The German War (54 page)

Especially in the Baltic states and western Ukraine, there were many who had welcomed the Germans as liberators and were willing to fight against Bolshevism. But the problem of what they were fighting for remained. The Germans had encouraged the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and both leaders of its rival factions, Andriy Melnyk and Stepan Bandera, maintained close ties to their German patrons in Military Intelligence and the Gestapo. Each man made a competitive bid for national independence after the occupation of Ukraine, and the Germans continued to support and encourage each faction’s activities, as well as refusing to endorse their calls for national independence and, at times, imprisoning their leaders. In practice, Ukraine continued to be divided along similar political lines to those which had held before 1939. In the former Soviet Republic, now the Reich Commissariat of the Ukraine, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, imposed his own brutally supremacist regime, taking every opportunity to enforce public floggings and executions of his ‘natives’. By contrast, in the former western Ukrainian region of Galicia, which saw the German occupation as an opportunity to break away from Polish as well as Soviet rule, a more liberal cultural and political policy prevailed. With Lwów as its capital, Galicia was given its own status as a district within Hans Frank’s General Government; Ukrainian nationalist publications and cultural life were encouraged. In July 1941 the SS had immediately set about raising Ukrainian Auxiliary Police battalions which played key roles in the murder of the Jews, in anti-partisan actions and in blockading the major cities in order to enforce Backe’s ‘Hunger Plan’. The number of these Galician police battalions grew markedly in the summer of 1942.

This was as far as any potential vehicle for Slavic nationalism was permitted to progress under German tutelage at this stage of the war. Despite pressure for a more liberal occupation regime from both Wehrmacht commanders and Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Eastern Territories, Erich Koch was able to hold on to a direct and brutal policy of forced labour, food requisitioning, degrading public punishments and arbitrary terror. He knew he could count on the firm support of Göring, Bormann and Hitler. In the neighbouring fiefdom of Belorussia, Wilhelm Kube steered a middle course. In July 1942, he rejected proposals to shoot most of those aged 17–21 as ‘100 per cent infected with communism’, opting instead to start recruiting them as industrial apprentices or to serve as auxiliary ‘volunteers’ for the SS and the anti-aircraft defences. But these pockets of positive engagement were tiny compared to the scale of German reprisals against the civilian population. They also kept running up against entrenched German fears that any resurgence of Slavic or Russian nationalism would automatically undermine their own plans to create areas of lasting German colonial settlement after Germany’s victory over Bolshevism.
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Raising ‘Eastern legions’, as they came to be known, progressed far more rapidly and smoothly in the non-Slavic territories, especially in Muslim areas. In November 1941, Hitler authorised the raising of a ‘Turkic Legion’, and by the end of February 1942 the High Command was collaborating with Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Eastern Territories to raise four separate legions for Turkistanis, Muslims from the Caucasus, Georgians and Armenians. Two more, the North Caucasian and the Volga Tatar Legions, followed that summer. Here the desire to rally all the non-Slav ethnic groups from the occupied Soviet territories and, later, the Balkans intersected happily with the pan-Islamic enthusiasms of the SS and the German Foreign Office, whose expertise dated back to stirring up the Middle East during the First World War. Over 500,000 men were raised in this way.
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When Army Group South entered the Crimea in autumn 1941, the Germans found themselves warmly welcomed by the population of 225,000 Tatars. As Sunni Muslims they had seen their mosques and madrasas desecrated, decommissioned and destroyed by the Soviets. Under German occupation, 150 mosques and a further 100 provisional prayer houses were renovated and opened in 1943 alone. The Germans drew the line at re-establishing a Muftiat in the Crimea, lest it provided a focus for political demands, but the local
ulema
helped to raise recruits for the militias attached to Manstein’s 11th Army. At a conference of the Tatar Committee in Simferopol in early 1942 one of the mullahs confirmed that ‘their religion and their faith commands them to take part in this holy battle alongside the Germans’ against Bolshevism. The whole Tatar gathering rose to their feet and prayed for ‘the achievement of a speedy victory . . . as well as for the long life of the Führer, Adolf Hitler’. By March, 20,000 Muslims had joined the militias.
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The Germans were impressed by the Tatar and Turkic Legions’ discipline and fighting power, and they soon established a name for themselves in anti-partisan warfare. A survey of military censorship from that spring revealed men who were guided by faith in ‘Allah and Adolf Effendi’. ‘I fight for the liberation of the Tatars and the religion of Islam from the Bolshevist yoke,’ wrote one recruit. Enthused by the capture of the Soviet naval base of Kerch in spring 1942, another man wrote, ‘We have . . . shattered the Red Russian Army so that it can never recover. The word of the victor is with us. Allah has also given Adolf Effendi to us, therefore we will always remain winners.’
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The Wehrmacht was quick to guarantee the right of religious observance within their Muslim units, enjoining German soldiers not to stare in curiosity and, above all, not to photograph acts of daily prayer. High holidays of Ramadan and Id ul-Adha were respected and serving pork was forbidden. It was more difficult to introduce ritual slaughter of livestock, because ‘animal protection’ legislation had been rushed through in April 1933 by the Nazis in order to close down kosher butchers in Germany, but the Wehrmacht issued the necessary guidelines for its Muslim units. The SS, which had raised a Bosnian Muslim division of its own, followed suit. The findings of a questionnaire distributed to recruits in October 1942 told a prosaic tale of motives for volunteering, such as escaping German prisoner-of-war camps and labour conscription. Among soldiers’ positive reasons for fighting, especially in the Balkans, protecting their families from partisan attack predominated. At the same time, the Wehrmacht and SS set great store by the key values which they believed Nazism and Islam held in common: obedience to the leader, belief in the family and commitment to a holy war against the ‘Jewish-English-Bolshevik enemy’. Heinrich Himmler even commissioned an academic study to discover whether Hitler could be set on par with the Prophet; he had to settle, for being depicted as ‘the returned Isa [Jesus] who is forecast in the Qu’ran and who, similar to the type of the Knight George, defeats the giant and Jew-King Dajjal at the end of the world’.
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The greatest transformation occurred in the relatively small military wing of the SS, which had not played a front-line role in 1941. With a mere 170,000 members at the start of 1942, the Waffen SS began to look beyond the Reich’s borders and recruit from a pool not covered by conscription to the Wehrmacht. It was helped in its efforts by a very successful illustrated magazine,
Signal,
published by the Wehrmacht but aimed at a western European readership numbering 2.5 million. In Paris, under Otto Abetz’s expert guidance, Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were able to go on working, with German officers attending the opening nights of Sartre’s plays. By allowing a limited cultural pluralism to flourish, ranging from such non-collaborationist radicals to out-and-out fascists and radical anti-Semites like Drieu la Rochelle and Céline, German cultural propaganda did its best to showcase their defence of West European culture against the barbarism of the East. In particular, they tried to enrol other nations’ heroes, stressing the Anglophobic legacy of Joan of Arc in France, while issuing stamps with Rembrandt’s head in place of the exiled monarch in the Netherlands and making a beautifully shot period film about the artist in 1942. Such cultural propaganda, with its limited scope for pluralism, may have served to dampen down support for the underground resistance movements, which remained very small at this stage. But it also proved difficult to persuade the Dutch, Belgians, French and Norwegians to volunteer for the Waffen SS divisions. It was far easier to recruit from ethnic Germans in Romania and Hungary or from Ukrainians in Galicia and Muslims in Bosnia.
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As the SS jettisoned its claims to ‘racial’ exclusivity, it had to re-educate its own members. It was a steep learning curve. In September 1941, after hundreds of Muslim prisoners of war had been executed, Reinhard Heydrich sent out a directive to all the SS
Einsatzgruppen,
warning them that ‘the circumcision’ and ‘Jewish appearance’ of the Turkic Muslims did not amount to ‘proof of Jewish descent’. As Otto Ohlendorf’s
Einsatzgruppe
D extended its slaughter to the Crimea, it wiped out the Ashkenazis and Turkic-speaking Krymchaks, but, on special instructions from Berlin, spared the Turkic Karaites who had converted to Judaism centuries earlier; a few hundred were even recruited into the Crimean Tatar volunteer units.
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Confused by the ethnically and religiously mixed, multilingual force to which they now belonged, German soldiers were often not so discriminating when it came to their own ‘Asiatics’. A German train was sighted in Warsaw on which the last carriage had been daubed with the instruction, ‘For Poles, Jews and Legionnaires’. Despite all the propagandists’ efforts to forge a more inclusive and tolerant attitude to their new allies, German soldiers remained, for the most part, wedded to their ethno-racist preconceptions. In June 1942, Fritz Probst was in high spirits as he listened to the wail of the German Stukas striking Red Army targets when the summer offensive got under way. The Thuringian family man still found time to shudder at the sight of the Soviet prisoners as they passed the German column. ‘You really have to see the Asiatic prisoners and the like, if they had come to our Fatherland, there’d have been such an enormous killing, because they aren’t human and also not harmless animals; they are wild beasts.’ As Fritz Probst repeated the idioms and metaphors he had imbibed since the start of the war, he could not get used to a different set of prescriptions. If anything, surviving the crisis of 1941–42 had schooled German troops in a common mindset which regarded hanging civilians, burning down villages, driving the inhabitants into the steppes or requisitioning the last of their provisions and winter clothing as natural responses to an overwhelming threat. This psychological transformation of the German soldiers on the eastern front proved irreversible: at key moments core elements of their collective outlook could be called on again, overriding all the complex, individual relations which grew up between occupiers and occupied.
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After six months on the eastern front, Eugen Altrogge set himself the challenge of capturing ‘the essence of the Russian people’ in his drawings. ‘However great the store we set by curtains and culture, wooden floorboards and culture, clean fingernails and culture,’ he wrote to his friend Hans Albring, ‘we mostly understand nothing of the powerful primitivism, simplicity of the soul, naïve strength and terrible violence of this people.’ In order to capture this exotic simplicity in art, Altrogge tried to find a new, ‘less abstract, simpler’ technique of drawing. The two young Catholics were searching for a kind of deep, religious purity, which they believed modern commercial civilisation had destroyed in the West. As his unit approached Stalingrad, Hans Albring went on admiring – and began to collect – icons. Both men were attracted by the physical beauty of Russian women and tried to capture its spiritual dimensions in their drawings. Yet, for all his religious and artistic sensibilities, Hans Albring was no different to Fritz Probst when he wrote about ‘the dehumanised hordes [who] later perpetrated a frightful crime and murdered the helpless wounded who could not be rescued before the dark hours of this deed . . . The devil’s leer is unbearable across this land.’
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Even such self-conscious letter-writers as Albring and Altrogge had stopped reflecting on how ‘hard’ they had become on the eastern front. There was no point reliving their own transformation. Instead, they looked to the emotional constants of home, family and the German culture they had been raised in. As they advanced across the steppe, Altrogge, Albring and Helmut Paulus all referred in their letters to reading Goethe and Hölderlin as well as Ernst Jünger’s recently published diary of the first year of the war,
Gardens and Streets.
These young men came from different parts of Germany, different Christian confessions and held different ranks in the army but they shared a deep attachment to the literary culture they had accumulated through their families and education. Lost in the vast, alien ‘deserts’ of the steppes, they found refuge in the classics.
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To many men, the eastern front appeared a necessary trial, a ghastly ordeal, where hope rested solely on calculating when it would end. A bluff Party member and rather strict father, Fritz Probst was not much given to introspection. But he was desperately conscious of what he was losing. By 1942, his youngest child, Manfred, who had still snuggled up in his mother’s bed at night in the first year of the war, was already starting school. Each new year of his service brought with it a calendar full of missed birthdays. On 6 January, it was their middle child Gundula’s and Probst confessed that ‘I always think of such days with horror, because the children make you realise that you are getting older and, what’s more, they are getting bigger and I can’t share the short time of their childhood.’ It was a year since his last home leave.
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His absence from home seemed to affect the oldest, Karl-Heinz, most. Probst warned his wife Hildegard that she should have reined him in earlier and periodically wrote letters admonishing his son. In 1940 he had appealed in a rather schoolmasterly way to the 12-year-old’s ‘word of honour’, promising him that ‘Mummy will never refuse a request’ if he would only be ‘obedient’. Two years later, Probst sent off a tirade telling the 14-year-old he ‘should be ashamed’ for behaving ‘loutishly’ in his grandmother’s presence. As Karl-Heinz entered the Hitler Youth, his father reminded him of the financial sacrifice they were making by letting him stay on at school beyond the normal
Volksschule
leaving age. And then there was the moral debt he owed: ‘Shame on you. Your father is far away and is helping to prepare a better future for you, so that you don’t have to do it later yourselves and can dedicate yourselves to other tasks, and you just don’t see it. I can only say once more: shame on you.’
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