America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (15 page)

For many of the nationalists, this was the turning point. Persecuted by the Poles and betrayed by the Russians, they turned toward fascism. Fascism appealed to the Byelorussian émigrés because it provided the best chance for an anti-Soviet crusade. To the embittered exiles, any rule in their homeland – even that of Nazi Germany – was preferable to the continuation of the Communist dictatorship. Besides, it was often argued, the period of foreign domination would be only temporary. And over and beyond its anti-communist aspect, fascism offered much that was attractive to the Byelorussians: discipline, nationalism, adulation of force, promises of social justice, and, last but not least, anti-Semitism. To them, “Jew-Bolshevism” was the cause of the world’s problems, a point of view made increasingly popular by the worldwide economic depression and the rise of Adolf Hitler.
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The White Ruthenian Nazi Party was founded in 1937 with subsidies from Berlin.

The Byelorussians, along with other émigré groups, sought financial support from any source willing to provide it. For example, Stephan Bandera, a Ukrainian right-wing extremist, was on the payroll of both the British and German intelligence services prior to World War II. Similarly, Ostrowsky is reported to have worked for several countries simultaneously. The Byelorussians competed with other nationalities for German money and support, particularly with the NTS, the Alliance of Russian National Solidarists, an organization of right-wing Russian political exiles that was formed in the late 1920’s and still exists. The nationalists were aware of the rivalries that were surfacing among the police and intelligence agencies of the Third Reich, which frequently competed with each other.

One of the major agencies was the Abwehr (officially, the Amt/Ausland Abwehr), the foreign-intelligence and counterintelligence department of the Armed Forces High Command. It was composed of two separate and more or less autonomous compartments: one covering the east, mainly the Soviet Union; the other engaged in operations against the west, primarily France, Britain, and America. The Abwehr was headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris until he was arrested as a spy in 1944 and hanged the following year. After Canaris’s removal, the Abwehr fell out of favor with Hitler because many of its officers were Foreign Office and military academy graduates privately opposed to Nazism.

Meanwhile, after eliminating Hitler’s original supporters (the Brownshirts of the SA, the Sturmabteilung) in the Blood Purge of June 1934, the SS (Schutzstaffel – literally, “defense echelon”) eventually attained almost absolute power. In 1939 the Reich Central Security Office was set up as the main security department of the Nazi government. Brought under this office were all the existing police forces, including the Gestapo (Geheime Staats-polizei-Secret State Police); the Kriminalpolizei, or Criminal Police; and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst-Security Service), the espionage and counterespionage apparatus of the SS.

The Allgemeine-SS (General SS) administered the concentration and extermination camps, as well as portions of the occupied eastern territories, while the Waffen-SS (Armed SS) was primarily a military organization which eventually expanded to thirty-nine divisions and came to rival the Wehrmacht, the traditional German Army. In 1936, Hitler designated Heinrich Himmler as head of the unified police system of the Third Reich, as Reichsfuehrer of the SS and leader of the Gestapo.
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In their rush to win the bureaucratic struggle, both the SS and the Abwehr hastily hired scores of foreign recruits, including a number of double agents who had been planted among the émigrés by the Soviets. The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 provided a fresh supply of Slavic recruits for the German espionage apparatus. The Hitler-Stalin pact resulted in a new partition of Poland in which the Soviets regained control of western Byelorussia. Many of the Byelorussian nationalists fled ahead of the advancing Red Army and settled in Warsaw, Prague, Berlin, and Paris, as their predecessors had done after World War I.
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To return to their homeland would have been suicidal, for their fate would have been the same as that of the unfortunates who had been beguiled into returning in 1930.

These new émigrés to the Third Reich were the cream of the Byelorussian intelligentsia – admittedly a small group after years of Polish oppression, but proud of their cultural and ethnic heritage. The SS had a natural attraction for them. They were impressed by the large number of professionals like themselves who wore the black uniform of the SS. Only racially “pure” Germans could become fully accredited members of the SS, but many of the blond, blue-eyed Byelorussians pretended to be of German origin to gain membership. The SD cultivated ties with the new crop of Byelorussian émigrés, using them as sources for recent information about the roads and rail systems of their native land. Even then, Hitler was contemplating the betrayal of his pact with Stalin.

The Nazis funded a network of Byelorussian “self-help” or welfare offices whose purpose was ostensibly charitable; in reality they were covert recruitment agencies.
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A Byelorussian-language newspaper, Ranitsa, was published in Berlin. Each issue carried venomous articles denouncing the “Jewish-Bolshevik world conspiracy” and predicting the early defeat of Britain and France. One of the “self-help” organization’s major functions was the screening of prisoners of war captured during the Polish campaign, with the aim of recruiting imprisoned Byelorussians and Ukrainians who were sympathetic to the German cause. It was rumored that several prison camps were staffed in part by Byelorussian prisoners who had joined the German side.

In their eagerness to expand operations at the expense of their rivals, the various German intelligence organizations recruited émigrés who had once had ties with the Communist Party. For example, Dr. Mikolai Abramtchik, the ambitious leader of the Byelorussians in Paris, had been active in the Communist youth organization in Byelorussia, and his brother was head of Soviet military intelligence in Minsk. Angry at being superseded in the confidence of the German intelligence services by the newly arrived intellectuals and professionals, the old Byelorussian collaborators, whose links had been with the now defunct SA, denounced the new recruits as Communist infiltrators. But these warnings were ignored amid the infighting among the contending agencies. Eager to build up its assets at the expense of rivals, the SS assumed that anyone willing to work against communism could not be a Communist. Such naiveté was visible everywhere as Germany hastily assembled an enormous but inefficient global intelligence network. Faced with similar conditions after the war, American intelligence agencies repeated the same mistake.

Why did the SS, which espoused some of the most extreme racial doctrines in Nazi Germany, become the principal benefactor of the Byelorussians and the other Slavic nationalist movements? The SS was pragmatic. The émigrés could provide a native intelligence network for the invasion of the Soviet Union as well as serve as guides for the invasion spearheads. They could also help in establishing civil administrations in the conquered areas.
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If so, SS leaders reasoned, it would do no harm to pay temporary lip service to their petty nationalist aspirations. For their part, the émigrés willingly joined the Nazi conspiracy because Germany appeared invincible. Some of the collaborators were willing to accept the slaughter of large numbers of their countrymen if it meant the destruction of Soviet communism. Others hoped that a benign Germany would permit some form of Byelorussian self-government. And always, there was the mutually shared support for extreme anti-Semitism.

The SS established a special test for its Byelorussian collaborators: Only those who assisted the Einsatzgruppen (task forces) would be permitted to become part of the civilian administration to be established in the wake of the advancing Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS troops.
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The Einsatzgruppen were special mobile formations charged with carrying out liquidations of communist officials, partisans, saboteurs, and Jews on the eastern front. They were attached to Amt (Office) IV (Gestapo) of the Reich Central Security Office but were subordinate to Amt VI (SD) for intelligence purposes. Together with other elements of the Sicherheitspolizei (security police), they were responsible for the deaths of two million of the estimated six million Jews killed.
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Himmler had organized four Einsatzgruppen; Einsatzgruppe B would follow Army Group Center along the traditional Warsaw-Minsk-Smolensk-Moscow invasion route through Byelorussia. Since the German Nazis had no manpower to spare, they would welcome any local help in carrying out the special tasks of the Einsatzgruppen.

The work of each group was planned with thoroughness. Following the tanks of the Panzer units, an SS forward command (Vorkommando) would capture local Communist headquarters and take possession of all documents and records before they could be destroyed. Native guides were essential not only in locating the buildings, but also in translating the documents containing the names of local commissars, informants, and intelligence officers. All Soviet functionaries were to be arrested and shot before they could disappear into the population. Armed with lists taken from the Soviet intelligence archives or drawn up by the collaborators, the Einsatzgruppen would then split up into smaller mobile killing units, or Einsatzkommandos, to deal with any members of the local population likely to resist Nazi rule. The Byelorussian collaborators would have a key role in singling out particular persons to be executed, but this would be kept secret from the local populace, which would know only that the German “liberators” had installed fellow Byelorussians to help run the municipal administrations. No one would realize that the mayors and police chiefs were systematically betraying their countrymen to the Einsatzgruppen execution squads. If the initial liquidations of Communist officials worked well, the SS planned for the Byelorussian collaborators to help with the much larger task of eliminating the huge Jewish population concentrated in the Pale of Settlement.
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A week before the invasion, Byelorussians from all over Europe met secretly in Berlin to plan the administration of the soon-to-be-conquered territories.

Sometime in the spring of 1940, Dr. Franz Six, a former professor of political science and head of the Vorkommando for Einsatzgruppe B, made contact with the local branch of the Byelorussian “self-help” organization in Warsaw and put together a task force of some thirty to forty trusted Byelorussians to serve as guides, administrators, and informers.
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Among them were Stanislaw Stankievich, who later ran the city of Borissow; Emanuel Jasiuk, who was assigned to the city of Kletsk; and Jury Sobolewsky, who administered Baranovitche, the second-largest city in Byelorussia. Radoslaw Ostrowsky, who spoke fluent Russian, was to organize the counties around Minsk and then follow the invasion forces into Russia proper. There were reports that Ostrowsky would be named mayor of Moscow after its capture. In a moment of optimism, the SS had designated Dr. Six’s unit “Vorkommando Moskau.”
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[
1
] Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first job as a young attorney in 1907 had been with Carter, Ledyard & Milburn.

[
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] In a recent interview, a senior intelligence official remained adamant that neither Wisner nor any other OPC official met Gehlen face to face in 1948. Historians, however, have described their connections in detail. One thing is certain from the documents of the period: Gehlen’s American liaison officer, Captain Erich Waldmann, was recruited by Wisner to conduct secret research on Byelorussian Nazis, and Gehlen’s own files conclusively establish that he was providing the OPC with information on Wisner’s recruitment targets. Whether Wisner and Gehlen conversed personally or through intermediaries, the fact remains that they carried on a long and profitable relationship under the noses of the other American intelligence agencies.

[
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] The Cheka became the OGPU in 1923, the NKVD in 1934, the MVD in 1946, and finally the KGB in 1953.

[
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] After the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen split up into individual command units that centralized all police, intelligence, and execution functions for the SS in the newly conquered areas.

2

Operation Barbarossa began at first light on Sunday, June 22, 1941. German troops moved across the Soviet frontier from the Baltic to the Ukraine, and swarms of paratroopers and saboteurs, many of them Byelorussians and Ukrainians, created havoc in the enemy’s rear. Although Stalin had been given ample warning by the British of an impending German assault, the Red Army was completely taken by surprise. The Russian air force was wiped out on the ground during the first day of fighting, and entire Russian units surrendered en masse. Minsk fell within a week, and it did not take much longer for the German armies to occupy all the territory incorporated into the Soviet Union since 1939. Hitler appeared to have overestimated when he allocated four months for the subjugation of the Soviet Union.
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Einsatzgruppe B followed in the wake of Army Group Center. The Vorkommando and its Byelorussian guides seized the Minsk archives of Soviet intelligence, which had been abandoned by fleeing Communist officials. They had been so panic stricken that they left behind lists of Soviet informers, and bags of money from the National Bank were found sitting on the ground in the stadium. The people of Minsk greeted the Germans with bread and salt, as they had welcomed conquerors many times before. Most of the population, remembering the freedoms permitted during the German occupation of World War I, were genuinely glad to see the Nazis. Even the Jews, who had fled the city along with the other civilians during the initial bombing, returned after a few nights in the Byelorussian forests. Cut off from the outside world, they had no idea what the Nazis had planned for them.