ This was the ‘British India model’ that Hitler often claimed to admire. Estonian SD men wore the same uniforms as their German counterparts and Sandberger sent the most diligent to Germany for ideological training. He insisted that junior German officers treat Estonians of senior rank with respect and he forbade expressions of German racial arrogance.
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Sandberger handed his Estonian security police an astonishing level of autonomy, as well as comradely friendship. Eager collaboration deserved reward. After the war, Sandberger tried to blame his former comrades in arms for the murder of Estonian Jews.

German immigrants had moulded Estonian society and culture for half a millennium. As a consequence, Jews had not settled here in such large numbers as they had in Lithuania and Latvia. In 1939, according to historian Eugenia Gurin-Loov, Estonia had just 4,500 Jewish citizens.
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Approximately half had settled in the capital Tallinn, but there were significant communities in Tartu and Pärnu. Poorer Jewish families ended up in small towns and villages. In 1941, the Russians deported
400 Jews to Siberian camps. Most would survive the war. On 10 July, Wehrmacht forces arrived in Tartu, and the onslaught of Estonian Jews began. Accompanying the German troops was an Estonian Omakaitse unit, the Southern Estonian Forest Brothers, commanded by Friedrich Kurg. The Estonians rounded up and arrested Jews then locked them up in the local Kuperjanov barracks, which was rapidly turned into an improvised internment camp. Five days later, Sanderberger and his Special Commando 1a arrived in Tartu; they immediately transferred the Jewish families incarcerated at Kuperjanov to another barracks which was soon designated as the ‘Death Barracks’. From here, the Estonian Forest Brothers, led by a few German officers, took their captives to the Tartu–Riga Road. Close to the road, the Russians had constructed an anti-tank ditch which now provided a convenient execution site. Other shootings, probably of the women and children, took place close to Tartu’s Jewish cemetery.

Sandberger’s Einsatzkommando and their Forest Brothers then moved on to Pärnu; here more executions took place close to the local station and at sites in the forest close to the town. Sandberger raced on towards Tallinn. Here in the capital city, Omakaitse officers had already prepared lists of ‘Jewish communists’ and other suspects. When Sandberger arrived, the Estonians arrested at least 200 men and a smaller number of women; all were murdered immediately. According to Gurin-Loov, the sequence of events after this first spasm of shootings is unclear. According to a prison guard Karl Tagasaar, who was interrogated after the war, large-scale executions by Omakaitse and Sandberger’s SD men certainly took place inside Tallinn prison in September. The SD also built a camp at Harku where they held Jewish women and children until the end of 1941. On 5 June 1942 an Einsatzgruppe report concluded: ‘Today, there are no more Jews in Estonia.’
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Denunciations and executions continued even after that report had been submitted and in 1943 the SS began transporting Jews from other countries to Estonia, where they were incarcerated and then murdered by Estonian guards. When Himmler closed the Estonian camps, Sandberger ordered Estonians to carry out mass shootings of the prisoners who remained alive.
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Today Estonians are loath to accept that their nation had any involvement with the Holocaust at all. In national myth, the Forest Brothers and Omakaitse are celebrated as freedom fighters, not murder squads.

Estonians were the first Eastern Europeans permitted to serve not just as policemen but as soldiers in the Waffen-SS. Before the summer of 1942, when recruitment began in Estonia, Himmler had appeared reluctant to authorise the formation of combat divisions in the occupied east. Historians assume that he regarded the Eastern Europeans as Slavic
Untermenschen
and that his allegedly reluctant decision
to authorise recruitment in the east was a desperate response to the collapse of the German war effort.

This argument does not stand up to serious scrutiny. In the summer of 1942, when the first eastern legion was authorised, neither the Germans nor the subject peoples of occupied Europe had any expectation that the Reich might be defeated. The Wehrmacht had, to be sure, suffered its first serious set back when Operation Typhoon had failed in the winter of 1941–42, but Hitler’s formidable war machine was bruised, not mortally wounded. Nor, as we have seen, did Himmler regard Eastern Europeans as a homogeneous sub-racial mass. His own fascination with the diversity of eastern ethnic groups had been reinforced by the ‘scientific’ findings of the Abel mission. What led Himmler to hesitate was not race, but nationalism. SS recruitment was an instrument of racial domination – of Germanisation. Himmler feared that authorising national militias would be interpreted as a precondition of political demands which would have worked against the onward flow of Germanisation. After June 1941 recruitment of Schuma battalions and other kinds of police auxiliaries channelled nationalist passions into the mass murder of shared racial enemies. By the summer of 1942, that gruesome process had run its course. The ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’ would be enacted mainly through different means. The crucial significance of the Estonian case is that it demonstrated to Himmler that as both police and Waffen-SS recruitment could be managed in a way that neutralised nationalist sentiments and permitted the realisation of SS racial ambitions.

After all, the idea of an Estonian SS legion had come from an Estonian. At the beginning of August 1941 Professor Edgar Kant, the acting rector of Tartu University, wrote to the German military administration. He claimed that many Estonian students backed Hitler’s ‘crusade against Bolshevism’ and urged the German authorities to consider recruiting an Estonian legion or some other kind of military unit.
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Shortly afterwards, General Otto-Heinrich Drechsler met members of the Latvian ‘Land Self-Administration’ who also urged him to consider recruiting Baltic legions. When Drechsler reported his discussions to SS headquarters in Berlin, he received very short shrift from Recruitment Chief Berger, who dismissed the proposal as a ‘political trick’ – meaning that it was a step too far towards genuine Latvian self-rule. Commissar Lohse too was hostile to any kind of native autonomy and joined in the attack on Drechsler’s proposal. He sent Rosenberg a fifty-one-page memorandum arguing that all administrative power should forthwith be concentrated in the office of commissar, namely himself, and that the office should be made hereditary. It will be recalled that Lohse yearned to found his own dynasty and was nicknamed Herzog or duke. Thanks to Lohse, the Latvian proposal to form national legions was thwarted – for now.
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In Estonia, however, the proposal to form a national legion was welcomed. The German Commissar Litzmann replied warmly to Professor Kant’s letter and, in defiance of Lohse, backed his proposal to recruit ardent young Estonians who wished to fight the Soviets. To begin with, Rosenberg refused to support Litzmann, claiming feebly that he was too busy struggling to fend off the aggressive commissar of Ukraine, Erich Koch. But Litzmann soon won the backing of Field Marshall Georg von Küchler, the commander of Army Group North, who ‘shared’ Estonia with Litzmann and then, more surprisingly, the German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. Litzmann’s refusal to submit to Lohse, his immediate boss, and his active encouragement of Professor Kant heralded a decisive step change in German occupation policy.

By mid-1942, the SS had already set up scores of Estonian police and Schuma battalions, and managed 40,000 Omakaitse men. But the service contracts signed by the Estonian recruits would run out on 1 September 1942. The Estonian police commander, Dr Heinz Jost, met Litzmann to discuss the impending crisis and the following day sent an urgent message directly to Himmler, who was on board his mobile headquarters, the
Zug Heinrich
. Jost revealed that many of the Estonians had made it clear that they would not sign another service contract. Many had come to regard their service as auxiliary Reich policeman as shameful. But Jost had a solution. The Estonian policemen would, he believed, almost certainly agree to join an SS legion, especially if pay and conditions were improved. Jost rounded off his appeal by stressing that at least 70 per cent of the Estonians were ‘racially suitable’.
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A week later Himmler replied to Jost. He refused to make an immediate decision, but ordered Litzmann to proceed with preparations to form an Estonian SS legion. Himmler’s involvement now set off alarms at German army headquarters. Major General Hans Kruth, who feared that Jost’s plan was the thin end of an SS wedge, soon called on Litzmann and urged him to persuade the Estonians to renew their contracts, thus retaining the auxiliary police as part of the shaded SD/Wehrmacht administrative apparatus and fending off the SS. Alarmed by Kruth’s ploy, Jost sent a second telegram to Himmler, urging him to make an immediate decision. The next day, Berger informed Rosenberg that following a meeting with Hitler, Himmler had agreed to form an Estonian SS legion.
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On 28 August 1942, a rally was organised in Tallinn’s central square. Litzmann called on the young men of Estonia to volunteer to join the new SS legion. He added a powerful enticement: anyone who accepted his challenge would be exempted from compulsory labour service in the Reich.

In January 1943 Himmler arrived at an SS training academy to meet the first Estonian Waffen-SS NCOs. He was pleased to discover that ‘racially they could
not be distinguished from Germans’ – the Estonians, he reported, were one of the few races that can ‘after the segregation of only a few elements be merged with us without any harm to our people’.
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Himmler had crossed the Rubicon.