Hitler's Foreign Executioners (62 page)

That a massacre happened in Huta Pieniacka has never been disputed. But Ukrainian SS veterans and some historians continue to raise doubts about the role of the SS ‘Galizien’, and some have attributed the atrocity to a German Schutzpolizei battalion. This phantom has never been identified.
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Since 1989, memorials erected to the victims at the site of the village of the attack have been vandalised, rebuilt then vandalised again. Huta Pieniacka remains a painful running sore. The hard evidence that the SS ‘Galizien’ did take part can be found in a Ukrainian document. In 1944 the Ukrainian Military Board met in L’viv and heard testimony from a Captain Khronoviat who had encountered the ‘Galizien’ men shortly after Huta Pieniacka was attacked. His report has been published by the Canadian Ukrainian Veterans’ Association, presumably because it shamelessly exonerates the massacre as an act of revenge:

Khronoviat’s report removes any doubt that Ukrainian SS men attacked Huta Pieniacka and that one reason that they did so was that Jews had been reported in the village and neighbourhood.
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This was not simply a
Vergeltungsmassnahme
(revenge action) provoked by the ‘massacre’ of the two soldiers. For Himmler and his commanders ‘bandit warfare’ was still a means of ‘ethnic purification’. It will be recalled that at meeting convened by General Max von Schenkendorff to discuss anti-partisan tactics with Himmler’s ‘bandit expert’ HSSPF Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, SS doctrine was crystallised in a slogan: ‘Where there’s a Jew, there’s a partisan and where there’s a partisan there’s a Jew.’
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To the very end of the war, Himmler often stressed this bond between ‘bandits’ and ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’: ‘In the concept of the partisan, Bolshevism tries to promote banditry to a national status. We have challenged this newly coined status by the Jewish-Bolshevik Untermensch [sub-humans] and have fought to remove the bandits from the population.’
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As Hitler’s armies retreated west, Himmler’s war on bandits ‘mopped up’ survivors of the camps and ghettoes. Waffen-SS foreign recruits, whether they had volunteered in L’viv, Paris or Riga, needed little persuading that, as Himmler claimed, the Jew and the partisan were one and the same enemy – to be exterminated as vermin.

On 16 May 1944 Himmler visited the SS ‘Galizien’ at a camp in Neuhammer. After Wächter had shown off the prowess of his recruits, Himmler spoke to the officer corps in German, with Paliiv translating for the Ukrainians. Himmler offered congratulations to the German officers and men of the SS ‘Galizien’: ‘the designation “Galician” has been chosen according to the name of your beautiful homeland … [which] has become even more beautiful since it lost, through our intervention, those inhabitants who often sullied the name of Galicia, namely Jews.’
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Officers and NCOs, German and Ukrainian, applauded loudly.

In the spring of 1944, a succession of catastrophic hammer blows overwhelmed Hitler's armies along the Eastern Front from the Baltic in the north all the way to the Black Sea in the south. The armoured might of Stalin's armies remorselessly drove the Germans back along every sector of the Eastern Front. In the Crimea, the Russians cut off 120,000 German and Romanian troops and crushed them without mercy. In May, Stalin and his generals turned their attention to the central Belorussian sector of the German line that had been caught in a pincer movement to north and south leaving a giant protrusion eastwards. A massive new strategic push, Operation Bagration, named after a Georgian prince, was set in motion to hurl the Germans back across the Polish border and into Romania. As Marshall Georgi Zhukov mustered prodigious numbers of troops, tanks and artillery, Soviet partisans unleashed a wave of deadly attacks in the German rear, targeting railway lines and roads to cut off supplies and reinforcements. As the Wehrmacht battled to restore order, a million Soviet troops closed in on the German bulge, backed by deafening barrages of Katyusha rockets, known as ‘Stalin Organs' by panic-stricken German troops. Zhukov's forces gobbled up territory, driving ever closer to the strongholds of the General Government. On 17 July, a supremely confident Stalin staged a victory parade in Moscow to show off 57,000 shamed and wretched German prisoners of war.
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The spectacular success of the first phase of Operation Bagration shattered the German front line. By the autumn, Soviet forces had pushed into the Baltic overwhelming German defences in Latvia and Estonia. On 23 July, Soviet troops crossed the border of the General Government and encircled the old Galician capital of L'viv. Three days later, the local governor Otto von Wächter, who had recruited the SS ‘Galizien' division, telexed Hans Frank in Kraków to announce that he had lost control of the ‘Distrikt Galizien'.

Hitler's Axis began to shed allies. In Romania, Marshall Ion Antonescu, who had masterminded the slaughter of Jews in the summer of 1941, was ejected from power by Carol's son King Michael who signed an armistice in Moscow on 12 September. German forces began pulling out of the Balkans, and Bulgaria belatedly declared war on Germany. In Hungary, the regent Admiral Miklós Hórthy, who had been reluctant to commit more than a few light divisions to the German war effort, began secret peace negotiations with the Allies, provoking a full-scale German occupation in March. The German ambassador and Plenipotentiary Edmund Veesenmayer appointed a new government headed by the compliant Dominik Sztoja to keep Horthy in line. For the Germans, Hungary was unfinished business. Its Jewish community was still largely intact. Goebbels had always believed that Hórthy was ‘reliable' with respect to what he called the ‘rhythm of the Jewish question'. The Hungarian was, he said, ‘murderously angry with the Jews'. But Hitler was convinced that his Hungarian ally had dragged his feet; with a more compliant regime in Budapest the matter could be settled at last. That summer, Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest with a Sonderkommando to begin organising deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Hórthy prevaricated. In October, with the Soviet army fast approaching his borders, Hórthy sent General Béla Miklós de Dálnok to negotiate an armistice directly with the Russians. Enraged, Hitler dispatched Otto Skorzeny to Budapest with orders to depose Hórthy. Skorzeny kidnapped the astonished regent and flew him to Germany. In the meantime, Arrow Cross fanatic Ferenc Szálasi, acting on Hitler's orders, seized power and took control of the Hungarian army. Arrow Cross death squads began murdering Jews and Eichmann returned to Budapest to begin his thwarted programme to deport the surviving Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. In December, the Germans incarcerated thousands of Jews in the Budapest ghetto, where they were subjected to unrelenting deadly assault by SS units and their Arrow Cross allies.

As Hitler's Reich shrank, Heinrich Himmler's power as SS chief bloated. In July, a colonel called Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg botched a plan to assassinate Hitler at his headquarters near Rastenburg. In the aftermath of the bomb plot, Hitler lashed out at the Wehrmacht and Himmler, and Gottlob Berger seized the
chance to ‘gather up' all the ‘foreign' units and divisions into the Waffen-SS. Their catch included the ill-fated Indian Legion, recruited by nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, as well as hundreds of thousands of Osttruppen, including Russians, Turkmen, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Mongolians and Georgians. In September, Himmler turned the most ruthless of these new SS warriors against the detested Polish capital of Warsaw.

During that last summer of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich, chronic stomach pain compelled Himmler to repeatedly summon his Baltic German masseur Felix Kersten, who often found his patient bedridden and tormented by gastric cramps. Himmler screamed: ‘I can't bear this pain any longer.' At one visit, Kersten noted that Himmler had a copy of the Koran open on his bedside table.
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But Himmler's public rhetoric still replayed the fatuous old myths. On 26 July, he addressed a new division of SS ‘Volksgrenadiers' (Infantry Division 545) and gloried in ‘a belief shaken by nothing, the belief in the Führer, the belief in the future of this greater Germanic Reich, the belief in our own worth, in ourselves'.
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In Himmler's imagination, the Greater Germanic Reich clung tenaciously to life. So too did his impassioned conviction that providence would look after the bearers of Germanic blood. Himmler's twisted optimism was nourished by the fantasy that new super weapons,
Wunderwaffen
, could soon be unleashed on Stalin's ‘Asiatic' hordes. Like many in Hitler's court, Himmler hoped that the alliance between Bolshevik Russia and the British and Americans would sooner or later break down; then he, rather than the plainly ailing Führer, would be called upon to lead a new Germany.

As Kersten waged war on Himmler's stomach cramps, Soviet armoured divisions ground relentlessly on towards the River Vistula, the last major natural barrier before they reached the borders of the Old Reich. Less than a quarter of the General Government now remained in German hands. By August, the Soviet vanguards had begun to approach the east bank of the Vistula. On the other side lay the city of Warsaw. The Polish capital had been Hitler's first prize in the ‘war of annihilation' that had begun on 1 September 1939. ‘The fact that we are governing,' Himmler informed General Keitel, ‘should enable us to purify the Reich territory of Jews and Polacks.' In the course of the next five years, German rule killed 6 million Poles, more than half of them Polish Jews.
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The Germans had turned occupied Poland into a slaughterhouse. Auschwitz and the Reinhardt death camps were all built on Polish soil. By the summer of 1944, Soviet General Rokossovsky and the hard-fighting First Byelorussian Front had reached Brest-Litovsk, where Hitler's troops had massed on 22 June 1941. That month, Soviet troops entered the Lublin district which had been the epicentre of Operation Reinhardt, the systematic mass murder of the Jews in the occupied east. In 1943, Himmler had ordered
‘Action 1005' to remove all traces of the mass murder camps, like Treblinka, or turn them into forced labour concentration camps. Despite the best ‘cleansing' efforts of the Germans, enough damning evidence remained to shock the Soviet soldiers and journalists who discovered this ruined archipelago of death. Then the Soviet forces and a small pro-Soviet Polish army led by General Zygmunt Berling pushed on towards the former Polish capital Warsaw, situated at the confluence of the Vistula and Narev rivers.

As the Soviets came ever closer, a grotesque procession began pouring back across the Vistula bridges and then through the old centre of Warsaw. Clad in frayed and tattered bloodstained uniforms, German SS men fled west alongside Ukrainians, Hungarians and Cossacks. Few had any transport; most walked or hobbled painfully. Extreme fatigue and hunger scarred their mud-caked faces. Few still carried arms. In the wake of these shattered relics of Hitler's war machine came a much bigger wave of civilian refugees. Inside Warsaw, the Germans began dismantling factories and sending industrial plants back to the Reich. Although Hitler had refused to arm any Poles, the German SS governor Ludwig Fischer harangued the Warsovians to ‘demonstrate their anti-Bolshevik sentiments' as they had when they sent Lenin's army packing in 1920. Warsaw, he ranted, had become the ‘breakwater for the Red flood'. He ordered Poles to begin building defences. ‘One hundred thousand volunteers immediately!' But not a single Pole was prepared to lift a finger to defend the hated German garrison.

As this human tide streamed through and past Warsaw, SS staff began incinerating the accumulated paperwork that documented five years of occupation. On 29 July, Poles watched with astonishment as immaculately turned out (and well-fed) soldiers of the Heeresgruppe Weichsel that comprised the Hermann Göring Panzer Division and the SS ‘Wiking', its ranks crowded with Swedes, Estonians, Danes and Norwegians, marched east across the Vistula and through the satellite town of Praga on the east bank. Hitler's multinational armies dug in to defend Fortress Warsaw (Festung Warschau) and repel the ‘Red tide' that bore down towards the city – unaware that another hostile army was being mustered in their midst.

From his secret command centre in an old tobacco factory, Polish general Tadeusz Komorowski (codename
Bór
, the forest) had mustered a secret ‘home army', comprising some 40,000 fighters. For months, Komorowski had been impatiently observing the retreat of demoralised German soldiers and refugees. Now, surely, it was time to strike hard and fast against the crumbling Reich. Born in L'viv, Komorowski (who had served in the Austrian army and spoke perfect German) was convinced that he and the Polish government in exile could not afford to dither. The Polish resistance was divided. Stalin, who had joined forces with Hitler in 1939
to dismember the Polish state, now backed the communist Polish Committee for National Liberation to ensure that, after the destruction of the Reich, Poland would be securely locked up inside a new Soviet empire. As the war raced to a climax in the east, General Bór and his advisors concluded, after impassioned debate, that seizing the former Polish capital provided the only way to resist the Soviet tide. So they began to hatch up a plan codenamed ‘Tempest' to seize the initiative and destroy the German garrison. Tempest was planned in secret and no attempt was made to warn the ordinary people of Warsaw of the fire storm that would consume their city. In his underground fortress, General Bór fretted and argued.
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