Hitler's Foreign Executioners (59 page)

For the Germans, there was just one stumbling block. As we have seen, the main Ukrainian nationalist faction the OUN had made its autonomist aspirations all too plain at the end of June 1941, when OUN leaders had rashly declared independence after occupying the Galician capital L’viv. It was this impertinent gesture that had led Himmler to reject the idea of a ‘Ukrainian’ SS militia when it was proposed by Berger in 1941. Even after the Galician region was absorbed into the General Government, on Hitler’s orders, Himmler refused to consider recruiting an SS division – although, as we have seen, thousands of Ukrainians served in the Schuma battalions. In Himmler’s view, the nationalist OUN, albeit devoutly anti-Semitic, had a stranglehold on Galician political culture. Then in the early spring of 1943, the Governor of East Galicia, SS-Gruppenführer Otto von Wächter, decided that the time had come to try a new approach. Wächter would become the main driving force behind SS recruitment.

At the beginning of March 1943 Wächter flew from his headquarters in L’viv to Hochwald in East Prussia to meet Himmler, who was headquartered at a railway siding in his official train,
Heinrich
. They had much to discuss. The minutes taken at the meeting refer to progress with ghetto clearances and similar matters to do with the ‘Final Solution’. For the Nazi governors of the occupied east, this was business as usual. Much more pressing was the increasingly precarious state of the German
front line. For Wehrmacht commanders and the Nazi elite in Berlin, the destruction of the 6th Army and the loss of half a million men at Stalingrad was ‘the most catastrophic hitherto experienced in German history’. ‘Imagine it,’ one Russian soldier wrote to his wife, ‘the Fritzes are running away from us.’
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Closeted inside his military headquarters at Rastenburg, Hitler raved about the cowardice of his generals, while Goebbels tried to spin the bad news, telling the German people that the 6th Army had been ‘annihilated’ so that ‘Germany might live’.
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Stalingrad had shown that the ‘invincible’ Germans could lose a battle; it did not, as some historians claim, ‘decide the war’. Shortly before Wächter met Himmler at Hochwald, Field Marshall Erich von Manstein had launched a successful strike against Soviet forces at Kharkov and captured the city by 11 March. Manstein’s formidable panzer armies restored the German front to more or less the same line reached in December 1941. Hitler’s war machine had by no means lost its offensive capabilities and that summer his commanders would muster enormous forces at Kursk to unleash the last great offensive of the war in the east, Operation Citadel. As it turned out it was the rout of German armies at the cataclysmic Battle of Kursk that was fought months later in July 1943 that truly signalled the beginning of the end for the German campaign.

Early in March, what focused the minds of Himmler and Governor Wächter was a different kind of crisis. By the spring of 1943, Soviet backed partisan units had become a serious threat to the German rear areas in the Balkans and on the Eastern Front. In the early months of the German attack, Hitler had used the ‘partisan threat’ to rationalise his radical conception of war in the east. He told a meeting of senior aides: ‘The struggle we are waging against the partisans resembles very much the struggle in North America against the Red Indians.’ For both pragmatic and ideological reasons, Hitler made Himmler’s SS responsible for pacifying German army rear areas and waging war on ‘bandits’. To begin with, as we have seen, Himmler used Bandenbekämpfung (bandit warfare) as a cover for the liquidation of Jewish civilians and communist officials. This equivalence of Jews and bandits would continue to shape Himmler’s ‘bandit war’. Field reports submitted by the German army, as well as by Himmler’s chief bandit hunter HSSPF Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, frequently included a count of any Jews who have been killed whether or not they were considered to be actual partisans.
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Now in the spring of 1943, the partisan war had become a lot more menacing. According to Goebbels: ‘The activity of partisans has increased noticeably … The partisans are in command of large areas … and are conducting a regime of terror.’
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Later that year Hitler would reiterate Himmler’s responsibility for the Bandenkampf und Sicherheitslage (Bandit Fight and Security Situation). For Himmler, the
reaffirmation of SS security management was another step towards complete domination of German occupation strategy. But it was also an overwhelming responsibility, which carried a tremendous risk of failure. This gave Governor Wächter a distinct advantage. He could claim with facts and figures to back him up that his own fiefdom, the ‘Distrikt Galizien’, was, so far, relatively free from ‘bandit activity’. But, he warned Himmler, he had recently noted a troubling rise in the number of ‘bandit attacks’ – and he blamed the insurgent Ukrayins’ka Povstans’ka Armiya, the UPA. Wächter had a radical solution to propose. He wanted Himmler to authorise the formation of a new SS division to be recruited in East Galicia. This would, he argued, siphon off support for the UPA and reinforce security in this strategically vital borderland region.

It was remarked that Wächter ‘understood Ukrainians’.
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This is generous. As an Austrian, Wächter retained a national memory of Galicia as a former Hapsburg province. Like the administrators of the Austrian Empire, he toyed with Ukrainian aspirations but according to very strict rules. It was a family tradition. Gustav Otto von Wächter was born in July 1901 in Vienna. His father General Josef Freiherr was a Sudetendeutscher (an ethnic German from the Sudetenland) who had fought in the western Ukraine during the First World War. Described in his SS file as ‘highly intelligent’, Wächter like so many of Himmler’s top SS managers had a doctorate in jurisprudence. A tall, trim man with curiously Slavic eyes, he soon became a big player in the Austrian Nazi movement and fled to Germany in 1934 in the chaotic aftermath of the abortive putsch. Following a short period of detention, Wächter began cultivating the SS elite with his usual energy and cunning. His subsequent ascent was, as his personal file records, rapid: March 1935 Untersturmführer; 1 June Obersturmführer; 9 November Hauptsturmführer; 20 April 1936 Sturmbannführer; 30 January 1937 Obersturmbannführer; 30 January 1938 Standartenführer.
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In March 1938, after German troops had marched into Austria, the new Governor Artur Seyß-Inquart appointed Wächter head of the police in Vienna. The ‘Wächter Commission’ took charge of expropriating Jewish property and ‘cleansing’ the Austrian bureaucracy by removing all Jews from public office.

Wächter was a zealous bureaucrat. In 1939, Hitler appointed him Gauleiter of the Kraków district in the new General Government, a region that would become one of the epicentres of the Holocaust. Governor General Hans Frank, who, it will be recalled, had been Hitler’s personal legal advisor, welcomed Wächter’s appointment hoping that he could use him to work against Himmler. Kraków was the administrative and communications hub of occupied Poland and, after 1939, was thoroughly ‘Germanised’. Wächter set about removing all traces of Polish culture and began deporting Jews. He believed that Jews had ‘no native place’ and often
discussed ways of achieving ‘total Jewish extermination’. According to one of his subordinates, ‘I have to say that my impression is that [Wächter] represented the point of view of the Master Race, that is the SS point of view towards the so-called Fremdvölkischen (foreigners). He was a high SS leader, constantly running around in his SS uniform.’
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The Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte, who witnessed the German-inspired pogroms in Romania, provides us with a vivid portrait of Wächter in his book
Kaputt
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In one chapter Malaparte describes an evening at the venal court of the ‘King of Poland’, Governor Hans Frank. In the course of a lavish dinner, Wächter and his wife refer to the ‘filthy state’ of Polish Jews. Later, Malaparte listens to Frank’s critique of the massacres in Iasi: ‘the Romanians are not a civilised people,’ he grumbles. ‘We must be surgeons, not butchers.’ Wächter concurs: ‘Germany is called upon to carry out a great civilising mission in the East.’

After his appointment as Governor of the ‘Distrikt Galizien’, Wächter was able to pursue his ‘mission’ on a much bigger scale. From his new headquarters in L’viv, he masterminded the liquidation of the last Jewish communities in his fiefdom. At the beginning of July, 1941, German troops and the Ukrainian ‘Nachtigall’ battalion had massacred thousands of Galician Jews. In December, the Germans had incarcerated the survivors in the L’viv ghetto, but in the summer of 1942, soon after Wächter had been appointed governor, he accompanied Globocnik to a meeting with Himmler to discuss Operation Reinhardt. When Wächter returned to L’viv, he authorised mass deportations to the Reinhardt camps. As the last train left L’viv for Treblinka, Wächter dispatched Ukrainian police battalions to flush out any survivors still hiding in the ghetto. Like all the SS top brass in the east, he had a great deal of blood on his hands.
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Himmler valued Wächter highly. But the General Government was, like every other German administration, a political battleground. Hans Frank hated Himmler and the SS as much as he despised his Polish subjects, and he fought every SS incursion into his fiefdom. He accused the HSSPF Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger of trying to ‘build an SS state within a state’. By 1943, a succession of brutal skirmishes between Frank and the SS had begun to tear the General Government apart. The wily Gauleiter Wächter, who was also an SS-Brigadeführer, adroitly cultivated allegiances in both camps – and by spring 1943 he had a powerful card to play. His ‘Distrikt Galizien’ was the eastern ‘wall’ of the German General Government. If the Soviet armies ever managed to overrun the Commissariat Ukraine, then East Galicia would become the next line of defence. If that happened, the internal security of Wächter’s domain was a matter of overriding importance. If your enemies are already behind you, there is no point building a wall and shutting the fortress door. So far, Wachter had maintained friendly relations with the pro-German
Ukrainian elite and successfully kept the lid on UPA activities in East Galicia. This was the Austrian way; according to his personal assistant Dr Heinz Georg Neumann, ‘we favoured the Ukrainians because of political expediency. Wächter therefore tried to carry out as much as possible the old tradition of Austrian policy in Galicia.’ Himmler commended him warmly:

In short, Wächter had cleverly pushed all the right SS buttons. But as Stalin’s armies pushed westward, the security of the ‘Galician wall’ could never be taken for granted.

When he met Himmler in March, Wächter’s main objective was to raise the delicate matter of recruiting Ukrainians and forming a new SS division. This, he argued, would bind the Ukrainians in East Galicia to the Reich and provide a means to attack and neutralise the partisans. As Wächter had anticipated, Himmler, who was the Reich’s Chef der Bandenbekämpfung (Chief Bandit Hunter), was obsessed with security. But he had to work hard to convince Hitler and the Wehrmacht high command to commit recourses to this shadow war.
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At the same time, Himmler exploited the Bandenbekämpfung to continuously expand the SS and its military and police forces – including non-German auxiliaries. It was this SS ‘war on terror’ that drove the dramatic expansion of non-German recruitment after the summer of 1942, and why in March the following year he listened attentively to Wächter’s proposal to begin recruiting in Galicia. He had long been fascinated by the racial ancestry of the Galician peoples and would soon come to believe that this fresh wave of SS recruitment provided another opportunity for ‘harvesting Germanic blood’.

Nevertheless, Himmler still had to square the nationalist circle. In other words, although Galicians possessed some quantum of Germanic blood, many were ardent, indeed fanatical nationalists. Wächter knew very well that the main Ukrainian nationalist faction, the OUN, wielded a good deal of influence and power. Fortunately, from his point of view, the OUN was split between rival clans. Its radical wing, the OUN-B, led by Stepan Bandera, resolutely opposed collaboration with the Germans and fed recruits into the insurgent movement, the UPA, which threatened to become the most dangerous insurgent force in the General Government. But Andreas Melnyk’s rival OUN-M took a more conciliatory
line. This more conservative wing of the nationalist movement traditionally leant towards Germany – and as historian Taras Hunczak admits, Wächter’s plan proved ‘easier and more successful than anyone could have possibly anticipated’.

Why? One answer is that Himmler reaped what General Governor Frank and Wächter had already sown. Wächter was convinced, like Rosenberg, that in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, Erich Koch had foolishly squandered the good will that Ukrainians had shown in 1941, when they greeted German troops as a liberating army. After visiting the Commissariat and observing at first hand what Koch’s rule meant in practice, Wächter wrote angrily to Martin Bormann. He did not pull any punches:

Bormann is unlikely to have passed on Wächter’s letter to Hitler, who consistently backed Koch’s draconian methods. Certainly, Wächter never received a reply. But in any case, German administrators in the General Government had deliberately raised the status of Ukrainians and demoted Poles as well as Jews. Frank established a Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC) chaired by the Ukrainian geographer, Professor Dr Volodymyr Kubijovych, and maintained good relations with its members. The UCC was analogous to the puppet ‘self-administrations’ in the Baltic states and its power was limited to welfare and cultural promotions. In his Galician fiefdom, Wächter cleverly exploited the UCC; he often reminded Kubijovych about the good old days under Austrian rule – and of the treachery of the Poles when they snatched statehood from the Ukrainians in 1919. He diligently cultivated the Melnyk wing of the OUN and the hyper reactionary Ukrainian ‘Front of National Unity’. He made sure the most compliant pro-German Ukrainians got the best jobs and excluded anyone suspected to be linked with the rival OUN-B. Wächter and Kubijovych had already begun discussions about an SS legion a few weeks before the meeting with Himmler. He did not, of course, reveal to his Ukrainian friends the real purpose of the proposed new SS division: ‘to be utilised as much as possible in the spirit of an introduction of the Ukrainian population of Galicia
to the strategic concept of being Germanic
.’
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