Hitler's Foreign Executioners (26 page)

We know the identity of at least one of the Lithuanians who served alongside German executioners at the Ponary site. His name was Jonas Barkauskas – though when he was arrested in 1972 he was using the Polish version of his name Jan Borkowski and was first trombonist in the orchestra of the Warsaw Opera.
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Borkowski was born in 1916 and grew up in Vilnius, then Polish Wilno. He did not speak Lithuanian, and after the destruction of Poland in 1939, this deficiency led to Borkowski having problems finding work. He did speak Russian, however, and an ethnic Russian neighbour introduced him to the Ypatingas Burys. He now
became Jonas Barkauskas and was assigned to guard duty at Ponary. To begin with Barkauskas escorted groups of Jews to the edges of the execution pits – but he was soon ‘rotated’ to join execution squads and began killing men, women and children. He began plundering his victims. He stole boots and a pair of dark green trousers that, together with a Lithuanian army cap, became a rough and ready uniform. He grabbed suits, fur coats, wristwatches, leather jackets – even some children’s sheepskin coats that he gave as presents to his nieces. After many weeks of dedicated and profitable service at the execution pits, Barkauskas won a transfer to the Ypatingas Burys headquarters where he processed the goods stolen from murdered Jewish families. At his trial, many decades later, Borkowski explained that he saw Jews as parasites and had no difficulty carrying out his duties.

A more privileged species of collaborator was Antanas Gečas-Gecevičius who would end his life as ‘Anthony Gečas’ in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2001. He too was born in 1916 into a family of prosperous landowners and attended the prestigious Lithuanian Military Academy. Gečas was an out-and-out opportunist. When the Soviets occupied Lithuania, he joined the NKVD as an undercover agent and worked in western Lithuania as a police spy. But just days after the Germans arrived, Gečas signed up for the German sponsored ‘Battalion for the Defence of National Labour’ which soon became a Schutzmannschaft (protective battalion). No doubt fearful that his services to the Soviets would be discovered, he sent an obsequious letter written in German to the local commander claiming that he was descended from old German stock and was dedicated to serving the greater glory of the Reich. His trick worked. By the time the new Lithuanian security police, the Saugumas, issued arrest warrants, Gečas was serving under General Baron Gustav von Bechtholsheim in Belorussia, who was in charge of ‘Operation Free of Jews’ (
Aktion Judenrein
). The plan was to amalgamate the German 707th Division with Gečas’ Lithuanian 2nd Schuma Battalion and the German 11th Reserve Police Battalion to liquidate every Jewish family in western Belorussia – they must ‘disappear without trace’. Like many German officers, von Bechtholsheim was convinced that Soviet partisans and Jews were inextricably connected. Since Gečas spoke excellent German, he received orders directly from German officers and took a leading role in
Aktion Judenrein
. At Slutsk, the Lithuanian 2nd Battalion and German police rampaged though the village shooting and beating Jews and local Belarusians. After that first assault, the Lithuanians rounded up Jewish families and herded them to pits on the edge of the village. Bellowing and screaming in German and Lithuanian, Gečas organised the killing, rotating platoons and personally shooting anyone who remained alive after the first volleys. Gečas was later awarded an Iron Cross.

In the former Lithuania, the Saugumas was the main agency that brought together German administrators and local collaborators. A decade older than Gečas, Aleksandras Lileikis had been born into a peasant family but managed to get into university to study law. He was forced to continue his studies part time and joined the Saugumas in 1939. In 1940, when the Soviet occupation began, Lileikis and other Saugumas officers escaped across the border and fled to Berlin where he applied for German citizenship and remained until August 1941. We have no documented records but it is almost certain that Lileikis received detailed briefings about the role of the Saugumas once the Germans had expelled the Russian occupiers. When he returned to Vilnius he immediately assumed responsibility for the city’s security and reorganised the Saugumas along Gestapo lines, setting up a special division to deal with Jews and communists – the Komunistų-Žydų Skyrius. His main job was to deal with escapees from the Vilnius ghetto. Records show that Lileikis issued a succession of orders handing over captured Jewish men, women and children to the German security forces. One was a 6-year-old called Fruma Kaplan (b. 1935), who would be ‘treated according to orders’. Fruma was shot with her family at Ponary on 22 December 1941.

Himmler’s SS closely managed the mass murder of Jews in Lithuania. But this fact does not exonerate. As a Christian doctor Elena Kutorgiene wrote after the war: ‘With the exception of a few individuals, all the Lithuanians, especially the intelligentsia, hate the Jews … The coarse Lithuanian mob, as opposed to the total apathy of the intelligentsia, acted with such beastly cruelty that by comparison the Russian pogroms seemed like humanitarian deeds.’
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On 30 June 1941, at 4.30 in the morning, a Ukrainian battalion sonorously named the ‘Nachtigall', recruited by German military intelligence and wearing Wehrmacht grey uniforms, marched into the city of L'viv (then known as Lemberg), once the capital of the old Austrian province of Galicia. They yearned to free their homeland from the Soviet yoke and arrived just hours before the first German units. In the city, chaos reigned. Between parked military vehicles, people swarmed waving blue and yellow Ukrainian flags. They shouted wildly and fired rifles and pistols with abandon. In the old Austrian office buildings, Soviet files lay strewn on the floor or flowing into the streets to be tramped underfoot by men wearing blue and yellow armbands. Officers of Einsatzgruppe B had moved into a building vacated by the Soviet NKVD just days before. Everywhere Ukrainians in old Austrian uniforms attacked Jews – ‘
Yids! Yids! Kaputt!
' – to the ubiquitous sound of the national anthem played on accordions.

The commander of the Ukrainian battalion, Roman Shukhevych, had family in L'viv. He soon discovered that the body of his brother lay rotting inside Brygidki prison, murdered by the NKVD along with thousands of other Ukrainian victims of the Soviet terror. Many Jews had also been murdered by the retreating Russians. Their corpses too lay in the prison yard and cells. But Shukhevych had no doubt who was responsible for the death of his brother. Jews were the agents of Moscow and must be punished.

A few days later, German soldiers exhumed some of the bodies and publicly displayed the rotting corpses. ‘Murdered by Jews!' Soon the ‘Nachtigall' men forgot all about liberating their homeland – and began to round up Jews wherever they found them. They murdered men, women and children as a German military cameraman calmly recorded the unfolding bloodbath.

The massacre in L'viv appears to confirm one of the enduring stereotypes of the Second World War – and the destruction of European Jewry – that is summed up by the phrase: ‘The Ukrainians were the worst!'All over Eastern Europe, as Jews and other victims of the genocide met their terrible ends, survivors reported that Ukrainians always behaved ‘worse than the Germans'. At every murder site and in the extermination camps like Treblinka and Sobibór, it would seem that Ukrainians barked and bellowed the last words heard by victims as they disembarked the death trains. Ukrainian guards and police showed themselves to be uniquely cruel, brutal and merciless. In the chapters that follow, we will encounter many such murderous Ukrainians. But as in the case of the Baltic States, a more complex historical narrative lies beneath the surface. Under German rule, millions of Ukrainians perished or were enslaved. Thousands of Ukrainian partisans fought German soldiers and SS men (as well as Poles and Jews). The barbarism of some Ukrainian guards and police auxiliaries cannot be generalised to all Ukrainians – just as crimes committed by Soviet agents of Jewish origin cannot be blamed on ‘the Jew'.
¹

This point should be made more precise. After 1941, the German occupiers recruited auxiliary police battalions from all over Ukraine. But they did not treat this immense region of Eastern Europe as a single homogeneous entity. The ideology of occupation policy, often referred to mistakenly as ‘chaotic', reflected German racial speculation that split the Ukrainian lands into two broad enclaves: the semi-Germanised lands west of the Dneiper River and the Slavic east. For this reason, ‘elite recruitment' by both the Abwehr and later the SS targeted a specific region of Ukraine region that had once been the ‘Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia' and, many centuries later, an Austrian province. To understand German occupation and recruitment strategy, we need to decode the enigmatic territorial concept of ‘Galicia', whose schizophrenic identity remains a contentious matter to this day.
²

Today Galicia, or in Polish ‘Halychnya', has no independent political status. It is a kind of shadow land split between modern Poland and Ukraine. There are no Galicians distinct from Poles and Ukrainians. In the early Middle Ages, a Kingdom of Galicia or Halych-Volhynia flickered intermittently into life. It reached an
apogee under King Danylo in the thirteenth century (his son Lev established the Galician capital at L'viv) but was in less than a century being tossed back and forth between more powerful neighbours above all Poland and Kievan Rus'. The latter, broadly speaking, was the ancestral form of the modern state of Ukraine. The history is fiendishly complicated and need not detain us here. By the sixteenth century, Galicia had been absorbed by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Throughout this turbulent history, impoverished Prussian Germans had migrated to Galicia to farm its rich, dark soils and happily intermarried with their Slavic neighbours. This rich ethnic mix was frequently stirred and reworked over time. To bolster their new state and mercantile ambitions, Polish rulers encouraged enterprising Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim Jews who migrated to the Galician region from Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia and other less tolerant ‘Germanic' lands. Sephardic Jews that had been expelled from Spain and Portugal settled here too, transforming Galicia into one of the most vibrant centres of Jewish commerce and religious culture. In the mid-eighteenth century, the empires of Prussia, Russia and Austria ripped apart the Commonwealth. The ‘Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria with the Duchies of Auschwitz and Zator' became the northernmost province of the Austrian Empire. And so Galicia remained until the end of the First World War, when once again the old kingdom became the fulcrum of violent conflict and ethnic upheaval.

For the representatives of the victorious Entente Powers who gathered at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, these relics of the Russian and Austrian empires presented a mighty challenge. British Prime Minister Lloyd George said that ‘Russia was a jungle in which no one could see what was within a few yards of him'. President Wilson lamented that ‘Russia … goes to pieces like quicksilver under my touch'.
³
After the Paris Conference, the three Baltic States won fragile independence. But not one of the Entente Powers was prepared to back an independent Ukraine. They pressed instead for a unified Russia, ruled by an anti-Bolshevik government and with the Ukrainian lands securely bolted to its western border. ‘I only met a Ukrainian once,' opined Lloyd George, ‘… and I am not sure that I want to see any more.' For the lobbyists and negotiators gathered in Paris, western Ukraine threw up the most acute difficulties. Since Galicia was former property of the now defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Entente Powers had to choose a new owner: but which one? Few disputed that western Galicia was Polish in character, but the east was less tractable. While ‘Ruthenians' dominated the countryside, the big cities like the capital L'viv and Tarnopol resembled Polish islands in a Ukrainian ocean. Overall, Poles made up just one-third of the East Galician population; Jews just over a tenth – so the majority was indisputably Ukrainian. This ethnic patchwork is still evident today in modern L'viv, 50 or so miles east of
the modern Polish-Ukrainian border. The Austrians erected grand state buildings, expansive parks and a handsome opera house – and often referred to ‘Lemberg' as ‘LittleVienna'. For their part, Polish Catholics erected scores of churches, whose spires still bristle along the skyline. Further out from the Austrian centre, Galician Jews constructed some of the most impressive synagogues in Eastern Europe, like the famous Di Goldene Royz, which was designed by an Italian architect, and the Reform Synagogue near Market Square. After 1941, the Germans destroyed both of these imposing structures; today only ruins remain. Outside the cities, Ukrainian peasants and the majority of rural or Shtetl Jews endured chronic poverty. In the mythology of Ukrainian victim-hood, these same Jews were to blame.