Hitler's Bandit Hunters (41 page)

The least desired eventuality for an SS-Police operation was a pursuit. This was in contrast to the army, which considered pursuit a positive outcome. The pursuit offered the “bands” some chance of escape, a burden for the SS because it extended their operational commitment, placed strains on men and equipment, and heightened the potential for casualties. Operation “Wehrwolf” involved a pursuit that turned out to be one of the most dramatic episodes of all SS-Police Bandenbekämpfung operations in the east. The matching sources of evidence from German reports and the partisan leader’s memoirs heighten the drama.
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Soviet partisan policy for the Ukraine changed in 1942, and one plan was to employ long-range raids deep inside German occupied territory.
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One such raid was led by Maj. Gen. Sidor Artemevich Kovpak. It resembled a Mongol invasion rather than a modern insurgency force.

The objective of the raid has been the subject of speculation. Armstrong believed they planned to destroy oil fields. Another opinion suggested that it was an attempt to assess the condition of the Ukrainian partisans on their home ground, although Kovpak himself noted strong resistance from the UPA, one of several Ukrainian nationalist resistance groups, to his presence in their region. Captured “bandits,” under interrogation, stated their objective was to reach either Hungary or Rumania. The Germans could not determine if the raid was to re-establish Soviet power and authority in the minds of the people of the occupied zones or if it was planned as a military-style operation.
The German files contain handwritten remarks that indicate some among the staffs believed the raid was an attempt to link up with Tito. The Kovpak band adopted a quiet routine until it reached the Galician borders, even passing strategic oil fields without any attempts at sabotage. The band adopted “hit-and-run” tactics while continuing westward and retaining the initiative.

Kovpak was a long-serving member of the Communist Party and a veteran of the Russian civil war. In the interwar years, he had served as mayor of the Poltava municipality. When the German army arrived in 1941, Kovpak formed a partisan band of more than three thousand well-armed men and women. His deputy was the ruthless political commissar Gen. Semyon Rudnev, who ordered execution for any partisan found plundering during the raid. The regimental organization and logistics of the raid were based on mobility and self-sufficiency. The band’s order of battle included five battalions of partisan infantry and an artillery company with nine field guns (76mm and 45mm caliber guns). Each battalion received twenty machine guns. The flak detachment was armed with 20mm anti-aircraft guns, and the mortar section carried medium-size mortars. Each battalion was assigned up to fifteen explosives experts for sabotage. The cavalry squadron, with more than one hundred twenty mounts, carried out the regiment’s advance reconnaissance and screening patrols. Signals were the responsibility of a Red Army officer and his two daughters, who expertly maintained contact with Moscow and liaised with the Red Air Force. The Germans’ signals monitoring service reported that the bands maintained strict radio routines and never deviated from preset security procedures. Female partisans walked along lanes pretending to be simple country folk while identifying landmarks, suitable air-landing fields, and regimental collection points. The headquarters staff, together with a scout company, and the supply function pooled three hundred motor vehicles. The band’s march route took it through communities and villages. The inhabitants were required to work for the band in gathering supplies and scouting. Wounded were flown out from air-landing points when air support was available. The supply formed forage teams to locate and acquire provisions. Like a nomadic tribe, the band drove three hundred head of cattle and many more sheep and carried crates of chickens. Once airdrops became unavailable, the regiment resorted to replenishment by attacks on police stations and small military depots.

On March 26, 1942, Kovpak set off from Bryansk, and after a brief fire fight with the Germans, his band found sanctuary in the Smolensk forest and took up residence. Months later in October, at the head of his band, Kovpak set off toward the west. By early 1943, they had passed Rovno and then Dubno and arrived on the Galician border. Along the way, the band liberated Jews from the Skalat labor camp and absorbed a group of young people into the “Jewish company.” To disguise the breakthrough, the bandits dressed in
German uniforms and so passed villages without interference. All captured Axis troops were stripped and killed. After the raid, the Germans found a collection of different uniforms and papers. The march was disciplined, with quiet routines and the skirting of German strongpoints. They crossed into Galicia via forests, traveling at night and resting under camouflage. For seven months, the incursion failed to attract any serious attention from the Germans.

Politically, the raid was a serious challenge to Bach-Zelewski’s authority. The route of Kovpak’s march not only triggered a response from the respective spheres of SS competence but had touched on the highly sensitive issue of the extermination program in Poland. Bach-Zelewski’s field commanders were the unlikely pairing of Globocnik and Krüger. The plan the SS concocted called for a rapid series of maneuvers to decapitate the bandit leadership. The SS placed a rich bounty on Kovpak’s capture, turning him into a Robin Hood figure. To match the SS projection of initiative with available forces, the SS command initially chose to pump units into the area like a drip feed, collecting them at strategic points, but all they did was commit units piecemeal and sustain losses. They thought this might reduce Kovpak’s options while allowing them to concentrate their forces, but Kovpak foiled their plan with his continuous movement.

A distinctive feature of Operation “Wehrwolf” was the SS-Police order of battle, which crossed several nationalities including Russian, Italian, German, Ukrainian, Polish, and Hungarian. The first Kampfgruppe Dorsch, a total of 16 officers and 267 men, included a gendarmerie squadron, the Tarnopol Schutzpolizei, the 3rd Battalion 23rd SS-Police Regiment, and a detachment of Ukrainian police. These units were later joined by the SS-Police Battalion Breslau and the Galician Cavalry Squadron. This Kampfgruppe was broken up on July 11, 1943, and replaced by Kampfgruppe Hauptmann Karl, which contained Landesschützen Battalion 543, an SS-Police signals detachment (Kraków), the surviving members of Kampfgruppe Dorsch, a squadron of reconnaissance airplanes, and troops from the army’s Reserve Grenadier Battalion 425. The total complement including staff was eighteen officers and 622 men. On July 12, the 4th SS-Police Regiment as a complete formation joined the fray. The SD-Einsatzgruppe Piper was dispatched from Reichskommisariat Ukraine with seven officers and 450 men.

The Germans first realized the implications of the raid on July 7, 1943, when aircraft from Luftwaffe Regional Command (
Luftgau
) VIII located the band 30 kilometers southeast of Tarnopol. The band ran for cover 15 kilometers southeast into the forest of Ivankovce, but the Germans were already prepared and attempted encirclement. Kovpak later wrote that a German or Axis ally blocking force countered his every move. “Having paved highways and motor transport at their disposal, the Hitlerites quickly sealed all the exits from the mountains and began to close the ring of encirclement.”
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Although
the Germans had insufficient numbers they continued to attempt encirclement, and the bandits kept escaping. The breakout of the evening July 12–13 led to the decisive commitment of the Luftwaffe.

From the beginning of the German reaction, the 7th Special Flying Group was committed with 6 Fieseler Storch airplanes. The commander of Luftgau VIII ordered the Luftwaffe School Deblin to assign two flying groups.
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The first was a ground-attack group (
Schlachtflieger-Gruppe
) with five of the newly arrived Henschel HS129 airplanes. With its heavily armor-protected cockpits, a 20mm cannon, and four machine guns, the HS129 was a deadly opponent for a bandit force. The other group, flying nine of the old heavy-type fighter aircraft, the ME110 destroyer (
Zerstörer
), was recorded as pilots under training for night-fighter duties.
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Both aircraft types had twin engines, and this led Kovpak to recall being continuously under observation and attack from Messerschmitts. Monitoring the results of these sorties, a Luftwaffe command team made up from senior officers flying an HS129 or a Fieseler Storch observed the attacks. Using their wireless location devices and plotting ranges on their 1 to 100,000-scale maps, the Luftwaffe again found the band under cover in a forest south of Tarnopol. The air attacks inflicted on the band caused high losses, which were confirmed by a local SIPO officer but not detailed. The band moved on, through forests and across the River Dniester, blowing up the bridge in their wake.

The band found deep cover but was located on July 16–17, and again the Germans attempted encirclement. It fought its way to Medynia but air attacks killed more than 150 horses. The “bandits” fled toward the Carpathian Mountains again destroying bridges desperate to hamper the German’s progress. They inevitably began to slow because of the combined effects of exhaustion and the sapping of morale by permanent air attack. To increase mobility they stripped down their motor vehicles from four wheelers to two wheelers (it this was never explained how). It was a costly decision. They faced encirclement with the added difficulty of rolling air attacks. In the fierce fighting, the rearguard of the band was destroyed and large amounts of supplies were lost. One air attack caught the forage teams in the open, and they came under repeated bombing and strafing. In desperation they offloaded their artillery pieces to increase their speed, but thereby deprived themselves of all anti-aircraft defense.

Just when it seemed Kovpak was finished, he responded heroically with an act that no doubt saved the remnants of the band. On July 18, 1943, Kovpak correctly identified elements of the 4th SS-Police Regiment in the town of Rosulna. He sent a small force to attack them (both sides confirm this). It was almost certainly a decoy attack. The Germans reported a small but sneak bandit attack at 11:40 p.m. The shock hit the 7th Company of the regiment unprepared. Krüger later reported that the bandits attacked with heavy machine-gun, mortar, and antitank gunfire. This was perhaps an exaggeration, as
the earlier pages of his report clearly stated that the bandits had dumped their artillery. Kovpak did not explain the content of the attack but claimed the SS had been “exterminated,” which was another exaggeration. The results reported by the Germans grudgingly confirmed a fleeting bandit success. One bandit was killed and another wounded, at the cost of eighteen German dead and seventeen wounded. The arrival of the 6th Company relieved or rescued, depending on one’s opinion, the 7th Company and saved the regiment from further shame.
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The effect of the attack allowed Kovpak to move. The German response was to deploy more troops. On July 24, the 13th SS-Police Regiment arrived, assisted by Jagdkommando Galician. They amassed between them fifteen hundred men, but more important, they were specialist bandit hunters. On August 1, a contingent of the 26th SS-Police Regiment with 40 officers and 1,764 men joined in the operations. Anticipating Kovpak’s run toward Red Air Force support, Himmler’s 1st RFSS Flak Battalion was deployed to hinder any aerial support for the bandits.

In August, Kovpak simply disappeared. On August 11, Bach-Zelewski made a scathing attack on the lethargy of the SS-Cavalry Division and added insult to injury by overly praising Kovpak’s ability.
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After the war, Kovpak described German tactics: “The enemy remained on the defensive. He reckoned on wearing us down, compelling us to expend all our ammunition, and meanwhile so to strengthen the solidity of the ring [encirclement] that not a single man would be able to break out.”
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Kovpak’s constant movement, even running away, saved him from capture, although these were certainly not the politically correct descriptions for his 1947 memoirs. Kovpak left behind his deputy, General Rudnev, killed on August 3–4, 1943, 641 “bandits” killed, and a hundred captured. The German’s estimated another 450 wounded remained behind, and it seems a significant number became undercover agents.
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The German casualties from “Wehrwolf” were 141 dead and 129 wounded (including 4 missing); the Axis allies sustained 7 dead and 4 wounded. The largest loss was suffered on July 8, 1943, with 42 dead and 6 wounded. After the war, Bach-Zelewski embellished Kovpak’s reputation:

[T]here wasn’t a Kolpak [Kovpak] man who went into capture. They were the most fanatical and courageous partisans that I have ever seen. They were strictly disciplined that if one of them was wounded, his comrade had to shoot him so that he did not get into German capture and betray any secrets.
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In examining Operation “Winterzauber,” Birn found a series of actions that revolved around “special treatment.” The Schuma committed the destruction of villages when the SD or GFP were unavailable. The executions were ordered carried out in the villagers’ houses, with the corpses covered in
straw and set alight. Birn stated that evidence from Russian sources indicated that many victims were deliberately burned alive.
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The question of whether witnesses were allowed to live or die has yet to be established. Birn noted that the Schuma Battalion 279 had been rounding up civilians and had released a mentally disturbed woman into their “care.” Eventually a Latvian Schuma trooper had brought the woman to the German security police. The German in command reported that this woman required long-term “special treatment” and said, “I think that it’s a great danger if one person knows of our methods and can lead to disaster.”
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