Blowback (29 page)

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

Late in the war the Germans became sufficiently desperate that they reestablished a more or less formal “alliance” with a quisling Ukrainian national committee headed by Pavlo Shandruk, an aging Ukrainian-Polish general who had been a war hero during World War I.
¹²
This propaganda gesture was accompanied by accelerated German recruitment of Ukrainians from the police groups into the Waffen SS, and by increased cooperation with the underground OUN/UPA leadership in a secret program that the SS-designated Operation
Sonnenblume
(Sunflower). According to U.S. interrogations of SS RSHA Amt VI clandestine operations chief Otto Skorzeny and his adjutant Karl Radl, Amt VI organized
Sonnenblume
in 1944 to coordinate German and OUN efforts during the Nazis' retreat from Russia.
¹³

Thousands of tons of arms, ammunition, and other war materiel abandoned by the Nazis were consigned to underground OUN-led troops, Skorzeny told the Americans. The deal proved to be an astute investment for the Germans. The OUN/UPA succeeded in tying down some 200,000 Red Army troops and killing more than
7,000 Soviet officers
¹⁴
during the Wehrmacht's disordered flight across Europe during 1944 and 1945.

The case of the OUN illustrates the complexity of the real-world relationships between Berlin and its collaborators on the eastern front. The OUN was not a puppet of the Germans in the same sense that the Vlasov Army was, but it did knowingly ally itself with the Nazis whenever it could. Whatever its conflicts with the Nazis may have been, the OUN's own role in anti-Semitic pogroms—such as the mass murders in Lvov in 1941—and in the Lidice-style exterminations of entire villages accused of cooperating with Soviet partisans has been well established. Many OUN members committed serious crimes during the war, and the primary victims of their excesses were their own countrymen.