Hitler's Foreign Executioners (47 page)

In 2004, in the Estonian town of Lihula, Mayor Tiit Madisson dedicated a memorial statue to Estonians who had served in the Waffen-SS. The memorial depicts an Estonian in German uniform holding a machine gun; the Estonians who had enlisted in the Waffen-SS had, said Madisson, ‘chosen the lesser of two evils. They had experienced the Soviet occupation and did not want to return to it.’ Madisson, who heads the Eesti Rahvususlikliit (ER, Estonian National Union) has authored a book called
The New World Order
that argues, with some originality, that Hitler was brought to power by Jews and Freemasons – and that the Holocaust never happened. When the Estonian government ordered the removal of the memorial, which had become an international embarrassment, hundreds of local people protested forcing the police to use batons and pepper gas. The memorial ended up at the private Museum of the Fight for Estonian Freedom, established in Parnu by an apologist for the Estonian division called Leo Tammiksaar.
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In 2004 300 veterans of the Estonian 20th SS Division paraded through Tallinn, and in 2007, representatives of the veterans demanded the removal of a new synagogue in Tallinn claiming its existence was an ‘insult’. Until that year, Estonia had been the only country in Europe without a single synagogue. Since 2007, SS veterans have staged reunions at Siminäe, the site of clashes between Soviet and German armies in the summer of 1944.
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In 2009, the Estonian publishing house Grenader Grupp published a calendar illustrated with German propaganda images of Estonian SS men. It sold out within three days.

According to publisher Aimur Kruuse: ‘The members of the legion tried to bring freedom to Estonia, or to give their families time to escape to the west before the Red Army returned to kill them or send them to Siberia.’
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Freedom fighters or war criminals? Or both at the same time? In 2004, wealthy Estonian farmer Lembit Someril sponsored yet another memorial, this one dedicated to SS-Standartenführer Alfons Rebane. A bronze statue of Rebane was built on private land, but the unveiling was attended by Estonian MP and former Foreign Minister Trivimi Velliste. The ceremony was condemned by Jewish organisations but many Estonians regard SS Volunteer Rebane as a national hero. British intelligence agency MI6 once held him in high regard too: Rebane escaped to the
west after the German defeat and was recruited by British intelligence. He played an important role as one of the co-ordinators of Operation Jungle, which backed anti-communist resistance in the Baltics. Rebane died in Germany in 1976, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, his body was taken back to Tallinn and interred with full military honours. Five hundred people attended the ceremony including the commander of Estonia’s defence forces, Lt Gen. Johannes Kert.
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Who was Alfons Rebane? According to Soviet documents, Rebane’s career as a collaborator began when he commanded the 658th Eastern Police Battalion that took part in attacks on villages near the town of Kingisepp and the village of Kerstovo in the Leningrad region (where many of the Baltic battalions were deployed).
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German-controlled Schuma police battalions recruited in Eastern Europe took part in the mass murder of Jews and other civilians. Rebane was a practiced ‘bandit hunter’ before he joined the Waffen-SS. In the Baltic states and Ukraine, Himmler used his ‘Eastern Legions’ as vanguard troops in the German ‘war on bandits’, as well as fighting against the advancing Soviet armies. This means that men like Rebane fought both as agents of genocide and as ‘freedom fighters’. The debate provoked by the rash of Baltic memorials is a false one. The ‘freedom fighter’ and the killer of civilians may be one and the same.

Even Latvians or Estonians who are embarrassed by the old veterans who march through their streets every year vehemently deny that the Baltic SS legions had any involvement with German war crimes. The web site of the Latvian government devotes a great deal of bandwidth to refuting such allegations. Their case appears to be buttressed by one incontrovertible and terrible fact: in the Baltic, the Germans and their native collaborators like the Arājs Commando and scores of other Schuma battalions did their work with pitiless diligence. By the end of 1941, all but a handful of Estonian Jews had perished: only 50,000 remained alive in Latvia and Lithuania, most of them quarantined inside ghettoes. By mid-1942, when Himmler authorised the formation of the first eastern SS division, the majority of Baltic Jews had been murdered. How then, the apologists argue, could the SS legions, which were formed after this period, have any connection to the Holocaust? In
The Holocaust in Latvia
, Andrew Ezergailis concludes that ‘The Latvian Legion is outside the scope of this study [of the Latvian Holocaust]’. He goes on: ‘no single event has ever been adduced associating the [‘Latvian Legion’] with atrocities against civilians.’

Ezergailis’ account of the German occupation is in many respects exemplary. He provides a wealth of detail about Latvians, such as Viktors Ārajs, who collaborated with the German occupiers and refuses to pull punches. But his argument that the formation of the Latvian SS divisions in 1943 had no connection with the events of 1941–42 is simply wrong. The different strategies of SS recruitment in occupied
territories reflected the changing needs of Himmler and the SS in the occupied Soviet Union. During the first so-called ‘wild’ genocide, or the ‘Holocaust by bullets’, the SS recruited mobile Schuma police battalions, such as the Arājs Commando, that carried out ‘special actions’ close to where their victims resided. In 1942, the Germans began systematically transporting Jews to specialised extermination centres: the Reinhardt camps in the General Government and Auschwitz-Birkenau. To facilitate this new strategy, the SS began recruiting guard units known as ‘Trawniki men’– mainly Ukrainians like Ivan Mykolayovych Demyanyuk, now better known as John Demjanjuk, but also Latvians and Estonians. At the same time, from the summer of 1942, Himmler simultaneously authorised recruitment of Waffen-SS non-German combat divisions in occupied Eastern Europe. Many of these Waffen-SS recruits had previously served in the Schuma units and now took part in so-called anti-bandit operations, which in many cases served to liquidate any Jews who had somehow survived the ‘Holocaust by bullets’. Since the recruitment of Schuma battalions and foreign Waffen-SS legions or divisions formed part of the same evolving genocidal strategy, it is quite wrong to argue, as Ezergailis and others have, that the combat divisions have no connection with the Holocaust.

Take the case of Latvian Juris Šumskis, cited by Ezergailis as a typical ‘Latvian Legion’ recruit. Šumskis was a young man (b. 1925) with a mediocre education who joined the infamous Arājs Commando. He said later that a friend had told him that pay and service conditions were good. Many of the first recruits who joined Arājs in the summer of 1941 were ideologically driven students and intellectuals. Šumskis, who volunteered on 29 April 1942, was typical of later batches. Few of these men had been to university and when questioned after the war offered quite banal reasons for their decision. As part of his training, which was conducted under German supervision,Šumskis was shown how to use light weapons and had ‘political lessons’ four or five times a week. That meant he was introduced to the doctrine of National Socialism and the evils of Bolshevism which had no doubt been merely instinctual before he joined up. Šumskis was not considered well educated enough to be sent to the SD school at Fürstenberg in Germany. But even before he had completed his training, Šumskis participated in special actions: in June, he took part in the slaughter of several hundred mentally ill patients at the Sarkandaugava Hospital in a neighbourhood of Riga. Some of the patients had difficulty walking on their own, and Šumskis was forced to carry one elderly woman on a stretcher to the execution site, where she was shot by a German officer. When all the patients had been liquidated, the SD commander Rudolf Lange made his Latvian auxiliaries swear an oath of secrecy. At the barracks,Šumskis and the other men who had taken part in the Sarkandaugava action received 500g of vodka.

For Šumskis, life as an SD auxiliary settled into a routine of tiresome guard duty – and routine murder. At the end of the year, he was assigned to a Latvian anti-partisan unit. Bandit warfare meant attacking villages suspected of harbouring partisans and setting them alight. If partisans had killed German troops, then a proportionate number of villagers would be shot. After this period, Šumskis’ activities are poorly documented. We know that in October 1943 he was assigned to dig a mass grave in sand dunes at Liepaja, well known as an execution site. He escorted a party of political prisoners to the grave and helped execute them. In March the following year, he took part in another mass killing. In April, Šumskis was in Riga, where he joined a border guard battalion, which was absorbed by 15th Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS in June. Not long afterwards, he was captured by the Russians. By the autumn of 1944, most of Arājs’ men had been assigned to different units of the Latvian Waffen-SS divisions.
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In short, there was an evolutionary relationship between the SD Schuma battalions and police auxiliaries and the combat SS divisions. With mass killing assigned to the extermination camps like Sobibór and Auschwitz-Birkenau, Himmler no longer needed field executioners, but ‘bandit hunters’. The SS inaugurated this second stage of their foreign recruitment strategy in Estonia – the most privileged region of the occupied Ostland.

According to German racial theory, Estonians had a special status in German plans. This partly reflected the influence of the Eastern Minister, Alfred Rosenberg, who had been born in Tallinn (Reval). Fresh data accumulated by German race experts implied that racially desirable characteristics were more strongly represented in Estonia than in Latvia and Lithuania. This implied, naturally, that Estonians could be more readily ‘Germanised’ than other Baltic peoples and this had a decisive impact on occupation policy and Waffen-SS recruitment. In the occupied east, the many different Reich agencies and potentates appointed by Hitler waged internecine war with their rivals. But in the Ostland, which incorporated the Baltic nations and Belorussia, Rosenberg’s Eastern Ministry was able to exercise a more powerful influence than in Ukraine, where Hitler consistently backed the despotic Commissar Erich Koch. Estonia is, of course, the most northerly Baltic state and in 1942 the German forces besieging Leningrad still straddled the old border with the Soviet Union. The presence of German Wehrmacht on Estonian soil meant that that the SD was forced to share jurisdiction with the army. In the confusing world of German occupation strategy this bolstered the power of Rosenberg’s Estonian representative SA-Obergruppenführer Karl-Siegmund Litzmann, who frequently
challenged the authority of his superior Hinrich Lohse. It helped that Hitler revered Litzmann’s father – a general who had served in the German Imperial Army in the First World War. He was also on very good terms with Himmler and used his well-oiled connections to shore up his Estonian fiefdom. Both Rosenberg and Litzmann regarded Estonians as blood kin (literally in Rosenberg’s case) and the ‘light touch’ manner of Litzmann’s administration favoured ambitious Estonians who wanted to carve out their own little empires under German administration.
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Estonia had been the last Soviet domain in the Baltic to be conquered by the Wehrmacht. The gap between Soviet withdrawal and German occupation had therefore been somewhat longer than in Latvia and Lithuania. This gave many patriotic Estonians time to escape into the forests and organise militias called Waldbrüder (Forest Brothers). When the Wehrmacht crossed the Estonian border, the Waldbrüder sent resistance units called Omakaitse (home guards) to harass the retreating Russians. Just as in Lithuania and Latvia, an SD Special Task Force commander, in this case Dr Martin Sandberger, then took over the Estonian units and, once the Soviet forces had been pushed back across the River Narva, began deploying Estonian auxiliaries to carry out ‘cleansing’ operations against ‘hostile elements’. Under German tutelage, these Omakaitse would be expanded to become a formidable pseudo-national militia that could muster up to 40,000 men. They were mainly recruited from farm workers who had become accustomed, over many centuries, to taking orders from Germans.