Hitler's Foreign Executioners (73 page)

At the Freedom Monument in Riga, the SS veterans vanish and the protestors begin to disperse. A few curious onlookers have stayed behind to gaze at the mass of wreaths and flowers propped against the plinth. The elderly veterans have vanished along with their shaven headed protectors. Young Latvians, who on the surface appear to have no connection with the far right and neo-Nazi supporters of the legion, take pictures of each other in front of the monument. I can hear one smartly attired young man telling a BBC reporter that he believes the legionaries were
‘heroes’. It would seem that a new generation of young Latvians has begun to adopt the memory of the Latvian SS legion as an icon of national identity seven decades after the end of the Second World War. It is not hard to understand why. Latvian historians and educators have deliberately chosen to commemorate the ‘three occupations’ and to erect a prominent Museum of Occupation. There is no national museum dedicated to the Latvian Jews who were murdered all over Latvia after June 1941. Until memory of the Holocaust and the role of the Latvian collaborators are given appropriate moral clout, young Latvians will persist in miscommemorating the SS divisions as a ‘national army’. The destruction of the so many tens of thousands of Jewish citizens of the Baltic nations must be understood as the focal catastrophe of the region’s history, not a sideshow to foreign occupations.

The shadows of Himmler’s foreign legions still fall over Europe. The terrible role played by SS executioners like the Latvian Viktors Arājs is in danger of being forgotten – or worse, rationalised as a necessary response to Bolshevism. Conservative intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Germany have launched a campaign, spearheaded by the 2008 Prague Declaration, to elevate the Soviet ‘terror’ to equal terms with the German Holocaust. They demand that Nazi and Soviet crimes should be jointly memorialised and invested with the same moral status. This is both bad history and bad ethics. By representing the premeditated plan to do away with an entire pejoratively defined race as somehow ethically one and the same as the cruelties of Stalin’s regime, the signatories of the Prague Declaration knowingly erode the specificity of the Holocaust, which has been proven by scores of studies. Equivalence implies that alleged victims of Soviet occupation who collaborated with the Third Reich should be exonerated on the grounds that by doing so they defended their nation against Soviet terror. This pervasive rationalisation occludes the fact that many collaborators participated in ethnic cleansing in the occupied Soviet Union and were driven by the same exclusivist ideology. They backed the occupational powers not to defend their nations but to purge them of unwanted citizens.

Latvia is not alone in failing to exorcise the demons of wartime collaboration. It would be tempting to blame this on ‘endemic anti-Semitism’ – a natural tendency to blame ‘the Jews’ for any misfortune. But this would be wrong. The architects of this dangerous modern myopia were the Soviet liberators of Eastern Europe who rewrote the history of the German occupation for their own ends. It is well documented that in 1945, the Soviets tried and punished tens of thousands of ‘collaborators’ who had served in the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. This wave of retribution took place against the background of a resurgence of Russian anti-Semitism, masterminded by Stalin himself, that culminated with the ‘Doctors’ Trial’. This meant that the Soviets punished collaborators not for taking part in
the German ‘war on the Jews’ and other lives ‘not worthy of life’, but for aiding ‘Hitlerites’ and killing non-specific ‘innocent civilians’. Although the Soviet army had liberated death camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, only a very few Russian investigators, most notably Vasily Grossman, openly acknowledged the ethnic identity of the majority of victims. In official Soviet histories of the ‘Great Patriotic War’, the murder of millions of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union was pushed into the shadows, and any public discussion of a ‘Jewish Holocaust’ denounced as collusion with an American ‘Jewish lobby’.
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This fusion of open aggression against Soviet Jews, combined with a gross misrepresentation of the actual intent of the Nazi genocide, promoted congenital blindness to the historical experience of Russian and European Jews. This occultation of victims has had profound consequences for the way the war was remembered in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states – and is bearing very dangerous fruit in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

In modern Romania, aggressive anti-Semitism ‘continues to be a problem’, according to a 2003 report by MCA Romania.
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A Romanian television poll listed Cornelius Codreanu, the founder of the Legion of St Michael, as one of the hundred ‘greatest Romanians’. Gigi Becali, the President of the New Generation Party and a wealthy businessman has revitalised old legionary slogans in his campaigns, and called for Codreanu to be canonised. In Hungary, the ‘neo-Fascist’ Hungarian Guard (Magya Garda), the paramilitary wing of the Jobbik Movement for a Better Hungary, explicitly acknowledges its descent from the Arrow Cross movement – and its black-uniformed supporters can stage large-scale, eye-catching parades. The emergence of these new extremist movements in Eastern Europe has the same roots as the Prague Declaration. Once someone is persuaded that ‘Stalin was just as bad or worse than Hitler’ then it is a short step to sanitising the ultranationalist far right and its ancestral militias like the Iron Guard and Arrow Cross which opposed Bolshevism. Mix in a slug of anti-Zionism and a shiny new kind of anti-Semitism no longer seems as shaming as it should. The rise of these aggressively xenophobic new movements following the collapse of the Soviet Union disconcertingly mimics the period after the First World War, when anti-Semitic demagogues emerged from the ruins of the German, Austrian and Russian empires.

Himmler and the German managers of the Holocaust dispatched their murder squads eastwards – into Poland, Ukraine and the Crimea. They built the apparatus of mass murder in the east – at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibór. This geographical bias meant that Eastern European collaborators had a hands-on involvement in the killing, as Schuma riflemen or as camp guards. In the west, puppet administrations had actively collaborated with the management of the ‘Final Solution’ and tens of thousands of young men had volunteered to serve in the Waffen-SS, as well as
police forces like the French Milice, which organised arrests and deportations to the east. In 1945, the new governments of France, Holland and Belgium confronted daunting problems as they struggled to come to terms with liberation. Asserting legitimacy depended on renouncing wartime collaborationist regimes and criminalising figureheads like Marshall Philippe Pétain or Vidkun Quisling. This punitive frenzy reflected the painful experience of the majority in occupied Europe between 1940 and 1945. ‘Most,’ the late historian Tony Judt noted, ‘experienced the war passively – defeated and occupied by one set of foreigners then liberated by another.’ Occupation was, above all, humiliating and degrading. Resistance, it must be said, was a noble but perilous course to take – and the German occupiers consistently responded with savage reprisals that decimated entire communities. But when the Germans fled, leaving short-lived power vacuums in their wake, formerly passive citizens donned the mantle of resistance by taking summary revenge on known or suspected collaborators. In France, ‘extra judicial proceedings’, meaning executions, claimed at least 10,000 lives; in two small regions of northern Italy, 15,000 alleged collaborators were killed in the final two months of the war.
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As this bloody inchoate wave of vengeful slaughter receded, new judicial apparatuses emerged to formalise the punishment of collaborators. Their task, with hindsight, was riddled with contradictions. It proved very difficult to come up with a legal definition of ‘collaboration’ that covered its many different forms. Should a jobsworth bureaucrat who pen pushed for the Vichy regime necessarily be judged less culpable than a French Milice volunteer who rounded up French Jews? Treason was an especially tricky judicial concept. Many accused collaborators argued that they had continued to faithfully serve the Motherland – albeit under the aegis of a foreign power. The case of Waffen-SS volunteers was just as twisted. Although recruits swore an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, Himmler had cunningly allowed the foreign Waffen-SS legions and divisions to retain some scraps of national identity and many former foreign SS volunteers insisted that they had joined Hitler’s war not as collaborators but as loyal Frenchmen or Netherlanders who fervently wished to defend their fellow countrymen against Bolshevism. Treason was often a blunt and discriminatory legal weapon that tended to punish rank-and-file grunts.

As Churchill’s Iron Curtain began descending, and rehearsals began for a new Cold War, the fractious Allies struggled to find common ground to bring the agents of Hitler’s war to justice. The apparatus of justice and retribution was the first battleground of the Cold War.
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The International Military Tribunal convened in Nuremberg successfully prosecuted the main actors of the German catastrophe, such as Rudolf Hess and Hermann Göring. But the process got tougher as the Americans worked their way down through the hierarchy through the so-called ‘Desk Killers’
in the German ministries to the doctors and a few of the Einsatzgruppe leaders. Judicial energies began to falter. A more radical denazification process was effectively resisted by the new West German government. Although Churchill himself had, in October 1942, proclaimed that retribution should be considered one of the ‘major purposes of the war’, by 1948 he was insisting that it was vital to ‘draw the sponge across the crimes and horrors of the past’.
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The consequence of this rapid diminution of righteousness was to allow the lesser players to quietly disappear, out of sight and mind. It did not take long for some energetic spongers to get to work. Just as US Army Intelligence recruited one of the Reich’s most notorious ‘Eastern experts’, Reinhard Gehlen, who subsequently embarked on a career as West Germany’s spy chief, British intelligence offered lucrative jobs to former Latvian and Estonian SS officers like SS colonel Alfons Rebane, who had served with the 20th Estonian SS Division. He had been captured in the British zone, with 1,000 of his men, and had ended up working in a Bradford textile mill. In 1947, the British Secret Intelligence Service, the SIS, came calling. Rebane moved to London and, despite acquiring a severe alcohol habit, enjoyed a prosperous career with British intelligence; he died in West Germany. The SIS also recruited a number of Latvians who had served with Viktors Arājs. Plate 32 is a mug shot of Arājs himself taken by a British intelligence agency.

One of the more troubling consequences of Cold War expediency involved the former SS ‘Galizien’ men. More than 11,000 Ukrainians who served in the division had fled west and surrendered to the British in Italy. The Ukrainians had, of course, surrendered in German SS uniform, and as former ‘Soviet citizens’ faced immediate repatriation to the Soviet zone of occupation. The British temporarily lodged the Ukrainians at a DP (Displaced Person) camp at Rimini to await judgement. In the event, only about 3,000 would suffer that fate: they became British or Canadian citizens.
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At the Yalta Conference in early 1945, the Soviets had insisted that all Eastern European refugees should be repatriated once the war was over. Stalin feared that this vast and desperate mass of people might somehow coalesce into an anti-Soviet émigré block, so it was essential that they were retrieved before they could do any harm. As a consequence of the Yalta agreements, at least 50 million Eastern Europeans and former Soviet citizens were repatriated by the Allies to the east. By the winter of 1945, just 2 million still remained in the west. As the repatriation net edged ever closer to the DP camp at Rimini, the former commander of the SS division, General Pavlo Shandruk, looked for means of rescue. He got in touch with Archbishop Ivan Buchko, who specialised in Ukrainian religious matters in the Vatican. Shandruk described the plight of his men, emphasising that they were
good Catholics and proven anti-Bolsheviks: the Soviets did not wish them well. Buchko went immediately to Pope Pius XII, who in turn approached the British military authorities. The Vatican delegation persuaded the British to change the status of the Ukrainians from ‘displaced persons’ to ‘surrendered enemy personnel’ – a sleight of hand that meant that the British would not be obliged to agree to repatriation. The former SS men stayed put.

Two years later, at the beginning of 1947, the Ukrainians faced a new problem. Italy was about to sign a peace settlement with the Allies, and once negotiations had been completed the British and Americans occupation forces would withdraw, leaving the DP camps in Italian hands. Shandruk feared that the Italian government would then honour its obligation to repatriate ‘Soviet citizens’. Once again, Shandruk raised the alarm. In the British Foreign Office, opinion was split. Some officials, knowing something of the division’s reputation, argued that they were not ‘innocent dissidents’. But an anti-Soviet Whitehall faction, citing the disastrous repatriation of the Cossacks, took a more conciliatory line. While the British mandarins dithered, Ukrainian pressure groups in Britain, Canada and the United States, brought under one organisational roof by Canadian MP Anthony Hlynka, began to loudly insist that the Ukrainians be offered sanctuary. The British agreed to look again at the case of the 8,000 Ukrainians at the Rimini camp. A rationale was not hard to find. Both during and immediately after the war, the British had employed German POWs for labour service. Now many Germans were returning home and needed to be replaced. Britain had been bankrupted by the war and faced severe labour shortages. The Minister of Labour George Isaacs had already drawn up an emergency plan codenamed ‘Westward Ho!’ to recruit at least 100,000 DPs and set them to work in British mines, farms and factories. Isaacs favoured hard-working Balts – but not Ukrainians, Poles, ethnic Germans and, shockingly, Jews. ‘Jews of any nationality’ would not be favoured because of ‘opposition from public opinion at home’. Such shameful prejudices infected post-war British policy. The ministry repatriated black and Asian soldiers and workers, who had contributed so much to the war effort, preferring to solve Britain’s labour shortage with white Eastern and Central Europeans.
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