The relationship between these forces and their German sponsors was complex and shifted repeatedly in the course of the war. As some minority nationalist leaders saw it, it was they who were using the Germans, not the other way around, in order to pursue their own aspirations of power. The German response to such ambitions reflected all the classical dilemmas of an imperial power caught between its desire for absolute control and the practical necessity of relying on minor allies with dreams of their own to achieve that end. The various factions of the Nazi state fought bitterly among themselves over how to deal with their unruly pawns. The émigré nationalists and the Vlasov forces were alternately supported and temporarily suppressed, then supported again as Germany’s military fortunes in the East changed.
There was one thing, it seems, on which all the German political warfare specialists could agree: Most of the blood to be spilled in the envisioned anti-Communist revolution would be that of Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks, and other natives of the USSR, not that of Germans. “Every Russian who fights for us,” the Nazi Foreign Office propaganda expert Anton Bossi-Fedrigotti argued, “saves German blood.”10
The German generals who commanded the émigré anti-Communist legions had no illusions about the motivations of most of the defectors who agreed to work for the Nazis in the East. “The bulk of the volunteers … I am convinced, did not enlist to fight for the [anti-Bolshevik] cause,” writes Lieutenant General Ralph von Heygendorff, a commander of the eastern legions (under Kostring’s authority) from 1942 through 1944. Instead, the majority came “solely for the purpose of gaining personal advantages, immediately or within the near future. Many of these men attempted to demonstrate strongly an idealism which neither existed nor governed their actions.” In reality, it was the “horrible conditions prevailing in most of the [POW] camps,” according to Heygendorff, that led most of the collaborators to seize on cooperation with the Nazis as a “last hope.”
The few “true idealists” among their ranks, the German general continues, “who combined a pronounced anti-Bolshevik attitude with a fanatical love for their own people” were among the most brutal and violent of all the Nazis’ legions when it came to dealing with the civilian population in the German-occupied regions, precisely because they were generally regarded as traitors by their own people. “They were extremely harsh toward fellow countrymen who failed to share their ideals,” Heygendorff writes. “In dealing with undependable individuals they were so severe that we frequently had to intervene” (emphasis added)—a German euphemism that indicates that the “idealists” were often responsible for mass murders of innocent civilians during the antipartisan campaigns.11
The Nazis selected the more promising and talented collaborators for intelligence missions behind Soviet lines, propaganda, sabotage, and—most commonly—the interrogation of the millions of Soviet POWs and civilians who had fallen into German hands during the opening months of the war. Multilingual defectors were often attached to the interrogation teams because of their language skills, knowledge of the local area, or, as noted above, enthusiasm for dealing with their compatriots “who did not share their ideals.” The German army and the SS specifically authorized torture and frequently employed it as a means of extracting information. Inside the POW camps local collaborators specialized in Durchkämmung, the “combing out” of Jews, “commissars” (Communist party members), and other undesirables from among the captured soldiers. The SS turned the “combed” ones over to the mobile killing squads for execution.
The work of these interrogators and interpreters was essential to the broader Nazi effort to locate and exterminate the Jews and Communists who had fallen into their hands. After the war the German political warfare experts rarely discussed their own roles or those of their defectors in these interrogations, despite their clear participation in them. This is perhaps because, as noted by the Nuremberg tribunal in its decision on SS man and political warfare specialist Waldemar von Radetzky, “by admitting the translation functions, [they] would be admitting that [they] knew of executions which followed certain investigations.”12 The political warfare experts were deeply involved in these interrogations throughout the war. Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, for example, who was later a central figure in CIA-financed émigré operations in Munich, spent much of the war as chief interrogator of the Russian intelligence directorate of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) on the eastern front.13
Otto Ohlendorf, the commander of Einsatzgruppe D mass execution squads in the Caucasus, offers a glimpse into a part of the careers of the leaders of the political warfare faction and their collaborationist troops that might otherwise be lost to history. According to Ohlendorf, the collaborator units formed one of the most important—and incriminating—links between the German military officer corps, on the one hand, and the SS’s Einsatzgruppen extermination squads, on the other. “The Army units had to sort out political commissars and other undesirable elements themselves”—that is, through use of native quislings and collaborators—then “hand them over to the Einsatzkommandos to be killed,” Ohlendorf testified. “[T]he activity of the Einsatzgruppen and their Einsatzkommandos was carried out entirely within the field of jurisdiction of the commanders in chief of the army groups or armies under their responsibility.”14
Collaborators often played an important role in mass murders. The officers of these killing squads were, like Ohlendorf, primarily Germans attached to various police units under SS jurisdiction. But many of the troops in the killing squads, significantly, were not Germans. They were, according to Ohlendorf, collaborators on loan from the army known as Notdienstverpflichtete (emergency service draftees, later to be designated Osttruppen, or eastern troops), local militias or companies of defectors that were destined to be directly recruited into the Waffen SS.
“The importance of these auxiliaries should not be underestimated,” notes internationally recognized Holocaust expert Raul Hilberg. “Roundups by local inhabitants who spoke the local language resulted in higher percentages of Jewish dead. This fact is clearly indicated by the statistics of the Kommandos which made use of local help.” In Lithuania municipal killing squads employing Lithuanian Nazi collaborators eliminated 46,692 Jews in fewer than three months, according to their own reports, mainly by combining clocklike liquidation of 500 Jews per day in the capital city of Vilnius with mobile “cleanup” sweeps through the surrounding countryside.
Such squads were consistently used by the Nazis for the dirty work that even the SS believed to be “beneath the dignity” of the German soldier. In the Ukraine, for example, Einsatzkommando 4a went so far as to “confine itself to the shooting of adults while commanding its Ukrainian helpers to shoot [the] children,” Hilberg reports. “We were actually frightened,” remembered Ernst Biberstein, the chief of Einsatzkommando 6, “by the blood thirstiness of these people.”15
The collaborationist troops of the eastern front were, in sum, an integral part of German strategy in the East and deeply involved in Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews. The Western powers recognized this fact during the war. Collaborators captured by Western forces were treated as prisoners of war, and many were turned over to the USSR as traitors and suspected war criminals in the first months after Germany’s surrender. The predominant opinion in the U.S. command at war’s end was that it was now up to the USSR to decide what to do with the Nazis’ eastern troops and other traitors, just as it was up to the Americans to decide what to do with Tokyo Rose and similar captured defectors from this country.
But a parallel development that would soon have a powerful impact on how Axis POWs were treated in the West was taking place. There was at the time in American hands another group of Axis prisoners, who, unlike the collaborators from the East, were regarded as quite valuable: scientists who had put their skills to work for the Nazi cause.
All the major powers considered German scientists part of the booty of war. The Americans, British, and Soviets each had established special teams that conce
ntrated on the capture and preservation of German laboratories, industrial patents, and similar useful hardware of the modern age. Scientists were generally regarded as another technical asset to be appropriated.
The United States and Great Britain jointly created a Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) to coordinate their efforts to seize particularly valuable targets. Actual raids were carried out by subordinate teams designated by a letter, like the “S Force” (also known as the “Sugar Force” in cable traffic) in Italy, the “T Force” in France, Holland, and Germany, and so on.16 These units had only minimal armed strength, but they traveled complete with accomplished linguists, Western scientists, and police specialists who permitted them to identify rapidly and capture useful experts and materials.
The stakes in the search for the scientific expertise of Germany were high. The single most important American strike force, for example, was the Alsos raiding team, which targeted Axis atomic research, uranium stockpiles, and nuclear scientists, as well as Nazi chemical and biological warfare research. The commander of this assignment was U.S. Army Colonel Boris Pash, who had previously been security chief of the Manhattan Project—the United States’ atomic bomb development program—and who later played an important role in highly secret U.S. covert action programs. Pash succeeded brilliantly in his mission, seizing top German scientists and more than 70,000 tons of Axis uranium ore and radium products. The uranium taken during these raids was eventually shipped to the United States and incorporated in U.S. atomic weapons.17
The U.S. government’s utilitarian approach to dealing with German science and scientists, however, proved to be the point of the wedge that eventually helped split American resolve to deal harshly with Nazi criminals, including the captured collaborators who had served on the eastern front. It is clear in hindsight that the Americans in charge of exploiting German specialists captured through Alsos and similar programs became pioneers of the methods later used to bring other Nazis and collaborators into this country. Equally important, the philosophical concepts and psychological rationalizations expressed by U.S. officials in dealing with the German experts were gradually stretched to cover utilization of almost any anti-Communist, regardless of what he or she had done during the war.
*Other features of military regulations promulgated by Manstein on the eve of the war include orders for the immediate liquidation of all captured Soviet political officers or leaders, summary executions for civilians who “participate or want to participate” in resistance to German troops, and “collective measures of force”—which soon came to mean murder of entire populations of villages, including children—to punish hamlets in which “malicious attacks [against the Wehrmacht] of any kind whatsoever” had taken place. German soldiers who had committed what would otherwise be crimes under Germany’s own military code were not to be prosecuted if their acts had taken place “out of bitterness against … carriers of the Jewish-Bolshevik [sic] system.”
Manstein later claimed at his trial for war crimes that the starvation order had “escaped my memory entirely.” He was convicted by a British tribunal and sentenced to eighteen years in prison, but he obtained release in 1952 after serving fewer than three years of his term. The former field marshal eventually became an adviser to the West German Defense Ministry.
*Vlasov was seriously ill with alcoholism throughout the war, and his condition worsened as defeat neared. Still, he clung to the conviction that his Nazi-sponsored army might somehow contribute to the overthrow of Stalin. Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, Vlasov’s German liaison officer, remembered one of his last encounters with the general as follows: “That night when he had gone to bed I went up to his room. ‘Forgive me, Wilfried Karlovich,’ he said. ‘Of late I have been drinking heavily. Of course I used to drink before, but it never got hold of me. Now I want to forget. Kroeger keeps filling up my glass and perhaps he thinks that is the way to manage me. He is wrong.… I miss nothing I just want to get away.… Wilfried Karlovich … [you must] tell the others that Vlasov and his friends loved their country and were not traitors. Promise me.…’” A broken man, Vlasov lapsed from these reflections into a fitful sleep.
In the very last days of the war Vlasov and his troops also betrayed the Germans and briefly assisted Czech partisans in Prague who were fighting the Wehrmacht. Following a short battle there, the general surrendered his men to the U.S. Third Army in early May 1945. The Americans, operating under wartime orders to cooperate with the Red Army in POW matters, turned Vlasov over to the Russians shortly after his capture.
There are several versions of how Vlasov passed from American into Soviet hands. The most colorful one is offered by Jürgen Thorwald, a German publicist who enjoyed close personal ties with a number of Vlasov’s senior officers. Thorwald asserts that an unknown American officer lured Vlasov to a secret conference at a “mysterious locality” near where the Russian was being held under house arrest. “While the party was passing through a wooded lane … it was suddenly surrounded by Soviet troops. Vlasov and his staff were overpowered before they knew what was happening.” Other versions claim the United States simply turned the general over to the Soviets during a routine POW transfer. Whatever the truth on that point is, it is clear that Vlasov and ten of his senior officers were tried for treason in Moscow during the summer of 1946. On August 12 the Soviet radio announced that “all of the accused admitted their guilt and were condemned to death.… The sentences have been carried out.”
*These troops were among the actual triggermen of the Holocaust, and were particularly active in machine-gun slayings of civilians. Some of Kaminsky’s men were also known to have titillated themselves by photographing naked Jewish women moments before murdering them. Some of the militiamen seem to have enjoyed “before and after” pictures, for a number of such prints were later discovered on the bodies of fallen Kaminsky soldiers. The Germans, however, fearing that premature publicity might wreck their “race and resettlement” schemes, soon put an end to Kaminsky’s picture-taking sessions at the edge of the executioner’s ditch.
CHAPTER THREE
“Chosen, Rare Minds”
German General Walter Dornberger is a case in point. Dornberger—a military, not an SS, officer—was never indicted or tried on any war crimes charge. Instead, he became a famous man in aerospace industry circles and remains much respected by U.S. corporate and military associations to this day. Dornberger is often cited as an example of the sort of German who was really innocent of Nazi crimes and who was appropriate for the United States to recruit once the war was over.
The U.S. Air Force, it is now known, secretly brought Dornberger to this country in 1947 and put him to work on a classified rocketry program at Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) near Dayton, Ohio. By 1950 he had gone into private industry with Bell Aircraft, and he eventually rose to be a senior vice-president in the Bell Aerosystems Division of the massive multinational Textron Corporation. There he specialized in company liaison with U.S. military agencies. He enjoyed high U.S. security clearances and many public honors, including the American Rocket Society’s Astronautics Award in 1959. He died peacefully in June 1980.1
Prior to his arrival in the United States Dornberger had been a career German artillery officer. He had recognized as early as the 1920s that the Versailles Treaty prohibited Germany from building more than a handful of cannons, bombers, naval guns, or similar conventional weaponry. Rockets, however, had been unknown as modern weapons at the time of Versailles and thus had not been banned by that agreement. Dornberger was one of the first who figured out that these scientists’ toys could be put to use to propel high explosives. He labored hard from 1932 on to make missiles an integral part of the arsenal of the Third Reich.
It was not easy being a military rocket chief in Nazi Germany. The SS, in particular, tried to muscle in on Dornberger’s work. Money, engineers, and slave laborers used in construction seemed always to be in short supply. And in March 1943 a terrible
blow fell: Adolf Hitler had a dream in which Dornberger’s pet project, the giant liquid-fueled V-2 rocket, failed to cross the English Channel. The Führer put great stock in these nightly visions, and soon the general’s project had fallen to the bottom of a heap of high-priority “secret weapons” that were supposed to extricate Germany from the mess it had created.
But General Walter Dornberger was nothing if not determined. He requested and got a private audience with Hitler during July 1943. With films, little wooden rocket models, and other audiovisual aids, Dornberger personally convinced Hitler to authorize the creation of a gigantic underground factory near Nordhausen for mass production of his machines. This factory would also house one of the major crimes of the war.2
The Nazis used slave labor from the nearby Dora concentration camp to build the Nordhausen rocket works. In fewer than fifteen months of operation the SS drove Dora’s inmates to hack a mile-long underground cavern out of an abandoned salt mine to house the facility. The starvation diet and heavy labor generally killed the toilers after a few months. The assembly line workers who actually built the missiles once the cave was finished were not much better off.
At least 20,000 prisoners—many of them talented engineers who had been singled out for missile production because of their education—were killed through starvation, disease, or execution at Dora and Nordhausen in the course of this project.3
The question of who bears responsibility for these deaths has been the subject of considerable controversy since the war. After 1945, of course, Dornberger and his subordinates denied that they had had anything to do with the Nordhausen production line. The SS, not they, they said, had controlled the labor force at the underground factory.
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