Hitler's Foreign Executioners (58 page)

The successful completion of Operation Reinhardt depended on the smooth running of these slaughter houses. Under Globocnik and his second-in-command, SS-Hauptsturmführer Herman Höfle, the camp commanders (many of them Austrian) wielded absolute power in their obscene camp worlds. But the insatiable demands of Hitler’s war machine meant that Himmler could allocate only a handful of German staff to the new extermination camps. He ordered Globocnik to find ‘persons who seem to be especially trustworthy and therefore can be used to rebuild the occupied territories’.
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These foreign assistant executioners would be trained at a former POW camp built not long after the Soviet invasion near the
town of Trawniki. Its shabby wooden barracks would now become Himmler’s college of genocide.

As Hitler’s armies smashed through Soviet defences in the summer of 1941, millions of prisoners fell into German hands. Many would die of neglect, starvation or torture. Others, desperate to save their lives – and it would seem that Demjanjuk was one of them – offered to work for the Germans to do so. The majority of these ‘Hiwis’ (
Hilfswillige
, helpers) came from Ukraine, but Latvians, Estonian and Lithuanians also ended up at Trawniki. Vladas Zajanckauskas, for example, who is currently under investigation by the American OSI, had served in the Lithuanian army.
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The Germans lumped them together, however, as ‘Ukrainians’, ‘Trawniki-Männer’ or ‘Askaris’ (a term first used during the First World War in German East Africa). Polish Jews called them ‘blacks’ (referring to the colour of their uniforms) or
Karaluch
(cockroach). Under the command of SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Streibel, the ‘Ukrainians’ were trained to be tough and completely ruthless. The Germans armed them with whips and Russian carbines.

To procure recruits for the SS Bataillon Streibel, SS recruiters ransacked the hellish German POW camps still dotted across occupied Poland. Alerted by SS anthropologist Wolfgang Abel, they tracked down many Soviet prisoners who plainly had German origins. Some claimed descent from Germans who had settled in Russia in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Many more originated in the ‘Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic’. It seemed that German migrants had somehow ended up in just about every corner of the former Russian Empire. In the first wave of recruitment, these ethnic Germans enjoyed a privileged status. Ukrainian Feordor Fedorenko testified to a court in Florida in 1978: ‘One day at Chelm [POW Camp], the Germans assembled the Soviet prisoners and walked down the line selecting 200 to 300 [ethnic Germans] who were sent toTrawniki … TheseVolksdeutsche also wore black uniforms but theirs were well tailored and of better material.’
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By 1943, as Operation Reinhardt began to wind up, Ukrainian recruits had come to dominate Trawniki and the camps. Regardless of their ethnic origin, the Trawniki men were, as Sobibór survivor Jules Schelvis wrote, ‘overzealous’. Their task was to herd Jewish victims from the bogus railway station where they disembarked through the camp and finally into the gas chambers. At every stage of this journey to death, many of the Trawniki guards indulged in the grotesque cruelties. They routinely plundered money and jewellery, and traded it for alcohol in nearby villages. Many seized terrified Jewish girls from the crowd and raped them. At the Treblinka camp the most feared was a Ukrainian called Ivan Demaniuk: ‘Ivan the Terrible’. According to survivor Eli Rosenberg, he ‘took special pleasure in harming other people, especially women. He stabbed the
women’s naked thighs and genitals with a sword before they entered the gas chambers.’
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As Operation Reinhardt picked up momentum in summer of 1942, some 1,000 Trawniki men, organised in two battalions of four companies, were stationed in Trawniki. These Trawniki men were not only deployed in the camps. According to a prosecutor in one of the post-war Trawniki trials: ‘Trawniki men didn’t just provide the great majority of camp personnel for the extermination camps … but they took part … in the liquidation of many ghettos. They were used in the most revolting and shocking operations and were known and feared for their cruelty.’
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At the beginning of 1943, German Trawniki recruiters arrived in East Galicia, a district of the General Government then ruled by the Austrian Baron Otto Gustav von Wächter. Galicia was also the stronghold of the Ukrainian ultranationalist movement, the OUN. It was at this time that Mychailo Fostun, who was almost certainly Dr Swiatomyr M. Fostun of Wimbledon, Surrey, joined up as a Trawniki man.
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Fostun, like many of new Trawniki recruits, came from the Tlumacz district. His identity documents include the required undertaking to serve the Germans for the duration of the war and confirm that he denied any Jewish ancestry and had never been a member of the Soviet Communist Party. From February until April 1943, after completing training, guard 3191 Fostun, served at the Jewish slave labour camp attached to the training camp at Trawniki. Fostun must have proved himself a diligent camp guard. On 17 April, the Germans selected Fostun and 350 other Trawniki men to take part in a special assignment. It would be commanded by one of Himmler’s favourite SS generals.

When American troops broke into the empty villa in Wiesbaden, formerly occupied by SS-Gruppenführer and Generalleutnant der Waffen-SS und Polizei Jürgen Stroop in 1945, they stumbled on one of the most chilling of all accounts of mass murder. The Stroop Report is compilation of communiqués and photographs, bound together with an elegant cover that is emblazoned in gothic lettering: ‘Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr’ (The Warsaw Jewish ghetto is no more). Stroop’s proud and meticulous report spells out in detail how Hitler’s foreign executioners, trained at the Trawniki camp and including Mr Fostun and other Ukrainian volunteers who would later serve in the SS ‘Galizien’, liquidated the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943.

Since the 1990s, trials of some of the SS auxiliaries who took part in the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto have revealed many details about the role played by the Trawniki men; it is evident that they were kept busy at every stage of Stroop’s attack, from the first encirclement to the final deportations. At assembly points, they guarded the prisoners on the trains, beat and humiliated them – and on arrival at Treblinka, herded them into the gas chambers. Witness statements by survivors refer
frequently to the black-uniformed Trawniki men, who usually spoke Russian or Polish. As well as Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians also took part in Stroop’s ‘Grand Action’. His report claims that his men ‘destroyed’ 56,065 Jews, 7,000 being killed immediately during fierce street and house to house battles. An unquantifiable number died in buildings razed by SS flamethrowers or destroyed by artillery shelling. The Trawniki men deported 6,929 ghetto prisoners to Treblinka, where all were gassed on arrival.

Stroop described his foreign executioners as ‘nationalists and anti-Semites but the best soldiers. Young, mainly without education, wild at heart and with a tendency towards base things. But nevertheless obedient.’
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The following year, 1944, Swiatomyr Fostun and many other Trawniki men enlisted in the 14th SS Division ‘Galizien’.

Many historians of the Second World War regard Himmler’s decision to recruit a ‘Ukrainian’ SS division as a last resort – an act of desperation. It is assumed that he abandoned any pretence that the Waffen-SS was an elite Aryan corps. This view is quite wrong and demonstrates a misunderstanding of German racial ideology and the way the ideas of race scientists changed as the war unfolded. I have shown that following Professor Abel’s studies of Soviet POWs, Gottlob Berger’s SS recruitment office was persuaded to broaden the catchment area where Germanic blood might be, as Himmler put it, ‘harvested’. As the SS empire expanded in mid-1942, Berger turned first to ‘Germanic’ Estonians and then ‘suitable’ Latvians to bolster his military divisions. Himmler next turned to the Bosnian Muslims, having been convinced that Bosniaks were a ‘Gothic’ people descended from Persians. Did the SS recruitment of Slavic Ukrainians fit the same evolving pattern? And if so how?

The most important clue is the name of the new SS division: the ‘Galizien’. In just about every document concerning the SS ‘Galizien’, Himmler insisted that the division was not Ukrainian but Galician. This was not semantic window dressing. It will be recalled that the former Kingdom of Galicia was annexed by the Austrian Hapsburgs in 1772 and become the most easterly province of their sprawling empire. Today, the Galician region occupies part of eastern Poland and the western edge of independent Ukraine. This is a liminal territory that stretches, in memory at least, from the regional capital L’viv, formerly Lemberg, south towards Chernivtsi in Bukovina; the Carpathian Mountains form a western border while its eastern margin flows along the Zbruch River. For modern Ukrainians, as historian Omer Bartov discovered, poor, muddy, backward Galicia remains ‘somewhat
foreign and suspect’. Indeed Galicia is not very Ukrainian, especially its western half. All over Galicia, cities and villages still show traces of a history that has drawn together Poles, Jews, ethnic Germans as well as ethnic ‘Ruthenians’. This was the birthplace of a rich Jewish culture that flourished for centuries alongside chauvinist Ukrainian nationalism. For the Hapsburg emperors in Vienna, this most remote territorial possession was an exotic backwater huddled on the western edge of the Russian Empire. Galicia has always been a volatile borderland, often prey to the slings and arrows of territorial upheaval. At the end of the First World War, as the Austrian Empire collapsed and Russia was engulfed by revolution and civil war, Galicia became a battleground. At the Paris Peace Conference, the victorious powers had frustrated Ukrainian demands for independence and the Soviets held on to much of their disputed homeland, while leaving Galicia up for grabs. Poles had, in any case, always dominated the western part of the old Austrian province – and in 1923, a resurgent Polish nation annexed the east as well, renaming it ‘Eastern Little Poland’.

In the period before the First World War, the light-touch rule of the Hapsburgs had encouraged Ukrainian nationalism to flourish in Galicia. Conversely, in eastern Ukraine, any expression of national separatism had been ruthlessly stamped out by the tsars through a policy that would be maintained by Lenin and then Stalin. As a consequence, Ukrainian nationalists tended to be both pro-German and, especially after 1917, aggressively anti-Semitic, since they identified Bolshevism with Jews. Ironically, Polish-ruled Galicia and its cultural hub, the city of Lwów (formerly Austrian Lemberg, now L’viv), became the crucible of a radical Ukrainian nationalism that was both anti-Semitic and dedicated to the destruction of Poland.

In 1939, the Germans and Soviets once again split Galicia according to the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Then after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler assigned Galicia to the General Government as the ‘Distrikt Galizien’. The eastern region (Ostgalizien) would be ruled by an Austrian SS professional, Otto von Wächter, who in 1943 would become the main architect of the SS ‘Galizien’. Wächter’s fiefdom bordered the vast Reichskommissariat Ukraine that was ruled by former Gauleiter Erich Koch. Koch was a gluttonous despot who waged an unending turf war with his nominal boss, the despised Eastern Minister, Alfred Rosenberg.

For both Himmler and the Austrian-born Hitler, Galicia had a special historical significance as a reservoir of Germanic blood. This was reinforced by Himmler’s RuSHA race experts, who claimed that about 25 per cent of the ‘Ruthenian’ population (i.e. Ukrainians) possessed a significant quantity of Germanic blood. Galicia was thus ripe for ‘Germanisation’, which provided the underlying logic
of Waffen-SS recruitment. We have evidence that Galicians fitted the SS recruitment plan in the records of an extraordinary meeting that took place at Hitler’s ‘Werewolf’ headquarters near Vinnitsa in Ukraine. The purpose of the meeting was to resolve the unending battle between Reich Commissar Erich Koch and his superior, the Eastern Minister Rosenberg. Rosenberg had complained bitterly and often that Koch ruled his fiefdom with excessive cruelty, thus damaging his efforts to exploit Ukrainian anti-Bolshevik and nationalist aspirations. Most pointedly, he accused Koch of inciting attacks by Ukrainian partisans which was for the Germans a very sore point in the spring of 1943. Hitler turned to Rosenberg. He reminded him that Wehrmacht attempts to recruit eastern troops (Osttruppen) in the occupied Soviet Union had usually ended in calamity. He would not permit recruitment of Ukrainians in the Reich Commissariat. But the people of Galicia, he pointed out, had lived for more than a century under Austrian rule. They had close connections with the old Hapsburg Empire. ‘It is therefore possible,’ he concluded, ‘for the SS to set up a Ukrainian division in Galicia.’
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Historians who have interpreted Himmler’s decision to recruit a Ukrainian division in 1943 as an expedient response to German losses on the Eastern Front have failed to take account of this crucial distinction he made between the broad mass of the Ukrainians and those born and bred in ‘Austrian’ Galicia.