Between Giants (28 page)

The pace of killing continued. On 9 and 10 November, the battalion killed 8,000 people, mainly Jews, in Borissov. Three days later, another 3,000 were killed in Kleck. By the end of the year, when the battalion returned to guard duties, it had either killed or aided in the killing of 46,000 people, the great majority of them Jews.
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Several Lithuanian battalions spent periods of time in the Ukraine, where they were frequently involved in mass killings. The 4th Police Battalion, created in Kaunas on 25 August 1941, later renamed the 7th Battalion, was sent to the Ukraine in mid-1942. Here, the battalion’s personnel were involved in the slaughter of Jews in Vinica and Nemirovo. Several of the battalions in the Ukraine found themselves sent to the front line as an increasingly desperate Wehrmacht attempted to shore up its defences, and suffered heavy casualties in combat.

It is estimated that ten of the 25 Lithuanian police battalions were involved in large-scale killings of Jews. Their personnel are thought to have killed some 78,000 individuals.
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In February 1943, partly to offset the losses suffered by Germany at Stalingrad, the
SS-Führungshauptamt
called for the creation of new SS divisions to help address the widespread manpower shortage. It was proposed that both Lithuania and Latvia would contribute a division. Brigadeführer Wysocki, who was the
Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer
(‘senior SS and police commander’ or HSSPf) for Lithuania, was instructed to raise a body of volunteers to form the new unit. He approached two former Lithuanian colonels, Anatanas Reklaitis and Oskaras Urbonas, and invited them to become commanders of two of the new division’s regiments. They declined to take part, and the number of volunteers coming forward remained woefully inadequate, numbering barely 200, not least because the Lithuanian administration successfully hindered the process. Wysocki lost his post and was replaced by Brigadeführer Harm, but he had just as little success, and the planned division was never created. Humiliated by their failure, the Germans declared that Lithuanians were not fit to wear SS uniforms, and threatened to force all able-bodied male Lithuanians to work in labour camps, but the Lithuanians continued to refuse to cooperate; they did not object to the creation of a Lithuanian division, but insisted that it should remain entirely under the control of Lithuanians. Furthermore, they insisted, the division should not serve outside Lithuania.

Negotiations dragged on into early 1944, when the demands on German manpower were even more severe. In February, the Germans agreed to the Lithuanian demands, and a further call for volunteers was made. Somewhat to the surprise of everyone, both Lithuanian and German, some 19,000 came forward. Immediately, the Germans decided to use the men – far in excess of their expectations – as replacement drafts for existing Wehrmacht units, in direct contravention of what had been agreed with the Lithuanian administration, but after further negotiations, the volunteers were all organised into 13 police battalions and a reserve unit.

In late March 1944, Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model, commander of Army Group North, announced a requirement for 15 Lithuanian units to act as guards at airfields across Lithuania. There was consternation amongst the Lithuanians, who feared that these units would not be under Lithuanian command. In May, the Germans announced a general mobilisation of manpower, explicitly stating that the new units would be under German command. There was widespread unrest amongst the units created in February, and to avoid the possibility of such a large number of armed men breaking free of German control, the German authorities disbanded all 14 units. Of their manpower, about 3,000 agreed to remain in service, and were assigned to flak formations.

In late summer 1944, as the Red Army reached the eastern parts of Lithuania, there was a final attempt to raise troops to fight for the ailing German cause. Generalmajor Helmuth Mäder was commander of Army Group North’s
Waffenschule
(weapons school), a training establishment created to remedy inadequate training amongst new recruits, and used the personnel of the school in the defence of Šiauliai. With two Lithuanian captains, Izidorius Jatulis and Jonas Cesna, he attempted to organise two infantry regiments and an artillery regiment from the remnants of police battalions and elements of the newly created
Tevynes Apsaugas Rinktine
(‘Fatherland Defence Force’ or TAR, akin to the German Home Guard or
Volkssturm
). Poorly trained and equipped, the battalions of the new formation fought in the last battles on Lithuanian soil.

The initial euphoria throughout the Baltic States after the arrival of the Wehrmacht evaporated in a matter of weeks, as it became abundantly clear to everyone that the Germans came as occupiers, not liberators. Under the control of the occupation authorities, the newspapers produced a steady stream of articles encouraging everyone to show more gratitude to Germany for the expulsion of the hated Bolsheviks, to little avail. Underground newspapers in all three countries highlighted German connivance in Stalin’s seizure of the region in 1939 and 1940, and a Dutch visitor to the area in June 1942 found almost nobody who could be regarded as a genuine Germanophile.
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One of the Lithuanian underground newspapers,
Nepriklausoma Lietuva
, compared the Nazis directly with the Bolsheviks, speculating on which were responsible for the murders of the most innocents.
³²

As cynical resignation replaced the euphoria of the expulsion of the Red Army, people began to consider how to resist the German occupation. Armed resistance seemed out of the question – there was little desire to assist the Red Army in overcoming the Wehrmacht and restoring Soviet rule. However, there were small groups of pro-Soviet partisans who were active from the outset. Antanas Sniečkus had been First Secretary of the Communist Party of Lithuania during the Soviet occupation, and was also head of the Department of National Security. He played a leading role in the organisation of the mass deportations of 1941, even having his own brother and his brother’s family deported. In November 1942, the
Lietuvos Partizaninio Judėjimo Štabas
(‘Lithuanian Partisan Movement’) was created in Moscow to coordinate activity in Lithuania, with Sniečkus at its head. In practice, this proved to be largely a figurehead organisation, formed in an attempt to show that there was a large number of Lithuanians who wished to fight for the return of Soviet rule. In reality, although a few thousand Lithuanians did take part in partisan attacks against German targets, many of the partisans were members of the Red Army who had been left behind during the chaotic retreat, or Soviet personnel who infiltrated into the area during the war. In addition, there were small but significant Jewish partisan cells active in the forests around Vilnius, including one led by Abba Kovner, who attempted to organise an armed rising in the Vilnius ghetto. His
Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye
(‘United Partisans Organisation’ or FPO), which adopted the slogan ‘We will not let them take us like cattle to the slaughter’, was opposed by the
Judenrat
, which was under constant pressure from the Germans – Jacob Gens, the leader of the
Judenrat,
was told that unless he brought the organisation to an end, the entire ghetto would be liquidated. Under pressure from the rest of the ghetto population, the FPO disarmed. Some of its members were arrested, while others fled to the forests. Yitzhak Wittenberg, who had been arrested and then rescued by the FPO, handed himself over to the Gestapo, but was found dead in his cell. It is believed that he was poisoned, possibly using poison that Gens gave him before he was handed over to the Germans.
³³

The Lithuanian Activist Front, which had organised the Lithuanian Provisional Government at the beginning of the German invasion, continued to press for at least a degree of autonomy, if not complete independence. The Germans rejected all such suggestions, and in September 1941, Leonas Prapuolenis, the leader of the LAF, was sent to Dachau. Two groups of those opposed to German rule were then formed in Lithuania, the
Lietuvių Frontas
(‘Lithuanian Front’) and the
Laisvės Kovotojų Sajunga
(‘Union of Freedom Fighters’). These came together towards the end of 1943 to form the
Vyriausiasis Lietuvos Išlaisvinimo Komitetas
(‘Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania’), which managed to maintain contact with Sweden and the west. The intention of the committee was to await a suitable moment to reassert Lithuanian independence; there was a hope that, as had been the case in 1918, the end of the war might provide a moment of opportunity. Unfortunately for the committee, the Gestapo was aware of similar moves in Estonia, and in 1944 moved to intercept a suspected Estonian courier. The person arrested was Colonel Kazimieras Amraziejus, a member of the Lithuanian group, and eight members of the committee were then identified and rounded up.
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In Latvia, anti-German partisan activity was at first limited almost exclusively to the eastern parts of the country, which had a large ethnic Russian population. Many of these partisans were initially trained in the Soviet Union, and then infiltrated into Latvia. The Soviet occupation had left most of Latvia with a strongly anti-Soviet sentiment, and the small number of Latvian communists had in the main left with the Red Army; most of those who stayed behind were denounced and handed over to the Germans, and shot. Some of those infiltrated back into Latvia were Latvian soldiers who had been conscripted into the Red Army, and had retreated with their parent regiments into the Soviet Union. Many now volunteered to return to Latvia as partisans, and whilst some may have been motivated by a desire to fight the Germans, most simply used it as a means of returning home, and disappeared within days of being parachuted into Latvia. A 250-strong unit of Latvian partisans attempted to work their way through the front line south of Lake Ilmen and then to move across country to Latvia, but was intercepted and easily destroyed by the Germans, who commented:

Apparently most of the Latvians merely wished to return to their homeland in this manner, or the leadership was so bad that it completely lost its head and let its troops get out of hand.
³⁵

As was so often the case in the occupied territories, it was German activity that proved to be the trigger for increased partisan activity. The population of the eastern Latvian province of Latgale, with its high percentage of ethnic Russians, was the subject of a major German drive in 1942 to collect men for forced labour inside the Reich. One such action, codenamed
Winterzauber
(‘Winter Magic’), saw 99 villages in Latgale burned to the ground and over 6,000 inhabitants shipped off for forced labour in early 1943; an additional 3,600 people were shot for allegedly supporting partisans.
³⁶
In addition to killing suspected partisans and their supporters, and gaining a supply of labourers, these operations were designed to create a desolate landscape where partisans would find it much harder to survive. For the local population, it was often an almost impossible situation. If they helped the partisans, they risked death at the hands of the Germans; if they refused to help the partisans, they risked death from the partisans, who regarded a failure to support them as treason. Indeed, until autumn 1943, almost all partisan activity in Latvia was directed against the civilian population, to extract food, clothing and shelter, with almost no attacks on German military targets.
³⁷
On occasion, locals were forced to join the partisans, while others were executed as suspected German spies. Some of the activities of the partisans were irritating enough to lead to German reprisals. After one attack, German security police burned 119 peasants to death in the village of Pirčiupis in June 1944.
³⁸
But like their German enemies, the partisans also carried out arbitrary revenge attacks. In 1944, a group of partisans commanded by Vasili Kononov, a Latvian of Russian ethnicity, came under fire near the village of Mazie Bati. Two days later, they returned to the area, and shot nine of the inhabitants of the village.
³⁹

Partisans in Latvia reported the tensions between the Germans and Latvians to their commanders in the Soviet Union, and in an attempt to increase recruitment, the Soviet Union began a propaganda campaign that tried to portray German rule as a continuation of the old domination of the area by the Baltic German aristocracy, and claimed that the partisan movement was composed of Latvian patriots. Nevertheless, the majority of Latvian partisans were either from within the Soviet Union, or ethnic Russians from Latgale – for example, the 235-strong partisan brigade
Sarkanā Bulta
(‘Red Arrow’), which was active in north Courland in 1944, had only 68 Latvians in its ranks.
⁴⁰

It was only towards the end of the war, as the certainty of German defeat became ever clearer, that there was a significant increase in the number of Latvians joining the partisans. Even at this stage, there were tensions between the largely ethnic Russian communists amongst the partisans and their more nationalist Latvian comrades, whenever former members of the German-controlled police or the Latvian SS attempted to desert. The communists were inclined to treat them as enemy Fascists, while the Latvians were more welcoming. Some found that they could not escape their past. Arvīds Štrauss went into hiding in 1944 to escape enforced service in the German cause; when he heard of attempts to raise a national army towards the end of the year, he reappeared, but then deserted when it became clear that this new formation had no future. He then joined the ‘Red Arrow’ partisan brigade, but was captured by a German patrol in the last days of the war, and imprisoned in Talsen. A few weeks later, the Red Army arrived. He was promptly shipped off to a Gulag in the Soviet Far East.
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Many partisan units made exaggerated claims of their efficacy, and given the importance of the partisan war to Soviet ideology, their claims were often accepted with little attempt to validate them. One unit, commanded by Vilis Samsons, later claimed to have destroyed some 130 German trains, but there is no corroborating evidence of train losses in German records, and the claim is probably an exaggeration, if not a complete fabrication. Soviet accounts claim that there were 24 major partisan units, organised in March 1944 into four brigades, each with between 500 and 3,000 men. After the war, Soviet accounts of Lithuanian partisan activity described the destruction of 364 German trains, over 2,000 cars and trucks, and 18 local German garrisons; these claims do not correlate with German reports of losses.
⁴²
Activity increased as the war continued, not least due to the continuing exploitation of Latvia as an occupied territory, and in January 1945, an SS officer recorded with glum resignation: ‘It is clear to the Latvians that the German civil authority is the greatest enemy of their people. It has never done anything good for them, and it never will.’
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