Hitler's Foreign Executioners (28 page)

The slippery Canaris did what he could to mollify the disheartened Ukrainians. Once the Wehrmacht had secured Warsaw, he had Bandera released from prison. In Kraków, the Germans discovered a highly organised community of some 3,000 Ukrainian émigrés, most with strong German sympathies. As soon as Hitler had decided on the division of Poland, the German administrators in the General Government made sure that their Ukrainian subjects received a stream of privileges and favours at the expense of Poles and Jews. They set up a Ukrainian Central Committee (UTsK), to promote Ukrainian welfare. The UTsK was headed by Volodymyr Kubiiovych, a professor of geography who had strong ties
to the OUN and would, in 1943, play a crucial role recruiting Ukrainians for Himmler's Waffen-SS. The UTsK foreshadowed later SS strategy by authorising Roman Sushko to turn his disbanded legion into a Ukrainian police force, which was eagerly seized on as a move towards national autonomy. As local administration posts in the General Government fell into Ukrainian hands, Sushko and Kubiiovych urged their German masters to transfer agricultural land from ‘Jewish hands' to Ukrainian co-operatives, which grew significantly in number after 1939. In the short period before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, German administration in occupied Poland effectively reversed two decades of ‘Polonisation'. At the same time, Ukrainians seized Jewish businesses and helped build new forced labour camps and ghettos. Even this was not enough. In April, 1941, the UTsK head Kubiiovych approached General Governor Hans Frank to urge him to completely purge all ‘Polish and Jewish elements'.
¹¹

But in the pressure cooker of the General Government, the OUN ruptured. Like every nationalist movement in history, it split between irreconcilable moderates and radicals. On one side, Andrii Melnyk, Konovalets' successor, advocated a gradualist approach. He had served in the Austrian army and was accustomed (like the Bosnian Muslims) to that long-vanished Hapsburgian munificence. A sovereign Ukraine, Melnyk believed, would be the reward bestowed for long service to Hitler's empire. But in 1940, his rival Stepan Bandera, who had made his mark assassinating Poles, impatiently rejected such abject kowtowing to a fickle and opportunist foreign despot.

The Bandera-Melnyk ‘split', bitter though it was, was tactical rather than ideological. Melnyk and Bandera were both committed integral nationalists and anti-Semites who, in some form or other, wanted German National Socialist backing. In 1940, the firebrand Bandera set up camp as OUN-B while Melnyk's conservative supporters regrouped as OUN-M. In March 1941, at a congress in Kraków, the split became public. German intelligence followed events closely. A NSDAP foreign policy expert, Arno Schickendanz, warned both Canaris and SD chief Heydrich that the OUN was a ‘purely terrorist organisation', with a ‘Galician colouration' (meaning that its influence was confined to the western Ukraine) that had forfeited any influence over other Ukrainian nationalists after the Soviet cession of western Ukraine. The OUN, he recommended, should be banned.
¹²
Canaris stoutly defended the OUN: it was ‘too early', he argued, to take a drastic measure which would have disastrous consequences for German relations with potentially useful Ukrainian émigrés. At the RSHA, Schickendanz's warning was noted, but thanks to Canaris, ignored. A split OUN might even be of greater use than a unified one. Melnyk and Bandera bickered and skirmished but neither abandoned
core OUN doctrines. The glue that kept them both in the German camp was the lingua franca of the radical right: hatred of Jews. One OUN writer put it concisely: ‘Long live greater independent Ukraine without Jews, Poles and Germans. Poles behind the San, Germans to Berlin, Jews to the gallows.'
¹³

By the summer of 1941, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's self-appointed ‘eastern expert', had begun hatching up convoluted plans for the administration of the European East. He proposed preserving ‘national units' such as in the Ukraine – but, unknown to either OUN leader, these pseudo-nations would soon be swallowed whole by immense German-controlled administrative blocks called Reich Commissariats. In instructions issued to future commissars (the Germans preserved the old Soviet titles) Rosenberg referred to establishing a ‘free Ukrainian state
closely linked
to Germany'. These viper words disguised the shabbiest window dressing. Hitler, as Rosenberg understood very well, would never recognise any kind of non-German national sovereignty in the east. All Rosenberg could offer was a kind of wishywashy status as vassal nations under German suzerainty. These temporary ‘national units' would eventually vanish. In a few decades, any national identity would have been dissolved in the acid bath of German occupation. For all his posturing as a defender of anti-Bolshevik national identities, Rosenberg never doubted the Nazi maxim that the outcome of conquest would be ‘the total destruction of the Judeo-Bolshevik administration' and the ‘vast exploitation' of former Soviet lands – above all the rich Ukrainian farms.
¹⁴

Rosenberg did not, of course, share these plans with Ukrainian émigrés. In ignorance of German intentions, in the spring of 1941 as Hitler became increasingly bellicose towards Stalin, OUN leaders began to plot ways of exploiting a future German attack on the Soviet Union. Both Melnyk and Bandera sent pleading memoranda to the Reich Chancellery urging the formation of Ukrainian military units to betrained by the Wehrmacht. OUN-B representative Colonel RikoVary met with Canaris and General Walther von Brauchitsch, who was also broadly sympathetic to Ukrainian aspirations.
¹⁵
After weeks of haggling, Vary secured an informal agreement with OKW ‘eastern experts' Professor Hans Koch and Theodor Oberländer to begin training two battalions, mustering in total some 700 men. Oberländer we will encounter again. He was, like Himmler, a trained agronomist and had a long record of reactionary agitation. In 1935 he had been appointed assistant to Erich Koch, then Gauleiter for East Prussia, and charged with ‘investigating' ethnic minorities on the Polish border. He was therefore considered an ‘eastern expert'.

Canaris did not get or even seek Hitler's approval to begin negotiations with the Ukrainians, and he and the other Abwehr officers involved dealt exclusively with Bandera's more radical faction, OUN-B. The German officers insisted that the agreement be kept secret and Hans Koch warned Vary that, realistically, still developing German policy in the east might well end up thwarting their political goals.
¹⁶
There were risks – but ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained'. It was imperative that Canaris keep the Russians in the dark, for the Non-Aggression Pact remained in force. He feared that Ribbentrop, the German architect of the pact, might betray the Abwehr plot. His protracted negotiations with Molotov had been the crowning achievement as Hitler's Foreign Minister and he had no desire to see his great scheme unravel so swiftly. It is almost certain that Heydrich and Himmler both knew what was afoot and it is not inconceivable that Canaris intended that the two Ukrainian brigades take the same ‘self-cleansing' role as the LAF militias recruited in Lithuania.

The Ukrainians called the battalions ‘
Druzhyny ukraïnskykh nationalistiv
' (Units of Ukrainian Nations) or DUN. The Abwehr awarded them romantic sounding code-names: Organisation Roland (for the medieval French knight who died in battle against the Saracens) and Sonderformation Nachtigall (apparently the recruits enjoyed singing). Both were disguised as ‘labour divisions' and trained in Austria and Silesia by Abwehr officers. Canaris assigned the ‘Nachtigall' recruits to the ‘z.b. V800 Brandenburg' – Special Task Forces or K troops, first deployed in Poland. Many ‘Brandenburg' officers were Sudeten Germans or Polish Volksdeutsche. At the end of the Polish campaign, Canaris reformed the K troops as 1st Training Company (German company for special missions) based in Brandenburg an der Havel – hence ‘Brandenburgers'. The ‘Brandenburg' resembled a German foreign legion or the British SAS and has acquired a spuriously romantic post-war reputation. Canaris recruited lower ranks from the Baltic, Romania, the South Tyrol, Africa, Palestine and even Australia.‘Brandenburg' commander Theodor von Hippel had fought with General Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa during the First World War. In 1914, the Germans had recruited tens of thousands of African mercenaries known as ‘Askaris' (Arabic for soldier) – a term that would now be applied to Ukrainian and other Eastern European recruits. Hippel boasted that the ‘Brandenburgs' ‘could snatch the devil from hell'.
¹⁷

Thousands of Ukrainian exiles had washed up in Vienna. It was in the old capital of the Austrian Empire that Vary found his ‘Roland' recruits. Abwehr officers then transferred recruits to Saubersdorf in Austria for training. In Kraków, Roman Shukhevych, head of Bandera's military section, rounded up some 300 Ukrainians for training at Neuhammer in Silesia. According to the
Aufgaben für Ukrainer-Organisationen
, the task of the two battalions was to aid in establishing ‘the
marching security for German troops on grounds not occupied by the German military, especially by disarming Russians'.
¹⁸
The Ukrainians had been encouraged to believe that if they fought well, the two battalions might be amalgamated. The Abwehr issued the ‘Roland' men with Czech uniforms that resembled those worn by Ukrainian soldiers in 1918. The ‘Nachtigall' received Wehrmacht
feldgrau
uniforms with a blue and yellow shoulder badge. Vary, when he negotiated with the Wehrmacht, had insisted that Ukrainians recruits would swear allegiance not to Hitler, but to Ukraine and the OUN. Canaris had secretly recognised Ukrainian autonomy, in the service of the Reich.

Although Canaris' plans remained secret, Gottlob Berger, Himmler's opportunist recruitment chief, had also spotted an opening. By the end of April 1941 Berger had recruited ethnic Germans, Flemish, Dutch, Danish and Norwegian volunteers. Why not, he thought, grab pro-German Ukrainians too? On 28 April 1941 he wrote to Himmler proposing that a few hundred Ukrainian émigrés who spoke both German and Ukrainian might be recruited by the Waffen-SS. Rudolf Brandt, Himmler's secretary, replied with a terse note a week later: ‘The Reichsführer is not willing at this stage to take any action regarding the combat training of these men.'
¹⁹
Himmler's response has been interpreted to imply that he was repelled by the idea of recruiting ‘Slavic sub humans'. This is mistaken. Himmler was a keen student of history so it can hardly have escaped his attention that Galicia had been an Austrian
Kronland
and that some ‘Ruthenians' must therefore have acquired an infusion of Nordic blood. Germans called the principal Galician city Lemberg. Modern-day L'viv was popularly known as ‘Little Vienna of the East' and was home to more than 50,000 proud German language speakers. We can be certain that Himmler did not turn down Berger's proposal on racial grounds. But like Rosenberg, he was suspicious of the OUN – above all, Bandera's radical wing, though he sympathised with its rabid chauvinism. Brandt's qualification ‘at this stage' is frequently overlooked. Less than two years after he rejected Berger's proposal in 1941, Himmler would authorise an SS recruitment drive in Galicia.

Far from playing the part of passive collaborators, the leadership of OUN-B harassed the German government throughout the period leading up to 22 June with memoranda that insisted on the primacy of Ukrainian interests and warned of the consequences if these were ignored.
²⁰
Himmler's priorities had to do with police operations and pacification; as Heydrich made clear in a letter to the HSSPF, the extermination of ‘undesirable' elements had to be pursued with ‘ruthless vigour'.
²¹
In central and northern Ukraine, this would fall to Einsatzgruppe C. Like the commanders of Einsatzgruppe A in the Baltic, the SD commanders assigned to Ukraine had received Heydrich's instructions to incite local pogroms and to use local
activists ‘to attain our goals'. It was on this point that German and Ukrainian interests converged. At an OUN gathering in Kraków, Bandera proposed:

Then two weeks before the scheduled date for the invasion of the Soviet Union, Bandera's ‘moderate' rival Melnyk sent a telegram to Hitler, asserting that he alone could best represent German interests in Ukraine. Like so many other nationalist supplicants who banged on the door of Hitler's Reichs Chancellery, Melnyk received no reply. On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, he made a second appeal demanding to march shoulder to shoulder with the Wehrmacht, to build a new Europe ‘free of Jews, Bolsheviks and plutocrats'.
²³
An opportunity to begin fulfilling that rabid dream would come soon enough. On 18 June, its training completed, the ‘Nachtigall' battalion crossed the territory of the General Government and arrived in Przemyśl, which, before the German invasion, was split between the Reich and the Soviet Union by the San River, which flowed through the middle of the city. That summer, the waters ran low and sluggish between muddy banks that glittered in the mid-summer sunlight.