Hitler's Foreign Executioners (61 page)

This latter measurement referred to the famous SS minimum height requirement. A closer look at the figures shows that a significant proportion of the Ukrainian volunteers ‘failed’ that crucial test and the criteria was later lowered. Berger was not especially dismayed.

What conclusions can we draw from this confusion of numbers? First, even if we revise down Wächter’s claim of 80,000 registrations to a more sober figure of about 50,000, it is plain that many Ukrainians in the Galician district rejected anti-German propaganda that was disseminated by both Polish and Ukrainian insurgents. Kubijovych and the UCC propagandists had done a fine job. A young volunteer from L’viv wrote to his parents: ‘Dear Mother and father, I have joined the [Galizien] division. I trust you will not object to it, but I have followed my conscience. I want to fulfil my duty to my people … the moment has arrived and if we lose it we shouldn’t call ourselves a nation.’
⁴⁰

Second, Himmler had not abandoned strict recruitment criteria. Many Ukrainians may have been a few centimetres shorter than the average German SS recruit, but Himmler still insisted on a rigorous weeding out of unsuitable candidates. In October, Wächter finally abolished the Military Board and handed responsibility for recruitment to the Ergänzungsamt der Waffen-SS Ergänzungsstelle Warthe (XXI) Nebenstelle, headed by SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr Karl Schulze. The new body applied even more stringent standards. On 30 October, Schulze reported that out of 80,000 volunteers, only 27,000 had been passed by SS medical boards. Of these 19,047 had been called up and 13,245 had actually reported for service. By the end of October, just 11,578 Ukrainians were in training – numbers barely sufficient to muster a division. These figures provide no support for the frequently made claim that ‘after Stalingrad’ the Waffen-SS recruitment bodies tore up the rule book and accepted ‘all comers’.

On 18 July 1943, 740 new SS recruits assembled in front of the Grand Opera House in L’viv to begin service with the 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr. 1). It was a warm, still day; Nazi swastika banners hung limply alongside the Galician lion. On the podium, Governor Wächter and other German military and civil dignitaries stood, their arms stiffly raised in the
Hitlergruss
. Over 50,000 Ukrainians had travelled to L’viv; they sang, cheered and threw flowers. After the usual speeches, the new recruits marched off to Chernovetsky station, where they would board trains taking them to a former Polish cavalry training camp in the General Government called Heidelager. A few scratched ‘Free Ukraine’ slogans
on the sides of wagons. The young men had provisions for three days, as well as one packet of undergarments, one sewing kit, one knife, a watch and writing equipment for letters home. As night fell, the German trains began steaming slowly westwards.

There was no disagreement about the purpose of the new SS division. It would maintain the security of the General Government – and this would mean fighting a dirty war. As we have seen, Himmler’s Bandenbekämpfung was genocide disguised as counter-insurgency. His foreign recruits frequently targeted civilians and Jews who had somehow survived the ghettoes and camps. To ensure that the SS ‘Galizien’ performed, Himmler packed its German officer corps with experienced ‘bandit’ fighters well versed in mass murder of unarmed civilians. Wächter had turned to Jürgen Stroop to advise on the formation of the new division. The first commander of the division was SS-Brigadeführer and Generalmajor der Waffen-SS Walther Schimana. As HSSPF Central Russia after 1942, Schimana had fought Himmler’s war in Belorussia, where anti-partisan and anti-Jewish actions were closely intertwined. But Schimana was not ‘hard’ enough for Himmler. In October he replaced him with SS-Oberführer Fritz Julius Gottfried Freitag. Freitag had joined the Waffen-SS in 1940 and been assigned to Himmler’s personal staff then taken part in the mass killing of Jews in the Pripet Marshes in 1941. Later he was appointed commander of the 2nd SS Brigade. By the time he took over the SS ‘Galizien’, Freitag was an experienced
génocidaire
. He made sure that his subordinates had equivalent experience: Franz Lechthaler, for example, formerly commander of the 11th Battalion of the German reserve police, had led Lithuanian auxiliaries in Kaunus and oversaw the murder of 5,900 Jews in Belorussia; Siegfried Binz, another anti-partisan ‘expert’, had reportedly liquidated more than 10,000 alleged bandits and Jews; Friedrich Dern had also served with notorious SS brigades.
⁴¹
These German commanders would be charged with moulding raw Ukrainian recruits into dedicated ‘bandit hunters’.

SS training was harsh, brutal and basically pitiless. SS ‘Heidelager’ was a primitive affair, much of it still under construction, with the crudest facilities. Built by slave labour on a flat, sandy triangle of land at the confluence of the San and Vistula rivers, the camp embodied the SS empire in miniature. Here, Waffen-SS officers trained their foreign recruits as the new German rockets were tested at a firing range nearby. Flemish Belgians drilled alongside Bosnian Muslims, Estonians and Latvians, all clad in SS uniforms. For the Germans assigned to the ‘Galizien’, fine distinctions between Galicians and Ukrainians counted for nothing. Neither the Germans nor the Ukrainians received any kind of language instruction; only those Ukrainians who had served with the Austro-Hungarian army spoke German with any kind of proficiency. For most recruits, SS discipline was a shock. One recruit
recalled that his platoon commander ‘was always ill tempered, excelled in yelling, abusing and insulting, and was always trying hard to persecute and abuse us’. The abusive drill sergeant has always been a cliché of the military life, but this particular martinet, one Scharführer Brandscheit, did not trouble to disguise his hatred for Ukrainians. On Sundays, the recruits chose between Mass or a bath, inspiring Brandscheit to laugh heartily: ‘I don’t know which is dirtier, your souls or your arses.’ Wolf-Dietrich Heike was one of a small number of German army (as opposed to SS) officers who served with the SS ‘Galizien’. In his memoir, Heike talks about the clash between Germanic order and Ukrainian spontaneity: ‘Among Ukrainians emotion overshadows reason. Not reason, but emotions that well up from the depth of the soul constitute the leitmotif of the Ukrainian’s life. This characteristic seems to apply to all Slavs.’ Heike’s Ukrainian driver had a temper ‘like a powder keg’ and drove accordingly. Himmler’s Galicians, Heike recalled, never forgot for a moment that they were Ukrainians – certainly not Galicians. In their barrack huts and vegetable gardens, the trident, the Ukrainian national symbol, popped up everywhere, much to the German officers’ displeasure.

The commander, Freitag, enjoyed pouring salt on Ukrainian wounds. He was ill tempered and volatile, possessing, it seemed, a talent for immiserating the daily lives of his subordinates and tormenting non-German recruits. He viewed his new assignment as punishment for some obscure misdemeanour. He had already served briefly with the Latvian SS 15th Division and had made no secret of his contempt for ‘foreigners’. Freitag demanded more German officers and removed allegedly unreliable Ukrainians. One SS veteran he recruited was SS-Obersturmbannführer Franz Magill, another veteran of the Pripet Marches special action. Since those glory days with the SS cavalry, Magill had fallen on hard times. The SS ‘Galizien’ was not a prestige posting.

Many of the Ukrainian officers, like SS-Hauptsturmführer Michael Brygidyr, had previously served in SS Schuma battalions, routinely used to kill partisans, burn down villages and, when the opportunity arose, murder Jews. Although Freitag, Dern and the other German officers distrusted their Ukrainian colleagues, they shared this bond as SS executioners. At the hub of this uneasy alliance was the sinister figure of SS-Hauptsturmführer Dmytro Paliiv (b. 1896) – an unnervingly hollow-cheeked, almost skeletal former journalist who liaised, semi-officially, between the Military Board and the choleric Freitag. In the late 1920s, Paliiv had split with the OUN and formed the Front of National Unity. He was, even in Ukrainian terms, an extremist ‘integral nationalist’. In the early 1930s, Paliiv had published a series of articles whose coarse and brutal anti-Semitic content has been compared to Julius Streicher’s ravings in the German propaganda rag
Der Stürmer
.
⁴²

By the winter of 1943/44, Hitler’s eastern empire was crumbling. At the beginning of the new year, General Governor Hans Frank warned delegates at a security conference that the front was just 50km away. (A year before, the distance had been 1,700km.) On the borders of the General Government in the ‘Distrikt Galizien’, tens of thousands of refugees fled the Soviet army into Reich territory, carrying with them the menace of typhus and cholera. In January, the Soviets launched a major new offensive in Ukraine, putting tremendous pressure on Wächter’s fiefdom.
⁴³
As Stalin’s armies pushed relentlessly westwards, Soviet-backed partisans intensified their campaign. Now the Wächter’s SS ‘Galizien’ would receive its baptism of fire and blood.

In February 1944, the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Galizien SS-Freiwilligen-Regiment was assigned to anti-partisan duty in the Cholm district, near Tarnopol, a region governed by Poland until 1939. After 1941, German rule had sparked a vicious civil war between Polish insurgents and the Ukrayins’ka Povstans’ka Armiya, the UPA. The Germans and their Ukrainian auxiliaries regarded many Polish villages in the region as bandit strongholds and as a matter of course punished them accordingly. According to the
Chronicle of the Halychnya Division
(Galizien division), held by the State Archive of Kiev, on 23 February the ‘Galizien’ regiment attacked the village of Huta Pieniacka. A Polish brigade killed two Ukrainians, Roman Andrichuk and Oleksa Bobak, and allegedly mutilated their bodies. When the news reached Wächter’s headquarters in L’viv he was enraged and organised ceremonial funerals for the two men. Five days later the Germans and the Ukrainian ‘Galizien’ men returned to Huta Pieniacka thirsting for revenge. They encircled the village and subjected it to a brief artillery bombardment. Then they closed in. They herded villagers into barns and set them on fire. Eyewitnesses watched horrified as the Ukrainian men dashed children against walls and cut open the stomachs of pregnant women. The entire village was torched. The Germans and their Ukrainian executioners tormented villagers until nightfall. By then most were drunk and returned to camp bellowing nationalist songs.

The massacre was first reported a few days later by Polish sources. Ever since, Poles and Ukrainians have argued bitterly about what happened and who killed between 800 and 1,000 mostly unarmed people in a single day. The attack on Huta Pieniacka precisely fitted Himmler’s Bandenbebekämpfung doctrine. Huta Pieniacka was targeted for two reasons: it was Polish and the SS had discovered that the villagers were sheltering Jews. We can establish this as certain fact because one of the Jewish survivors of the attack left a memoir, which has been published by Yad Vashem.
⁴⁴

Its author, Zvi Weigler, had been born in the East Galician town of Sasov. In 1943, he and a number of other Jews had escaped from a labour camp in Zlochov. Hardened though they were by ghetto and labour camp life, Weigler and his companions now faced a battle for survival, especially in the winter. The Jews came to depend on Polish farmers and on the generosity of two villages in particular. One was Huta Werchobuska and the other: Huta Pieniacka. In his memoir, Weigler tells us that the Polish farmers and villagers provided shelter and food even though Governor Wächter warned village heads (
soltisses
) that any village found to be sheltering Jews would be collectively punished. Weigler and the other Jewish fugitives always shunned Ukrainian villages, fearing that they would be betrayed to the SS.

That February, the Polish resistance reported that the Germans had begun planning a punitive action against Huta Pieniacka and other villages for providing aid to partisans and Jews. As soon as he heard the news, Weigler and other Jews retreated back into the forest. Then Weigler states: ‘The warning … was not an empty threat. The punitive action came in February, 1944.’ Weigler and the other Jews fled after the first attack. Then on 28 February, Weigler watched from his forest shelter as German and Ukrainian SS men returned to Huta Pieniacka. As other eyewitness accounts have stated, the village was surrounded then raked by machine-gun fire from all sides. The SS men hurled hand grenades through the doors of houses then herded the farmers and their families into barns. They slammed shut the doors and set them on fire. The Ukrainians stood by to make sure that no one escaped. When night fell, Weigler and the Jews who had hidden in the forest returned to the still burning village and began searching for anyone who remained alive. The following morning, Polish farmers from nearby villages arrived with wagons and took the handful of survivors to the hospital in Brody. Weigler later discovered that few had survived. Three weeks later, on 23 March, Huta Werchobuska ‘suffered the same fate’.