After the war the USSR also organized its own labor companies out of the German POWs it had captured. “Former German military personnel, both officers and other ranks, held in the USSR as prisoners of war have been organized into labor battalions,” the CIA reported in 1947. “[They] have been given Soviet training for administration posts, and police work, and in some instances been organized into small combat units for use against Baltic partisans.” These men, the CIA continued, were “available for service with whatever regime the Kremlin elect[s] to establish in Germany.” The Soviets also created labor units from among captured Poles, Yugoslavs, and Romanians who had fought on the German side during the war, according to the agency.
*Karklins concealed his wartime career at the time he entered the United States. Detailed charges concerning Karklins’s role at the Madonna camp were published in English by a Latvian state publishing house as early as 1963 and had been available in the Latvian language for several years before that. Unfortunately, however, no action was taken against Karklins by American authorities for more than fifteen years.
Finally, in 1981, the Office of Special Investigations (which had been forced to fight a tough bureaucratic battle simply to establish itself within the Department of Justice) succeeded in bringing charges against Karklins. In its complaint the OSI alleged that Karklins had “assisted in the persecution and murder of unarmed Jewish civilians and committed crimes including murder.… During [Karklins’s] tenure as Commandant of this camp, unarmed inmates were starved, beaten, tortured, murdered and otherwise brutalized by the defendant and/or by persons acting under his direction.…”
Complex litigation ensued, depositions were gathered in Latvia, and thousands of hours of court and attorney time were consumed. Karklins, however, died peacefully on February 9, 1983, in Monterey, California, before a decision concerning his deportation from the United States could be reached.
*Unfrocked double agents were also tortured—there is no other word for it—in so-called terminal medical experiments sponsored by the army, navy, and CIA. These tests fed massive quantities of convulsant and psychedelic drugs to foreign prisoners in an attempt to make them talk, according to CIA records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by author John Marks. The CIA also explored use of psychosurgery and repeated electric shocks directly into the brain.
Then CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all records of these “experiments” in the midst of Watergate and congressional investigations that threatened to bring to light the agency’s practices in this field. A cache of papers that he accidentally missed was found some years later, however, and the agency has since been forced to make public sanitized versions of some of those records. It is now known that similar agency tests with LSD led to the suicide of an army employee, Frank Olson, and are alleged to have permanently damaged a group of unsuspecting psychiatric patients at a Canadian clinic whose director was working under CIA contract. The agency unit that administered this program was the same Directorate of Scientific Research that developed the exotic poisons used in attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba.
*The USSR, too, made substantial use of assassination as a political tool during the cold war. To name only one example, KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky murdered émigré OUN leaders Lev Rebet (in October 1957) and Stepan Bandera (in October 1959) with poisonous chemical gas guns. Soviet president Kliment Y. Voroshilov awarded Stashinsky the Red Banner Combat Order for his efforts.
Stashinsky defected to the West after the Bandera murder, bringing with him the Voroshilov award and the chemical pistol as proof of the deed. The assassin, interestingly enough, claimed he had been recruited by the Soviet security police on the basis of threats against family members who had once collaborated with the Nazis.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Any Bastard as Long as He’s Anti-Communist”
The more deeply American agencies became involved in relations with the exile groups, the more rapidly myths grew up around those organizations concerning what they had actually done during the war. The common theme of those stories is the tragic heroism of the defectors from the Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Eastern Europe who chose to fight Stalin by joining the Nazis. That proposition was (and is) often accompanied by the assertion that damaging statements about these émigrés are nothing more than Soviet propaganda.
The standard version of that saga and the political use to which it was put during the cold war is perhaps best illustrated by a 1949 Life magazine article by noted journalist and psychological warfare expert Wallace Carroll, who argued that during the war “the Germans had millions of eager accomplices in Russia … [who] welcomed them as liberators and offered their cooperation.” Unfortunately the Nazis let “this chance slip through their hands” because of Hitler’s racial policy and the German government’s refusal to implement fully a political warfare program when the time was ripe. Hans Heinrich Herwarth and Ernst Kostring’s political warfare tactics, when attempted, were “a phenomenal success,” according to Carroll. “There was no Partisan movement in their area … [and] no sabotage, and the peasants fulfilled the German requisitions of farm products on schedule.” The attribution of atrocities to these troops, as well as the numerous pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic periodicals published by the Vlasov organization during the war, were “forgeries [which] Soviet propagandists shrewdly attributed to Vlasov’s forces.” These “facts,” Carroll writes, had been “known for a long time to the Russian experts of the State Department and to a small number of American officers” and were now a “lesson which we must learn without delay.”1 Carroll’s 1949 conclusion was, in part, that America needed to embrace the former Nazi collaborators as a central tactic in a comprehensive strategy of political warfare against the Soviets.
The fact that Carroll was a psychological warfare consultant to the U.S. Army at the time he penned this narrative was acknowledged by Life’s editors. Indeed, they even included a special introduction that billed Carroll’s work for the army as a “perceptive and fresh standpoint from which to re-examine U.S. strategic planning.”2
The 1949 publication of Carroll’s article marked a new stage in the development of U.S. political warfare tactics and in the blow-back effect that these operations were beginning to have at home. Up until then every effort had been made to keep secret the increasingly warm relations between U.S. intelligence agencies and émigrés who had once collaborated with the Nazis. The U.S. press had frequently presented heroic accounts of anti-Communist and anti-Nazi émigrés, such as deposed Hungarian leader Ferenc Nagy or Polish anti-Nazi underground chief Stefan Korbonski, who had fled from Eastern Europe after the Soviet occupation of the region. Carroll’s article took this publicity an important step further: Nazi collaborators could be considered heroes of a sort, too, as long as they had fought against Stalin. Though not stated directly, the implication of Carroll’s thesis was that the United States should encourage wide participation of Vlasov Army and Eastern Waffen SS veterans in U.S.-sponsored anti-Communist coalitions and political warfare projects.
Wallace Carroll was certainly not the first American to advocate these ideas. George Kennan, Charles Thayer, and other national security experts had been promoting them inside the government for several years by the time his article was published. The prominent endorsement given to these theories by the mass circulation Life magazine, however, is an indication of the degree to which revisionist theories on the character of the Nazis’ eastern legions were already entering the mainstream of American political thought.
Noted American scholars picked up much of the same theme during the intense cold war years of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This trend can be seen even in the work of careful scholars such as Alexander Dallin, who has produced some of the most sophisticated analyses of Soviet affairs available. During the cold war years he prepared a massive study titled German Rule in Russia with the cooperation of U.S. intelligence agencies. This work has been considered the
classic presentation of the Nazis’ use of collaborators in the East practically from the day it was published, yet it mentions the role of Nazi collaborators in crimes against humanity and the Holocaust only in passing. Dallin acknowledges that this was an important oversight. Were he to write the text today, he has commented, he would “dwell at greater length on the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish Question, not only because it sealed the fate of substantial numbers of Soviet citizens but more generally because it was part of the context in which decisions relating to the ‘East’ were being made in Nazi Germany.”3 Overall, the role of the German political warfare group and their collaborators in crimes against humanity was generally either denounced as Soviet propaganda (as by Carroll) or largely passed over (Dallin). The German political warriors themselves, who produced a flood of memoirs and histories after the war blaming Hitler for the German defeat, consistently denied any knowledge of the atrocities of the war.
A review of the more popular histories of the war published in the West during those years, with a few lonely exceptions, leaves the distinct impression that the savageries of the Holocaust were strictly the SS’s responsibility, and not all of the SS at that. The defector troops of World War II—the Russian Vlasov Army, the Ukrainian OUN/UPA, even the nazified SS volunteers from Latvia and other Baltic countries—were frequently portrayed as anti-Communist patriots despite their German uniforms. The SS and Wehrmacht officers who commanded them (despite their Nazi party memberships and their steady advances up the career ladder in the German government) were really anti-Nazis or even just plain democrats who had somehow wound up in uniform through an unfortunate quirk of fate—or so the story went.
This bogus history is important because it became, as Carroll’s article illustrates, the basic cover story for the Nazi utilization programs of the U.S. government as well as for many of the individual Germans and Eastern European defectors employed in these programs. Like any good propaganda, there is some truth to the version of events presented by those authors. But a review of the evidence presented at war crimes trials in Nuremberg, from captured war records and interrogation of POWs, would lead most people to quite a different conclusion concerning the role of the Nazis’ political warfare specialists in the Holocaust and about the actual character of some of the men who were enlisted by the United States after the war.
The postwar myths of anti-Stalin, anti-Hitler nationalism among the Nazis’ armies of defectors had a distinct utilitarian value for the American government during the cold war. These stories permitted more or less satisfying answers to nagging questions concerning the character of certain émigré political organizations whose American sponsorship could not always be successfully disguised. Rewriting the history of the Vlasov Army and other defector troops into a tale of idealistic (though tragic) opposition to Stalin made it easier for U.S. policymakers and intelligence officers to avoid coming to grips with the fact that there were war criminals among America’s new recruits.
But those U.S. officers who were sufficiently honest with themselves—and sufficiently well informed about covert CIA and military intelligence operations—did know that former Nazis and collaborators were at the heart of many American clandestine warfare efforts of the period.
“We knew what we were doing,” says Harry Rositzke, the CIA’s former head of secret operations inside the USSR. “It was a visceral business of using any bastard as long as he was anti-Communist … [and] the eagerness or desire to enlist collaborators meant that sure, you didn’t look at their credentials too closely.”4
Franklin Lindsay, who headed CIA paramilitary and guerrilla operations in Eastern Europe in the early 1950s, also acknowledges that a substantial number of the émigrés trained and financed by the CIA during those years had been Nazi collaborators. “Was it right?” he asked during an interview with the author. “That depends on your time horizon. We thought war could be six months away. You have to remember that in those days even men such as George Kennan believed that there was a fifty-fifty chance of war with the Soviets within six months. We did a lot of things in the short term that might not look wise from a long-term point of view.… We were under tremendous pressure,” he continued, “to do something, do anything to prepare for war.”5
An important example of these preparations for an all-out war with the USSR was the U.S. role in a guerrilla war that was then simmering in the Ukraine, an ethnically distinct region near the present Soviet-Polish border. Anti-Communist guerrillas led by the Ukrainian nationalist organization OUN were particularly strong in the western Ukraine, which is also known as Galicia.
The western Ukraine is a long-disputed territory that has changed hands among the Russians, Germans, Poles, and—briefly—the Ukrainians themselves at least a dozen times over the last few centuries. Most of the region had been controlled by Poland between World Wars I and II, but the Soviets claimed it as their own following the Russian invasion of eastern Poland under the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact. The Nazis occupied the area for most of the war; but once the conflict was over, the Soviets moved the borders of the USSR westward into Poland, and the Galician territory was again abruptly incorporated into the USSR itself.
That development seriously threatened wealthy peasants, landlords, and church leaders in the region, for obvious reasons. At the same time much of the ethnic Ukrainian population resented the authority of the new Russian-dominated power structure. These forces combined to provide a narrow but real base of support for a continuing rebellion led by the extreme-right-wing Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its militia force, UPA, which had frequently collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation. The small circle of U.S. policymakers responsible for guidance of U.S. clandestine operations during the late 1940s became fascinated by the scope of this postwar Ukrainian rebellion. Here, at last, it seemed, was a movement that was really standing up to the Russians.
The relationship between the Ukrainian nationalists and the Nazis had been complex, and most postwar commentators have chosen to emphasize the aspect that best suits their own point of view. To Soviet commentators, the OUN and the UPA were Nazi collaborators, period.6 Many Western commentators, on the other hand, contend that they were instead a “third force” during World War II that had actually favored democracy, national independence, and other Western-style values.7 Both these positions obscure the truth.
The roots of the OUN/UPA may be traced to the militantly anti-Communist and nationalist Ukrainian underground founded by Colonel Eugen Konovalets in the 1920s, when much of the region was under the Polish flag. Its program consisted primarily of a demand for independence for the Ukraine, frequently supplemented by a virulent anti-Russian and anti-Semitic racism. Although certainly opposed to Stalinism, the group was itself totalitarian and Fascist in character, with strong links to the German intelligence service of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.8
OUN activists had been in the business of assassination and terror since the earliest days of the group and were responsible for the 1934 murder of Polish Interior Minister General Bronislav Pieracki, among others. The League of Nations had publicly condemned the OUN as a terrorist syndicate for organizing that killing, and Polish courts had handed down death sentences (later commuted to life imprisonment) to OUN leaders Mykola Lebed and Stepan Bandera for their roles in that crime. Both men were freed, however, in the confusion that followed the German and Soviet invasions of Poland in 1939. Once out of prison, Lebed entered a Gestapo police school near Krakow, while Bandera organized OUN sympathizers into armed squadrons under an Abwehr program code-named Nachtigall,9 or Nightingale.
The Nazis poured money and arms into the OUN during the two years leading up to the Germans’ 1941 invasion of the USSR. Specially trained OUN police troops traveled with the German forces during the opening months of the invasion, providing intelligence, creating local quisling administrations in areas under Nazi occupation, and playing an active role in the roundups and murders of Jews. Captured German records make
clear that the Nazis considered the OUN their pawn.
But the OUN itself had bigger ambitions. It wished to be the government of the Ukraine, which it envisioned as an ally of Germany, equal in status to Hungary or Romania. This was to be an independent Fascist country whose program included, as the OUN’s chief political officer Wolodymyr Stachiw wrote to Adolf Hitler in the midst of the German invasion, the “consolidation of the new ethnic order in Eastern Europe [völkische Neuordnung in Osteuropa]” and the “destruction of the seditious Jewish-Bolshevist influence.” Writing directly on behalf of the OUN chief Stepan Bandera, Stachliw appealed to Hitler (the “champion of the ethnic principle,” in Stachiw’s words) to “support our ethnic struggle [völkischen Kampf].”10
But Hitler had no intention of accepting an alliance of equals with persons he considered Slavic “subhumans.” He double-crossed and arrested a number of OUN leaders who insisted on more autonomy than he was willing to give. At this point a still more complicated relationship between the Nazis and the OUN emerged. OUN activists continued to play major roles in local quisling governments and in Nazi-sponsored police and militia groups, although the OUN organization as such was banned. These German-sponsored police and militia formations, in turn, were deeply involved in thousands of instances of mass murders of Jews and of families suspected of aiding Red Army partisans. Meanwhile, the then underground OUN leadership organized an anti-Communist guerrilla force known as the Ukrainska Povstancha Armia (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), or UPA, in order to continue to pursue its plan for an independent Ukraine. The UPA, according to its own account, did much of its recruiting among the genocidal Nazi-sponsored police groups, on the theory that those already armed and trained men would make the best soldiers. While the UPA insurgents did occasionally clash with the Germans, their true target was the Red Army, which was viewed as the greater danger to Ukrainian independence.11
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