America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (19 page)

It was not unusual to find Byelorussians serving the Nazis in the Waffen-SS. The latter was a heterogeneous organization through whose ranks nearly one million men of fifteen nationalities eventually passed. Most were German volunteers, but there were also Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Romanians, Hungarians, Yugoslavs, even Muslims.

The names of some Waffen-SS divisions indicate their diverse national composition: SS-Freiwilligen-Panzerdivision-Nederland (Dutch); Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS-Charlemagne (French); Waffen-Grenadierdivision der SS-Lettische No. 2 (Latvians). The motives of the foreigners for joining the Waffen-SS were also diverse, ranging from anticommunism to simple opportunism to desire for adventure. Thus, the Byelorussians cannot be singled out as unique for having joined the Nazi cause. What made them different from most of the other nationalities, however, was their eventual, and curious, fate.

A portion of the division was sent to Warsaw in August 1944 to assist in putting down an uprising by the Polish underground. It was one of the bloodiest episodes of the entire war. The Byelorussian units were accustomed to unrestricted brutality and methods of terror against civilians, and murder, rape, and looting were common occurrences. The revolt was crushed, and the Nazis razed the city as an example. While the Poles fought and died in the ruins of their capital, the Soviet army had deliberately stalled outside the gates of Warsaw waiting for the SS to suppress the rebellion. The massacre spared them, at least temporarily, the problem of dealing with Polish nationalism.

The 30th Division was regarded as experienced in anti-partisan tactics, so it was immediately shipped to Alsace-Lorraine to fight the French underground. More important, the division could be quickly sent into combat in the event of an Allied breakthrough in western France. An alarmed Ostrowsky sought a meeting with Himmler in an attempt to persuade the SS chief to change his mind.
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He knew that his ill-trained peasant terrorists would never stand up against the Allied armies. Ostrowsky also asked that the Byelorussian brigade of the 30th Division be put under Byelorussian command, not just for nationalistic reasons, but also to make certain that his units did not take part in the fighting against Allied troops. If the Third Reich collapsed, Ostrowsky did not want the Allies to treat the Byelorussians as enemies, for he was already hoping to make a deal with them.
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Himmler reluctantly agreed to place the Byelorussian segments of the 30th Division under the control of the puppet government.
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With the help of the SS, Ostrowsky set up an officers’ school and had uniforms and insignia made for the new “Waffen Sturm-brigade Belarus.” The symbol chosen was an ancient religious sign, a cross with two bars equal in length and parallel to each other.
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The Belarus officer cadets had barely time to enroll in the school before they were thrown into battle along with other half-trained units against General George S. Patton’s advancing Third Army. They were routed and a sizable number captured, while the survivors retreated back to Germany after burying their dead near the Swiss border. Orders were issued for the dazed remnants to be thrown into battle against the Red Army. But Ostrowsky, determined to keep the Belarus Brigade together, deliberately dragged his feet in carrying out the order.
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Ostrowsky also resisted attempts by Gustav Hilger, the Foreign Office liaison to the SS for émigré affairs, to unite all the Russian groups into an anticommunist Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia. Collaborators were Hilger’s specialty.

In the winter of 1944-45 the Third Reich, in the hope of staving off the Russian advance, abandoned its anti-Slavic ideology and enthusiastically embraced its Eastern European allies. Nearly twenty collaborationist “Governments-in-Exile” were formed in Berlin as a belated sop to the nationalist aspirations of the émigrés.
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Hilger met frequently with Buchardt of the SS and members of Gehlen’s staff to create a political structure to unite the émigrés against the Communists. However, infighting among various Nazi ministries delayed the formation of Hilger’s umbrella organization of collaborators. As a strong nationalist, Ostrowsky believed that such an organization would subordinate Byelorussian interests to those of its other members, particularly the White Russian NTS, which opposed all attempts by the various nationalities to break away from a central Russian state.

In the meantime, Himmler had given his blessing to a “special intelligence operations” section within the SS that was to organize resistance behind Soviet lines. SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny, who had led the commandos who rescued Benito Mussolini from captivity in September 1943, was placed in charge. Under Skorzeny’s guidance, a paratroop and commando school for Byelorussian Nazis was established at Dahlwitz, near Berlin, where they were trained in radio communication, encoding, sabotage, and assassination. After parachuting into Soviet-held territory they were to make contact with the auxiliaries who had been left behind when the collaborators had fled and to launch a guerrilla war, just as the Russians had done to the Nazis.

Skorzeny began the campaign by airdropping some thirty Byelorussians behind enemy lines. Known as the “Black Cats,” the unit was commanded by Michael Vitushka and scored some initial successes. Vitushka capitalized on the disorder in the Soviet rear areas to organize elements of the police force that had been left behind. Other Byelorussian units slipped through the dense Belovezh Forest along the Polish border, and a full-scale guerrilla war erupted. Skorzeny also tried to activate the network of collaborators that had deliberately been left behind during the German evacuation. To ensure cooperation, the agents were told that unless they joined the fight, details of their services to the Nazis would be leaked to the Russians. Such threats would have been effective except for the fact that the NKVD already knew the identity of every secret collaborator.

In evacuating the Byelorussian quislings, the Germans had brought out the Soviet spies among them as well. Soviet intelligence was continually apprised of the latest moves of the collaborators. In fact, several NKVD informants were alleged to have worked their way into the battalion undergoing training at Dahlwitz itself. Even before Ostrowsky reviewed his men at a graduation parade, Soviet intelligence was working on a counter-plan to destroy the guerrilla units before they could do much damage. The entire population along a fifty-mile border strip was removed and transported to Siberia. No more spies could cross from Poland. Armed with reports provided by their agents, the Russians went through each village and town arresting those who had in any way served the Germans. There were many arrests, and many executions. Quickly and efficiently the NKVD rolled up Skorzeny’s guerrilla fighters and most of Ostrowsky’s informants. Three years of SS effort in organizing the Byelorussian informants network was destroyed in a little over three months. Most of the paratroopers escaped and made their way back to Germany, but a few, including Vitushka, never returned. The original Black Cat unit was hunted down, and Vitushka himself was captured and executed.

Ostrowsky realized that it was only a matter of time before his commandos were caught and if he were to make use of them in his bargaining with the western Allies he would have to move swiftly. He had had considerable experience with the thoroughness of the NKVD in dealing with infiltrators. Earlier, when the SS had tried to place a group of his men behind Soviet lines, the Soviets assigned an entire intelligence division, almost 10,000 men, to comb through each house in the area in search of the spies. Intelligence work is largely the gathering of great quantities of routine information in the hope of discovering an occasional gem. The Soviets guaranteed that they would uncover even the smallest jewel by systematically searching and sifting all relevant sources of information. If it took 10,000 men one week to interrogate a few hundred thousand people, so be it. The spies had been caught and dealt with.

With Germany collapsing around him, Ostrowsky recognized that the only politics that mattered now were the politics of survival. Victorious Allied armies were advancing on all fronts – from the east, south, and west. Cities had been bombed to rubble by thousand-plane raids. Refugees fleeing the Soviets clogged the roads and spread nightmarish stories of rape and murder. Factories had been either leveled or shut down because of power failure. The machinery of government had been shattered, the telephone exchanges destroyed, and Hitler had disappeared into a bunker deep beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Nazi Germany was dying in a Wagnerian funeral pyre ignited by Hitler, and Ostrowsky was determined to avoid the flames.

Envoys were dispatched to the American, British, and French armies with the Byelorussians’ last bargaining chip – their offer of an “existing” spy network and an “active” guerrilla army to fight Communists. On the surface it looked as if Ostrowsky and his intelligence chief, Mikolai Abramtchik, were the masterminds of a giant espionage network behind Soviet lines. By the time the Allies discovered that Ostrowsky’s spies were long since dead or had been “turned” by the Soviets, the Byelorussians would be safely ensconced behind Allied lines, where they could await the day when the West took up the anti-Bolshevik crusade.

Ostrowsky decided that the best chance for safety lay with the Polish government-in-exile in London and its anti-communist leader, General Wladyslaw Anders. Ostrowsky’s son, Wiktor, had managed to escape the Soviet attack on Poland in 1939 and had made his way to Egypt, where he joined Anders’ army. Franz Kushel, Ostrowsky’s minister of war, also had a link to Anders. Kushel and Anders had been cellmates in Moscow’s Lubyanka prison after the Russian takeover. They were among a handful of captured Polish officers not slaughtered by the Communists at the Katyn massacre.

With the help of Abramtchik‘s contacts in Paris and Switzerland a deal was quickly made. General Anders, a bluff professional soldier without political guile, agreed to welcome the Belarus Brigade as part of a Free Polish army to liberate his country from what he feared would become a long Communist occupation. It is one of the ironies of history that the Poles, who had recently suffered so much at the hands of the Byelorussians, were first to give them shelter from the avenging Russians. But there is no evidence that the Polish government-in-exile in London made the connection between the Belarus Brigade and the perpetrators of the holocaust in Byelorussia.
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To all appearances Ostrowsky was a dedicated nationalist willing to work with any ally who might free his country from Communist occupation. Such views met with much sympathy. There were many officers, especially in the American military, who were ardent in their hatred of communism and openly advocated the immediate conquest of the Soviet Union.

In the spring of 1945, as the Third Reich was collapsing, Ostrowsky ordered Kushel to march the Belarus Brigade toward General Patton’s Third Army. Patton was both a friend of Anders and an outspoken anti-communist, so Ostrowsky hoped he would provide temporary shelter for the Byelorussians until they could link up with Anders. The brigade members removed the double cross from their collar tabs, hid their flags and records, and, disguising themselves as escaping POWs, marched toward the sanctuary of the American lines.
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The Belarus SS settled down as “prisoners” in an American internment center just outside the city of Regensburg.

[
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] It is not known whether Ostrowsky had a personal confrontation with Himmler, but he had told his associates he would make every effort to meet with him personally.

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] Some nationalities had more than one representative body in Berlin. The Byelorussians, for example, had one national committee willing to work with Russian collaborators, and another committee, headed by Ostrowsky, that opposed such a union. Similarly, a faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists accepted the offer of Nazi political recognition while a rival group continued to haggle over terms.

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] The Polish secret service maintained an active spy network in Byelorussia during 1941-42. Their reports on Byelorussian atrocities under the collaborators were forwarded to the Polish Minister of the Interior in London, and to the OSS. Copies of these reports are in the files of the Sikorski Institute in London and of Yad Vashem in Israel.

General George S. Patton, 1945

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Early on the morning of May 7,1945 a telephone rang in General George S. Patton’s mobile headquarters trailer in southern Germany. General Omar N. Bradley, commander of the Twelfth Army Group, was on the line. “Ike just called me, George,” he said. “The Germans have surrendered. It takes effect at midnight, May eighth. We’re to hold in place everywhere up and down the line. There’s no sense in taking any more casualties now.” The truculent Patton had wanted to plunge ahead with his tanks and capture Prague before the Red Army got there.
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1 As the Third Army warily settled into place, Dr. Stanislaw Hrynkievich, who had been dispatched by Ostrowsky as the Byelorussian envoy to the Americans, sought a meeting with Patton’s intelligence chief.