Hitler's Foreign Executioners (74 page)

The British government promised to screen the Ukrainians to head off any protests by left wingers and appointed Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, whose Special Refugee Commission was already in Italy vetting Yugoslavian refugees, to handle the task. Maclean had fought with Tito’s partisans and already knew quite a lot about the ‘Galizien’. He suspected that many of the Rimini Ukrainians might not be ‘repatriable’ and that ‘there were war criminals amongst them’.
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But London set the SRC a tight deadline of mid-March, giving Maclean just a few weeks to process 8,000 plus men. He protested vigorously that ‘These men have had ample time
in which to disguise their identity and this commission has no machinery in whatever form for criminal investigative work’.
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Since he was also still obliged to screen Yugoslav POWs, Maclean delegated Ukrainian screening to his assistant D. Haldane Porter. In the time available, Porter made a decision to interview a representative selection. The SRC had problems recruiting Ukrainian speakers and so had to rely on the word of a fanatical former ‘Galizien’ officer who had no difficulty pulling some very thick wool over British eyes. The Ukrainians had destroyed their SS service cards and Porter had no time to access German records. Many of the POWs insisted that they had never been Soviet citizens and were from the Polish region of Ukraine, occupied by the Soviets in 1939. When it came to investigating the service records of ‘Galizien’ units, Porter was hamstrung: he had no doubt that every Ukrainian he interviewed ‘may be all or in part lying’. He made some effort to cross check divisional rolls with Soviet lists of war criminals, but was forced to rely on a Ukrainian history of the SS division which claimed that it had been formed in September 1944, after the Battle of Brody, thus excluding any investigation of well-attested atrocities committed by the SS recruits before that date.

As Italian independence loomed ever closer, the pro-Ukrainian faction in Whitehall finally prevailed. This change of mind was enforced on the ground by one of Maclean’s officers, the rabidly anti-Soviet Major Denis Hills. Hills accepted that the Soviets had a legal case, but as one of a new breed of Cold War warrior was determined to thwart their demands. He told journalist Tom Bower: ‘I found myself shielding the Ukrainian Division [sic] of 8000 men from forcible repatriation … but legally they should have been returned.’ Hills exploited the vexed nationality issue by insisting that the interned Ukrainians could not be considered ‘Soviet citizens’. Maclean’s screening mission was in effect abandoned. On 23 March, the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee agreed to permit the Ukrainians to enter Great Britain as an ‘innocent people’.
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This was not the end of the matter. The arrival of 8,000 former SS men could not be kept secret – and a journalist called Felix Wirth got in touch with the maverick Labour MP Tom Driberg. Wirth insisted that the Ukrainians had played a ‘terrible role as Germany’s faithful and active henchmen in the slaughter of the Jews of [L’viv] and other towns’. The ‘notorious Ukrainian SS division’ had perpetrated ‘monstrous outrages’. In the House of Commons, Driberg tabled a question as to whether the Ukrainians had been properly ‘checked’ and somewhat tamely accepted Foreign Office assurances that they had. Soon afterwards, the first shiploads of Ukrainian SS men began arriving in British ports. ‘Westward Ho!’ officials in the Home Office began to prepare to ‘civilianise’ the DPs and began negotiations with Ukrainian lobby groups to allow some to move on to Canada.

As ‘Westward Ho!’ gathered momentum, more Eastern European DPs flooded into Great Britain. Many had originated in the Baltic nations and, as they passed through various screening processes, doctors noted that some had distinctive tattoos (i.e. ‘blood group markings’) under their arms. This was unique to Waffen-SS men; it had been customary for Allied officers to get POWs to lift up their left arms. At a DP hostel in Hans Crescent, London, a Polish doctor, who was all too familiar with the tattoo’s significance, began asking unwelcome questions and provoked a minor riot. When the ‘SS tattoo affair’ threatened to escalate, an influential Latvian based in London called Karlis Zarins, aka Charles Zarine, sprang to his fellow citizens’ defence. He launched a campaign to defend the Latvian Legion and bombarded the Foreign Office with memoranda and letters. He insisted that the ‘Latvian Legion’ had been ‘taken over’ by the Germans and that recruits had wanted only to fight the Russians. Zarins’ defence sowed the seeds of the obfuscation that still blights discussion about the occupation of Latvia. Like its Ukrainian counterpart, the Balt lobby was well organised and supported by some influential anti-Soviet right wingers, like the Duchess of Atholl. When, in November 1945, the Russians tried to arrest former SS-Standartenführer Arvids Kripens, who was held in the British POW camp at Zedelghenin, Belgium, they were sent away empty handed. Echoing Zarins’ relentless stream of propaganda, the British asserted that ‘the fact that he belonged to an SS formation’ did not justify handing him over to the Soviet authorities. The Russians had not troubled to assemble much evidence since in Soviet-ccupied Latvia; the fact that Kripens had been an officer in the ‘Latvian Legion’ would automatically have been enough to have him executed or deported. In one of his diatribes, Zarins alluded to one ‘Arājs’: ‘a great national patriot … I should feel very relieved if His Majesty’s Government would allow them to come to the safety of this country.’ Our first Labour government did not choose to offer refuge to that self-proclaimed ‘killer of Jews’, Viktors Arājs.
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That honour would go to West Germany.

In this way, Britain and Canada became a refuge for many thousands of individuals who joined a ‘war of annihilation’ that targeted a bogus ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ foe.

That naturally brings us back to the question posed at the beginning of this book. Was Daniel Goldhagen’s proposal in
Hitler’s Willing Executioners
right? Was the Holocaust a consequence of German ‘exterminatory anti-Semitism’? Can his argument account for the tens of thousands of non-German executioners who willingly took part in mass murder operations against Jews? Was the Holocaust a European rather than a German crime?

The answer to that question, on the basis of available evidence, must be yes. Following the invasion of Poland in September 1939, many non-German Europeans
actively sought the destruction of Jews in German-occupied regions of the Soviet Union. After 1933, German agencies like the Abwehr and the SS promoted the cause of ultranationalist factions in most European nations. Every one of these factions broadly accepted that Soviet Communism was a manifestation of Jewish power, and must be eliminated. The mythical notion of a ‘Jewish head’ on a ‘Slavic body’ that Hitler and his followers had adopted from Russian anti-Semites became the shared ideological language of the European far right and was sanctioned by a powerful nation state: Germany. But Hitler had no interest in promoting the cause of any nationalist movements and remained suspicious of ‘arming foreigners’.

SS Chief Heinrich Himmler went much further. He imagined a future ‘SS Europa’ which had dispensed with the NSDAP and its leader Adolf Hitler and was chopped up into SS-ruled provinces. Jews and other undesirables would be liquidated and a massive programme of ‘Germanisation’ would redraw the ethnic map of Europe. This master plan depended on SS recruitment of non-German ethnic groups: in Himmler’s words, ‘harvesting German blood’. The unfolding of this master plan commenced in 1940 with the Nordic peoples of Scandinavia and the Netherlands, but as German race science adapted to new data gathered in POW camps, Himmler’s scheme would draw in other peoples, beginning with Estonians. Himmler believed that loyal service in SS police battalions and the Waffen-SS military divisions could fast track the process of ‘Germanising’ ‘suitable elements’ in occupied Europe, raising non-Germans up to the level of ‘Germanic’ peoples over time. The service he demanded as the price of a future place at the Aryan high table was mass murder. This was congruent with the political ambition of radical nationalists like the Lithuanian LAF and the Romanian Legion of St Michael, who had long sought the destruction of their fellow Jewish citizens.

When the Reich was defeated in April 1945, just a single stage of Himmler’s master plan had been completed, at least in part. That is not to belittle the worst genocide in recorded history. Himmler’s foreign executioners played a murderous part in the destruction of European Jewry between 1941 and 1945. The German SS learnt how to manage their auxiliary murderers. They wanted to recruit, as the governor of occupied Poland put it, surgeons not butchers. SS top brass conceived and built Trawniki and the Reinhardt camps for a single wicked purpose: to murder every Polish Jew. They recruited men like John (Ivan) Demjanjuk and many thousands of other Eastern Europeans to help realise this master plan. These men had been brought up to hate Jews. But the lethal application of this hatred was managed by Hitler’s willing German executioners.

1 The political division of the Balkans following the German invasion, April 1941.

2 SD Einsatzgruppen followed German army groups across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (top). Along each route, the Germans recruited local collaborators to form auxiliary police squads that facilitated mass murder, as shown by the recorded percentages of Jewish communities who fell victim to the genocide (bottom).

3 The German political division of Eastern Europe and the occupied Soviet Union following the 1941 invasion. Puppet administrations in each new administrative region assisted with the recruitment of non-German police and Waffen-SS units.

Arab Nations

Deutsche-Arabische Bataillon Nr 845

Deutsche-Arabische Lehr Abteilung

Albania

21. Waffen-Gebirgs-Division der SS Skanderbeg (albanische Nr. 1)

Belgium

27. SS-Freiwilligen-Grenadier-Division Langemarck (flämische Nr. 1)

28. SS-Freiwilligen-Grenadier-Division Wallonien