Hitler's Foreign Executioners (50 page)

Visvaldis Mangulis, who observed some of the meetings between the SA and the Germans, tried to rationalise the dilemma of the Latvian SA: ‘If they did not mobilize and the Germans won the war, then the Latvians would have a weak claim to independence … If they did not mobilize and the Germans lost the war, then surely Latvia would be occupied by the Reds once more.’
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Mangulis’ analysis is hardly logical, but it is repeated every year by the organisers of the ‘Latvian Legion’ commemorations in Riga. If the Soviet army could crush the mighty German war machine, how could a single Latvian division resist its bulldozer-like advance into the Baltic? The fact of the matter is that the Latvian self-administration ‘directors’ had been ‘hoisted by their own petard’. Collaboration made Latvians more, not less, vulnerable to any renewed Soviet terror. By agreeing to recruit young Latvians, the SA condemned an entire generation to certain death on the battlefield and decades of persecution as ‘traitors’ by the Soviets who would successfully reoccupy the Baltic after 1945. The dirty mirage of national autonomy, of ‘Latvia for Latvians’, led Valdmanis and the other SA stooges into a foolish trap. In return for an illusory share of power, they gambled away Latvian lives. The Germans, for their part, took a completely cynical view of the Latvian self-administration. The Mayor of Riga, Hugo Wittrock, writing to his close relative Alfred Rosenberg, disparaged the insatiable appetite of the Latvian ‘clique’: ‘First “Volkshilfe”, then directorate general, now protectorate, then á la Slovakia … The end, I don’t want to spell it out! The arrogance of these well known gentlemen [Valdmanis et al. ] … has now reached its peak.’ Wittrock had no doubt about the appropriate solution: ‘once kicked in the teeth, that gang quickly takes cover, which is what actually happened.’
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Many ordinary Latvians, Abwehr intelligence revealed, regarded the German occupiers more realistically as incompetent, corrupt, selfish, narrow-minded, conceited and uncultured. Collaboration was a one-way, dead-end street.

In 1943, the Latvian SA had begun to fear that Germany could lose the war – but this did not necessarily mean that in early 1943 they had any reason to believe that they could negotiate from a position of strength. To be sure, the German front line was by then under intense pressure and the surrender of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad was a calamity. But Hitler and the Nazi elite did not believe the war was lost. Even after Stalingrad, Hitler’s generals continued to fight an offensive war and laid plans to launch a massive new spring offensive against the Soviet armies. The Latvian misperception of German vulnerability led them to fall for an old trick: the promise of future autonomy in exchange for recruitment. So while Hitler
was supposed to be considering Latvian autonomy, Berger cynically pushed ahead with drafting Latvians with the connivance of the Latvian authorities. It is customary for historians to pour scorn on ‘chaotic’ German administrations in occupied territories. In practice, the multiplication of different, competing authorities often wrong-footed indigenous nationalists with a kind of confusing hard cop/soft cop routine. That may have been inadvertent, but the effect was to encourage compliance with the promise of a better deal to come. The Latvian collaborators had fallen for this kind of practice from the day German SD men marched into Riga.

Today, Latvians who defend the annual commemoration of the ‘Latvian Legion’ stress that Latvians were conscripted: service was not voluntary. At the same time, defenders of the legion argue that Latvians joined to defend their nation against a second Soviet occupation. They want it both ways: the SS recruits as both heroes and victims. In reality, at least 25 per cent of the Latvian recruits did volunteer. But even if we accept that the Germans drafted the majority of recruits, they fought in any case for a Latvia ‘cleansed’ of fellow Jewish citizens.
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In 1941–42, many of these conscripts, like the aforementioned Juris Šumskis, had taken part in the SD special actions against Jews and the mentally ill. In 1943, they took up arms against the Soviet Union – in defence of a Latvia founded on chauvinism.

The records show that in order to form the core units of a new SS division, Berger yoked together the Latvian Schuma and SD police battalions that had so impressed Himmler on the Leningrad front. Many of these men had not only murdered Jews in Riga and elsewhere, but also participated in ‘bandit operations’ in the Minsk region. As we saw in a previous chapter, the Arājs Commando had been militarised at the end of 1941 and deployed to fight partisans in Belorussia. The Schuma battalions had purged Latvia of unwanted Jews; it was logical to use their skills outside Latvian borders to continue their ‘work’.

In November 1941, the 18th Latvian Police Battalion took part in the liquidation of the Jewish ghettoes at Barisov and Slonim. In January the following year, Latvian Schuma men joined in a renewed round of slaughter that, according to an SS report, left over 20,000 unarmed civilians dead. The Latvians proved to be such effective ‘bandit hunters’ that Himmler doubled the number of Schuma battalions. In February 1942, the Latvian puppet self-administration willingly took over the management of the Schuma and appointed a ‘Committee of Latvian Volunteer Recruitment’, headed by Pērkonkrusts fanatic Gustavs Celmiņaks. It will be recalled that Celmiņaks had fled to Berlin before the war, then returned to Latvia with the German armies in June 1941. It is significant that he and the other committee members presided over the redeployment of the Latvian Schuma battalions outside national borders as ‘bandit hunters’.

In many areas behind the Eastern Front, as I have emphasised, SS anti-partisan actions frequently (but not consistently) provided opportunities to liquidate those Jews who had escaped from ghettoes or camps. If SS anti-bandit units captured Jews, it was customary to torture them in the vilest way before they were executed. Five Latvian battalions took part in one such ‘bandit operation’: Operation Swamp Fever under the notorious 2nd SS Infantry Brigade. Another operation led by HSSPF Jeckeln and known as ‘Winter Magic’ also deployed Latvian units that had been incorporated into the Kampfgruppe Jeckeln – and ‘cleared out partisans’ in a 55-mile-wide strip of territory along the Latvian border near Lake Osveya. A succession of search-and-destroy ‘sweeps’ led by these Latvian battalions invariably left burning villages and murdered civilians in their wake. In many cases, it is the officially reported ‘kill numbers’ that tell the real story. After one attack, the Germans reported that over 7,000 people had received ‘special treatment’ (i. e. immediate execution) and 3,300 Jews liquidated; the Germans lost two men.
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It was during Operation Winter Magic that Walther Stahlecker, the former Special Task Force commander who had recruited Arājs and Veiss, attacked the village of Sanniki with a battle group comprising Germans, Latvians and Estonians. In the course of the attack, Stahlecker was shot dead and his men sought revenge. They burnt Sanniki, and killed every villager, both Christian and Jew.

To begin with, the new 15th Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS undertook the same kind of tasks – as we find in a report filed by Lg.-Standartenführer Artūrs Apsītis on 17 November 1943. On 14 November his echelon, severely under-equipped, had been deployed to the south of Ostrov, where the Latvians received orders to ‘clear out partisans and possible Red Army units … from six villages’, then to proceed further south to ‘clear out a wider area occupied by partisans’.
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So let us be clear about the origins of the ‘Latvian Legion’ and their role in Hitler’s ‘war of annihilation’. In 1943, Himmler amalgamated a number of Schuma battalions serving on the Leningrad front into the 2nd Latvian Volunteer Brigade; this would become the core of the 15th Latvian Waffen-Granadier-Division. By mid-1944, many of the Schuma battalions had been transferred to the Waffen-SS divisions, at the same time as German Order Police battalions were being absorbed into the Waffen-SS. In 1944, the Arājs Commando was amalgamated with the 15th Latvian. So whatever the modern apologists for the legion claim, it is simply a matter of fact that men who had committed the most gruesome atrocities serving with the Arājs Commando and other Schuma battalions both in Latvia and later in Belorussia ended up serving in the two SS divisions known as the ‘Latvian Legion’. As the Nazi programme of mass murder focused on the extermination camps rather than the ‘rifle-and-ditch’ method of earlier phases, Himmler had no
further use for Schuma brigades and diverted their activities to ‘bandit warfare’ and the front line.

From the spring of 1943, a succession of military setbacks in the Mediterranean as well as on the Eastern Front had a powerful impact on German decision making. Mounting losses of German troops, the surrender of the 6th Army at Stalingrad and the security crisis engulfing the occupied territories led cumulatively to increased levels of non-German recruitment by the German armed forces and especially the Waffen-SS. But in Himmler’s mind, the expansion of recruitment followed a completely logical path that was shaped by his racial creed. Foreign recruitment began with ethnic Germans in Romania, expanded to include Nordic Europeans in Scandinavia and Holland and then, in mid-1942, embraced Estonians who were considered a heavily Germanised Eastern European people. As the lessons of the Abel study of Russian POWs sank in, the potential pool of recruits broadened further still.

The mission’s findings had a decisive impact on German anthropological ideas about race and subsequently on Waffen-SS recruitment. In 1942, Berger’s recruitment office introduced a three-tier recruitment scheme based on Professor Abel’s reports. It split foreign recruits into three hierarchical categories as follows:

Nicht-germanische
here simply meant ethnic groups usually excluded from the Aryan family but that were, as Abel had showed, potential bearers of Germanic blood. In theory, there was no limit to the process of ‘Germanisation’, with the exception of Jews, Poles and Roma. In April 1944, Himmler delivered a lecture about how the selection process worked:

What this statement proves is that as late as spring 1944, Himmler was still thinking in terms of racial hierarchies. He continued to view Waffen-SS recruitment as a means to ‘gather Germanic blood’.

One last point is in order here. In late 1943, the Germans launched a campaign to recruit Lithuanians into the Waffen-SS. Dr Adrian von Lenteln, a Baltic German who had been appointed General Commissar for Lithuania, had every reason to expect success. Lithuanians had proved themselves eager executioners in the period following the German occupation in June 1941. As one American report put it: ‘The Lithuanian military police, Litauische Schutzmannschaften is organised into SS units … [and] used by the Germans to perform executions.’ But in 1943, as Estonians and Latvians rushed to join the SS legions, the Lithuanians balked. Efforts to establish a Lithuanian SS legion ran into the ground. In March 1943, Himmler and von Renteln travelled to Kaunas to persuade the Lithuanians to start recruiting but got nowhere. Lithuanians, Himmler complained, were ‘not worthy to wear SS uniform’. Today, Lithuanians celebrate this refusal as ‘heroic resistance’. It was nothing of the kind. It was merely a shrewd recognition that Germany was losing the war and there was no point going down with the Reich. Many of the bureaucrats who successfully fended off Himmler and von Renteln had been responsible either directly or indirectly for murdering tens of thousands of Jews. The Lithuanian refusal teaches a very different lesson. The Estonian and Latvian administrations had a choice. Reinforcing Hitler’s war and sacrificing the lives of tens of thousands of young men was not inevitable.
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As the tide of war turned relentlessly against Germany and the frontiers of the ‘Greater German Reich’ began to shrink, Himmler’s SS empire bloated. As the Wehrmacht began its long retreat to the borders of the old Reich, SS propaganda proclaimed that the Waffen-SS would be the ‘fire brigade of the Eastern Front’. The Nazi elite turned against what Goebbels called the ‘fat, big paunched majors in the Bendlerblock [German army headquarters in Berlin]’, but Himmler’s star began to ascend to its zenith. At a meeting in September 1943 Hitler informed his loyal paladins that ‘The best thing I leave to my successor is the SS’.
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Himmler would become the emperor of defeat.