Hitler's Foreign Executioners (57 page)

In the former Yugoslavia, Croatian militias and SS divisions like the ‘Handschar’ and its ragged Albanian counterparts waged a barbaric war. They fought simultaneously as both German proxy troops and as agents of a violent civil conflict that had been unleashed by the German invasion of Yugoslavia. Acting under German orders, the Muslim SS recruits and their Catholic Croatian comrades sought to completely exterminate their Serbian foes. Since Himmler regarded Serbs as Slavic
Untermenschen
and his Muslim warriors as Aryan descendants of Persians, the Balkan war was just another means to liquidate the race enemies of the Reich. A few historians have claimed that the ‘Handschar’ men murdered tens of thousands of Jews when they returned to Croatia after 1943.
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This is exaggerated. The majority of Jews had already been murdered by the Ustasha squads and by German Wehrmacht units and their Serbian collaborators. In the case of the ‘Handschar’, we have just two documented cases that led to the killing of Jews. In the summer of 1944, ‘Handschar’ men killed twenty-two Jews in Tuzia. Later that year, a ‘Handschar’ punishment detail was assigned to guard Hungarian Jewish forced labourers in the Austrian village of Jennersdorf. According to eyewitnesses they treated these men with great cruelty. Some who were considered unfit to work were taken away and shot.
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These documented atrocities are shameful enough, but wild claims about much larger scale killings by ‘Handschar’ men of Jews serve no historical or indeed moral purpose.

Haj Amin el-Husseini’s grand plan was to forge a pan-Islamic state, rivalling the defunct Ottoman Empire, that would be rendered
judenfrei
. Had it succeeded, this German-backed Jihad would have unleashed a human catastrophe on an unimaginable scale as SS murder squads like the Rauff Kommando and Muslim militias reached out far beyond the Mediterranean to do the Grand Mufti’s bidding. The SS ‘Handschar’ might possibly have played a part in the Mufti’s plan, though the evidence for this is less than convincing. As it turned out, the Bosnian Muslims became pawns in a merciless German-instigated civil war that pitted Croatians and Bosniaks against Serbs. That was the Balkan tragedy.

Shortly before dawn on 27 February 1944, the 2nd Battalion of the 4th SS ‘Galizien’ Police Regiment, clad in white winter uniforms, slipped quietly along a winding forest path that led to the village of Huta Pieniacka in the Tarnapol district in east Galicia.
¹
It was dark and bitterly cold and the SS men’s breath hung thickly in the air. Boots crunched through ice. Leather belts creaked. The 200 or so dwellings of Huta Pieniacka lay silent under a thick blanket of snow. Chimneys, lit early, propelled ash high into the freezing air. A dark green veil of thick forest enclosed the village. German aerial reconnaissance had revealed a grid of narrow, twisting streets clustered around a crossroads and the Catholic church. The Germans called this borderland between the General Government and Ukraine ‘Partisanengebiet’: bandit country. The province of East Galicia was crisscrossed by vital road and rail links, all vulnerable to attack from well-organised Soviet partisans who operated in small, fast-moving units. They could strike at will from their mobile strongholds hidden behind an impenetrable screen of birch and alder forest that stretched from the Prussian border to the eastern edge of the vast Pripet Marshes. No German commander relished engaging such an elusive enemy who could slip away like quicksilver through this labyrinth of forest and swamp.

A few very dim lights glowed as villagers began to get ready for the day. In 1944 Huta Pieniacka was considered to be a Polish village – and hence unreliable. Since November 1943 a few hundred Jews had also sheltered in Huta Pieniacka, as well as in a triangle of other tiny ‘Polish’ hamlets in the region.

When the SS men reached the shallow ditch at the edge of Huta Pieniacka, the German officer in charge called a halt. After a short wait, he signalled his men to begin encircling the village following the line of the ditch. The men whispered to each other in Ukrainian. For this SS regiment was attached to the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS known as the ‘Galizien’. They had marched to Huta Pieniacka with murder in mind. What happened here is still disputed by historians and Ukrainian officials and, in 2010, remains under investigation by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. The institute’s investigators have interviewed nearly a hundred witnesses since 2001, leading to a preliminary conclusion that ‘there is no doubt that the 4th battalion “Galizien” of the 14th division of SS committed the crime’.
²

According to eyewitness testimony:

Another eyewitness testified: ‘Then they took groups of people one by one to barns and houses, poured petrol over them and burned them. The screaming and crying was terrible.’
³

According to villager Miecelslaw Bernacki: ‘Finally, the village was set on fire. The only people who saved themselves were those who on finding out about the approaching Ukrainian SS managed to hide in the forests (only men).’
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Bernacki told the investigators:

The massacre at Huta Pieniacka at the end of February 1944 was not an unusual occurrence. Three weeks later, on 23 March, another Polish village in the same district of East Galicia, Huta Werchobuska, suffered the same fate. All over the German-occupied east, as well as in the Balkans and occupied France, Waffen-SS anti-partisan squads like this Ukrainian regiment waged a deadly ‘war on bandits’. In Ukraine, the road to Huta Pieniacka is a long and twisted one. It begins with the first Ukrainian battalions the ‘Roland’ and the ‘Nachtigall’, which were recruited by German military intelligence and murdered many hundreds of Jews in the city of L’viv in July 1941. After these battalions had been disbanded, the Germans continued to recruit Ukrainians to serve as auxiliary policemen in both the Reichs Commissariat Ukraine and the Galician district in occupied Poland, the General Government. Many Ukrainian Schuma battalions, like their counterparts in the Baltic, participated in special actions against Jews, most notoriously at the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev when the German Sonderkommando 4a and auxiliary police murdered 33,771 Jews between 29 and 30 September 1941.

In 1942, the Germans made a decision to liquidate all Jews who remained alive in the General Government. Operation Reinhardt may have commemorated the RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich, who had been assassinated in Prague at the end of May.
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To accomplish this monstrous plan, Himmler abandoned the so-called ‘wild genocide’ or ‘Holocaust by bullets’ that had been entrusted to the SD Special Task Forces and Schuma squads, and ordered the construction of specialised extermination camps in the Lublin District of the General Government. These camps would use new gassing technologies, developed by the Aktion T4 euthanasia experts such as Christian Wirth and SS-Obersturmbahnführer Walther Rauff of the RSHA Technical Department, to liquidate the Jews of the occupied eastern territories.

The trials of the Ukrainian Ivan (John) Demjanjuk first in Israel and then two decades later in Germany have made the names of these Reinhardt camps a litany of grotesque horror: Sobibór, Treblinka and Bełżec. The German managers of these mass-murder camps employed many thousands of Eastern Europeans as guards, mainly Ukrainians, but also Latvians and Estonians. The very few survivors of the Reinhardt camps have never forgotten the sadistic behaviour of these Eastern European camp guards. The Germans trained the majority of camp auxiliaries at a camp close to the Polish village of Trawniki. They were known as ‘Trawniki-Männer’. As well as working as Reinhardt camp guards, these Eastern European recruits took part in other SS special actions. New research, using documents discovered in Russian archives, shows that ‘Trawniki men’ took part in the liquidation
of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, as well as other Jewish ghettoes, and many later joined the Waffen-SS 14th Grenadier Division, the ‘Galizien’.
⁷
Likewise, Latvian men who had served in the murderous Arājs Commando later joined the Latvian SS divisions that Himmler began recruiting at the beginning of 1943. In the same way, Trawniki men recruited to serve at the Reinhardt camps ended up enlisting in Waffen-SS military divisions.

For many years, a Dr Swiatomyr Fostun served as the General Secretary of the Association of Ukrainian Former Combatants in Great Britain (the SS division’s old comrades’ club). Fostun lived comfortably in a London suburb. Dr Fostun was happy, indeed proud to talk about his service with SS ‘Galizien’, which he joined in 1944. According to Canadian researcher Michael Hanusiak, whose findings have been confirmed by British documentary producer Julian Hendy, ‘Dr Fostun’ was in fact Mychalio Fostun, who in 1943 had been trained at the Trawniki SS camp – and had taken part in many ‘ghetto liquidations’. Dr Swiatomyr Mychailo Fostun and Mychailo Fostun shared the same birth date, 22 November 1924, for example. Other evidence is even more telling. In the 1970s, Dr Fostun had his photograph taken for inclusion in the
Almanac of the Association of Ukrainian Former Combatants
, which openly commemorates the veterans of the SS ‘Galizien’. Three decades earlier, Mychailo Fostun had been photographed at the Trawniki camp. The resemblance is striking.
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The unashamed ‘Galizien’ veteran, Dr Swiatomyr Mychailo Fostun died in London after a road accident; it was a violent end to a life that may once been devoted to murder.

The recruitment of the Trawniki men, as the Fostun case implies, provides a missing link connecting Operation Reinhardt with the formation of the ‘Galizien’ SS division. Understanding this evolutionary tie between the SS ‘Reinhardt’ camp guards and the Waffen-SS ‘Galizien’ is crucial. After Ukraine became an independent nation, many historians recast the SS division as a ‘national liberation army’, whose sole intent had been to resist the Soviets. This is a misrepresentation. Both the formation and the conduct of the ‘Galizien’ reflect its origins in the German plans for mass murder.

Although the precise timing is still debated, it appears very likely that in the winter of 1941, Hitler secretly authorised a massive escalation of the German ‘war on Jews’. This ‘unwritten order’ was hammered into a practical plan at the Wannsee Conference convened on 20 January 1942 by RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich to examine a ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’. For the German bureaucrats who gathered at the villa overlooking Lake Wannsee, like the SD commander in Latvia Rudolf Lange, the numbers looked daunting. Military conquest had delivered 11 million Jews as well as other ‘undesirables’ into the hands of the German
occupiers. The ‘solution’ had to be ‘final’ – but how? The mass shootings in the countryside would continue for some time, but streamlining the killing process now became an urgent priority. Heydrich had no doubt that the recruitment of native mass killers would need to be significantly ramped up.

The ‘Final Solution’ dreamt up in that lakeside villa presented a formidable task. Heydrich had precisely defined what ‘Final Solution’ meant in practice: ‘Europe is to be combed through from west to east. The evacuated Jews will be brought, group by group, to the so called “transit ghettoes” to be transported from there further to the east.’ Himmler had already decided to use the Lublin district ‘further to the east’ as a vast execution site. To manage what would soon be referred to as Operation Reinhardt, Himmler appointed one of his most repellent favourites, Odilo Globocnik (or Globotschigg) (b. 1904), who had already proved himself a highly proficient, as well as venal,
génocidaire
.

As well as Globocnik, Himmler recruited SS personnel who had worked on the T4 euthanasia programme. These men, responsible for the deaths of more than 70,000 men, women and children, ‘lives not worthy of life’, would be assigned to a cluster of new camps to be built in the Lublin district in the General Government. These would be specialised extermination camps, rather than mixed labour/murder camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau. The first to be constructed was close to the Polish town of Bełżec and situated at the end of a railway spur. Euthanasia veteran SS-Hauptsturmführer Christian Wirth, a ‘gross and florid man’ known as ‘Savage Christian’, was appointed camp commander. According to one of his staff: ‘Wirth told us that in Bełżec “all the Jews will be struck down.”’ Soon after the Wannsee Conference, Wirth carried out the first ‘experimental killings’ at Bełżec using carbon monoxide. His engineers disguised the new gas chambers as ‘Bath and inhalation rooms’ – and the camp was ingeniously laid out so that large groups could be rushed from the railway head to their deaths in the most orderly way. Bełżec became fully operational in March 1942 and Wirth’s system was replicated at the other Reinhardt camps at Sobibór and then Treblinka.