The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (73 page)

The Ukraine was perhaps the most blood-soaked place of all. In Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), egged on by the Germans, massacred between 60,000 and 80,000 Poles. Whole villages were wiped out, men beaten to death, women raped and mutilated, babies bayoneted. In the Polish village of Leonowka, Dominik Tarnawski was shot by
Ukrainians but managed to escape; his family was not so fortunate. His friend Tadeusz Piotrowski describes their fate:

First, they raped his wife. Then, they proceeded to execute her by tying her up to a nearby tree and cutting off her breasts. As she hung there bleeding to death, they began to hurl her two-year-old son against the house wall repeatedly until his spirit left his body. Finally, they shot her two daughters. When their bloody deeds were done and all had perished, they threw the bodies into a deep well in front of the house. Then, they set the house ablaze.

This was not an isolated atrocity. Waldemar Lotnik, a Polish teenager who escaped from a German labour camp and joined a Polish ‘Peasant Battalion’, was just about to rape a girl when he realized he knew her family and remembered her as a child. As another Pole recalled, ‘Stories abounded of Polish mothers being held by the Ukrainian Nationalists and forced to watch as their families were dismembered piece by piece; of pregnant women being eviscerated; of vivisected pregnant women having cats sewn into their bleeding abdomens; of Ukrainian husbands murdering their own Polish wives; of Ukrainian wives murdering their own Polish husbands; of Ukrainian fathers murdering their own sons in order to prevent them from murdering their own Polish mothers; of sons of Polish-Ukrainian heritage being sawn in half because, the Nationalists said, they were half Polish; of children being strung up on household fences; of helpless infants being dashed against buildings or hurled into burning houses.’ Here was ethnic conflict not merely between neighbours, but within families. The internecine war in the Ukraine only grew more ferocious as the war progressed, with some Ukrainians fighting for the Axis, some for the Allies and others for an independent Ukraine.

In the Balkans, too, there were multiple civil wars along ethnic, religious and ideological lines. Yugoslavia had fallen apart in the wake of the German invasion of April 1941. Seizing the moment, the Croatian leader Ante Pavelić had pledged to side with Hitler. In the ensuing chaos, his Ustašas waged a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against their Serbian neighbours in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, torturing and killing hundreds of thousands of them. The populations of entire villages were packed into their churches and burned to death, or were transported to be murdered at camps like
Jasenovac. Serbian Četniks and Partisans repaid these crimes in kind. Of the million or so people who died in Yugoslavia during the war, most were killed by other Yugoslavs. This included nearly all of Bosnia’s 14,000 Jews. In Greece the German occupation was the cue for bitter conflict. There, as in Yugoslavia, a three-cornered war raged – between the foreign invaders and nationalists, but also between nationalists and indigenous Communists. When Bulgaria annexed southern Dobruja from Romania, tens of thousands of people were expelled from their homes on either side of the new border.

Most empires purport to bring peace and order. They may divide in order to rule, but they generally rule in pursuit of stability. The Nazi empire divided the peoples of Europe as it ruled them – though, ironically, the divisions that opened up in Central and Eastern Europe generally had as much to do with religion as with race (most obviously in the conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians or between Croats and Serbs). But the ‘skilful utilization of inter-ethnic rivalry’ the Germans consciously practised did not lead (in the words of one German officer) to the ‘total political and economic pacification’ of occupied territory. On the contrary, in many places their rule soon degenerated into little more than the sponsorship of local feuds; the institutionalization of civil war as a mode of governance.

There was, it must be said, an irony in all of this. For the more the Germans relied on foreign allies and collaborators the more multiethnic their empire necessarily became.

The first symptom of this unintended transformation was the changing complexion of Hitler’s armed forces. The army that invaded the Soviet Union included 600,000 Croats, Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks and Spaniards. In addition to fighting alongside troops from allied countries, German soldiers also increasingly saw foreigners wearing German uniforms. Franco had declined to join Hitler’s war in the West, but he permitted the formation of a Spanish ‘Blue Division’ (named after the blue shirts of its Falangist volunteers) to fight against the Soviet Union; it served with distinction
between October 1941 and December 1943, when it was reduced to a rump ‘Legion’ to maintain the credibility of Spanish neutrality. French volunteersalso fought, in the
Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchevisme
, as part of a Wehrmacht infantry division. Other foreigners generally wore the uniform of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the SS, a reflection of Himmler’s enthusiasm for broadening the available pool of ‘Nordic’ blood, as well as the Wehrmacht’s reluctance to surrender large numbers of Germans of military age to the SS.

Formally, some of these foreigners were not supposed to be foreign at all; they were
Volksdeutsche
, like the 17,000 Croatian Germans recruited or conscripted into the Prinz Eugen division, the 1,300 Danish Germans who volunteered to serve in the Wiking division and the Hungarian Germans who served in the Horst Wessel and Maria Theresa divisions. Residents of Alsace, Lorraine or Luxembourg who could claim two or more German grandparents were also offered Reich citizenship if they joined the Waffen-SS. From an early stage, however, non-Germans were also recruited, beginning with Dutchmen, Belgian Flemings, Danes and Norwegians in the summer of 1940. These nations were supposedly ‘Germanic’ or ‘Nordic’ in character, though there were also Waffen-SS recruits from Latin countries, notably Belgian Walloons. In all, these West European countries produced at most 117,000 men, not counting the tiny British Free Corps, made up of around fifty prisoners of war. Recruiting proved easier in Eastern Europe. May 1941 saw the formation of a Finnish legion, which proved to be a highly effective fighting force, followed by Latvian and Estonian divisions. The Waffen-SS also accepted Ukrainians, Slovaks and Croats. With every passing month after Stalingrad, the criteria for Waffen-SS membership grew more elastic, forcing Himmler to cite the multinational structure of the old Habsburg army as a precedent. Ukrainians were recruited; so were Hungarians, Bulgarians and Serbs. In February 1943 the first of three divisions was formed of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims, who wore fezes decorated with SS runes and were led in their prayers by regimental imams notionally under the supervision of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Out of all forty-seven Waffen-SS divisions, twenty were formed wholly or partly out of non-German recruits or conscripts and a further five out of
Volksdeutsche
Towards the end of the war, in fact, there were more non-Germans than Germans serving in Himmler’s army. At a meeting with the Chief of Staff of the Latvian Legion, Himmler himself offered a rationale for this seeming paradox:

Every SS officer, regardless of nationality… must look to the whole living space of the family of German nations [Himmler specified the German, Dutch, Flemish, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Baltic nations]. To combine all these nations into one big family is the most important task at present. It is natural in this process that the German nation, as the largest and strongest, must assume the leading role. [But] this unification has to take place on the principle of equality… [Later] this family… has to take on the mission to include all Roman nations, and then the Slavic nations, because they, too, are of the white race. It is only through unification of the white race that Western culture can be saved from the danger of the yellow race. At the present time, the Waffen-SS is leading in this respect because its organization is based on equality. The Waffen-SS comprises not only German, Roman and Slavic but even Islamic units… fighting in close togetherness.

Also fighting on the German side as auxiliaries – usually known as ‘Hiwis’ (short for
Hilfswillige
, literally ‘those willing to help’) or
Osttruppen
– were a variety of different groups from the occupied Soviet Union: not only ethnic Germans from ‘Transnistria’, the Romanian-occupied area between the lower reaches of the rivers Dnestr and Bug, but also Ukrainians. Six months after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, six new national legions were formed from former Soviet peoples identified as racially and politically reliable: Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, North Caucasians, Turkestanis and Volga Tatars. By late 1942 there were fifteen battalions of such troops; by early 1943 an additional six had been created. Don and Kuban Cossack defectors and deserters were also employed, not only on the Eastern Front but also in the Balkans and even in France. At Stalingrad, Paulus’s 6th Army had around 50,000 such auxiliaries attached to its front-line divisions, over a quarter of its total strength, rising to around a half in the case of the 71st and 76th infantry divisions. When the 6th Army was encircled, between 11 and 22 per cent of those still fighting were non-German. After Stalingrad as many as160 battalions of Soviet PoWs fought on the German side, numbering as many as a
million men. ‘Does this mean you will kill your own people?’ one group of these unfortunates was asked. ‘What can we do?’ they replied. ‘If we run back to the Russians, we would be treated as traitors. And if we refuse to fight, we’ll be shot by the Germans.’ As this suggests, most of those Soviet citizens who fought for the Germans were non-Russians.
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But even some ethnic Russians were, after much debate, permitted to bear arms on the German side. Variousanti-Soviet forces had in fact sprung into being in the immediate aftermath of Barbarossa, including a Russian National Army of Liberation and the Russian People’s National Army, though the Germans had been very reluctant to legitimize such spontaneous organizations. Only in the final stages of the war did they sanction the creation of a Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia and an anti-Communist Russian Liberation Army under General Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov, who had been taken prisoner by the Germans in July 1942 after an unsuccessful bid to raise the siege of Leningrad. Though sent to the front in March 1945, Vlasov’s army saw action only briefly before refusing to follow German orders and joining Czech nationalists in Prague in their revolt against the SS.

Meanwhile, running counter to all the grandiose plans for German colonization of foreign living space, the insatiable demand for labour of the Third Reich’s military-industrial complex and the conscription of a rising share of able-bodied Germans into the armed forces meant that Germany itself began to be ‘colonized’ by foreign workers. The number in the Reich rose from 301,000 in 1939 (less than 1 per cent of all employees) to around two million in the autumn of 1940, to more than seven million by 1944 – nearly a fifth of the workforce. They came from all over Europe, some voluntarily, others under duress: from Belgium, Denmark, France, Holland and Italy; from Hungary and Yugoslavia too. At first, it was skilled workers from Western Europe who were attracted by the rapidly growing German economy; the men who built the road to the Eagle’s Nest were in fact Italian stonemasons, willing beneficiaries of Hitler’s boom. As the war
wore on, however, it was Poles who came to predominate. Few of them came of their own volition. Already in September 1941 there were more than a million Poles working in the Reich, accounting for just under half the total foreign workforce. By July 1943 around 1.3 million workers, not including prisoners of war, had been sent to the Reich from the Government-General. There were soon more Poles in Germany than Germans in Poland. After 1941 they were joined by comparable numbers of Ukrainians and other former Soviet citizens. Many of these were women; in the autumn of 1943, there were 1.7 million female foreign workers employed in the Reich, most of them from occupied Polish or Soviet territory. Here was a headache for a regime that aspired to Germanizing Europe – an ethnographic Europeanization of Germany, a process in conflict at once with their own racial theory and with the sentiments of ordinary Germans.

One unintended consequence of all this was that, even as Nazi racial experts engaged in the laborious racial classification of Poles and Czechs, the very tendency they wished to eradicate – miscegenation – was continuing. Indeed, the chaos caused by war and forced resettlement positively increased the sexual contact between Germans and non-Germans. On March 8, 1940, new police regulations had to be issued for Polish workers in Germany, the seventh of which specified bluntly that ‘anyone who has sexual intercourse with a German man or woman, or approaches them in any other improper manner’ would be liable to the death penalty (later specified as death by hanging). If a Polish woman became pregnant by a German, the pregnancy would be compulsorily terminated. The only qualification was that, as in the annexed territories, RuSHA assessors had the option of recommending a convicted Pole for Germanization if he or she fulfilled the requisite racial criteria. Beginning in late 1940, ‘prohibited contact with foreigners and prisoners of war’ became a criminal offence; this applied not just to sexual relations but to almost any kind of intimacy, including giving foreigners food, drink or tobacco. A special Reich Law of May 1943, ‘concerning Protected Membership of the German
Reich’, imposed further limits on Polish workers’ sexual freedom: in addition to facing execution if they had sexual relations with German women, they were not to marry until they were aged twenty-eight in the case of men or twenty-five in the case of women, and their choice of spouse was confined to Poles not eligible for Germanization. As with the ‘racial defilement’ legislation, these measures were implemented. As early as August 1940 a seventeen-year-old Polish farm worker was publicly hanged for having sex with a German woman who was actually a prostitute. In the first half of 1942 a total of 530 out of 1,146 death sentences handed out by regular courts were passed against Poles, including ten for sex with German women and forty-seven for ‘moral offences’. Under an RSHA decree of August 1940, British and French prisoners of war caught
in flagrante
with German women were also supposed to be sentenced to death, though in practice they were generally given up to three years’ imprisonment. German men convicted of sleeping with Polish women faced up to three months in a concentration camp. Steps were also taken against German women who had relations with ‘foreign workers’. A Krupp factory girl was sentenced to fifteen months in jail for an illicit liaison with a French PoW. In some cases, transgressors were publicly humiliated (by having their hair shaved off) or even sent to concentration camps like Ravensbrück (where they were known as ‘bed politicals’).