Hitler's Bandit Hunters (23 page)

In July 1942, the German army captured Red Army general Vlasov and since then had allowed him to become the leading personality in the Russian collaboration movement.
¹⁸
The growing sense of failure and isolation since 1942 led Max von Schenckendorff toward a curious fate. He was a product of the Schlieffen system and steeped in the noble family military tradition of Frederick the Great and General Blücher. Born in February 1875, by 1914 he was a battalion commander, and by 1918 he was the commander of the 29th Infantry Regiment, one of Bach-Zelewski’s former regiments. Since December 1942, he had constantly misread Hitler. When he drifted into the Russian nationalist circle, perhaps convinced that only a Russian could defeat a Russian, he placed himself outside the circle. He encouraged his Feldkommandanturen to support local initiatives that resembled micro-experimentation with Russian self-rule. Soon this turned into a strong relationship with Russian collaborators, which was remembered long after the war. He sponsored a plethora of formations, including the “Order Department” (
Ordnungsdienst
), Cossack detachments, and communities or settlements with a counter-partisan bias. He gave them weapons and trained their personnel. In April 1943, Schenckendorff jointly hosted a visit to his region by the former Red Army general Vlasov.

In January, Himmler had warned Bach-Zelewski against any ideas of building a new Russian nation. Bach-Zelewski gave his interpretation of Vlasov’s visit in a report to Himmler. He encapsulated the proposals of cooperation or colonization. They reflected Himmler’s January sentiments.
¹⁹
He opened by dismissing out of hand the politically immature German commanders (presumably referring to Schenckendorff) who were embarrassing the situation. In his opinion, if Vlasov had not been captured, he would have become the Red Army commander-in-chief. In his present situation, he was a Russian nationalist pursuing a Russia-only agenda. Vlasov had not endorsed Germanization. Cooperation with the Russians, Bach-Zelewski alleged, could not be honest when German propaganda described the Slavs as a “minor race” (
Minderrasse
) or declared supreme German mastery. Vlasov was not the answer for many Russians who were increasingly aware of Stalin’s order that captured, unwounded soldiers were traitors. The Russian audiences sat in stony silence during Vlasov’s speeches. Stalin had already reacted to counternationalistic sentiments by freeing religion and granting other minor political concessions. Bach-Zelewski advised that Vlasov was only honest in small groups, for example when he had told Schenckendorff that Germany
would lose the war. Bach-Zelewski believed that the Russians only collaborated while there was no German colonization. He also mentioned that Vlasov thought the mobilization of labor program was disgraceful and that in Russian minds German corruption was worse than Soviet corruption. He concluded that Vlasov “would not take Russian lives until he received confirmation from Hitler of a national Russian state.”

On May 14, Schenckendorff, Gehlen (Foreign Armies East), and several Army Group Centre officers held a meeting to discuss the future of eastern policy. They agreed that further discussions should take place before representations were passed to Hitler. Eight days later, a former member of Goebbels’s propaganda staff attempted to bring Vlasov into contact with the Nazi governor of Galicia, Dr. Otto Gustav Wächter. On May 25, a conference was hosted by Rosenberg, attended by Bräutigam, Gehlen, Wagner, and other officers from Army Group Centre; the military also brought a letter of endorsement from Kluge in the hope of generating a substantial change in policy. On June 8, Hitler declared he would never build a Russian army and called their ideas fantasy.
²⁰

Meanwhile, Stalin treated Hitler like King Canute, releasing a tidal wave of partisans through Fortress Europe. The partisans targeted the German communications network in what became known as the “War of the Rails.”
²¹
The German army’s main supply collection and distribution centers were joined by an east-west double-track trunk railway line. The supply collection centers were located in Königsberg, Bialystok, Brest-Litovsk, Kovel, and Lvov.
²²
From March 1943, the partisans undertook 404 attacks on the railways, blowing up bridges and attempting to cut the German army off from its logistical support. The number of attacks increased monthly and peaked in July with 1,114 incidents. Following the Battle of Kursk, the Soviet plan for late summer of 1943 was to destroy key points along the German rail system. The plan came in two operational phases: Phase 1 (August 1943) caused 21,300 rail attacks, mostly in Byelorussia, carried out by 167 partisan brigades totaling 95,615 partisans.
²³
Phase 2 (September 1 to November 1, 1943) deployed 193 partisan brigades totaling 120,000 partisans. The target was the destruction of 272,000 miles of railway. There were mixed opinions at the time about whether the plan succeeded or failed, although the rear area of Army Group Centre recorded 20,505 rails destroyed.
²⁴

The weakest links in Fortress Europe were Germany’s allies, only tolerated by Hitler to sustain the illusion that Germany was not alone in the war. Goebbels was uneasy about the allied strategic threat of invading southeast Europe and gathering support from the Balkan.
²⁵
In 1941, the Axis alliance had divided the spoils of Albania, Yugoslavia, and Greece but security had been an afterthought. Hitler introduced Directive 31 to establish a “clear and unified system of command.” It was supposed to engineer cooperation with Italian and Bulgarian forces.
²⁶
The collapse of the
Afrika-Korps
in the latter
half of 1942 forced Hitler to reconsider the security for the region. In December, Hitler issued Directive 47 for the “command and defense measures in the South-East.” This time he tried to bind the Axis forces operating in the Balkans (Italy, Bulgaria, and Croatia) under a unified but German command. In the summer of 1942, Himmler set Bandenbekämpfung on the Balkans. To raise the political profile of this policy, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and Keitel met Italian Marshal Cavallero in December 1942. Ribbentrop explained to Cavallero that Croatia required cleansing of a strong British presence. He admitted that “the Führer had declared that the Serbian conspirators were to be burnt out and that no gentle methods might be used in doing this.” Keitel immediately interjected that “every village in which partisans were found had to be burnt down.”
²⁷
Orders passed to the judge advocate of the German armed forces in southern Europe from OKW demanded the prosecution of aggressive Bandenbekämpfung.
²⁸
On February 21, 1943, Ribbentrop met with the Italian ambassador in Berlin, and they mutually agreed that “the [bands] had to be exterminated, and that included men, women and children, as their continued existence imperiled the lives of German and Italian men, women, and children.”
²⁹

The Nazi political relationship with Vichy France began to deteriorate following the string of defeats in the Mediterranean region. On June 18, 1942, General De Gaulle proclaimed a Free French victory at Bir Hacheim, a small but significant battle in North Africa. Six months earlier, De Gaulle had sent Jean Moulin to occupied France as his representative to stir the resistance into action against the Germans.
³⁰
With events turning against him in the Mediterranean theater, Hitler began to string together a southern theater security strategy. In November 1942, formations of the Waffen-SS led the occupation of Vichy France. The Italians joined the operation and both armies converged on the harbor of Toulon. Territorially, this theater stretched from southern France at its western flank across to Greece in the southeast; Hungary and Italy at the center formed a north and south junction, while Bulgaria and Romania faced east. The bridge to this theater was the “Alpenland,” the southern most mountainous range that linked Germany with the south. The southern Mandarins, whether from the Wehrmacht or SS, proved as adept at pulling on the purse strings of the German war effort as their comrades in the east. Two prima donnas formed a dual command in the area: Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (headquartered in Munich, commanding the southern regions) and Luftwaffe Field Marshal Alfred Kesselring. German setbacks in Stalingrad and El Alamein stirred a will to resist especially in northern Italy, Greece, southern France, and Yugoslavia. The Germans thinned out their security forces in the east, to be able to send troops to bolster the Axis in the south. The invasion of Sicily and the dismissal of Mussolini led Hitler to make contingency plans. In July 1943, a British strategic assessment of Hitler’s southern flank judged,

German defense of the Balkans and Italy largely hinges on the security of the German positions in the Istria-Slovenia area which has been brought under Rommel’s command…. Further reinforcements have recently arrived in Yugoslavia from France and Greece, and there is ample evidence that the battle against the partisans has become Rommel’s most pressing commitment.
³¹

Frederick the Great is reputed to have said, “To defend everything is to defend nothing,” an aphorism that accurately described Hitler’s Fortress Europe. In desperation to erect fortifications and feed the arms industries, the Germans mobilized labor in France, Italy, and the Balkans.
³²
Militarily, Fortress Europe further burdened Germany’s reserves, which were distributed across three theaters of operations, while the Alps served to divide Hitler’s empire north and south.

The new year opened with another bleak military task for Bach-Zelewski: to hold the line following Soviet breakthroughs around Velikie Luki. He took charge of the 1st SS-Infantry Brigade within Gen. Kurt von Chevallerie’s LIX Corps. Gottberg, assisted by Bassewitz-Behr, continued to prosecute security operations in his absence. Bach-Zelewski’s first impression of Chevallerie was that he was a ruined man, depressed and suffering involuntary shaking of the head. Then he discovered that Chevallerie was the former Reichswehr colonel of the 4th Infantry Regiment in which Bach-Zelewski served as a lieutenant. His opinion mellowed when the general proved to be brave and so Bach-Zelewski wrote in his diary that Chevallerie played the part of the “shining god of war” (
den strahlenden Kriegsgott markierte
). However, this did not detract from two major problems. The first involved the condition of the SS brigade, which had little frontline experience and few heavy weapons, was staffed with ethnic Germans from Hungary, and was led by a small cadre of Germans. Attached to the brigade was the highly regarded manpower (
Menschmaterial
) of the
SS-Freikorps Danmark
. Irrespective of the redeeming features of this formation, its general command demeanor was low. Bach-Zelewski believed there were no merits to be gained with these troops: “I could lose reputation and command qualifications against tanks without antitank guns.” He was assigned no further troops and had 14th and 15th SS-Police Regiments removed from his Bandenbekämpfung command. They were sent to join another disastrous situation (
Schweinerei
) in Army Group South. Bach-Zelewski was informed that the commander of the 14th Regiment, Oberst der Polizei Buchmann, the man he regarded as his only capable field officer (refer to
chapter 5
), had been killed in action. He concluded that the front was only held because the Red Army did not press its attacks vigorously.

On February 19, Bach-Zelewski attended a meeting, arranged by Himmler,
with the general quartermaster of OKH, Wagner.
³³
The witnesses to this meeting were Ernst Rode, Wagner’s aide Colonel Altenstadt, and SS-Brigadeführer Zimmermann. A record of the meeting from Bach-Zelewski’s diary suggests the main topic was the concern that a general uprising could affect the whole rear area of Army Group Centre and HSSPF Russia-Centre. Bach-Zelewski ventured the opinion that in the face of blatant corruption and mounting anarchy within the German civil administration, the only solution was to impose German army authority (
Wehrmachtshoheit
). To bring about a bureaucratic normalization and to secure the army’s rear-area supply lines, he recommended declaring a state of emergency (
Ausnahmezustand
). Wagner was of the same opinion.
³⁴
Wagner exposed the underlying political theme of the meeting, when he indicated that the Wehrmacht would endorse a field commander of security. Wagner proposed a new office, based on Bach-Zelewski’s existing authority as Bevollmächtigter für die Bandenbekämpfung im Osten, but placed under the command of Army Group Centre.

From the Wehrmacht’s perspective, this offer removed two nagging problems. First, they had located an acceptable and energetic replacement for Schenckendorff. Second, this solution returned the control of security warfare to the army. Wagner offered Bach-Zelewski the thinly veiled bribe of a general’s rank and a military career, but in political terms, the offer only confirmed the naiveté of the army. Wagner’s proposal played into Himmler’s hands through the ploy of persuading the army to trust Bach-Zelewski. The ability to gain the trust of opponents and then misuse it was Bach-Zelewski’s greatest asset and one he used repeatedly during his lifetime. The army had underrated Himmler and plainly failed to comprehend that control of all security policy was an SS agenda. After the war, he claimed Himmler forced him to refuse the offer, which was patently absurd. This would have been paramount to passing over the top executive job for a line function.
³⁵
Himmler and Bach-Zelewski had conspired and outmaneuvered the army into accepting SS control of security warfare. Taken from another standpoint, in the shadow of Stalingrad, Hitler was unlikely to hand back this authority. On February 24, Bach-Zelewski attended a medal awarding ceremony for senior officers hosted by Schenckendorff. The special guest was Lilian Dagover, a famous German actress, and Bach-Zelewski joined the celebrations.