Hitler's Foreign Executioners (23 page)

Like Himmler, Heydrich was also preoccupied with the ‘nationalism problem’. As we have seen, he insisted that ‘self-defence circles’ must not be provided with any ‘political assurances’. In other words, mass murder could not be rewarded with promises of nationhood. This was tricky because authorising any kind of native militia as the Germans planned implied the de facto recognition of statehood. It was a dilemma that would plague SS efforts to exploit eastern peoples until the very end of the war. Stahlecker was well aware of the quandary: ‘The security of [Riga] has been organised with the help of 400 [Latvian]
Hilfspolizei
(auxiliary police) … care has been taken to assure that these troops
would not become a Latvian militia
… two further independent units have been established for the purpose of carrying out pogroms. All synagogues have been destroyed.’(My italics.)
²³

This then was the German dilemma: how to encourage ‘self-cleansing efforts’ without igniting nationalist agitation. What of the other side? As we have seen in the Balkans and Romania, the arrival of German armed forces acted like a catalyst on the peculiar mosaic of each national culture and the nature of the ruling elite. The destruction of Yugoslavia offered Croatian fascists the opportunity to strike decisively at Serbs. Alongside this civil war, the Ustasha regime also targeted Jews – partly to satisfy Croatian chauvinism but also to reinforce its bond with the Reich. In Romania, Germany promoted a radical ultranationalist and anti-Semitic regime led by Ion Antonescu to secure vital economic resources and the services of the Romanian army. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Germans and Romanians
colluded in the destruction of Romanian Jewry. Hitler made no claim to ‘living space’ in puppet states like Croatia or Slovakia and he had no wish to undermine the national integrity of Romania so long as Antonescu stayed on side.

The Baltic nations and Ukraine had a very different significance in German imperial plans. The purpose of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, was to seize living space for the German people and to smash the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ state. German radical imperialism, founded on the blood right of Germans to exploit the east as (in Hitler’s words) a ‘garden of Eden’ or territorial
tabula rasa
, had no room for nation states. Since the twelfth century, Germans had sought hegemony in the Baltic region. The Teutonic Knights, armed with the ‘cross and the sword’ brought Christianity – and serfdom. In Riga, founded by a Bishop of Bremen, and Reval (Tallinn), Hansa merchants dominated commerce and trade. In rural areas, big German baronial estates, which resisted any attempt to abolish feudal relations between master and serf, remained largely intact until the end of the First World War. Serfdom retarded national aspiration, and while Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians spoke distinct languages and nourished different cultures, it was only the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that had ever achieved genuine statehood. In the seventeenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth swallowed up much of the Baltic region, including what is now modern Latvia and Estonia which were mere duchies. Catholic Lithuania had successfully resisted ‘Germanisation’ by the knights and their feudal successors while Lutheran Latvia and Estonia had succumbed. But at the end of the eighteenth century, the Commonwealth had been dismembered and Lithuania was split between the Russian empire and Prussia. This turbulent history meant that the Baltic national movements that bubbled up from the wreckage of the Russian and German empires after 1918 had grown the shallowest of roots. The Baltic States suffered bloody and traumatic birth pains. Even in defeat, Germany was unwilling to give up its Livonian fiefdoms, and the Freikorps ‘Iron Brigade’ and Baltische Landeswehr exploited the threat of a Red Army incursion to make a last ditch attempt to establish a German state. Allied intervention eventually drove out both the Freikorps and the Russians – and in 1920, recognised three new sovereign states.

The rebirth of Lithuania had been especially painful. Lithuanians squabbled with Poland over Vilnius and laid claim to Klaipèda – the German Memel. The new Lithuania was a feeble reiteration of the old grand duchy – a mere buffer state between Germany and the Soviet Union. This inspired a kind of national siege mentality and a succession of authoritarian governments. From 1926, Antanas Smetona ruled Lithuania as a virtual dictator. Latvia and Estonia, the other Baltic nations, proved equally rickety and followed much the same path. In Latvia, Kārlis Augusts
Vilhelms Ulmanis seized power in a coup in 1934; he banned Latvian political parties, locked up his opponents and closed newspapers, including those published in Yiddish. That same year Kontantin Päts introduced martial law in Estonia. These regimes were authoritarian rather than fascist in a strict sense. Ulmanis, who liked to compare himself with Oliver Cromwell, openly rejected any kinship with Italy. At a political congress in 1935, Lithuanian president Smetona denounced what he tartly called Nazi ‘zoological nationalism’ – and on the surface, there was little overt evidence of ‘eastern’ anti-Semitism. The Lithuanian Minister of National Defence, Balys Giedraitis, even passed legislation forbidding attacks on Jews.

This fragile tolerance reflected the long history of Jewish settlement. Since the eighteenth century, the Russian Pale of Settlement had included Lithuania (but not the territory of the other more Germanised Baltic States). And while many Jews who lived in the Shtetls of the Pale endured both poverty and frequent pogroms, Jewish social and cultural institutions flourished: Vilnius was celebrated as the Jerusalem of Lithuania, and Jews made up nearly half the city’s population. Tolerance was the public face of the regime. Dig deeper and a rather different picture takes shape however. The coup that brought Smetona to power had been engineered by an extremist faction of Lithuanian army officers called
Geležinis vilkas
– the Iron Wolf. This was the guard movement attached to Smetona’s Tautininkai Party, headed by Augustin as Voldemaras, who became prime minister after the coup. Voldemaras was a charismatic, brilliant radical nationalist (educated in St Petersburg) who soon fell out with Smetona. The president was honorary head of the Iron Wolf, but feared the fanatical young army officers who gravitated to Voldemaras’ extremist camp. The Iron Wolf, for their part, viewed Smetona as too moderate, especially with regard to the alleged ‘influence’ of Lithuanian Jews. In 1934, Iron Wolf officers tried to oust Smetona and replace him with Voldemaras. But the coup faltered and Smetona had his rival arrested.

The Iron Wolf never became a mass movement as Codreanu’s Legion of St Michael did in Romania, but its anti-Jewish agenda reflected the secret views of many Lithuanians. From the mid to late 1920s, organised anti-Semitism became increasingly evident. Gangs defaced Yiddish street signs; attacks on Jewish shops and individual Jews in cinemas, restaurants and other public places began to rise noticeably. As the world depression deepened, attacks on ‘Jewish influence’ in the press became increasingly venomous. Driving this up-swelling of anti-Semitism was the
Tautos valia (Will of the Nation
) newspaper which began appearing in October 1926 and the Union of Lithuanian Business (LVS), whose paper
Verslas (Business
) agitated for the Lithuanisation of the national economy.

Smetona had been thoroughly rattled by the Iron Wolf and now tried to buttress his power by tapping into the new chauvinism. He abolished the Ministry of
Jewish Affairs (established in 1918), stripping Jews of effective political representation at a stroke. After conferring with gentile business leaders, Smetona introduced a series of measures designed to smash Jewish enterprise. The new legislation denied Jews access to cheap credit, forcing many businesses to declare bankruptcy. In the countryside (where so many thousands of Jews would be killed in 1941) the hoary myths of Jew hatred revived. In 1935, a rural newspaper reported that in the village of Plunge two Christian children had vanished and insinuated they had been abducted by local Jews. In deeply traditional Lithuanian villages, there was no need to spell out the old ‘Blood Libel’ – the medieval myth that Jews used the blood of Christian children to bake matzo bread. Soon after the newspaper report appeared, a rash of flyers urged ethnic Lithuanians to take revenge. The children had not yet been found and feelings ran high and ugly. At a
Jomarkas
(open-air market), an angry mob attacked Jewish traders. Another child disappeared a few months later – and again, mobs attacked Jewish homes and vandalised synagogues. A gang of young men ambushed some Jewish travellers who were watering their horses by a stream. The local police, already under attack for failing to find the missing children (or their remains) carried out a few token arrests, but this merely provoked a fresh surge of anti-Semitic leafleting.

This was not an isolated incident. The disappearance of any child provoked the same kind of hysteria in other villages and towns. Anti-Jewish feeling in rural areas was reinforced by state legislation. All over the old Pale, Jews traditionally made a living as agricultural middlemen, trading corn and other produce between country and city. If they did well, gentile peasants and merchants resented their success and accused them of sharp practice. In the mid-1930s, the LVS promoted the idea of rural co-operatives in effect to take over the services performed by Jewish merchants. Smetona became an enthusiastic convert to the co-operative movement and its rapid success bankrupted many rural Jewish businesses. Many middle-class Lithuanian Jews admired Smetona. He appeared to respect the bastions of Jewish culture and faith in Vilnius and Kaunas. But his apparently benevolent dictatorship pushed them to the margins of Lithuanian society, where they would be exposed to terrible peril. A younger generation, deeply impressed by Zionism, felt differently. Lithuania, they rightly suspected, was no longer safe. One young journalist wrote on the eve of war that: ‘Jews and Lithuanians lived alongside one another … on the same street and often in the same building. That should have brought them closer to one another but that never happened.’ The Lithuanian liberal elites failed to notice the groundswell of hatred, openly expressed on the streets and in the farms, until it was too late.
²⁴

In the republic of Latvia, anti-Semitic agitators spoke louder and wielded greater influence. Latvian Jews had made a vital contribution to the independence
movement, but President Ulmanis was a fanatical nationalist who promoted ‘Latvia for the Latvians’ (meaning ethnic Latvians) and privately resented Jewish business expertise. We associate anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe with the pogrom and the mob. But in Latvia, as in Romania, an influential intelligentsia had been radicalised by student fraternities, the Korporacijas. These elitist reactionary student associations slavishly mimicked the German fraternities, the Burschenschaften. Like their German counterparts, the Korporacijas, such as the Lettonia and Selonija, cultivated a broad network of contacts in government and business. Membership provided a fast track to business and state elites. But not for every Latvian citizen. All the Korporacija
s
refused to admit Jewish students and promoted a heady brand of radical nationalism. Many graduates of the Lettonia, like Arveds Bergs, turned to journalism and he, it was said, educated an entire generation. Stirred by Bergs’ rhetoric, Gustavs Celmiņš, another Lettonia graduate, set up a new ultranationalist party, Ugunskrusts – inspired by the Romanian Iron Guard – that proclaimed ‘Latvia to the Latvians, bread and work to the Latvians!’ Recruits donned quasi military uniform (dark grey shirt, beret, trousers with knee high boots) adorned with swastikas – and staged impressive public drills and organised mass meeting at rural camps.

Celmiņš claimed that by 1933 he had 12,000 members – almost certainly an exaggeration, but he made enough noise to rattle the Ulmanis government and the Ugunskrusts was banned. Undeterred, Celmiņš simply changed the name to Pērkonkrusts (Thunder Cross). His programme was not especially complex: ‘The sovereign power in Latvia belongs to the Latvians and not to the people of Latvia.’ This slogan alluded to Latvian Jews, but also to Baltic Germans. ‘Already now our Germans, anticipating the arrival of their messiah Hitler, feel like half-masters in our house … If today the general struggle is against Jews, it does not mean that we shall not purge Latvia of the pitiful baronial detritus.’
²⁵
By the time Hitler seized power in Germany, Latvia had become infested with nationalist factions like the Pērkonkrusts that promoted radical nationalist agendas and threatened to destabilise the young Latvian republic.

The crisis suited Ulmanis who, like his presidential neighbour in Lithuania, had grown weary of democracy. And like Smetona, the Latvian president had powerful backers. At the end of the First World War, Latvian vigilantes formed Aizsargi (defence units) to fight off incursions by Soviet troops or German Freikorps. By 1922, the Aizsargi had voluntary armed units in every township in Latvia and attracted tens of thousands of recruits. Like the German SA Brownshirts, the Aizsargi unnerved the regular Latvian army. But Ulmanis strenuously cultivated the Aizsargi leadership. In 1934, they duly proclaimed him ‘Vadonis’ – Führer. To
defend his seizure of power, Ulmanis claimed that Latvia was threatened by dangerous nationalist agitators – and Celmiņš organised a few outrages to help him make his case. Once Ulmanis had tightened his grip, he had the Pērkonkrusts banned and deported Celmiņš, who, like legions of other exiled radicals, found his way to Germany, where he offered his services to the Reich. In Latvia, Pērkonkrusts radicals went underground, organising secretive cells inspired by the Iron Guard to continue Celmiņš’ crusade. For the next six years, Ulmanis resisted all efforts by the Latvian army to demobilise his Aizsargi benefactors and instead used them as a private militia.
²⁶