America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (20 page)

Hrynkievich’s reception by the Third Army was something less than Ostrowsky had hoped. During a routine search, military policemen discovered a food ration card issued only to very high-ranking Nazis, and Hrynkievich was arrested as a fugitive collaborator. Before he was taken away to a POW cage, Hrynkievich did manage to get an interview with an intelligence officer. He proudly announced that he was an ambassador from the Byelorussian Central Council, which was the anti-communist national government established on the formerly Soviet territory. Hrynkievich conveyed the willingness of the BCC to do anything to assist the Americans in defeating communism. As evidence of the good faith of the Byelorussians, Hrynkievich gave the American intelligence officer the name and official position of nearly every senior Nazi collaborator – at least a hundred names in all.

Hrynkievich’s statement constituted a complete organizational chart of the Byelorussian-Nazi hierarchy. He described each of the front groups, traced their Nazi affiliation, and identified those Byelorussians who had been secret Gestapo informants. Princess Radziwill, a distant relative of Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis, was listed among the Byelorussian Nazi ranks, as were several Catholic priests and bishops. No mention was made of the empty ghettos or the Einsatzgruppen, however. Hrynkievich also withheld the fact that the remnants of the Belarus Brigade, disguised as Polish prisoners of war, had gone to ground in American POW camps in Bavaria, which was under Patton’s jurisdiction.

A copy of the Hrynkievich interrogation was sent to the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. Attached to the Twelfth Army Group, which included the Third Army, was a special CIC section whose primary task was to identify and arrest Nazi war criminals and key officials in every town under occupation. Lists of Nazis wanted for arrest had been compiled from information supplied by the OSS and the British Secret Service, and each of them had been placed in an arrest category. Category One was reserved for high-ranking Nazis, major war criminals, and security threats who were to be automatically arrested. Hrynkievich was a Category One because of his membership in the “self-help” group and the Byelorussian Central Council in Berlin. Every name mentioned in his report was also given a Category One rating and was to be hunted down.

But the denazification program was the responsibility of area military commanders, and Patton was lax in rounding up Nazi collaborators. Instead, he repeatedly urged that several of the best Waffen-SS divisions be incorporated into his Third Army so he could “lead them against the Reds.” When General Joseph T. McNarney, the deputy U.S. military governor of Germany, told Patton that the Russians were complaining about the Third Army’s lack of diligence in disarming and confining German units in Bavaria, he snapped: “What do you care what those goddamn bolshies think? We’re going to have to fight them sooner or later. Why not now while our army is intact and we can kick the Red Army back into Russia? We can do it with my Germans … they hate those red bastards.”
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The Belarus Brigade had good reason to be grateful for Patton’s reluctance to root out Nazis, especially after they saw what happened to the survivors of Vlasov’s Russian Army of Liberation. At the Yalta conference, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill had agreed to Stalin’s request that any fascists found in their areas of occupation after the war be repatriated to the Soviet Union. As soon as the war ended, Soviet emissaries searched the POW camps for Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian fugitives to be repatriated to either death or exile in Siberia. Fully realizing that they would be treated as war criminals if they were turned over to the Soviets, the Byelorussians found it even more vital to keep the history of the Belarus Brigade a secret.
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The roundup and mass deportation of some 2 million Russians, known as Operation Keelhaul, is one of the saddest chapters in American and British history. Some of the deportees had fought in Vlasov’s army, but the majority were POWs who had cooperated with the Nazis merely to survive. Many were confirmed anti-Stalinists and passionately wanted to remain in the West. But, ignoring every tradition of asylum, the western Allies uniformly treated all the Russians as “traitors” and forcibly loaded them into boxcars for shipment to the Soviet Union. Rather than return, some of the desperate Russians committed suicide by throwing themselves under the trains. Those who escaped execution were shipped to Siberia as slave laborers in the gulags.
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Before the Red Army captured Berlin and the abandoned bunker where Hitler had committed suicide, the Byelorussian puppet government fled to the west.
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Ostrowsky escorted most of the exiled leaders and their families some 300 miles to Hoexter, in the British zone of occupation, and Abramtchik made his way to the French. Unlike the Americans, who did not realize the significance of the Byelorussians and unceremoniously arrested Hrynkievich, the British and French knew with whom they were dealing. The first Nazi code cracked by the ULTRA operation had been the SS communications code, and the British had almost continuously monitored the activities of the Byelorussian Einsatzgruppen. They understood what these collaborators had done to gain power, but were willing to employ them nonetheless.

Disillusionment was darkening relations between the Soviet Union and its allies. Churchill warned President Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, “an iron curtain is [being] drawn down” across Europe by the Russians. At a Big Three meeting in Potsdam in July 1945 Stalin rebuffed every attempt by Churchill and Truman to question Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and the conference marked the beginning of the Cold War. Having lost Reinhard Gehlen and his organization to the Americans, the British had to pick up intelligence assets where they could find them. Even as planning for the Nuremberg war crimes trials was underway, they began recruiting Eastern European Nazis. One of the chief recruiters was Harold A. R. [Kim] Philby, head of the anti-Soviet intelligence unit of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Kim Philby was a Soviet mole who passed on to his employers information about the defectors while warning the Russians when one of their own agents was about to be unmasked.

Abramtchik and the western Byelorussians, maneuvering for independence from Ostrowsky, volunteered their assets to the French secret service. The French had a long history of engagement in Poland and Byelorussia, and many had been involved with Vatican intelligence in the prewar “Prometheus” program – a Franco-Polish effort to instigate an anticommunist revolution in Byelorussia and the Ukraine. Like the British, the French were willing to overlook the wartime collaboration of the Byelorussians. The French approved the establishment of a Polish military mission in Paris, which served as a cover organization for Franco-Polish attempts to recruit the leading members of the Belarus.
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The word was soon passed to General Patton, presumably via General Anders, that if the Americans were uncomfortable with the Byelorussians in their zone of occupation the French would be more than willing to accommodate them. The news must have come as a relief to Patton. Although he was sympathetic to the anticommunist cause, he could not go on sheltering large numbers of ex-SS members for much longer. The Byelorussians were only one of many former SS fighters offering their services to Patton. The Western press was attacking him for his laxness in pursuing the denazification program. If it was learned that most of the Belarus Brigade was living in an internment camp under his command, there would be trouble. The pressure was mounting to do something about the Byelorussians before a Soviet repatriation mission arrived.

According to a member of the Belarus Brigade, an American officer came to the Regensburg DP camp
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where most of the unit was hiding and said they really would have been better off fighting with the Poles, who happened to live just nearby in the French Zone of occupied Germany. If the Byelorussians were to take a stroll in that direction, the French government would be only too glad to give them shelter. The border to the French zone was only a few kilometers away, and the Belarus Brigade took the hint. That evening they noticed that every American guard had been pulled away from the camp perimeter.
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By morning they had fled to other DP camps or moved to the French zone. In early October 1945, Patton was relieved of command of the Third Army and as Military Governor of Bavaria by General Eisenhower. He was given command of the Fifteenth Army, which was largely concerned with historical research and controlled no divisions or occupation area. Among the reasons for Patton’s removal from Bavaria was his failure to cooperate with the denazification program. In December, he was fatally injured in a motor accident.

For many of the Nazi collaborators, the postwar months in the French zone were an idyllic time. A Byelorussian school was opened, and a sort of Nazi community in exile was established. The men who had presided over the mass murder of the Jews in Byelorussia were now safely ensconced as employees of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA). Stanislaw Stankievich was hired as an English-language teacher for the camps.
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Dimitri Kasmowich, former police chief of the Smolensk region and commander of one of Skorzeny’s “special” units, was a refugee rations officer. Throughout the occupied zones, the French and British intelligence organizations sought jobs for their new assets with UNRRA in the camps. It was not only good cover but provided extra funds, since the British and French had no money to pay a large retinue of ex-Nazi puppets.

These jobs were often a cover for the real work as recruiters for the Polish Military Mission. The Polish mission itself was an arm of the British and French secret services, which sought to provide assistance to the government-in-exile in London. Throughout 1945 and 1946 a task force composed of several of the original Einsatzgruppen guides reestablished contact with the now scattered elements of the Belarus Brigade and other Eastern European collaborators hiding in the DP camps. The Byelorussian collaborators had been given false identity cards showing that they were discharged Polish officers. [The real Polish officers may have grumbled privately, but they kept their mouths shut.] General Anders was assassinated soon afterwards.

The chief document-forger for the BCC was Jury Bartishevic. During the war he had run the Nazi warehouses in Minsk that stored arms and food for the German troops. He also collected valuables extorted from the Jews. In 1944, General von Gottberg had appointed him Minister of Administration in Ostrowsky’s government. Bartishevic’s staff apparently made new identities for each of the leaders of the BCC just before the war ended. Most of the members of the Belarus simply changed their names from the Byelorussian spelling to the Polish, and the confusing conversion from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin was enough to conceal their identities. Ostrowsky replaced Astrouski, Jasiuk replaced Yasyuk, Sobolewsky replaced Sabaleuski, Franz Kushel replaced Frantzishak Kusiel.

The forging operation had intelligence implications as well. Large numbers of Byelorussian Nazis had been trapped behind enemy lines, and all through the summer and fall of 1945 survivors came trickling into the western Allied zones of Germany. Travel through the Soviet zone was still possible: Some German units were operating in the chaotic rear areas despite the end of the war. Each arrival often brought news of Soviet military activity and troop movements. The Byelorussians combined these bits of gossip and fact and printed them up to look like captured Soviet documents. Those who had served with Ostrowsky in Vorkommando Moskau had ample experience with real Soviet documents when they pillaged the offices of the Minsk NKVD in 1941. A large number of these authentic but out-of-date documents had been taken to Germany when the Byelorussian collaborators fled in 1944. By mixing real documents with the newly concocted reports, the Byelorussians hoped to convince the Allies that they possessed an active spy network behind the Soviet borders. The sale of the documents from the Byelorussian paper mills brought in a sizable income during the first years after the end of the war. After 1946, however, the last trickle of border-crossers was cut off by the Soviets, and the Byelorussians lost most of their contacts with the homeland.

Realizing that the Allies could not officially embrace a government created by the Nazis, Ostrowsky called the fugitives out of hiding at the end of 1945 to create another front organization.
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He told a special meeting of the Byelorussian Central Council that it would be in their best interests to dissolve the government in order to avoid being sent back to Byelorussia as war criminals. In fact, following Patton’s removal from command, the Third Army had forcibly repatriated 243 Soviet nationals who had fought for Germany during the war. The BCC changed its name to the Byelorussian Central Representation (BCR) and within a month was operating in the British zone under the new name but the same leadership. But whatever unity had prevailed among the exiles was already splintering.
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Factionalism is the bane of émigré political organizations. Increasingly remote from the reality of their homelands, the exiles exist in a hothouse atmosphere that breeds a mixture of intrigue and paranoia. Each faction becomes convinced that it alone is the legitimate instrument of struggle for national liberation, and the fights between them take on the bitterness of a family argument. This is exactly what happened among the Byelorussians. The western, Polish faction was growing more and more uncomfortable with Ostrowsky’s leadership, complaining that he was too visible a target because he was widely known as the leader of a Nazi puppet government. It split off and formed its own organization under Abramtchik. Unlike Ostrowsky, Abramtchik had worked secretly for the Gestapo and the SS, and his role as a Nazi collaborationist was not widely known.
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To be sure, he had participated in Ostrowsky’s government-in-exile in Berlin as Intelligence Minister, but it would be difficult to connect him with the atrocities committed in Byelorussia. Moreover, Abramtchik had a front organization of his own to offer the Allies, the Byelorussian National Republic, which had been established following the Russian Revolution and had set itself up as a government-in-exile in Paris.