To understand how certain people in the pages that follow escaped punishment for their crimes, it is necessary to look briefly at one of the most prominent features of the Nazi political philosophy: extreme anticommunism and particularly fanatic hatred of the USSR.
The slaughter that followed the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 is without equal in world history. Next to the Nazis’ operation of the anti-Jewish extermination centers at Treblinka, Sobibor, Birkenau, and elsewhere, the most terrible crimes of the entire war took place in name of anticommunism in the German-occupied territories on the eastern front. Civilian casualties in these areas were so enormous, so continuous, and so extreme that even counting the dead has proved impossible. Scholars have attempted to deduce the numbers of fatalities from captured German records, reports of Einsatzgruppen (mobile execution squads), prisoner of war (POW) camp mortality reports, and Soviet census statistics. The evidence indicates that between 3 and 4 million captured Soviet soldiers were intentionally starved to death in German POW camps between 1941 and 1944. At least a million and a half Jews were exterminated inside Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, mainly through mass shootings but also through gassing, deportation to extermination camps, looting and destruction of villages, hangings, and torture. The generally accepted figure for all Soviet war dead is 20 million human beings—about 15 percent of the population of the country at the time—but the destruction was so vast that even this number can be only an educated guess.
The Nazis deliberately used famine as a political weapon in the East, and it soon became the largest single killer. As the German invasion of the USSR began, General (later Field Marshal) Erich von Manstein ordered that “the Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated.… In hostile cities, a large part of the population will have to starve.” Nothing, Manstein continued, “may, out of a sense of mistaken humaneness, be distributed to prisoners or to the population—unless they are in the service of the German Wehrmacht.”*
This was a war not only of conquest but of extermination. Entire regions of the USSR were to be cleared of the existing Communist apparatus and of Slavic “subhumans” to make way for settlement by “Aryan pioneers.” Above all, it was believed necessary to conduct an ideological war to wipe out the “Jewish-Bolshevist plague” and those who were its “carriers.”
The Nazis’ mass killings at Lidice, Czechoslovakia, and Oradour, France—where the Germans rounded up the town’s population in retaliation for the assassination of a German official, murdered the captives, and shipped any survivors to concentration camps, then burned the place to the ground—are well remembered in the West today.
But inside the Nazi-occupied USSR there were not just one or two Lidices. There were hundreds. Mass killings of the Lidice type took place at Rasseta (372 dead), Vesniny (about 200 dead, mainly women and children), and Dolina (469 dead, again mainly women and children), to name only three. In the Osveya district in northern Belorussia alone, in the single month of March 1943, the Nazis and collaborationist troops devastated some 158 villages, according to Times of London correspondent Alexander Werth. “All able bodied men [were] deported as slaves and all the women, children and old people murdered,” Werth reports. This pattern of massacre and scorched earth warfare was repeated again and again throughout the war on the eastern front.
Nazi warfare against partisans was consistently brutal throughout Europe, and the Germans and their collaborators committed numerous violations of the “laws and customs of war,” such as torture, mass killings of innocent persons in retaliation for guerrilla attacks, and murder of hostages across the Continent. It was in the East, however, that such killings reached a truly frenzied level. At Odessa, for example, the Nazis and their Romanian collaborators destroyed 19,000 Jews and other so-called subversive elements in a single night in retaliation for a partisan bombing that had killed about a dozen Romanian soldiers. Axis troops rounded up another 40,000 Jews and executed them during the following week. The SS used gas wagons disguised as Red Cross vans to kill about 7,000 women and children in the south, near Krasnodar. At least 100,000 Jews and Slavs were slain at Babi Yar, near Kiev, and so on, and on, and on.2
Hitler’s high command carefully planned the extermination campaign on the eastern front, drawing up directives for mass killings and distributing them to Wehrmacht and SS commanders. They established special SS teams devoted exclusively to mass murder—the Einsatzgruppen and their subgroups, the Sonderkommandos and Einsatzkommandos—and set up liaison between the killing teams and the army commanders at the front to ensure that the killing teams received the necessary intelligence and logistical support. The SS carefully tabulated the results of the carnage as it took place, wrote it up, and sent word back to Berlin. Teams of inspectors and experts (among them men who were later employed as experts on Soviet affairs by U.S. intelligence agencies) traveled the eastern front throughout the war to make sure the exterminations or confiscations of food from occupied territories were going properly and were being carried out, as one Einsatzgruppe leader was to testify at Nuremberg, in a manner which was “humane under the circumstances.”3
What has since come to be termed “political warfare”—that is, the use of propaganda, sabotage, and collaborators to undermine an enemy’s will to fight—played an important role in German strategy from the beginning of the conflict. Specialized Nazi-trained propaganda and terror teams made up of native collaborators were among the first units that marched with the German armies across Europe.
The Nazis originally planned to conquer the USSR in a matter of months, and for a time it looked as though they might succeed. But the German offensive bogged down, their supply lines stretched longer and became more vulnerable, and the partisan movement in the German rear grew stronger. As the fall of 1941 turned to winter, army commanders on the eastern front began to place increasing stress on using native anti-Communist collaborators to administer regions under Nazi occupation and to supplement Germany’s fighting troops, particularly in antipartisan warfare.
Germany’s Soviet affairs specialists contended that a systematic program of employing collaborators and quislings, not unlike that which Germany had used in the occupied zones of Western and Central Europe, was a necessary tactic to achieve a military victory over the USSR. They argued that the invading Nazis should attempt to convince the Soviet people that the Germans would permit collaborators to enjoy a measure of wealth and power under Nazi sponsorship, that the occupied territories would be granted some sort of limited “national independence,” that churches would be reopened, and that the collective farm system would be dissolved. The more extreme types of Nazi brutality should be temporarily restricted, they asserted, in order not to interfere with stabilizing Nazi power in the occupied areas. Anti-Communist émigré groups already on the Germans’ payroll, such as the Natsional’no-Trudovoi Soyuz (NTS) and the Ukrainian nationalist movement, Organizatsiia Ukrainskikh Natsionalistov (OUN), were promoted as the Nazis’ best instruments for applying this combined political/military strategy inside the occupied zone.4
Hitler, however, rejected such reasoning. His hatred of the Slavs in the East was both racial and political, and he had already laid plans to exterminate the majority of the Slavic people once he had finished with the Jews. He had little interest in setting up any sort of Slavic states in the East, not even those ruled by Nazi quislings.
But political warfare tactics continued to gain popularity among Wehrmacht and some SS officers who were alarmed by Germany’s disastrous losses in the field. These men began to criticize some aspects of the German occupation of the USSR, a fact which has been repeatedly raised in their defense since the end of the war. Such “criticisms” of Hitler’s strategy cannot be taken at face value, however. One leading advocate of political warfare, Karl-Georg Pfleiderer, for example, followed up a 1942 inspection tour of the Ukraine with a report that the famine created by the German army was a bad practice—but only because it would interfere with Nazi efforts to extort
more food from the occupied areas the following year.
Even that sort of logic did not apply to the treatment of Jews. The political warfare faction of the German leadership “washed their hands of the Jews of Russia,” notes Holocaust historian Gerald Reitlinger. Mercy for the Jews “had nothing to do with winning the war against Stalin” for the Germans, he writes; “it was not essential to the war effort.” Indeed, according to Reitlinger, advocates of political warfare in the East often used aggressive anti-Semitism as a means of legitimizing their otherwise controversial program.5
As the military situation of the German troops worsened, German intelligence experts on the USSR found themselves in increasing demand. Several of these consultants had been born in czarist Russia, all spoke the language, and all of them had made careers out of their expertise in Soviet affairs. Some such authorities, like Franz Six and Emil Augsburg, were senior SS officers and true believers in the Nazi cause who had personally led mobile extermination squads in the East. Others, like Gustav Hilger in the Foreign Office and Ernst Köstring, Hans Heinrich Herwarth, Reinhard Gehlen, and Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt of the Wehrmacht, appear to have been motivated primarily by a sense of duty and a nationalistic pride in what they perceived to be a historic mission to eradicate communism.6
Native collaborators and defectors became the key to the German political warfare group’s plans. In the course of the war, the Nazis enlisted about a million such collaborators, including Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, Cossacks, and, of course, large numbers of Russians. The Osttruppen (eastern troops) program, commanded by Köstring and Herwarth, embraced all eastern collaborationist troops under German army administration, while the SS recruited its own defectors into units that eventually became part of the Waffen SS. A variety of auxiliary police, militia, and other antipartisan formations organized directly by the Nazis or by collaborationist local administrations under Nazi control filled out the picture.
The jobs assigned to these collaborators ranged from hauling ammunition for frontline troops to mass executions of Jews—the dirty work, in short, that the Nazis often did not want to do for themselves. For the Germans, these units became a living laboratory for the development of sophisticated propaganda, guerrilla warfare, and intelligence techniques for use against the Soviet government. After the war was over, as will be seen, they became the raw material from which the new U.S. political warfare capability was built.
The most important common cause among the German political warriors during (and after) the war became a “Russian Liberation Movement,” which they financed and armed. Their aim was nothing less than uniting all the squabbling collaborationist groups throughout the Nazi-occupied USSR into a single anti-Stalin army. The plan never succeeded, in part because of obstruction from Hitler, who feared the prospect of any all-Russian army, even one commanded by Nazi officers.
Hitler was, however, willing to go along with the pretense of a supposedly independent “Russian Liberation Movement” as a propaganda ploy, so a psychological warfare operation built around those themes was undertaken by Gehlen and Strik-Strikfeldt as early as 1941 and continued throughout the war. In 1942 this effort became known as the Vlasov Army after Andrei Vlasov, a former general in the Red Army whom the Germans had chosen to be the crusade’s leader. Vlasov, who had been personally honored by Stalin in 1941 for his courage in the defense of Moscow against German attack, had defected to the Nazis the next year following a humiliating defeat. A tragic figure of Dostoyevskyan proportions, Vlasov apparently sincerely believed that the Nazi government would back his effort to raise an anti-Communist army from among German-held POWs and refugees, then train and equip that army, all the while asking next to nothing in return. Such dreams, of course, were bound to lead to ruin. In the end Vlasov lost both his army and his life.*
In 1942, however, Vlasov was just the man that the political warfare faction was looking for, and the creation of an army of Soviet defectors under German control using him as a figurehead became its central preoccupation for the remainder of the war. “The Germans started a form of blackmail against the surviving Russian war prisoners,” war correspondent Alexander Werth notes. “[E]ither go into the Vlasov Army or starve.” The overwhelming majority of Soviet POWs refused the offer, and about 2 million POWs who were given the choice of collaboration or starvation between 1942 and 1945 chose death before they would aid the Nazis. But many thousands of Russians did join the invaders as porters, cooks, concentration camp guards, and informers, and later as fighting troops under German control.7
As will be seen, the Vlasov Army has frequently been portrayed in the West since the war as the most noble and idealistic of the Nazis’ émigré legions. Vlasov was “convinced that it was possible to overthrow Stalin and establish another form of government in Russia,” writes U.S. psychological warfare consultant Wallace Carroll in a widely circulated 1949 feature story promoting American recruitment of Vlasov’s veterans. “What he wanted was a ‘democratic’ government, and by ‘democratic’ he meant … [a] republican and parliamentary system.”8
In reality, Vlasov’s organization consisted in large part of reassigned veterans from some of the most depraved SS and “security” units of the Nazis’ entire killing machine, regardless of what Vlasov himself may have wanted. By 1945 about half of Vlasov’s troops had been drawn from the SS Kommando Kaminsky, which had earlier been led by the Belorussian collaborator Bronislav Kaminsky. *
The Kaminsky militia’s loyalty to the Nazis won it an official commission in the Waffen SS, quite an honor for Slavic “subhumans,” coming from the Germans. They went on to spearhead the bloody suppression of the heroic 1944 Warsaw Ghetto rebellion with such bestial violence that even German General Hans Guderian was appalled and called for their removal from the field. The Germans eventually caught Kaminsky pocketing loot that he was supposed to have turned over to the Reich. They executed him in the last days of the uprising.
With Kaminsky himself gone, the SS then folded together his remaining troops with other Russian turncoats from POW camps, plus a variety of other ethnic Russian and Ukrainian Schumabataillone, or security units.9 Many of these new soldiers had histories similar in all important respects to those of the Kaminsky men. They are who made up the “idealistic” Vlasov Army.
The German political warriors were themselves split over the traditionally knotty question of the minority nationalities in the USSR. Advocates of political warfare tactics within the Nazi Foreign Office, the SS, and German military intelligence, for example, generally favored uniting all the defectors and collaborators from the USSR into the Vlasov Army. The figureheads of that force were generally of Russian ethnic background and sharply opposed to the nationalistic ambitions of the Ukrainians, Caucasians, and other minority groups within the USSR.
Alfred Rosenberg’s nonmilitary (but thoroughly Nazi) ministry for the occupied eastern territories argued, on the other hand, that the Baltic, Ukrainian, and Islamic minority groups from the periphery of the USSR should be encouraged to create separate “national liberation armies” to free their homelands from both “Jewish-communism” and the imperialism of the Russians. Rosenberg’s ministry created about a dozen “governments-in-exile” for Belorussians, the Crimean Tatars, Soviet Georgians, and other minority groups inside the USSR to carry out this program.
The old czarist Russia, it will be recalled, had been an expansionist empire for centuries and had gradually conquered much of Central Asia and the northern approaches to the Middle East. The subject peoples of those territories—the Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kalmyks, and others—were primarily Muslim by religion and of Turkic or Mongolian ethnic background, with languages and cultures sharply different from those of the Orthodox Christian czars who attempted to rule them from Moscow.
Similarly, czarist Russia had also repeatedly attempted to assimilate the peoples along its European border to the west of Moscow. There Russians had historically clashed with the Lithuanians, Poles, and Romanians over a long strip of dispu
ted territory stretching north to south from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Perhaps the most important prize in those early conflicts was the Ukraine, a rich, ethnically distinct area on the southeastern border of modern-day Poland.
The revolution of 1917 had added still another layer of complexity to the bitterness among these groups and had intensified the existing ethnic, class, and religious antagonisms. Many of the subject peoples—notably the Ukrainians, Armenians, and Georgians—attempted to set up new nation-states in their territories in the wake of the fall of the czar. All the major European powers, now including the predominantly Russian Bolsheviks, jockeyed for power in the contested regions, each of them backing a favored faction of the rebellious minority groups in a bid to expand its influence. By 1925 many of those struggles had been settled through force of arms in favor of the Soviets, particularly in the south and east of what was now the USSR. But the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in the north had managed to preserve a fragile national independence, and Poland had gained thousands of square miles of the Ukraine under the armistice that ended World War I.
These earlier upheavals had left a powerful legacy of ethnic and religious discontent inside the USSR and had led to the creation of large anti-Communist émigré communities in several major European capitals. The violence and bloodshed that accompanied Stalinist land reform and the suppression of religion during the 1930s ensured that many of those wounds remained open.
Alfred Rosenberg’s vision was to make use of these conflicts as a means of advancing what he perceived to be Germany’s racial and national mission in the East. The German intelligence services had also systematically recruited sympathizers among the various émigré groups and by the eve of World War II had trained and armed several large squadrons of Ukrainian nationalists for use in both the 1939 division of Poland and the later blitzkrieg attack on the USSR.
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