Hitler's Foreign Executioners (2 page)

In 2008 many of the far-right parties of Europe backed the Prague Declaration on Conscience and Communism. This was hatched up by Baltic scholars and politicians. Its authors demand that the European Union ‘equally evaluate totalitarian regimes’. In other words, the crimes of the Soviet regime and the Nazi Holocaust should have equivalent moral status. This is often summed up by the slogan ‘red = brown’. The Prague Declaration proposes replacing Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January with a ‘Day of Remembrance’ to be held every 23 August, the day on which the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939. This ‘equal evaluation’ may appear seductive. After all, how often does one hear that ‘Stalin was just as bad or worse than Hitler’. But the apparently reasonable claim that ‘there are substantial similarities between Nazism and Communism in terms of their horrific and appalling character and their crimes against humanity’ is not what it seems.
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The authors of the Prague Declaration grossly distort the historical record and seek ultimately to tear down the unique moral status of the Holocaust. The concept of ‘double genocide’ lumps together heinous Soviet practices such as summary execution, deportation, imprisonment and loss of employment with the deliberate and planned attempt to liquidate an entire human group. Soviet crimes should indeed be properly memorialised, but they are not equivalent either in intent or result to the ‘Final Solution’.

The consequences of rendering the crimes of the Soviet Union equivalent to the German Holocaust are already becoming clear in many Eastern European nations. In the Baltic States, Hungary and Ukraine it is now commonplace to hear politicians imply that wartime collaboration with the Third Reich should no longer
be regarded as a moral catastrophe – a stain on the nation. Instead collaboration is increasingly reinterpreted as a pragmatic means to oppose the destructive power of the Soviet Union. This inevitably means that the tens of thousands of men who volunteered to serve the German occupiers as policemen and soldiers can be reinvested as heroic nationalists – no longer vilified as collaborators in genocide. Compelling evidence that this historical lie has begun to take root in Europe can be observed every 16 March in the capital city of Latvia.

In spring 2010, I travelled to Riga to observe the annual ‘Legion Day’ – a parade by Latvian Second World War veterans. Nothing remarkable about that you might suppose. But you would be wrong; the veterans’ parade I witnessed commemorates the ‘Latvian Legion’ recruited by Heinrich Himmler’s private army, the Waffen-SS, in 1943. Surviving members of this SS Legion mourn their fallen comrades in Riga’s cathedral, the Dom, then march to the ‘Freedom Monument’ that stands in central Riga close to the old town.

In 2009, the Latvian SS Legion was splashed across the front pages of British newspapers when David Miliband, then British Foreign Secretary, denounced the Conservative Party for forging links with far-right European parties – including the Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom Party that, Miliband alleged, supported the Nazi Waffen-SS. Miliband’s speech provoked an international storm – from both the Conservative Party and the Latvian government. Timothy Garton Ash, the doyen of historians of Eastern Europe, weighed in: ‘How would you describe a British politician who prefers getting acquainted with the finer points of the history of the Waffen-SS in Latvia to maximising British influence with Barack Obama? An idiot? A madman? A nincompoop?’
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William Hague, now Foreign Secretary, refused to back down. The ‘Latvian Legion’ had nothing to do with the Holocaust, he claimed. The old Legionaries had never been Nazis. Hague went on: ‘David Miliband’s smears are disgraceful and represent a failure of his duty to promote Britain’s interests as Foreign Secretary. He has failed to check his facts. He has just insulted the Latvian Government, most of whose member parties have attended the commemoration of Latvia’s war dead.’ Hague neglected to mention that the ‘Latvian Legion’ refers to two Waffen-SS divisions: the 15th Waffen-Grenadier-Division of the SS (1st Latvian) and the 19th Waffen-Grenadier-Division of the SS (2nd Latvian). These war dead sacrificed their lives for Hitler’s Reich – and its ‘war of annihilation’. Now their surviving comrades will commemorate the memory of the legion as national heroes.

I arrive at Riga airport early on Monday morning. It is bitterly cold and wet; the sky a leaden canopy. Snow is forecast for the following day, 16 March, when the SS commemoration takes place. When I cross the grand Vanšu tilts, or ‘Shroud Bridge’,
an hour or so later, faltering sunshine glitters on the broad expanse of the Daugava River. At first sight, Riga resembles any prosperous modern European city. Its wide boulevards are lined with imposing villas, built by a German elite two centuries ago, and swarm with gleaming Mercedes and BMWs. The skyline of the old city is pierced by spindly brick spires – also built by industrious Lutheran Germans. It is hard to escape the shadow of the Teutonic Knights who conquered the Baltic region in the fourteenth century and whose descendants dominated Riga until the end of the First World War. In one Lutheran church, I notice a wall plaque dedicated to a composer and concert meister, Johans Gotfrids Mitels (1728–88), who is also buried as Johann Gottfried Müthel. But Riga is not a fustian museum city. Although the global recession hit Latvia hard, pushing up unemployment to 23 per cent, many young Latvians conduct themselves like students all over Europe, crowding into busy new internet cafes, American-style coffee bars and McDonald’s. A rather beautiful tree-lined canal flows through the centre of Riga, crossed by the Freedom Boulevard. At the intersection stands the granite-clad Freedom Monument, built in 1935 to honour the soldiers killed fighting for Latvian independence in 1919. It is a potent symbol of nationhood which has withstood three foreign occupations. Next day, on 16 March, the Latvian SS legionaries would march here from the Dom cathedral and lay wreaths to their fallen comrades.

In 1939, under the secret terms of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Soviet forces had occupied the Baltic States, instigating a reign of terror and deporting tens of thousands of Latvians. In June 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, and by early July had driven Stalin’s armies out of the Baltic region. To begin with, many Latvians welcomed German troops as liberators – a pattern repeated elsewhere in the east. But the new masters of Latvia swiftly threw together an occupation regime whose savagery eclipsed the brutality of the Soviets. German administrators amalgamated the three Baltic States into a single entity – the Ostland – effectively abolishing them as sovereign nations. On the heels of the German armies came the Einsatzgruppe – the Special Task Force death squads that unleashed the systematic mass killing of Jewish civilians in a bloody swathe across the Baltic, Belorussia and Ukraine. As these death squads moved north towards Leningrad, the German SD (Sicherheitsdienst), an agency of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, began recruiting fanatical young Latvians as auxiliary policemen and used them to murder Latvian Jews. These so-called Schuma battalions proved horribly effective. By October, at least 35,000 Jews had been murdered. In the summer of 1942, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler authorised recruitment of ‘non-German’ Waffen-SS soldiers in neighbouring Estonia – and extended the net to Latvia at the beginning of 1943. According to the Latvian government, more
than 100,000 Latvians ended up serving in the German SS.
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On 16 March 1944, as the Soviet Army drove Hitler’s armies towards the Baltic, the two Latvian SS divisions fought ‘shoulder to shoulder’ against the Russians on the banks of the River Velikaya. It is these allegedly heroic events that are commemorated on Legion Day. A few brigades of the Latvian SS that survived these terrible battles ended up defending Berlin, Hitler’s last ‘Fortress City’. After the destruction of the Reich, the Russians rapidly consolidated their occupation of the three Baltic States and turned them into Soviet socialist republics. As Riga’s Occupation Museum insists, this was the second Soviet occupation – and this time the Russians held the Baltic in an iron grip for nearly half a century. Few Latvians who endured these grim years imagined that the vast Soviet Empire would collapse with such humiliating speed – and that Latvia would once again become an independent nation and part of the European Union.

Freedom is a heady drug. But it can also be a sour blessing. In the aftermath of independence, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania successfully applied to join the European Union. As a condition of membership, the new Baltic governments came under intense and unwelcome pressure to ‘document and clarify’ crimes against humanity committed on their territory during the Second World War. This necessarily implied exposing the role of collaborators – whose participation in mass murder was already well documented by scholars. The Latvian government has always insisted that historians in the west are excessively preoccupied with the Holocaust and overlook Soviet crimes. They insist that their nations had suffered equally under Soviet and German occupation. The near destruction of Latvian Jews should never be accorded an elevated moral status overshadowing the fate of other Latvians. Thus German and Soviet crimes became morally equal – and it is this historical relativism that encourages some Latvians to sanction the commemorative rituals of the ‘Latvian Legion’. These veterans did not fight for Hitler – ‘they defended Latvia against the Soviet army.’
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Shortly after I arrive in Riga, I meet Michael Freydman in the ‘Peitava-Shul’, the single Riga synagogue to survive the German occupation, which has recently been restored. Squeezing into a tiny, hemmed-in lot on Peitavas Street, the synagogue is exquisite. As I look for the entrance an edgy police officer watches me warily. Inside, Mr Freydman points out the Hebrew dedication from the Psalms, above the Ark: ‘Blessed is Jehovah who hath not given us/A prey to their teeth.’ Mr Freydman has no time for the moral sophistry that not just forgives but honours men who swore oaths of loyalty to Adolf Hitler as Waffen-SS recruits. He points out that in Latvian schools, students rarely hear the word Holocaust – instead they are taught about ‘the three occupations’. This ‘occupation obsession’ has now become the mantra of
amnesia. But the few survivors of the Latvian Holocaust cannot forget that many thousands of their fellow citizens proved all too eager to volunteer as executioners for the Reich. In 1935, some 94,000 Jews lived in Latvia – about 4 per cent of the population. After 1941, the German occupiers and their Latvian collaborators murdered at least 70,000 Latvian Jews in camps, ghettoes and in the countryside; 90 per cent of Latvia’s Jews died as ‘prey to their teeth’. The Legionaries made a choice – and it was the wrong one.

On the afternoon before Legion Day, I catch a train to a tiny station just outside Riga, called Rumbula. Between the railway line and the main road to Riga, there is a silent and enclosed glade of trees. Twisting paths link low concrete rimmed mounds. These are mass graves. Here, at the end of November 1941, SS general and police chief Friedrich Jeckeln and his Latvian collaborators, led by the notorious Victors Arājs, slaughtered more than 27,800 Jews in two days. Himmler thoroughly admired Jeckeln as a highly proficient mass murderer. He knew he would ‘get the job done’ quickly and efficiently. Jeckeln had invented a ‘system’ that he referred to, with grotesque cruelty, as ‘sardine packing’, which he had honed and refined at killing sites in Ukraine.‘Sardine packing’ allowed the SS men and their collaborators to ‘process’ many thousands of victims every hour, ransacking their possessions then dispatching them at the edge of a pit. At Rumbula, Jeckeln applied his highly regarded ‘system’ with industrial efficiency – and without mercy. After each day’s ‘work’, the SS men recycled their plunder. Clothes, jewellery, money even children’s toys ended up enriching the lives of supposedly needy German families.

I am the only visitor to the Rumbula memorial site that morning. A few hundred yards away, gleaming Mercedes race along the road to Riga or pull off into a glitzy new shopping mall. Mountains of litter have washed up along the edge of the memorial site. The only sounds are the wind in the trees and the distant rumble of traffic. Latvian historians like to emphasise the macabre fact that Himmler authorised recruitment for the Waffen-SS in Latvia after the majority of Latvian Jews had been murdered. It follows, they claim, that the ‘Latvian Legion’ had ‘nothing to do with the Holocaust’. This callous argument was put to me on a number of occasions during my visit – most forcefully by Ojārs Kalniņš, the eloquent Director of the Latvian Institute. The claim is a puzzling one. Many of the Latvian police auxiliaries who voluntarily took part in Friedrich Jeckeln’s ‘special action’ at Rumbula, as well as hundreds of other mass shootings of Jewish civilians, later enlisted in the ‘Latvian Legion’.

Tuesday, 16 March 2010. For Latvians, this has been the worst winter for thirty years and overnight temperatures have plummeted. Heavy snow falls and long lines of traffic crawl blindly across the Daugava bridges, generating a sickly yellow haze.
A giant Baltic ferry squats in the iced-up river. Snow ploughs rumble through Riga’s old town towards the Dom, where the legion will begin its march to the Freedom Monument. Ice sheaths a red granite memorial to the Latvian ‘Red Rifleman’, recruited by the Russians at the end of the First World War to fight the German Imperial Army – a reminder that many Latvians backed the Soviets and fought against the Latvian SS divisions.
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Soon after dawn, police vehicles park close to the Dom, engines running to warm the police reserves still sheltering inside. From misted windows, they gaze into the swirling snow, gloomy and bored. Their comrades on duty outside in the blizzard are dressed in beetle-like black armour and helmets.

The thick snow shrouds the towering spire of the Dom, a monument to German Lutheranism. Outside the main entrance, journalists and film crews outnumber police. Cameras flash as elderly men, accompanied by wives, most clutching bunches of Easter flowers, hasten inside. The veterans are like phantoms who return here every 16 March, bringing a chill and unwelcome reminder of the past. On the corner of Doma Laukums square, a knot of old men huddle together, shivering and selling copies of a pamphlet about the ‘Latvian Legion’. A few old men stop to tell their stories, evidently knowing the routine: ‘Forget the SS: we fought for Latvia, for freedom.’When I arrived at Riga airport I was astonished to see that newspaper stalls sell weighty memoirs written by ‘Latvian Legion’ officers. Since 1991, the organisations that support the veterans have hammered out a shared historical narrative that explains and justifies joining the war on the side of Hitler’s Reich. Although I have contacted
Daugavas vanagi
, the veterans association, to request an interview, it becomes increasingly clear that these old men are conveyors of the party line, not historical testimony.