Türkçe TercümeHeinz Bongartz (aka Jürgen Thorwald) was born in Solingen in 1915, the son of a teacher. After dropping out of the Faculty of Medicine for health reasons, he continued studying German literature and history at the University of Cologne. In 1933, Bongartz became a journalist and worked for the Essener National-Zeitung, the Nazi party organ. During the Second World War, he worked as a civil servant in the history department of the Naval Command in Berlin, writing daily journalism, popular historiography, and propaganda.
After the war, Bongartz founded the weekly newspaper Christ und Welt in Stuttgart. The Allies characterized it as a “secret Nazi newspaper”, publishing articles largely written by employees of the propaganda department of the former Foreign Office. Bongartz was also directly accused by the Allies of propagandizing nationalism and militarism through his articles. During that period he started using a pseudonym, Jürgen Thorwald to avoid close surveillance and repercussions of the Allies. In 1947, Bongartz officially adopted the name Jürgen Thorwald.
Among his many other works on the Second World War topic, “Die Illusion” (The Illusion) was about the Nazis' mobilization of desperate nations for the political and military purposes of the Reich. Thorwald stated that the book was written in 1950 at the request of the CIA as a background for cooperation with Gehlen’s network in West Germany.
Thorwald's theme is that the populations of the occupied territories first hailed German soldiers as liberators from Bolshevism, but then the mistreatment of the local population led to the failure of efforts by people like Alfred Rosenberg to use ethnic nationalism against the Kremlin. Thorwald notes that approximately 700,000 “Volunteers” who fought on the German side were a mixture of anti-Soviet Turks, Caucasians, Cossacks, Ukrainians, and other minorities, as well as detachments of anti-Soviet refugees and, ultimately, tens of thousands of concentration camp inmates trying to survive by any means possible. Thorwald emphasizes that General Vlasov, who defected from the Red Army, wore a Nazi uniform, rarely went to the front, and constantly begged for weapons from the Wehrmacht. Despite the wealth of original material and the archival sources to which he had the opportunity to access, Thorwald provides little information about the actual events and conflicts in his book, which reads like a work of narrative fiction. Nevertheless, instead of giving references and citations within the text, Thorwald contents himself by providing a holo-bibliography for his sources at the end of the book.
After the war, Thorwald donated the documents and stenographic transcripts of his interviews with high-ranking German officers and bureaucrats serving on the Eastern Front, particularly in the Eastern Ministry and the Caucasus to the German archives. Digital copies of these transcripts on the Caucasus are available in the primary sources section of our archive. You can access these documents, totaling 637 pages, via the links below:
Gerhard von Mende, Theodor Oberlander, Fritz Rudolf Arlt and Hans Helmuth Wolff;
https://www.historycaucasus.com/archives/jurgen-thorwald-papers-gerhard-von-mende-theodor-oberlander-fritz-rudolf-arlt-and-hans-helmuth-wolff/reader
Ernst Köstring;
https://www.historycaucasus.com/archives/jurgen-thorwald-papers-gerhard-von-mende-theodor-oberlander-fritz-rudolf-arlt-and-hans-helmuth-wolff-1/reader
Otto Brautigam;
https://www.historycaucasus.com/archives/jurgen-thorwald-papers-gerhard-von-mende-theodor-oberlander-fritz-rudolf-arlt-and-hans-helmuth-wolff-2/reader
Ralph von Heygendorf;
https://www.historycaucasus.com/archives/jurgen-thorwald-papers-gerhard-von-mende-theodor-oberlander-fritz-rudolf-arlt-and-hans-helmuth-wolff-3/reader
(Click on the image for a larger view)
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[…] Köstring had warned of a war with the Soviet Union and doubted that the Soviet Union had any intention of breaking the friendship pact and attacking Germany. The Soviets had rearmed, but out of fear of the increasingly powerful German Wehrmacht and for its own security. It was only the German attack that had brought about the life-and-death conflict in which the Soviet Union was now developing into a power that Germany would not be able to match militarily in the foreseeable future.
Hitler did not forget this warning of Köstring. He had indeed received Köstring when he returned to Germany from the Soviet Union via Baku-Tiflis-Cospoli in July 1941. However, he had finally abandoned him when Köstring warned against premature celebrations over the victories in the East. Since then, the general had lived idly in Berlin, with no hope of ever being asked for advice again. He had followed the political developments in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union with growing concern. He had also watched the start of the great summer offensive of 1942 in the south of the Eastern Front on July 1st without doing anything - skeptical, worried, without hope.
So, he was completely surprised when he received the order on August 10th, 1942, via the Army High Command to go to the headquarters of Army Group A, which was advancing towards the Caucasus. His job title was to be: General Commissioner for the Caucasus.
Shortly before departure, Köstring learned that the Führer's headquarters and the Army High Command had moved to Vinnytsia in Ukraine. When Köstring arrived there after a thirty-six-hour train journey, he found the OKH at the western exit of the city in the university buildings. The Quartermaster General resided two kilometers outside the city in the buildings of a mental institution. “If we have chosen you for this position”, said [Eduard] Wagner, as he shook Köstring's hand, “then there are very serious prospects behind it. So far, terrible stupidities have been committed in the occupied territories. Therefore, I consider it essential that, for the current operations in the Caucasus region, at least from our side, experts are on site. The Caucasus is far away. It seems that its population is considered politically harmless by the Führer. The Caucasians also seem acceptable to the Minister for the East. In any case, it is strange that of the national associations that we have so far, the Turkic and Caucasian associations are the only ones that have received official blessings. Professor von Mende from the Eastern Ministry has a dozen liberation committees for Caucasian tribes in his pocket. The chances of at least winning over the population down there are good. I would like to be sure that there is a man there for us who can distinguish sense from nonsense.”He looked at Köstring's white hair. “We know here”, he said sarcastically, “that the Führer can manage without you, but after everything that has happened, we want to hold on to you..”. Twenty-four hours later, Köstring flew from headquarters. From Poltava, he had to continue his journey in a car. Lieutenant von Herwarth was driving with him as his adjutant. He too had lived in Moscow for a long time as a diplomat.
On the way, Köstring learned that the operations against the Caucasus had progressed to the mountain ridges north of Sukhum and Tuapse and the area around Ordzhonikidze, but that the attack had stalled. Field Marshal List, the commander-in-chief of Army Group A, had demanded that the attack be stopped or that the attempt to reach two targets simultaneously with the forces of his army group - namely the Black Sea coast near Sukhum and the coast of the Caspian Sea near Makhachkala - be abandoned. When Köstring arrived at headquarters in Stavropol, List had already been replaced. He was replaced by Colonel General [Paul Ludwig Ewald] von Kleist. He was a gentleman and cavalryman of the old school, but like most of his kind, without any political knowledge or experience.
“I am glad to see you here”, said Kleist as he received Köstring in his house surrounded by gardens. I am depressed by the huge space. I am depressed by the mass of people in which we are lost if we do not win them over. “To win”, had now become a kind of slogan.
At the same time, Wagner and [Claus von] Stauffenberg in Vinnytsia were trying to send a second man they trusted to Army Group A.
They wanted to have a representative of the Eastern Ministry in the army group who could decide political matters independently and thus be Köstring's political partner. It was important to launch him in such a way that he was given real powers. He had to be able to act without having to ask questions in Berlin about every little decision.
They decided on [Otto] Bräutigam. He could not wish for anything better than to see the Caucasus again and to get even further away from the Berlin ministry. But he knew that his deployment would cost a fight. And Stauffenberg knew it even better. “General”, he said, “Rosenberg really only has two people under discussion for the Caucasus. One is Professor von Mende... The other is the designated Reich Commissioner for the Caucasus, Rosenberg's friend Schickedanz. Mr. Schickedanz has been waiting for his moment for more than a year. He is supposed to have 1,200 officials together to set up his administration in the Caucasus. He will do everything in his power to prevent someone else from creating a fait accompli before him.”
Wagner replied: Two Reich Commissioners are enough for me for the moment. Mr. Schickedanz will only go down there when the Caucasus is no longer an operational area and we no longer have any say. Golden pheasants have no place in the operational area. Only soldiers go there. And Bräutigam is a captain... Stauffenberg was right when he saw the greatest resistance from Schickedanz. Mende was unreservedly for Bräutigam. He wanted to direct things from the lofty vantage point of the ethnologist. The forces with which he hoped to realize his renaissance of Caucasian and Turkestan national states lived in his circle in Berlin.[…]
[…] Mende felt at home in this unreal world, built on vague hopes for the future. He campaigned for Bräutigam to be appointed. Schickedanz, on the other hand, immediately opposed this. To prevent him, who had been waiting for so long as a king without a country, from being passed over, he urged Rosenberg to appoint a man for Army Group A whom he himself had earmarked for a later role in his own Reich Commissariat. The negotiations went back and forth. Then Wagner broke the deadlock by using a favorable moment at a briefing to get Hitler to make an approving comment about Bräutigam. As was often the case in such cases, Hitler was not aware of the consequences of his remark. For Rosenberg, however, the mention of Hitler was enough to commission Bräutigam and give him two assurances. The first assurance was that there would be no forcible deportation of workers in the Caucasus region. The second authorized Bräutigam to promise the population that all collective farms and collectives would be dissolved immediately. Since Bräutigam knew the dubious value of a Rosenberg assurance, he also secured himself by making agreements with the main labor department and consulting the chief group for food and agriculture. There, however, he was only granted that all collective farms in the barren Caucasus mountain regions could be dissolved. In the more fertile Kuban region, the conditions were to be studied on-site first. The country, set against the oppressive but also mighty backdrop of the Caucasus Mountains, between steppe, fertile fields, and the unmistakable green of the Caucasus high forest, had always been a problem child for the Tsars and the Soviet Union. It was not until 1934 that Soviet special units overcame the last resistance of the Mountaineers. The Cossacks on the Kuban and Terek, the Karachays, Kabardinians, Balkars, Ossetians, and Ingush still had a sense of independence. Wherever German troops marched through their towns and villages, new hopes arose. Köstring and Bräutigam were, strictly speaking, a strange team, because after all his years in Moscow, Köstring felt Greater Russian and did not believe in the backward-looking separation of the border states, to whom Bräutigam was close.
They traveled all alone through the steppes, over fertile fields, on barely passable roads to old mountain nests. They were warmly welcomed everywhere. There were no partisans anywhere in this area. Everywhere there was only a trusting expectation, the focus of which was either a return to free peasantry, which had always been prevalent in the Caucasus in contrast to the serfdom of the rest of Russia, or occasionally a return to free pastoralism.
The Kabardinians received Köstring in the capital Nalchik when he reached their area in the wake of German troops. The regional elders accepted Köstring's promise that the land and the cattle herds would once again become their personal property. The mass of Kabardinians waited outside, on foot and horseback. When Köstring himself stepped out to them and made the same promises that he had made to their elders, he was seized, thrown into the air again and again, and caught again. He was then asked to deliver a few thousand sheep and a hundred horses of the famous Kabardian breed to the German army group as a gift of gratitude. The riders were ready to take part in the fight for liberation on the German side.
In the capital of the Balkars, the liberation celebration became a religious festival. Dances alternated with horse riding performances. When the Balkars brought a liberation gift for Hitler, a gold-plated bridle, Bräutigam bowed his head for a moment. He was troubled, as he later reported, by the realization of the terrible illusion that these people had about the “supposed author” [Adolf Hitler] of their liberation.
None of those who were rejoicing there and believed in a new future seemed to believe it was possible that the Soviet troops could ever return and inevitably take bloody revenge on them. In those late autumn days, it seemed as if the advance across the Caucasus had been restarted with the handover of command to Kleist. The invasion of the Karachay region followed with new rejoicing and new celebrations...
But between the days and weeks of a macabre liberation, the signs of the “master spirit” that wafted over from the Führer's headquarters and the other occupied territories began to make themselves known again. When the Karachays invited people to the Bairam festival in honor of the German troops, representatives of the Four Year Plan, led by Secretary of State Körner, arrived at the army group. One of them spoke up: Karachays, Karachays! We have liberated you from Bolshevism. But that doesn't mean that you can now do whatever you want. Now you must prove yourselves worthy of liberation by our great leader Adolf Hitler and sacrifice and work for the German victory. Now it's time to roll up your sleeves. Go at the enemy. There's no room for giving up.
Bräutigam pulled himself together and translated: Karachays! We know that a noble people is living in the Caucasus, the Karachays. We heard that the Bolsheviks took away this people's property and their freedom. That is why Adolf Hitler sent his army and liberated you... His conscience tormented him as he continued: "From now on you will live freely in your villages and on your own land again.... And his inner voices stirred even more insistently when the cheering had died down and the speaker of the Four-Year Plan Commission said to his neighbor: That is how you have to talk to the brothers. They immediately understand the encouraging voice of the Lord. But Bräutigam allowed himself to be carried away by the events, his scruples of conscience and worries, and once again took refuge in his own illusions.[…]
[…] But Köstring gained experience with field battalions that had emerged from the Turkic and Caucasian legions in the General Government and were hastily sent to the Caucasus front to help liberate their Georgian or Armenian homeland. The battalions came from the General Government of Poland. Köstring had never foreseen them. They had no local leaders but randomly assigned Germans who did not understand a word of their native language. Lacking any knowledge or understanding of their subordinates, they had assembled "colonial troops" and treated them with the arrogance of real neo-colonialists.
Since the Georgians and Armenians had been rescued from prison camps by the committees of their self-appointed country leaders, they had had no political speech other than general phrases about the fight against Bolshevism. The threat of punishment had kept them together. Even the connection with the commissions had been broken off. At the same time, they had observed the harsh treatment of the Poles in the General Government. These impressions had not helped to strengthen their initial willingness to fight together with the Germans. Their armament consisted only of captured weapons. Some of their German superiors had told them that these weapons were just good enough for them. Some of the Germans viewed being assigned to the legions as a punishment.
So these battalions arrived at Army Group A. When Köstring inspected a Georgian battalion and one made up of Ossetians, Circassians, and Karachays on the march to the front, the first misfortune had already occurred. An Armenian battalion already deployed at the front had largely defected. The German regimental commander was outraged. Without any political knowledge, he raged about the rabble, about "spies" and "cowards." Köstring recognized the impending disaster that could destroy the country's own troops. He made urgent representations to Stauffenberg. He demanded that hasty front-line deployments of legionary units be stopped immediately. He demanded a thorough review of the situation in the legions in the General Government. Köstring countered the angry reports from German commanders about their front-line experiences with the first Caucasian units with reports that arrived on the same days from the leader of the miners' units, Captain Oberländer, about his Caucasian units. Oberländer complained bitterly that his units were not being used for the purpose for which he had created them, namely for insurgent operations beyond the German front. The growing bitterness of the fighting in the Caucasus foothills and the increasing shortage of German forces had led to the Bergmann units on the Terek being thrown into normal front-line operations without further ado. But they had fought there tenaciously and reliably, despite heavy losses and third-rate armament.
Köstring's call did not go unnoticed. On September 22nd, Colonel Ralph von Heygendorff left one of the front-line leave trains at Warsaw station, which came from the area of Army Group Center. While he was looking around for ways to reach his destination, Rembertow, he spotted a train on a side track that caught his attention. The carriages bore the inscription: Poles, Jews and Legionnaires last carriage. In this way, Heygendorff got a foretaste of the new task for which he had been taken out of the front at Stauffenberg's insistence. Until a few days ago, he had led an infantry regiment in Army Group Center. Now he had the order in his pocket that made him commander of the formation staff of the Eastern Legions in Rembertow, the commander of the legionaries who were banished to the last wagon like lepers...
Up until then, Heygendorff had only heard sporadically about the formation of the various state-owned units in his army group area. The fact that there were also state-owned units in the General Government under the name of Eastern Legions was news to him. That did not mean that he was annoyed at being appointed their commander. Quite the opposite. He had learned Russian during the First World War and accompanied high-ranking Soviet officers on maneuver visits in Germany in 1930 and 1932. During the campaign in Poland, he had been a liaison officer with the Soviet Army. After that, he was a member of the German-Soviet commission that established the new border between Soviet and German territory after the abrupt conclusion of the German-Soviet friendship pact in 1939 and the mutual attack on Poland. After that, he was Köstring's assistant until 1941. So Heygendorff was expected to have a certain amount of understanding. That was the reason why Stauffenberg assigned Heygendorff this new task.
On September 23, Heygendorff arrived in Rembertow. Major Meyer Mader, the first commander in Rembertow, had already left the town at the beginning of April. In Skierniewicze he had set up the Turk Battalion 450 and rolled it out to Army Group South at the beginning of May. Since then, leadership positions have changed constantly.
Four legions had emerged from Rembertow: the Turkestan Legion, the Azerbaijani Legion, the Georgian Legion, and finally the Armenian Legion. The Georgian Legion had been divided again. A North Caucasus Legion had been branched off. In the Turkestan Legion, there were Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Turkmen, Karalpaks and Tajiks. In the Georgian Legion, there were Georgians, South Ossetians, Svens, Laks, Adjars, and Karachays. Only the Azerbaijanis and Armenians gave a unified impression. The German leadership, brought in from various units and sometimes given up because of their poor qualities, did not understand why people who had previously been considered subhumans should suddenly fight on the German side and be treated decently. Most German officers and NCOs did not understand that their subordinates could have such a thing as national feeling, pride, and self-respect. German battalion commanders explained in the presence of Turk officers who understood German that it was the job of the Turk battalions to save more valuable German blood at the front. Heygendorff had such commanders replaced during his tour.
In Kielce, Heygendorff found a home for the disabled in an ugly building for amputated, paralyzed, and blind legionaries. A few hundred seriously wounded were cared for by Sturmbannführer Geibel. There was no senior German doctor, no medical equipment, no training opportunities, nothing. A Turkish doctor showed Heygendorff a reply from the Army Medical Inspectorate, which he had asked for prostheses. It said: that prostheses are in short supply and are only needed for German soldiers. Geibel had tried to obtain light ash wood so that the wounded could carve their own prostheses. The answer was: that ash wood is only needed for aircraft construction. Couldn't they have at least supplied a few prostheses to show goodwill? There were no awards, no recognition. Soldiers who had become fit for work again were sent to hard labor camps and the Eastern Worker Badge was sewn onto their chests.
Finally, Heygendorff went to Warsaw. He visited a hospital for legionaries and found Georgian and Caucasian doctors who had been assigned by German privates to do dirty work such as cleaning latrines. The paymaster withheld special rations and cigarettes from the wounded legionaries. He was surprised when Heygendorft reprimanded him and threatened him with punishment. The paymaster's surprise was genuine. It also came from the poisonous pond of propaganda. Heygendorff reported to Governor General Frank. There he demanded that the signs on the railway trains reading Poles, Jews, Legionnaires be removed from the last carriage. “But, Colonel”, said an official, “we cannot let the Asians you are commanding travel in the same carriage as Germans.” Heygendorff was a man of great self-control. But now he shouted: “But they are good enough to be put in German uniforms and to sell their skins for us...” “Colonel”, the man replied, “do you think that a native in an English colonial regiment is allowed to travel in a railway carriage with Englishmen?” Heygendorff struggled to control himself, repeated his demand that the signs be removed, and, when he was finally given permission, drove back to Rembertow. He was determined to do a thorough job or resign.
In mid-December 1942, Stauffenberg had an order in his hand that finally allowed an inspection for the volunteers and volunteer units in the East to be set up and thus to give the forces that had sprung up so explosively at least a certain organizational order. Stauffenberg had pursued this goal in complete silence. The approval of the Wehrmacht High Command had again taken the longest. It was only granted with the comment that the inspection had to be clear that it only had an advisory function and that it was forbidden to use Eastern peoples to set up larger units.
The department was allowed to use the title "General of the Eastern Troops". Roenne expressed reservations about this title from the outset. The word "East" already had an offensive connotation due to its use as a badge for Eastern workers. The word troops sounded similar to the Russian word "trup"(corpse), which means corpse. But it was fortunate that the department had been approved at all, and Roenne suggested his former division commander, General Hellmich, as General of the Eastern Troops.
Hellmich was commander of a reserve division in the General Government at the time. During the Battle of Moscow, he had actually or supposedly failed as commander of the 23rd Division and lost his command of the front. During the First World War, he learned to speak half Russian while in Russian captivity. He was tall, almost stocky, with dark blond hair streaked with grey and a large head with eyes that were not particularly intelligent but humanly kind. He was certainly an experienced, honest soldier, but he had no understanding of politics or diplomacy. Roenne realized too late that he himself had made a mistake and put a mere soldier in a position that required a particularly skilled negotiator and psychologist, but above all a man without military blinkers.
The same loyalty complex that in a certain sense led Roenne to propose his old division commander led Hellmich to put together his new staff from former officers of the 23rd Division who of course did not speak Russian and had no specialist knowledge. Only the first chief of the new staff, Lieutenant Colonel von Freytag-Loringhoven, who was ordered to Lötzen by Army Group South in mid-December, had such knowledge. When Hellmich moved into his office in the Steinmetz barracks at the edge of Lötzen, he did not know that his new task would become the greatest tragedy of his life after the death of his two sons in the war.
Since November 19, Colonel General von Kleist's staff had been looking north with concern. Hitler's defiant will to conquer Stalingrad had led to Army Group A being deprived of more and more forces and more and more material for the battle for Stalingrad. Everyone in Kleist's inner circle knew that the second major attempt to bring down the Soviet Union militarily in 1942 had failed. The fronts between the Don, Volga, and Caucasus were expanding. Superior Russian armies had launched a pincer attack northwest and southwest of Stalingrad and had broken into the far too thin German and allied fronts.
When Bräutigam had a brief conversation with Kleist in the first days of December after returning from a trip to the Cossack areas, Kleist told him: “The 6th Army is surrounded in Stalingrad. We must get used to the idea of withdrawing our army group to the Don. We will never return to the Caucasus...” Bräutigam, as his notes show, thought with horror of the fate of all those who had greeted the German troops and him as liberators and had since begun a new life full of trust. Leaving them behind in a retreat to the west would have meant their downfall. Meanwhile, Köstring fell ill. The illness put him out of action for weeks. And Bräutigam was left alone.
On December 28, the retreat orders for Army Group A arrived. On New Year's morning, Kleist explained to Bräutigam: “Stalingrad is finished. The Führer has forbidden the 6th Army to break out. Now it is too late. He has also forbidden us to go back across the Don. We have a bridgehead on the Kuban and also the city of Rostov to hold. The Führer wishes to maintain a position on the eastern Black Sea about Turkey...”
Does that mean, asked Bräutigam, that the idea of conquering the Caucasus has not yet been abandoned? The idea certainly has not. That said it all...
- Bräutigam. “And what will become of the Caucasus peoples who have sided with us? We cannot leave them behind.”
- We will have to fight for our own lives. We must march to save our own skins at the last moment.
- Bräutigam insisted: “We must at least take with us all those who have put themselves in a particularly exposed position and who want to go with us...”
- “How can I justify that?” said Kleist. “The convoys would clog up our roads and put our own units in hopeless predicaments.”
- Bräutigam: “Then the convoys will have to march outside the roads.”- Kleist asked: “Do you think that is possible?”
- Bräutigam did not know whether it would be possible. But he said: "Yes...”
- Kleist replied after a brief hesitation: “You will hear my decision tomorrow.”
The following morning Kleist ordered the formation of a "Caucasus Refugee Staff". Its head was the field commander of Pyatigorsk, General Mierczynski. Bräutigam became his representative. Twenty-four hours later the instructions were sent out to the field commands. Bräutigam once again recalled the autumn days of jubilation that he had experienced among the Caucasian peoples, and probably wished he had never experienced them. Another twenty-four hours later, the march out of the homeland was already underway. No one had time to lament their own fate and curse the Germans. The field commanders had said that it was only a temporary retreat for the winter. Tens of thousands packed their wagons overnight.
Bräutigam did what he could to guide the treks along reasonably safe routes. The Cossacks were to move across the ice of the Sea of Azov to Mariupol. However, as the ice was not yet completely closed, large groups of Cossacks fell into the hands of the Soviet forces pushing forward. The Caucasian treks tried to reach the Kuban bridgehead or to reach the Sea of Azov near Azov, where the ice was closed.
Bräutigam himself reached Rostov after days of depressing experiences and self-reproach. There he gathered all the refugees to send them on to the Nogai Steppe. In Taganrog, he received an order from the Ministry of the East to return to Berlin immediately. The "Caucasian Question" had been settled. But Bräutigam could not detach himself from the general fate for which he felt partly responsible. He stayed. He championed the idea of leading the Cossacks in the Baranovichi area and settling their families there. But [Erich] Koch threatened to take away the horses of Cossacks who were moving through the Ukraine.
Every day brought new battles for a safe route to the west. Finally, the Cossacks' march ended in Tolmezzo in northern Italy. There Bräutigam separated from them. In the same weeks, the Kalmyks also streamed west. Doll [Dr. Otto Werba] and his helpers gathered the tribes who at first did not want to understand that their trust in the Germans had dragged them into an adventure that would now cost them their existence as a people. They moved towards the Ukraine in long treks with women and children and their herds. Kalmyk squadrons that reached eastern Ukraine and were temporarily safe were used to protect the railways. They did their job as best they could. But the consequences of being transplanted to a world that was foreign to them soon became apparent. Doll had never aspired to make the Kalmyks soldiers in the Western sense. He knew that was impossible. And so they became a thorn in the side of German command posts. They were demanded to be disarmed here and there. They were demanded to be separated from their wives and children. The Kalmyks reacted as they had to react as uprooted, homeless, misunderstood, and attacked people. They took what was not given to them. As the front retreated, they moved further west from stage to stage until they finally reached the Neuhammer military training area in Silesia.
On March 1, 1943, Bräutigam, marked by the hardships of the long trek, faced Wagner in Mauerwald. The Führer's headquarters and the OKH had returned from Vinnytsia to Mauerwald after the collapse of the 1942 offensive. A few days previously, Köstring had been there. He had now traveled to Berlin but was due to return in a few weeks to take up the post of Inspector of the Turkic Associations in Mauerwald.
“Don't tell me anything!” said Wagner. “I know that the end of this Caucasus campaign was horrific and that no one can overlook the consequences. We are hopelessly entangled in the drama. If we don't want to simply give up everything, we must continue to fight. While you were down there, a new battle began here in which more is at stake than was ever at stake in the Caucasus. We have found your Russian leadership nature.”
Arlt created a Ukrainian oath formula instead of the swearing-in to Hitler that had been customary up to that point. It was to Arlt and [Pavlo] Schandruk's advantage that the German division commander, General [Fritz] Freitag, who was a non-native German, understood as little Ukrainian as the interpreters, who only spoke Russian. They did not understand the new oath formula.
The 1st Ukrainian Division was on the march to Slovakia. Schandruk himself was busy setting up a second Ukrainian division. It was to be made up of Eastern Ukrainians under the leadership of the Ukrainian Colonel Diatschenko. Preparations were also underway for the formation of a Ukrainian national committee. Efforts to gain the approval of the radical Ukrainian leaders Bandera, Melnik, and Hrynjoch for this committee promised success. At Arlt's insistence, Stefan Bandera had just been released from the concentration camp where he had been since 1941 and was handed over to Arlt.
Like Rosenberg, Arlt suddenly found himself under pressure from all the national leaders with whom he had negotiated in recent months. They too were looking for support against Vlasov. Arlt hoped to find mediation help from [Erhard] Kroeger. But Kroeger turned him down: he shared Vlasov's view that success in the East could not be achieved through fragmentation but through the unification of all forces.
Meanwhile, in Rauchstrasse, on Fehrbelliner Platz, in the Hotel Adlon and in the hotels and private quarters where Kedia, Gabliani, Schandruk, Bandera, Melnik, Hrynjoch, Kajjum Khan, Bangerski, Kantemir, Alibegov, Djamalian, Ostrowskij, Krasnov and Rosenberg's other favorites maintained their dreary residences, people were encouraging each other to fight.
Vlasov, for his part, resisted friends from Dabendorf who, in the euphoria of the moment, urged him not to engage in any conversation with the separatist traitors. He stuck to the wise position he had announced to Himmler: namely, unity in the fight against Stalin. Only after the fight should the decision be made about what relationship Ukrainians, Caucasians, or White Ruthenians wanted to have with “Mother Russia”. Vlasov was therefore ready to negotiate. But every attempt to bring about an open conversation failed. On October 25, Arlt met Kroeger in the corridor of his office. “It will not help your separatists”, said Kroeger, “that they are trying to sabotage Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Government. If they do not come voluntarily, we will bring them to the negotiating table.”
“Be reasonable”, said Arlt, “you cannot do this by force.” He predicted correctly. Kaltenbrunner and the Reich Security Main Office intervened to untie the knot by force. One of the first people [Ernst] Kaltenbrunner ordered to meet with Vlasov in his presence was Kedia, who he had been told was one of the leading minds of the Caucasians.
Kedia was compelled to follow the order. The meeting took place in a private house because Vlasov refused to enter the Reich Security Main Office. On one side sat Vlasov and Truchin, on the other Kedia and Arlt. In between were Kaltenbrunner and [Otto] Ohlendorf. Vlasov's eyes expressed an almost painful expectation. No one who saw him at that hour doubted that he was honestly fighting for unity. Kedia's face, on the other hand, betrayed only passionate rebellion against the compulsion that had brought him here.
Kaltenbrunner's forbidding face had a threatening look on it. “Mr. Kedia”, he said, “are you ready to take part in the formation of a liberation government for your Russian homeland under General Vlasov?”
Kedia lost his temper when he heard the word “Russian”. “No!”, he screamed, “Never!”
Kaltenbrunner: “And why?”
Kedia: “Because we Caucasians have not fought to this day to throw ourselves at the mercy of a new imperialist Russian”, and then added: “I prefer Stalin in my face to Vlasov in my ass...”
Kaltenbrunner was not prepared to give in but Vlasov interrupted: “I do not want to continue negotiating in this way. Mr. Kedia evidently believes that it is not necessary to unite forces to have any chance at all against Stalin. Mr. Kedia believes that I am worse than Stalin. I do not want anyone to follow me under duress.”
Kaltenbrunner made other attempts to bridge the differences that had arisen by force. Vlasov did not take part in this after Ostrowski, the "President" of the White Ruthenians, also following Kaltenbrunner's orders, visited him. The professorial man without a country explained: "General Vlasov. Our paths are different. You are for a free Russia, I am for a free White Ruthenia." Then he took his leave, not without a theatrical pose. Vlasov could not prevent Kaltenbrunner from gathering other previously unknown representatives of the nationalities. There was no lack of Ukrainians, Cossacks, Caucasians, and White Ruthenians, who were ready to join Vlasov as leaders of their peoples. Regardless of whether it was the Ossetian Zogoll, the Ukrainian Musitschenko, or General Balabin, who as a Russian had once served in a Cossack unit and now acted as a representative of the Cossacks. When Kroeger expressed his satisfaction that representatives had finally been found, Vlasov looked at him and said: "The others are only shadows of their peoples. But these are only shadows of shadows."
The turn of October into November was filled with preparations for the first meeting of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia and the proclamation of a manifesto. Vlasov demanded that the proclamation of this manifesto should not take place in Potsdam, as Kaltenbrunner had ill-intentioned, but on Slavic soil. He suggested Prague as the venue. Karl Hermann Frank, the deputy Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia, protested because he feared unrest among the Czech population after a major Vlasov action in Prague. But Kaltenbrunner forced him to give in. Meanwhile, Vlasov and Dabendorf's intellectual brain trust concentrated all their energies on drawing up a manifesto that Vlasov would proclaim in Prague. The fathers of the first version were Kovalchuk, a surviving friend and colleague of Zykov, Professor A. N. Zaitsev, and N. Nareikis. Everyone agreed on the aim that the manifesto had to pursue. It was to make clear not only to Germany and the Soviet Union, but also to the rest of the world, especially the Western powers, that here was a man and a movement that stood up against Stalin and his brutal form of Bolshevism, not as a mercenary of Hitler, not as a participant in his war, but as a spiritually independent force. The manifesto had to express that Vlasov's idea of a new Russia had nothing to do with Hitler's fascist regime and was not shaped in its image. It had to make clear that the National Committee was not influenced by the reactionary spirit of tsarist émigréism. It had to make it unmistakably clear that it was building on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and, after the fall of Stalin, was planning and proclaiming a social democratic people's government that would safeguard the freedom of individuals- and this amid a country ruled by the dictator Hitler.
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Istanbul, 26 January 2025