Yes, in modern literature it is not denied that the Jews were killed by representatives of the police, created by the Ukrainian National Committee, which proclaimed the independence of Ukraine on June 30, and simply by amateur pogromists. Poles were among the latter, which is not surprising given the anti-Semitism in pre-war Poland.
However, although there were more than three times more Poles than Ukrainians in what was then Lviv, there is much less information about their participation in the pogroms. Some of the victims (in total, 4-6 thousand Jews died in late June - early July), of course, fell at the hands of the Germans, but the main role of the occupiers then was reduced to incitement and non-intervention. But the death of Polish professors is considered the work of the Einsatzgruppen led by SS Brigadeführer Eberhard Schöngart.
As for the Nachtigal battalion, in Ukraine they prove that all the accusations against him, in particular the testimonies, were fabricated by the KGB and the security service of the GDR in order to tarnish the political leader of this unit, later the prominent West German politician Theodor Oberländer. In 1960, this figure in the GDR was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for the murders of Jews and Poles in Lvov. But the conclusion is made: once in the same year, the Bonn court acquitted him, which means that Nachtigal was not involved in these acts either.
However, everything is far from being so simple. In fact, there was no justification, because there was no judgment; the prosecutor's office stopped the case: regarding the Jewish pogroms - due to lack of evidence, and regarding the execution of Polish professors - in connection with the establishment of the non-involvement of the accused.
At the same time, it is impossible not to pay attention to the fact that such a debunker of Ukrainian nationalism as Vitaliy Maslovsky, in his final work “Ukrainian nationalists fought against whom and against whom in the fates of Another world war” (M., 1999) does not use that evidence base , on the basis of which Oberländer was convicted in the GDR. He frankly writes about the “lack of weighty and comprehensive documents and analytical studies” on this issue, and the involvement of “Nachtigal” in crimes leads only from the book of the Polish author Alexander Korman “From the Bloody Days of Lvov 1941.” (London, 1991), based on eyewitness accounts.
“Nakhtigalivtsy” hung out from the houses of communists and Poles, who were immediately hung on the balconies ...”; “Ukrainian warriors of the battalion “Nakhtigal” were called “poultries” by the Meshkantsy of Lvov…”; “Ptashniks were in German uniforms and with German military signs. They spoke in Ukrainian language ... "- Maslovsky quotes this edition.
And the Polish historian Jacek Wilchur, who lived in Lvov in 1941, claims that he was then told: "Ptashniks" were killed in four ways - with bullets, a bayonet, a butt, or simply beaten to death with their hands and feet ". As already indicated in the quote from Korman, it was the Nakhtigalevites who were called "birders" - because of the image of the nightingale on their cars and motorcycles: in this they differed from the Ukrainians who served in other German units as translators.
Would it be fair to reject Vilchur's evidence on the grounds that he himself did not see these crimes, or because of doubts about his objectivity? Memory, of course, can fail anyone. But it is known that the pogroms in Lvov really took place, and if the Polish historian were a Ukrainophobe, he would rather attribute those atrocities to nationalists independent of the Germans (for example, the police subordinate to the national committee), and not to the division of the German army - because in the first case, the blame was assigned would be for some Ukrainians, while in the second it is divided between the German command and its subordinates.
"Prelude to the Holocaust". What the German archives say
Nevertheless, the materials of Korman and Vilchur that are available to us do not allow us to firmly determine how serious their evidence base is. This also applies to other press reports about Polish historians convinced that Nachtigall was involved in those crimes in Lvov. In addition, some of their compatriot colleagues hold the opposite opinion... And to independently draw a conclusion about the guilt or innocence of the Ukrainian Abwehr battalion, having at hand not the historical works themselves, but only responses to them or individual quotes, such a task seems unrealistic.
Now, however, any Internet user has access to a source that makes it easier for those who do not speak foreign languages to come to a definite conclusion on this issue. This is Hannes Heer's article "Prelude to the Holocaust: Lemberg in June-July 1941", written ten years ago and recently reprinted in Russian by a number of sites. True, there are two shortcomings in the publications of this most interesting text. Firstly, an extensive reference apparatus, references to sources (footnotes are practically not translated, German abbreviations are not deciphered, which makes them obscure even for many trained readers), and secondly, nothing is said about the author himself .
Meanwhile, Hannes Heer is the most famous German historian, who in the late 90s of the last century organized the most resonant exhibition “Wehrmacht Crimes”, which breaks the stereotype common in Germany that the SS, Gestapo, SD were involved in Nazi atrocities - but not the army.
At the beginning of the "Prelude ..." Heer explains that the battalion of the 800th training and sabotage regiment of the Abwehr "Brandenburg" (800 soldiers), to which the Nachtigal battalion (400 soldiers) was attached, was given a special task in Lviv - the preparation of actions "self-purification", which meant in Nazi jargon the destruction of Jews and other elements undesirable for the occupiers by the local population:
« Assuming that the military leaders involved in the East knew in advance about the "self-cleansing" actions planned by the Einsatzgruppen and may have already heard about the first such staging that took place on June 25/26 in Lithuanian Kaunas, Stulpnagel(Commander of the 17th Wehrmacht Army. - A.P.) pursued the goal of obtaining support from the Einsatzgruppen for their own actions in this direction.
At the disposal of the army was a unit that could be used not only for risky sorties behind enemy lines, but also for other tasks - battalion 800 of the Brandenburg training and sabotage regiment. Since there were no military reasons to use the elite unit - the Red Army surrendered Lemberg without a fight - only a political order remains as an explanation. This had its own logic - three Ukrainian companies of the Nachtigal battalion were extremely anti-communist and anti-Semitic and recruited from the well-versed residents of Lemberg and the surrounding area.
Judging by the preparatory measures, Lemberg was assigned a special role: both the order to take the city and the appointment of the commandant came from the 17th Army. Moreover, after the occupation of Lemberg, she continued to tightly control the cordon of the city. In addition to the battalions involved, no formations were allowed to enter Lemberg, the admission of individuals was possible only with special passes (how strict the control was, is shown by the fact that the special commissioner of the Abwehr Prof. Koch was initially not allowed into the city), even the passage of front-line units - such as the Waffen-SS division "Viking" - was detained for one day.
Movement inside the city was also restricted: patrols had to be accompanied by an officer, and mountain shooters were ordered to remain at their posts in the citadel and the High Castle. These precautions give the impression that they wanted to give Battalion 800 the opportunity to operate without interference. In this regard, it is interesting that battalion 800 did not obey the ordered order of following the mountain shooters and became the first unit of the Wehrmacht to enter the city.
This ignorance of the order, mentioned in the battalion report, had no consequences, according to the documents, since the army obviously covered it. In the justification for the violation of discipline given by the commander of the battalion Heinz - he wanted to save "still living German soldiers and Ukrainians" from the burning prison of the GPU, as well as to prevent the "Jewish population and the mob" from plundering warehouses with a quick maneuver - tasks appear that in fact In fact, they were put in front of a battalion of 800: to take control of the prisons and, possibly, to coordinate anti-Jewish actions.
The matter was not limited to taking control. From the testimonies of witnesses, it becomes clear that after the arrival of Battalion 800 and the Ukrainian companies subordinate to it, some of the corpses in prisons were mutilated. The same, apparently, happened in other cities of Galicia. The performers are called OUN-B activists. Enkavedeshniki - witnesses say - were primarily concerned with evacuation measures and their own hasty retreat, they had "too little time" for sadistic bullying.
These terrible manipulations with the bodies explain the inconsistencies in the reports from the prisons (most of the testimonies of those who visited the prisons on June 28-29 do not contain, unlike later testimonies, indications that the corpses were mutilated; also the first report of Battalion 800 does not contain such indications ). It should be added that the Jewish victims of the NKVD were taken out of the Lemberg prisons before the population was allowed inside for identification.».
Almost every phrase of the author is supported by links. Only in this fragment of the article there are 14 of them (here we do not give these footnotes for the sake of space, but they are present in Russian reprints of the full text; however, it is not easy to work with them, as noted). Moreover, the author refers not only to editions of eyewitness memoirs and monographs of historians, but also to archival documents. In particular, information about the first report of the 800th battalion was taken from the archives. And the assertion that the Nakhtigalevites were recruited mainly from Lviv is based on the book by Philipp-Christian Wax "The Case of Theodor Oberländer" (Frankfurt, 2000), the author of which, carried away by the character and biography of the hero of his work, closely communicated with him in the last years of his life and had access to personal archives.
As you know, the blame for the executions in Lvov prisons was laid not only on the NKVD, but on Lvov Jews in general, and in order to more likely provoke a pogrom, the Jews were instructed to dismantle the corpses of the executed in the presence of the relatives of the latter.
Here is what Heer writes about the role of Shukhevych's battalion in these events:
« Ukrainians from the Nachtigal battalion were also involved in the scenario. They forced the Jews brought to prison to crawl on their knees to the corpses and wash them, they tore the dresses of women and girls in order to photograph them half-naked, they tore out the beards of old men. Grenades were suddenly thrown at working Jews or panicked with well-aimed shots. The climax was the repeated ritual of punishment with gauntlets repeated over and over again.
As one of the Jewish survivors reports: “After we managed to sort through the mountains of corpses, we were forced to run around the courtyard for a long time, while we had to keep our hands above our heads. [...] During the run, and maybe right after it, I heard the German command "To the gauntlets" or "Line up for the gauntlets." As far as I remember, this command was given by someone from a group of German soldiers who were standing somewhat away from the common grave and were watching us all the time. The group consisted of 5 or 6 people. These were the officers. [...] According to this German order, the Ukrainian soldiers lined up in two tapestries and put up their bayonets. All the Jews who were in the courtyard of the prison had to pass through these tapestries, while the Ukrainian soldiers beat and stabbed them. I was not among the first to go through the tapestries. Pure chance. The first Jews who had to pass were almost all stabbed with bayonets.” In total, 4,000 Lemberg Jews died during this staged massacre.».
« Contrary to the claims of German officers that the Nachtigall personnel did not leave their places of deployment, the presence of battalion soldiers in all three prisons was confirmed. First of all, for the NKVD prison, there are accurate testimonies of witnesses, on the basis of which the Bonn prosecutor's office established that at least part of the second company(and there were three companies in the battalion. - A.P.) “turned to acts of violence against the driven Jews and is responsible for the deaths of numerous Jews.” The testimony of an employee of the SD, who was present at the execution of Jews by the military personnel of the Nachtigal battalion in the courtyard of the gymnasium, gives legitimate grounds to doubt that the circle of criminals was limited only to the second company, and the place where the crimes were committed was the NKVD prison.
The Nachtigall fighters were more than resolute: the hagiographic literature about the actions of the 800 battalion in Lemberg says without a hitch that the Ukrainians were obsessed with only one thing - revenge. The report of the secret field police says that the translators assigned to it through the mediation of "Nachtigal" are so "fanatical" towards the Jews that "the limits of their use [...] within the framework of military discipline" became apparent on the very first day. Even for the political instructor Oberländer, who was not very friendly towards the Jews, the condition of his soldiers these days became a cause for concern.».
The above two snippets are supported by 15 references. One third of them are testimonies, which were contained in the decision of the Bonn prosecutor's office, which studied the Oberländer case. Key witnesses are the former Lvov resident and later Israeli journalist Eliahu Jones, who would later write a book about the fate of the Lvov Jews, and the West German businessman of Jewish origin, Moritz Grunbart, who was in prison at the time of the occupation of Lvov (he escaped from the Lodz ghetto and was arrested by the NKVD for illegal border crossing).
It is extremely difficult to imagine that these people were influenced by the KGB. And the archival documents published by Vyatrovich, which he interprets as indicating the preparation of a provocation, speak exclusively of working with Soviet witnesses for the trial on the territory of the GDR. The "orange" historian does not have any hints that evidence against the "Nachtigal" may also be in the West German Oberländer case.
Convinced Nazi and his Ukrainian lawyers
However, the testimonies of Grünbart and Jones are not such a secret: their memories of what happened in Lvov in the first days of its occupation were published in Spiegel in February-March 1960, when the Oberländer scandal had just begun, and are now available to everyone on the official website of this magazine.
One of these publications also cites Oberländer's words at a press conference: “ I can say that during the six days during which Nachtigal was in Lvov, not a single shot was fired and that I am not aware of a single case of any violence ... During those six days I must constantly monitor the posts set up "Nachtigalem" for the protection of various objects. I was then in Lemberg for a long time and I can tell you that during these six days the Nachtigal did not fire a single shot in Lvov.».
However, he lied. Heer did not imagine that the Nachtigall political leader was then concerned about the excessive zeal of his wards: this statement is supported by a reference to Oberländer's letter to his wife, given in the aforementioned book by Waks.
By the way, the statement quoted above at a press conference clearly contradicts what Ukrainian historians are now writing - apologists for Nachtigall. So, according to Oberländer, the battalion guarded some objects all the time, and according to Viatrovich and his ilk, this unit was sent on a week's vacation a day after entering Lviv, after which it left the city.
But the contradiction here is apparent and symptomatic. At the moment when the scandal broke out, the defenders of Nachtigall and Oberländer could still try to claim that there was no shooting at all in Lvov. But when it is clear to everyone that such a version does not work, it remains to talk about a “weekly vacation”: then the crimes committed by soldiers in the form of this battalion can be explained by their personal indiscipline, removing responsibility from the command.
Even the Bonn prosecutor's office in 1960 could not whitewash the entire staff of Nachtigall. In its ruling, which is quoted by Viatrovych, it is not ruled out that “ members of the Ukrainian Nachtigal battalion, whose names have not been established, could, at their own discretion, take part in murders and pogroms, without the knowledge and contrary to the clear prohibitions of the battalion commanders».
But Vyatrovich and Co. do not cite any archival documents to confirm the prohibitions, and Oberlander's letter to his wife clearly indicates whether crimes were committed with or without knowledge. It is clear that one cannot trust the objectivity of the Bonn prosecutor's office, which historians of this kind press on. Not so long ago, “2000” already wrote what denazification in Germany was ( Should we expect victims of national reconciliation? // № 15 (554), 15-21.04.11):
« ... Since 1945, in the western occupation zone, a process called denazification was really launched, and individual war criminals were convicted. But the logic of the Cold War led the West to curtail this process and demilitarize Germany. Many criminals were released early from prison and began to play a prominent role in the country. And some have never been behind bars.
For example, the creator of such a key element of the Nazi system as the Nuremberg racial laws, Hans Josef Globke, from 1953 to 1963 headed the government apparatus under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. True, he was helped to some extent by the fact that he was, so to speak, a non-partisan Nazi. His active work in the Center Party (until 1933) became the basis for Bormann personally refusing to admit him to the NSDAP in 1940. That is why Globke avoided denazification. However, both the leadership of Germany and the leadership of the United States were well aware of its role under Nazism.».
I will add that the Americans, having received information about the whereabouts of the organizer of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, did not share it with Israel precisely for fear that his capture would endanger Globke.
Attempts to justify Oberlander and at that time did not inspire the confidence of democratically minded Germans. So, "Der Spiegel" back in 1960 stated that the international commission of inquiry "Lviv-1941" then created in Holland had discredited itself and its materials were absolutely unconvincing. And Ukrainian historians, the defenders of Nachtigall, also like to refer to this commission.
Defending the reputation of the Ukrainian Abwehr battalion, they, of course, defend Oberlander as well. And the level of this protection just well shows the degree of their historical competence.
For example, Vyatrovich explains why the USSR wanted to compromise Oberländer: “ ... The desire to punish war criminals was used as a cover for the political game inspired by the KGB against the West German government headed by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. In 1953, he appointed Theodor Oberländer to the post of Minister for War Victims, Deported and Repatriated Germans. Under his care were millions of German refugees and migrants from the former lands of the Reich, who after the war went to Poland, Czechoslovakia and the USSR. Among these people, anti-communist sentiments prevailed. Over time, Oberlander, relying on them, decided to create a powerful political party with a bright anti-left bias, which attracted the attention of the Stasi, and therefore the KGB. In part, the task of compromising the government of Adenauer and Oberländer directly, the valiant Chekists nevertheless managed to realize. Despite being acquitted in court, Oberländer had to resign as a minister involved in a high-profile political scandal"(ZN, No. 6, 16.02.08).
In fact, the politician left the post of minister in May 1960, when the prosecutor's office had not yet taken up his case. And most importantly, there are no serious materials about his plans to create a new party in the FRG. On the contrary, everything was exactly the opposite: in 1953 Oberländer got into the Adenauer government precisely as a representative of the junior partner of the CDU - the All-German Bloc / Union of Exiled and Deprived of Rights party, which was voted for by people from the lands lost by Germany in 1945 But already in 1955, together with the leader of this political force, Waldemar Kraft, and its other prominent functionaries, he joined the CDU, drawing the main electorate of this party (which then quickly withered away) to the Christian Democrats. They were quite comfortable among the Christian Democrats, because at that time the degree of the anti-left bias of the latter simply went off scale. And the USSR benefited from the discrediting of Oberländer precisely as a figure in Adenauer's cabinet, while the emergence of a new party would rather be beneficial to Moscow, increasing the potential for internal conflicts in the German government.
And Holocaust researcher in Galicia Zhanna Kovba, who diligently emphasizes the non-involvement of Ukrainian nationalist formations in atrocities, finds only the following words to characterize Oberlander: “ not only with his sharply anti-communist, anti-radian views, ale thim, that he was an officer of the Wehrmacht, chiming in with the Nachtigal battalion.
Of course, the figure in question was an anti-communist and anti-Soviet. However, for example, Churchill's anti-communism and anti-Sovietism did not prevent him from becoming an ally of the USSR. And Oberländer was on the opposite side, because he was a staunch Nazi - as an 18-year-old he participated in Hitler's "beer putsch" (1923), because of which he spent four days in jail. The subject of his main interests before World War II was not communism and the USSR, but Poles and Jews. On the one hand, he was engaged in inciting national contradictions in Poland, on the other hand, in the fight against the Poles from among the subjects of the Reich. Already in the mid-1930s, he spoke in favor of a ban on social relations between Germans and Poles, and in 1939-1940. carried out ethnic cleansing in the Polish lands annexed to Germany.
However, Oberlander did not like the Poles not just as such, but as Slavs - back in 1936, in the article “Demographic Pressure in the German-Polish Borderlands,” he wrote that “the rapid growth of the Slavic population is a serious threat to all of Europe.” At the same time, he spoke in favor of the liquidation of the assimilated Jews, in whom he saw the main carriers of Bolshevism. The Jewish property confiscated in Poland, Oberländer proposed to partially transfer to the Poles in order to improve their attitude towards the Germans. But at the top in Berlin they did not heed this proposal. It is these purely tactical disagreements that are sometimes inflated to fundamental contradictions in Western literature, primarily in the aforementioned book by Waks, where Oberländer appears almost as a Stauffenberg-type fighter against Nazism*.
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* Klaus Schenck von Stauffenberg (1907-1944) - Colonel of the Wehrmacht; one of the main participants in the "conspiracy of the generals", which culminated in an unsuccessful attempt on Hitler's life on July 20, 1944. Stauffenberg was shot along with a group of associates. - Red.
However, in modern German, British and American studies, a lot is also reported about the Nazi activities of Oberländer, about his racist views. Excerpts from these works are also abundantly presented in articles about him in the English and German versions of Wikipedia.
And the fact that Ukrainian historians - the defenders of "Nachtigal" stubbornly do not see these qualities in the political leader of the battalion, just acts as a convincing argument in favor of distrust of their arguments about the non-involvement of this Abwehr unit in crimes.
Published documents show that the “warriors” of “Nachtigal” are obviously involved in the pogroms in Lvov in 1941, both as provocateurs and as perpetrators. But the extent of their specific guilt remains to be ascertained, as well as Oberländer's guilt: if the latter's defenders seek to present the crimes of his subordinates as unauthorized acts, this does not mean that it was so. It's just that this version is the most convenient for whitewashing the battalion's political instructor.
SS men are the organizers. And who are the performers?
As for the murder of Polish professors, it was undoubtedly a German action. However, defenders of the nationalists are deceiving when they claim that the leading Polish researcher of this problem, Zygmunt Albert, proved that the Ukrainians were completely innocent of this. In fact, in his work, which is also in Russian, the following is said: “ Many Poles still mistakenly believe that Ukrainians committed the murder of professors. If this were so, then the Hamburg prosecutor would not have admitted after the war that it was the case of his compatriots - the Germans ... This prosecutor admitted that only the group of executioners consisted of Ukrainians, translators dressed in uniforms of the SS formation».
But Hannes Heer just wrote about the role of "Nachtigal" in providing the Gestapo with translators. Albert also shares the version widely spread in Poland that the professors were discovered on a tip from the nationalists:
« Many Poles wondered how the Germans got the list of professors sentenced to death. It doesn't matter much, since the names and addresses could be found at least in the pre-war telephone directory. One can, however, believe Walter Kutschman, who said Assoc. Lanckoronskaya that the list was given to the Gestapo by the Ukrainians. Fortunately, there were only 25 professors on the list. After all, only one university had 158 associate professors and professors ...
Based on the fact that the Gestapo on that July night was looking for those who died after the start of the war(i.e. after September 1, 1939 - A.P.): oculist prof. Adam Bednarsky and dermatologist prof. Roman Leshchinsky, it can be assumed that the list originated in Krakow. Due to the fact that Lviv was separated by the border, in Krakow they could not know who died after that. The most plausible version seems to be that the Krakow Gestapo, before the start of the German-Soviet war, demanded that Ukrainians, students or graduates of higher schools in Lvov, indicate the names and addresses of professors known to them. That's why the list was, fortunately, so relatively short.».
If this version, which is shared by most other Polish researchers, is correct, then there may well be “Nachtigalevites” among the gunners of the killers.
But before the professors could be shot, they had to be arrested. An employee of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, Stanislav Bogachevich, says that these warriors also arrested them, and believes that Oberlander's personal role in this needs to be clarified. Jacek Wilczur also writes about their participation in the arrests. It is also reported that in the spring of 2005, the Union of Descendants of Murdered Professors, in a letter to the then President Viktor Yushchenko, spoke of the soldiers of the battalion as participants in this crime. But what exactly the authors sought from the Ukrainian president and what answer they received is unknown.
Meanwhile, as Igor Melnik rightly emphasized in his speech, “ It’s my fault to know who you drove in ... I’m not dead, but we, we live, so that this doesn’t happen again».
But, alas, no attempts are made to find out the true role of "Nachtigal" in the events of that time. On the contrary, one gets the impression that this truth is not needed, while the mythology created under Yushchenko remained in service with some structures of the new government. After all, for example, a reprint of Vyatrovich’s apologetic article “How the legend of Nachtigall was created” cited here is presented on the website of the Ukrainian Embassy in the United States (both in Ukrainian and in English) in the “Pages of History” section (see below). Stopped time// "2000", No. 26 (564), 1-7.07.11).
" "Last spring, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine was submitted to a draft law on the establishment of a new national holiday in the country - the Day of the Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood, scheduled for June 30. On this day, in 1941, in Lvov, which had just been occupied by the Ukrainian Wehrmacht battalion "Nachtigal", an independent Ukrainian state was proclaimed by the activists of the "Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists" (OUN). On the same day in Lviv, Ukrainian legionnaires and OUN militants began mass executions of Jews, Poles, Russians, communists and Soviet workers. It seems that it will not be useless for both Ukrainian and Russian readers to be reminded of the events of those days.
Ukrainian nationalism as an organized ideological and political movement took shape in the lands of Poland populated by Ukrainians, as well as among Ukrainian emigration scattered all over the world, in the 1920s-1930s. In Poland, Ukrainian nationalists were most radical and did not shun terrorist methods of struggle. Back in 1923, contacts were established, which were no longer interrupted, with the intelligence services, first of Weimar, and then of Nazi Germany, from which they received comprehensive methodological and material assistance. In 1929, the "Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists" (OUN) was created. In 1939, after the capture of part of Poland by the German troops, active work was carried out on this territory to put together a military wing of the OUN. The formation of the so-called "marching groups" began - the core of the future Ukrainian national army. In cooperation with the Nazis, these detachments were soon deployed in the "Squads of Ukrainian nationalists." It was these squads that served as a mobilization base for the further formation of special battalions of the Wehrmacht intelligence service "Abwehr", staffed by Ukrainians.
“At the beginning of 1941, it became possible to make a school for two Ukrainian units, with an approximate number of up to a kuren, under the German army,” - so in the late 1950s. the leader of the Ukrainian nationalists Stepan Bandera recalled the birth of the Abwehr special battalions. The battalion, codenamed Spezialgruppe Nachtigall, staffed by OUN volunteers, was formed between March and April 1941 in the Polish city of Krynica, and then underwent combat and special training in the German Neuhammer. At the same time, since April 1941, the Abwehr battalion Roland (Organization Rolland), also staffed by Ukrainians, was formed in Vienna.
The word "Nachtigall" in German means a harmless nightingale. In modern Ukrainian historiography, there is an idyllic legend that German officers gave this name, imbued with sad melodic Ukrainian songs that the training camp fighters sang in the evenings. It should be noted that the “OUN” themselves were reluctant to use the German names of their formations, preferring their own term “Squads of Ukrainian Nationalists” (DUN). The same battalion "Nachtigal" in the documents of the OUN was called "Northern Kuren DUN". The leader of the Ukrainian nationalists S. Bandera never mentions a German name in his long essay on the OUN-UPA military organization and its leader R. Shukhevych. The “innate” ambivalence of the Ukrainian formations of the Wehrmacht is fully present in the modern scientific and journalistic field in Ukraine, terminologically, as it were, dissociating Ukrainian nationalists from the crimes of Nazism.
There were 330 people in the Nachtigal battalion. consisting of four companies. Almost immediately, the new formation was included in the Brandenburg-800 special purpose regiment, which was under the jurisdiction of the 2nd department (organization of sabotage) of the Abwehr. At the head of the battalion was a kind of triumvirate. Lieutenant Albrecht Herzner was appointed German commander, Captain Roman Shukhevych, a close ally of S. Bandera, a member of the Revolutionary Wire of the OUN (b), was appointed commander from the Ukrainian side. Bandera himself after the war called Shukhevych "one of the most significant figures in the entire history of the nationalist revolutionary liberation movement." Finally, a no less “wonderful” character became the political leader of the battalion, which will be discussed below - a specialist in Eastern Europe, Theodor Oberländer. Forming the Ukrainian national units, the Germans expected to use them, first of all, as saboteurs and scouts. In addition, the undoubted propaganda effect on the Western Ukrainian population of participation in the fight against the Red Army of the Ukrainian military personnel of the Wehrmacht was taken into account. The legionnaires were dressed in the field uniform of the Wehrmacht, but had some distinctive features, for example, blue and yellow piping on shoulder straps and a bird silhouette on cars (due to which they were remembered by many witnesses). So, "Nachtigal" was a personnel unit of the Wehrmacht, was maintained and subordinated to the German authorities.
As part of the 1st battalion of the Brandenburg-800 special purpose regiment, on June 18, 1941, the Nachtigal and Roland battalions were transferred to the Soviet-Polish border in the city of Radymno. Before that, in a solemn ceremony, they swore allegiance to the leader of the Third Reich, vowing to fight for him "to the blood." Among the first units of the Wehrmacht, early in the morning of June 22, Nachtigal crossed the Soviet border and headed for the city of Przemysl, then crossed the San River with the task of advancing on Lvov. However, in the first days of the war, Nachtigal moved in the second echelon, remaining in the operational reserve of the German troops.
The offensive of the Wehrmacht in Western Ukraine in the summer of 1941 developed rapidly. Lutsk was taken on June 25, Rivne on June 28, Lvov on June 30, Ternopil on July 2, and Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivsk) was taken by the Hungarian troops. By July 7-9, the Wehrmacht was already on the old Soviet border.
On the night of June 29-30, 1941, the commander of the Brandenburg-800 regiment set the task of occupying Lvov to subordinate units. The Nachtigal battalion entered the city early in the morning on June 30, without encountering resistance from the Red Army, which had already left the city. Ukrainian legionnaires, ahead of the columns of German troops by several hours, occupied some important objects, including the buildings of the town hall and the radio station. The battalion divided into hundreds and fifty, established control over the main central streets of the city. At the Cathedral of St.
In Ukrainian nationalist discourse, the place of “Natkhigal” is especially important due to the fact that immediately after the battalion occupied Lviv and the Lviv radio center in the building of the Lviv “Prosvita”, the creation of an independent Ukrainian state was announced. In a solemn ceremony, this was announced by the representative of the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists - OUN (b) Stepan Bandera, Professor of Lviv University Ya. Stetsko - one of Bandera's closest supporters and a member of the supreme body of the Bandera wing of the OUN - the Revolutionary Wire, created by the latter in 1940. To a “storm of applause and tears of joy” from those present, Stetsko read out the “sacred act of proclaiming Ukrainian statehood” (“Act of the Voting of the Ukrainian State”), authored by S. Bandera.
At the same time, the composition of the Ukrainian government was announced, headed by Stetsko himself. The relevant proclamation was read out over the radio and is said to have caused a "great upsurge" among Ukrainians. On July 1, Metropolitan Sheptytsky blessed the proclaimed Ukrainian state. He hailed the German army as a liberating army.
Meanwhile, the top political leadership of the Third Reich and the command of the Wehrmacht were not aware of such an independent act of Ukrainian nationalists. The “High Assembly” limited itself to a cordial greeting from the “creator and leader of Greater Germany” Adolf Hitler. A few days later, the newly-minted Prime Minister Stetsko turned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany, informing him of the accomplished "will of the Ukrainian people" and at the same time offering his services to "Greater Germany".
The Banderaites understood their relationship with Nazi Germany as a temporary and, moreover, an equal alliance to overthrow the "Bolshevik yoke" and counted on the fact that Hitler would allow them to create a more or less independent national state like Slovakia or Croatia. Ukrainian nationalists did not hide their plans to use Nazi Germany for their own purposes, primarily to expel the Bolsheviks from Ukraine. The meaning of this political action in the late 1950s. S. Bandera explained grandiloquently, trying to "slip" between two totalitarianisms - Soviet and Nazi: "When in 1941 a war broke out between two predatory, totalitarian imperialisms on Ukrainian land and for its possession, then the OUN, remembering the conclusions of Yevgeny Konovalets from the events of 1917 - 1918, gave rise to the current framework for the active performance of the Ukrainian nation in the historical arena.
The proclamation of the revival of the Ukrainian State in June 1941 and the building of an independent state life testified that the Ukrainian people will under no circumstances renounce their rights as masters on their own land, and only respect for these sovereign rights of Ukraine by other peoples and states can serve as a platform for friendship with them. . Specifically, about the Ukrainian battalions, Bandera wrote: “By sending a detachment of the DUN to study in the German army, the OUN set its own conditions, which were accepted by those German military officials who organized the case.”
But the naive calculation of the nationalists that, by putting the Germans before the fact of creating a Ukrainian state, they would be able to achieve recognition of their rights, turned out to be a calculation. The German patrons, who had long cherished Ukrainian nationalism and planned to use it for their own purposes in the war against the Soviet Union, did not like such self-will.
Stetsko was soon arrested in Lvov, and the guide (leader) of the OUN Bandera was arrested in Krakow. The latter soon ended up in the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen, where he spent until September 1944, and the newly appeared Ukrainian state was abolished after only two days.
All the more valuable for modern Ukrainian historians and nationalist politicians is that brief moment when national statehood existed at least formally. Local historians are making a lot of efforts, proving that this act of independence was not a declaration and an empty phrase.
It is alleged, for example, that in June 1941, in Galicia and Volyn, which the Soviet troops and the Soviet authorities left virtually without a fight, representatives of the OUN "became almost complete masters of most of the settlements of the whole region." In this sense, “Natkhigal”, who went “with fire and sword” through a number of cities in Western Ukraine, which we will discuss below, becomes, as it were, at the “pedestal” of the Ukrainian state tradition, the heir of which the current Kyiv authorities consider themselves to be. "Nathigal" is understood as a kind of advanced armed detachment of Ukrainian patriots, carrying (or at least symbolizing) the liberation of the Ukrainian people from the "Bolshevik yoke".
At the same time, the dark side of the history of this unit, its function as a punitive tool, a faithful helper of the German fascist conquerors who entered Soviet soil with no peace-loving plans, remains in the shadows or is categorically swept aside.
It is difficult to deny the documented facts that will be given below, but interpretations come into play.
The Ukrainian side, often without denying the very participation of "Nahigal" in punitive actions, justifies them with understandable motives: they say, the legionnaires took revenge on them for a million (according to Ukrainian historians and publicists), allegedly killed or deported by the Bolsheviks Western Ukrainians in 1939 - 1941. The “account” for the Soviet authorities also includes “thousands” of prisoners in the prisons of Galicia and Lvov, whom the NKVD officers allegedly “shot and threw grenades” immediately before the German occupation. The confrontation between historians has long gone beyond the scope of an academic dispute and it has quite specific victims: for example, in 1999, the well-known historian Professor V. Maslovsky, who had recently published a book on this topic, was killed in the entrance of his own house.
Whatever ideals the Ukrainian nationalists were guided by, in reality their embodiment turned into loyal service to the occupiers and active complicity in numerous crimes against the civilian population and the party and Soviet activists of Western Ukrainian cities. The most famous of them was the Lvov pogrom, which took place in late June - early July 1941. This crime against humanity, in which the Nachtigall fighters took an active part, was one of the first acts of mass extermination of civilians in the occupied territory of the Soviet Union.
While in the building of the Lviv "Prosvita" there were impromptu celebrations of the independence of Ukraine, in parallel with them and, as if illustrating the nature of the new state, terrible and bloody events took place. The “Nachtigal” fighters, together with OUN activists (“Ukrainian militia”) who came out of the underground and detachments of auxiliary police hastily created by the Germans, and simply residents of Lviv, began an unprecedented cruelty cleansing of the city from Jews, Soviet activists and representatives of the Polish intelligentsia, taking revenge on the innocent people for the corpses of Ukrainian activists found in the abandoned prisons of the NKVD. Collective responsibility for the executions was assigned to Lvov Jews who had nothing to do with them. In a few days - from June 30 to July 2 - only about 4 thousand Jews were killed in Lvov. In addition, a large number of citizens of Russian and Polish nationalities were killed.
The issue of the Holocaust is an international issue and it is impossible to simply silence it. In modern Ukraine, politicians and historians have long chosen the path of complete denial of everything that can link the OUN movement and the Holocaust. At one time, many Israelis were struck by the statement of President of Ukraine V. Yushchenko that today not a single document has been found proving the participation of Ukrainian nationalists in the extermination of Jews. At best, compromising materials in Ukraine are called "fabricated by the KGB" The current Ukrainian nationalists continue this tradition.
Meanwhile, the recollections of witnesses, primarily the victims of the pogroms in Lvov in the summer of 1941, are more than enough to formulate an accusation of crimes that do not have a statute of limitations.
According to a resident of Lviv, T. Sulim, who witnessed the massacres, "there was no street in the city where the corpses of people would not lie." “Inhuman screams,” recalled one of the surviving Jews, “broken heads, disfigured bodies and beaten faces, covered in blood mixed with dirt, aroused the bloodthirsty instincts of the mob, which howled with pleasure. Women and old people, who were lying on the ground almost breathless, were poked with sticks and dragged along the ground.
The Lvov prison Brigidki became the epicenter of the extermination of Jews. According to Kurt Levin, a former resident of Lvov, he and his father, Rabbi Ezekiel Levin, were driven to Brigidki, where Ukrainians and Germans brutally beat Jews. K. Levin especially remembered one Ukrainian. He beat the Jews with an iron stick. “With each blow, pieces of skin flew up into the air, sometimes an ear or an eye. When the stick broke, he found a huge charred club and broke the skull of the first Jew who came under his arm with it. The brains scattered in all directions and fell on Levin's face and his clothes ...
The pogroms were accompanied by cruel abuse of defenseless people. Many recalled the so-called "knee marches" when Jews were forced to crawl to a prison or place of execution. Washing pavements and entrances with tongues was also widespread. The women were stripped naked and driven through the streets. In such bullying, one can see not a very high flight of fancy, but an extreme degree of bitterness of the executioners. Numerous photographic evidence of these abuses have survived to this day.
Although the pogroms in Lvov these days have taken on a massive character, there is a lot of evidence of the active and organized participation of the legionnaires of Natkhigal in them. Immediately after the arrival of the Nachtigal battalion in Lviv, about 80 Ukrainian legionnaires were allocated from its composition. As the former battalion fighter G. Melnik recalled, a few days later they returned to the location of the unit and said that they had arrested and shot many local residents. Two of the legionnaires, by the name of Lushchik and Pankiv, personally told Melnik that they had taken Polish scientists to the Wuletskaya Gora in Lvov and shot them. Another former legionnaire, J. Spital, recalled how indoors at home on the street. Drohomanov (former Mokhnatsky), 22 housed a kind of "detention house", in which the soldiers of "Nachtigal" shot people of different nationalities every night. One night, a large group of detainees were thrown from the balcony of the second floor, and then shot to death.
Witness Makarukha, who had been a Soviet worker before the war, was arrested, taken to the police building, stripped naked and subjected to severe torture. The commander of the battalion, Shukhevych, personally participated in his interrogation, demanding that Makarukha extradite the communists. These days, while in prison, Makarukha saw daily how Ukrainian nationalists in German uniforms, with a trident on their chests and
yellow-blue stripes on shoulder straps, and the Germans selected groups of 10-15 people in prison, who were then shot. He was also shot, but, wounded, he was able to get out of the pit with corpses and hide. One of the following days, he saw a soldier in a German uniform grab a small Jewish child by the legs, hit his head against the wall of the house, and in this way killed him.
Witness Hübner, who was a serviceman of the construction battalion of the Air Force stationed at that time in Lvov, observed from the window of the washroom of his unit the carnage in the fire station. About 30 people, aged 17 to 51, were driven individually through the Nazis in the direction of the tower of this depot. At the same time, they were so cruelly tortured that most of them did not reach the door of the tower, but fell to the ground dead. The few who made it to the tower were then thrown out of the top windows of the tower. In those cases when even after the fall they remained alive, they were finished off. The fact that the killers were servicemen of the Nachtigall unit, the witness learned from the fact that in the unit only commands were given in German, and they spoke Ukrainian among themselves.
Having “successfully” completed the task in Lvov, on July 7, 1941, the Nachtigal battalion moved to Ternopil and Grimailov. Then he spent two weeks in Vinnitsa. After that, a special team of legionnaires took part in executions in the city of Satanov, then in Yuzvin. For some time, teams from the battalion guarded Soviet prisoners of war, identifying commissars and Jews from among them along the way and shooting them. At the same time, both in Lvov and in Satanov, and other places, the leadership of the battalion (T. Oberlender, R. Shukhevych) had in advance lists of persons to be destroyed, not only adults, but also children.
A couple of times the legionnaires had to face in battle with the regular units of the Red Army. So, near the city of Brailov, "Nakhtigal" was seriously battered by Soviet troops. However, his main "front" was far from the front line.
It should be especially emphasized that the Jewish pogroms in Lvov were not an accidental phenomenon, an "excess of perpetrators", as they say now. Anti-Semitism is one of the pillars of the OUN ideology, deeply rooted and ideologically substantiated by emigre figures of Ukrainian nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. The same Yaroslav Stetsko, elected head of the Ukrainian government in Lvov, in 1939, wrote in one of his articles in the Canadian journal Novy Put: Ukrainians were “the first in Europe to understand the corrupting activity of the Jews,” and dissociated themselves from the Jews centuries ago, preserving “ purity of their spirituality and culture. Nationalists considered Jewry and Bolshevism to be representatives of a single Jewish communist conspiracy. And in the 17th paragraph of the resolution of the 2nd All-Great Council of the OUN, held on the eve of the Great Patriotic War, in April 1941, it was directly stated: “The Jews in the USSR are the most devoted support of the ruling Bolshevik regime and the vanguard of Moscow imperialism in Ukraine.” Therefore, they were declared "enemies of the Ukrainian nation." And in early July 1941, the OUN published an appeal with the words: “People! Know! Moscow, Poland, Magyars, Jews are your enemies. Destroy them. Poles, Jews, Communists - destroy without mercy.
The position of the local churches regarding the mass extermination of the Jews should be emphasized. Although in some places the priests tried to stop the pogroms that had already begun, and later hid the Jews - in their homes or in church institutions - most of the clergy came out in support of the Nazi "Final Solution". One priest of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church addressed the flock with the following sermon: “I beg you: do not give a single piece of bread to a Jew! Don't give him a drop of water! Don't give him shelter! Anyone who knows what
a Jew is hiding somewhere, he is obliged to find him and hand him over to the Germans. There must be no trace left of the Jews. We must wipe them off the face of the earth. Only when the last Jew disappears will we win the war!”
In modern Ukrainian literature, the events in Lvov are rather evasive: they say that Ukrainian battalions really ruled the city for some time, pogroms and massacres of Jews and Poles took place, but Ukrainian independence did not last long at all and the responsibility for this lies with the German administration, which replaced the Ukrainian one. “And in general,” writes R. Chastiy, one of Bandera’s apologists, “it is possible that the Lviv pogroms were initiated by the Germans themselves. It is also possible that no Ukrainian military took part in them. And the legend about their participation was created by the Nazis themselves at a time when relations with Ukrainian nationalists finally deteriorated ... ". It turns out that the Nazis “invented” numerous witnesses who, even decades later, shudderedly recalled those days, and numerous volunteer assistants to the executioners with yellow-blue and white bandages on their sleeves - Ukrainian “policemen” and “OUN” members.
Although in Lvov and other Western Ukrainian cities, the Ukrainian legionnaires of the Nachtigall and the Nazi invaders did what is called a common cause, after the dissolution of the Ukrainian government, the Nazis did not dare to keep the Ukrainian battalions staffed by OUN activists for a long time. As one of the leaders of the Abwehr, P. Leverkün, recalled, “there was a gradual change in the mood of his soldiers and officers ... were forced to disband. Already on August 10, 1941, Roland was disbanded. And on August 13, Nachtigal was also recalled to the rear. It was sent to the Neuhammer camps for "additional training" but was soon disbanded. The personnel were invited to join the new police battalion without any “independent frivolities”, So in Frankfurt an der Oder the 201st police battalion was formed (commander E. Pobigushchiy, his deputy R. Shukhevych, who was thrown into the fight against unfolding partisan movement in Belarus, and there he more than once “distinguished himself” like the Lvov “exploits” ...
On the whole, Ukrainian nationalist historians are pleased with the “combat experience” gained by the fighters of the Nachtigall and Roland, and then the police battalion in the cities and forests of Western Ukraine and Belarus: later, many of them joined the ranks of the Ukrainian rebel army (UPA), bringing with him "knowledge of the organization, strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare." On account of the 201st battalion, dozens of Belarusian farms and villages were burned, as well as the Volyn village of Kortelisy, where 2.8 thousand inhabitants were shot, accused of having links with partisans. It is known that the commander of the battalion Pobigushchy and his deputy Shukhevych were marked for their activities with "iron crosses".
Battalions "Nachtigal" and "Roland", as well as their reincarnation - the 201st police battalion - became only the first swallows in a huge list of Ukrainian police and auxiliary units created by the Nazis from Ukrainian collaborators. It is known, for example, that by the end of 1943 almost 45 Ukrainian auxiliary police battalions were formed on the territory of the Reichskommissariat "Ukraine". In other occupied territories of the USSR, another 13 battalions of Ukrainians were created, and on the territory of the Polish Governor-General - another 8. Their "combat activity", mainly in Belarus and Ukraine, is a chain of war crimes, including the tragically famous Khatyn . As you know, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of such Khatyns.
The history of "Nachtigal" and the pogroms in Lvov was not known to the general public for a long time. More precisely, it is known, but not all. Already in the first months of the Great Patriotic War, the atrocities of the invaders in Lviv were made public to the whole world. The note of the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs dated January 6, 1942, which later became an official document of the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, said: “On June 30, the Nazi bandits entered the city of Lvov and the next day staged a massacre under the slogan “beat the Jews and Poles.” After killing hundreds of people, the Nazi bandits staged an "exhibition" of the dead in the building of the passage. Mutilated corpses, mostly women, were piled against the walls of houses.
In the first place of this horrific "exhibition" was placed the corpse of a woman, to whom her child was nailed with a bayonet. However, for a long time, the Soviet authorities did not have the details of who exactly committed these massive crimes against humanity. The note of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs mentions "Hitler bandits", "Gestapo". Perhaps the role of Ukrainian nationalists in this massacre would have remained in the shadows if big politics had not intervened in the matter after the war.
The fact is that in post-war West Germany, the former political leader of the Nachtigal Battalion, Theodor Oberländer, occupied a prominent place on the political scene. In 1953 - 1960. he held an important position at that time in the government of K. Adenauer - Minister for Refugees, Displaced Persons and War Victims. It is clear that among his wards, which included, first of all, people who lived in the territories seized from Germany, there were few people who sympathized with the Soviet Union. The Oberländer Ministry has become a stronghold of the ultra-right and revanchist forces in the FRG.
In the late 1950s in the neighboring GDR, an investigation in absentia was initiated into the facts of war crimes committed by Oberländer personally and by military units subordinate to him. In 1959, a trial in absentia took place over him, which sentenced the former leader of Natkhigal to life imprisonment. He was charged with, among other things, just the execution of several thousand Jews and Poles after the occupation of Lvov in July 1941. There is evidence that later (after the disbandment of Nachtigall, his career in the Wehrmacht went up) Oberländer personally took part in torture and executions, in particular, he personally killed 15 people in a prison in Pyatigorsk in 1942. In Germany, in response, a pre-trial check began, which, as expected, did not find corpus delicti in Oberländer's actions, just as the facts did not impress the investigators, made public by witnesses and former servicemen of the battalion at a press conference held in Moscow on April 5, 1960 in Moscow about the atrocities of the Natkhigal battalion in Lvov and its environs (the Ukrainian cities of Zolochev, Satanov, Yuzvin, etc.)
However, Oberländer's political career came to an end and he was forced to submit his resignation.
The Oberländer case gave rise to a wide discussion in both Germany and in the USSR and forced the public to recall his past "merits". Oberländer came to the position of the head of Nathigal from the university department: in 1941 he served as dean of the Faculty of Law and Social and Political Sciences of the Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague and was considered a specialist in the field of agriculture and law of Eastern European countries, he had two doctoral degrees.
True, he turned all his knowledge base to very specific goals: Oberländer became one of the inspirers of the ethnic concept of the “new order” in Eastern Europe (work “Struggle at the forefront”, 1937), holding the opinion that the economic decline in Germany is the result of actions of "Eastern European Jewry", which is the agent of the Comintern. The theory of overpopulation as a source of social problems in Germany has become one of the most important justifications for the mass extermination of the population in the territories intended for the resettlement of Germans in the East. So, this convinced Nazi with serious theoretical background as the political leader of the Nachtigal battalion turned out to be, as they say, in his place.
The short but turbulent history of the Ukrainian Nachtigall Battalion is one of the cornerstones of the history of Ukrainian nationalism during World War II. It is from the "Nachtigal" that the fierce armed struggle of Ukrainian nationalists on the territory of Western Ukraine originates, which continued almost until the mid-1950s. The leaders of Nachtigall today are at the head of the pantheon of Ukrainian heroes. Those who remembered the war are leaving, and the aggressive pressure of the OUN lobby forms the image of the OUN-UPA as the bearer of the ideas of humanism and democracy, and its participants as sacrificial and noble fighters. R. Shukhevych was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine in 2007.
The lessons of history, which did not benefit the Kiev authorities, have now brought Ukraine to the brink of disaster - military, political, economic and ideological.
Alexander ISAKOV
The history of the Ukrainian battalions "Roland" and "Nachtigal" is the history of German meanness, self-confidence and short-sightedness. These battalions were to become the basis of the future army of an independent Ukraine, an anti-Bolshevik force allied with the German Reich, but Hitler said: “... There should be no question of allowing the creation of any military force west of the Urals. It is impossible to allow anyone other than the Germans to carry weapons ... ”, and all the work of the Abwehr to establish relations with the Ukrainian nationalist underground went to dust.
Unlike other Ukrainian parts of the German army, all employees of "Roland" and "Nachtigal" were members of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). Moreover, they are members of the OUN military referent. Moreover, they were selected and recommended for service by the Supreme Providence of the OUN. They were hardened by the underground, educated (half of the soldiers had higher education), volunteers tested by years of struggle. Let me remind you that we are talking about the OUN of the 30s, that is, an organization that was banned by the authorities, killed Polish ministers and Soviet consuls, whose members were in prison and received the highest measure; at the same time, the organization had the broadest social base - from student communities and secret circles of Ukrainian officers to children's sports and educational movements such as PLAST. German intelligence relied on her. Canaris (as well as Rosenberg and a number of senior officers of the Wehrmacht), unlike Hitler and his entourage, seriously assessed the role of the oppressed nations in the anti-Bolshevik front and, in general, approved of the idea of independent states in the expanses of the former Russian Empire.
Politically, “Roland” and “Nachtigal” were subordinate only to the OUN, and took an oath to the Ukrainian state. Their service in the German army was to be limited exclusively to the eastern front, exclusively against the USSR. The battalions were trained in the Brandenburg Regiment for Special Assignments, subordinate to the Abwehr Foreign Department (Amt Ausland/Abwehr). They did not have a number and were listed as a separate formation (Sonderformation). Formally, they did not belong to the Wehrmacht at all, but were only assigned to it for individual tasks. If you look at the essence, their main function was agitation and propaganda. Entering Ukrainian cities in the forefront of the German army, they had to testify to the local population that it was not an occupier, but a liberator.
Harmony ended when Nachtigall was resting after the battles for Vinnitsa. In Lvov, the nationalists, without taking an interest in the opinion of the Germans, announced the creation of an independent Ukrainian state. The Germans, feeling dizzy with success and seeing how easily the Soviet army rolled back to the east, decided not to play diplomacy and quickly break the rebellious Ukrainian ally. The Supreme Providence of the OUN is arrested, including Stepan Bandera. OUN members are being arrested. Hanging over the Roland and the Nachtigall is the prospect of a concentration camp.
It's not that Ukrainians used to have much confidence in the Germans and believed in Hitler's desire to build an independent Ukraine. Already during the formation of “Roland”, the second battalion of Ukrainians, the commander of “Nachtigall” Roman Shukhevych (future cornet general of the UPA) advised the fighters to sign up not under their own names, but under pseudonyms. He understood that sooner or later he would have to go underground.
Moving east, the Germans made Galicia a "district" and annexed it to one of their general governments, while the rest of Ukraine was declared a "Reich Commissariat". The declaration of independence in Lvov was a demarche on the part of the OUN. Either the Germans accept this idea, or it becomes completely clear that the Ukrainians do not go along with them. The German answer was more than unequivocal.
Shukhevych appealed to the General Staff with a protest. Due to the arrest of the Ukrainian government, the Nachtigal Battalion can no longer remain part of the German army. In fact, Shukhevych declared a riot.
The battalion was removed from the front, disarmed and sent to Krakow, closer to Auschwitz. Negotiations about his fate went on for a week. In the end, a compromise was adopted: instead of a concentration camp, the soldiers were offered to be sent to Belarus and a one-year contract to serve in the military police - to protect strategic objects from Soviet partisans. Shukhevych accepted these conditions, especially since in Belarus “Roland” and “Nachtigal” were supposed to unite into one formation. From that moment on, the brigade of Ukrainian nationalists exists under the name “Schutzmannschaftbattalion No. 201”. A year later, at the end of the contract, none of the fighters signed his continuation. They were awaited by Ukraine and the emerging Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
P.S.
The main accusation against “Nachtigal”, sounding today, is participation in the mass executions of Jews in Lvov, at the very beginning of the war.
Firstly, there was neither sense nor necessity to involve Ukrainian nationalists in punitive actions at the beginning of the war. The executions were carried out by special German Einsatzgruppen, this was their profile. The main role of "Nachtigal" was propaganda and demonstration. There was no need to dirty it in the eyes of journalists and the local population, besides, the fighters themselves were not policemen recruited from prisoners of war, but volunteers with their own political leadership and their own principles. They could simply refuse to comply with such an order.
Secondly, there could not have been mass executions at the beginning of the war. Rather, they were, but on the other hand: when the Germans entered Lvov, the NKVD prisons (in particular, Brigitte's prison, the prison on Lonskoy) were full of corpses. Retreating, the Soviet authorities decided not to leave possible enemies and shot everyone indiscriminately. The Germans set up their death machine in the occupied territories much later, and at first the killings were carried out according to pre-compiled lists. The Gestapo arrested and killed 38 Lvov professors, and this fact is recorded in the third volume of the materials of the Nuremberg Tribunal published in the USSR. There is no mention of "Nachtigal" there.
Information about the mass executions, moreover, committed precisely by “Nachtigal”, was loudly voiced much later than Nuremberg. Specifically, after the West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer appointed Theodor Oberländer as “Minister for German Affairs - Repatriates, Exiles and War Victims”. Oberländer was a fiery anti-communist and hater of the USSR. In addition, in June-July 41, he was a liaison officer between the Abwehr and Nachtigall, in fact, a curator from the German side. This part of his biography seemed to the Soviet Union the weakest and gave a chance to fabricate an accusation of Nazi crimes. Moreover, it would rhyme well with the anti-nationalist campaign that was then unfolding in the USSR itself.
With the help of East German professors of history, as well as communist parties, an information campaign was launched around the world, which led to the resignation of Oberländer. The tribunal, considering his case, did not find a reason for the accusation.
Hitler's spy machine. Military and political intelligence of the Third Reich. 1933–1945 Jorgensen Christer
Battalion "Nachtigal"
Battalion "Nachtigal"
In the autumn of 1940, with a lull on the Western Front due to uncertainty over Operation Zeleve (Sea Lion), the OKB/OKH began to develop a plan for an invasion of the USSR. In the winter of 1940/41, a new training camp was set up at Neuhammer, near Legnica. Partisan agents were recruited from the OUN and UPA detachments of Stepan Bandera, and they were led by the outstanding Ukrainian commander Skonprynka. Another source of replenishment was the Ukrainian composition of the Polish units, who went over to the side of the Germans during their invasion of Poland. The training course was particularly rigorous, and Skonprynka tirelessly emphasized that he was preparing soldiers for the liberation of the occupied homeland. The German command of the unit was represented by Lieutenant Albrecht Herzner and Professor T. Oberländer. The Abwehr named the division, in which many sang well, "Nachtigal", that is, "Nightingale". The name is beautiful, but not the case.
In June 1941, Nachtigal was assigned to special forces. On June 29-30, having heard about the planned reprisal against compatriots in the Lvov prison of the NKVD, the Nachtigall entered the battle until the Germans approached and held out for several hours. Like the Lithuanians, the Ukrainians naively believed that the Germans would grant independence to their country immediately after the expulsion of the Soviets.
They first announced the creation of an independent Ukraine when they seized a radio station in Lvov. The Germans immediately refuted this statement and reported that Western Ukraine was included in the General Government (what was left of Poland. - Ed.) Hans Frank. Morale in all Ukrainian units (created by the Germans), especially in Nachtigall, dropped noticeably, and the Germans decided to disband them.
An angry Oberländer, an expert on Ukraine and an ardent supporter of its independence, obtained an audience with Hitler and expressed displeasure at such a dismissive attitude towards Germany's valuable ally in the war against Stalin. The Fuhrer was not impressed by his arguments. Demonstrating ignorance and astounding stupidity, he said, “You don't understand what you're saying. Russia is our Africa, and Russians are our Negroes.” Struck by this answer, the professor returned to report to the commander of the Brandenburg regiment and blurted out in a fit of temper: "This is Hitler's concept, and with such a concept we will lose the war." Oberländer was not mistaken in his prediction.
Peter Vershigora, leader of the Soviet Ukrainian partisans and mortal enemy of both Germans and Ukrainian nationalists. Commanded thousands of partisans in Ukraine
At first, the only thing that saved the Germans in the East was that Stalin so turned the Ukrainians against him by his actions - ruinous economic policy, mass repressions and deportations - that they were ready to serve the Germans even after the events of 1941. In the end, choosing between two evils, Ukrainians , like the peoples of the Baltic states (some of those and others. - Ed.), preferred the one that they did not know. Surprisingly, even a year later, 200-250 thousand Ukrainians served in the ranks of the German army and the SS (defending their common homeland, the USSR, 1,377,400 Ukrainians died in the ranks of the Soviet armed forces (including those tortured in captivity and other demographic losses) - Ed.) . As for the Balts, even after three years of humiliation and insults, they rushed in 1944 to help the SS units that defended their countries from the advancing Red Army (including from the 8th Estonian Rifle Corps and other formations. - Ed.).
Ukrainians warmly greet their German liberators from the "Stalinist yoke" in August 1941. Their enthusiasm soon faded due to Hitler's colonial policy
This text is an introductory piece. From the author's book From the author's bookThe "Muslim battalion" begins to operate on July 5, 1979, a group of state security officers from the special reservists of the KUOS (Advanced Courses for Officers) with special reconnaissance and sabotage training was sent to Kabul. In
From the author's book2nd Battalion (802nd Regiment) Units of this battalion (regiment) carried out special missions in the North Caucasus.
From the author's bookThe 3rd battalion (803rd regiment) The battalion (regiment) sent its units to the Eastern Front and France to fight the French partisans. The battalion included the 9th - 12th companies, the regiment - the 1st - 3rd battalion. The 10th company of the battalion in 1942 operated under
From the author's book4th Battalion (804th Regiment) Divisions of the battalion (regiment) carried out special operations in certain sectors of the North Caucasian, Karelian fronts and in Africa. The headquarters was stationed in Hamburg, then in Brandenburg. The regimental commander is Major Heinz. The battalion included the 13th - 16th
From the author's book5th battalion (805th regiment) The 5th battalion (regiment) had its own units in the sectors of the Leningrad and Karelian fronts. The battalion included the 17th - 19th companies. The 17th company operated on the Leningrad front, the 18th - on the Karelian front, the 19th - at the battalion headquarters. From the diary
From the author's book"Alexander" battalion was formed in September 1942 in Brandenburg. The personnel of the battalion underwent military training until July 1943, then was sent to fight the partisans in the Zhytomyr region. Through the efforts of the military personnel of the Brandenburg unit, with
From the author's book500th / 600th Airborne Battalion of the SS Troops
From the author's bookChapter 4 "The Exodus Will Be Decided by the Last Battalion" Early in the morning of September 30, 1941, the 2nd Panzer Group, and on October 2, the 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups of the Army Group Center, Field Marshal von Bock, dealt terrible blows to the defensive positions of the Soviet armies, covering the approaches to Moscow.
From the author's bookThe "Cossack foot battalion of the corps" on October 7, according to a telegram from the commander-in-chief, General Denikin, the Terek division was hastily, by train, was sent to the rear, since "Father Makhno" captured almost the entire Yekaterinoslav province and was already approaching Taganrog, to Denikin's headquarters. IN
From the author's bookGrams Special Purpose Battalion After the heavy siege of Rostov in early December 1941, a relative calm reigned at the front, and it should be noted that the 40th tank reconnaissance battalion under the command of Lieutenant Wentz fought bravely, constantly
From the author's bookCHAPTER 3. THE BATTALION IS FORMED Everyone was in a hurry to part with their hair as soon as possible. Enterprising Samoilova, strikingly similar to a boy, having bought a comb and a machine with scissors, began to cut her hair, taking 50 kopecks each. from the head. Somehow, returning from training, we found
From the author's book1st PERSONNEL BATTALION OF THE BELARUSIAN REGIONAL DEFENSE In the second half of July 1944, the leadership of the BCR finally settled in Berlin and again began active work. In order to prove in practice his determination to continue the fight against Bolshevism, Radoslav
From the author's book257th Battalion of the Lithuanian Police The structure of all Lithuanian police combat units - detachments, platoons, battalions, regiments - was almost the same. Let's try to consider the history of formation, structure, armament and provision of Lithuanian police battalions
First, we present data on the organization of these formations in the system of the Nazi Abwehr.
Stepan Bandera wrote: "At the beginning of 1941, it became possible to create a school for two Ukrainian units, approximately up to a kuren, under the German army." Here, Bandera noted that "military training sessions" were performed by OUN-Bandera R. Shukhevych, D. Gritsay-Perebiynis and O. Gasin-Lytsar. It is quite well known that the special Abwehr battalion "Nachtigal" ("Nightingale", "Night Bird") named after S. Bandera was formed in March-April in 1941 from Bandera. The formation underwent military training in Neuhammer as part of the 1st battalion of the Brandenburg-800 special forces regiment, which was subordinate to Abwehr-2 (the Abwehr department, which was engaged in sabotage in the enemy camp). The political leader of the battalion was Theodor Oberländer (a well-known German figure who dealt with the Germans of the East, Oberführer SS), the commander of the battalion on the part of the Germans was Lieutenant Albrecht Herzner, the commander of the battalion on the part of the Ukrainians was Captain Roman Shukhevych.
The special battalion of the Abwehr "Roland" named after E. Konovalets and S. Petlyura was formed in April 1941 from Bandera, Melnikov, Petliurists and Hetmans and underwent military training in Saubersdorf near Vienna under the leadership of the Wehrkreiskommando XVII of Vienna, which was also subordinate to special formation of the Abwehr "Brandenburg-800", but the battalion was intended for military operations in the southern direction of the Eastern Front. Its leaders were: Riko Yary from the German side and Major Evgen Pobigushchiy ("Ren") - from the Ukrainian side. In essence, Major Pobiguschiy was the leader of the battalion, because R. Yariy, as a member of the OUN-Bandera wire and at the same time a resident of the Abwehr in the same OUN, constantly carried out other assignments.
Before talking about those so-called "Ukrainian" special battalions, it is necessary to give a short information about the Abwehr "Brandenburg-800" formation, which they were part of, and about the "special" purpose of these formations (which is often hidden by nationalist authors) . And the point is this. In the book of the German General B. Müller-Gillebrand "Land Army of Germany. 1933-1945" it is noted: "The Brandenburg-800 division was formed on September 21 in 1943 on the basis of the deployment of units of the 800th Special Purpose Construction Training Regiment Brandenburg, which was a special unit that was at the disposal of the 2nd Directorate of the Abwehr of the OKW (Intelligence and Counterintelligence Service of the OKW).However, the deployment of the division was delayed.In October in 1944, it was reorganized into the brandenburg motorized division.
Here, as we see, the author goes around sharp corners and the division is presented as an ordinary military formation, moreover, "construction", "training" and at the same time "special unit for special purposes". What did the Abwehr saboteurs of the 2nd division build, if the regiment, and then the division, was called "construction"? Nothing. They were causing destruction, sabotage and massacres!
Other authors reveal the truth. It turns out that the special purpose regiment "Brandenburg-800" and the special purpose division "Brandenburg" were "construction" and "training" only for disguise. In fact, these formations were special units of the Abwehr-2 (sabotage in the camp of the enemy) only because they carried out special tasks at the front and in the immediate rear of the enemy: they organized and carried out sabotage, cleared entire areas of the enemy from possible and impossible preparations for sabotage against Germany. Detachments of this formation caused panic and chaos in the area of action. Their actions were also intended against partisan detachments and formations that carried out frequent and massive sabotage in the rear of the Nazi troops.
Abwehr historiographer Gert Buchgait testifies that during the "Eastern campaign" of the Nazis, only one front-line intelligence, subordinate to the first department (Abwehr-1) of the Abwehr administration at the headquarters of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), was "neutralized", that is, liquidated, 20 thousand Soviet citizens. Buchgait does not name such an action of the 2nd department of the Abwehr, which was directly involved in sabotage and punitive actions in the state of the enemy and which, in fact, belonged to the special forces "Brandenburg-800" and "Brandenburg", and they, in turn, - such special -battalions like "Nachtigal" and "Roland".
Another researcher, the Hungarian historian and publicist Julius Mader, who conducted a rather voluminous analysis of many studies of the actions of the Abwehr during the last war, sheds light in the same direction: , insisting on the speedy destruction of resistance groups and partisan detachments.The Abwehr and its special unit "Brandenburg-800" operated in 13 European countries.Only in 12 of them (not counting the USSR) were Nazi invaders killed during hostilities, shot and tortured in prisons more than 1,277,750 people. Most of these victims should be attributed to the killers from the Abwehr and their professional "partisan hunters". And how many Soviet people were killed by them? Not yet calculated. I think that future historians will still calculate these victims.
Thus, we will make some clarifications and summarize. The formation of the special purpose "Brandenburg-800" arose even before the war of Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. At first it was a special battalion, which in 1940 became the Brandenburg-800 Special Purpose Regiment, and then in 1943 the Brandenburg Division. It was not an ordinary army unit, but a special association of saboteurs, punishers, bashi-bazouks, formed from condottieres of non-German nationalities, from those countries against which the Nazis were preparing aggression. So, the 1st battalion, stationed in Brandenburg (whose name is given to the entire regiment and special forces division), was formed from representatives of the peoples of Eastern Europe (mainly the territories of the USSR) and was intended for war in the "eastern direction" (it was the battalion "Nachtigal" was assigned for training in Neuhammer and the attack on Lvov); The 2nd battalion was stationed in Düren (Rhine region) and consisted of Alsatians, French traitors, Belgians and Dutch; The 3rd battalion was stationed in Baden (near Vienna) and intended for operations in the south, in the countries of South-Eastern Europe (the Roland special battalion was assigned to it). At the same time, companies, battalions, and then regiments of this formation significantly, or even several times, exceeded the usual manning standards in their numbers.
Consequently, "Nachtigal" and "Roland" were not just ordinary military formations within the Wehrmacht (nationalists are still trying to call them "Squads of Ukrainian Nationalists" (DUN), but special-purpose Abwehr formations - to carry out sabotage and punitive actions in the camp E. Pobigushchiy, head of the Roland battalion, and then the Schutzmannschaft battalion, notes in his memoirs that the task of the detachment was to "seek out the developments of Soviet units and so provide the rear." And what is "provide the rear" is well known, because it meant liquidating those "bookmarks"!
Both formations, as almost all nationalist authors testify, were the realization of the long-standing dream of the OUN leaders to form professional military units with the help of the Nazis and turn them into the basis of their future nationalist armed forces. This dream, as you know, came true, but unsuccessfully and not as intended.
Actions of "Nachtigal" and "Roland"
This question is complicated because the Abwehr, as you know, did not advertise their actions. It is known that on June 30, 1941, the special battalion "Nachtigal" entered Lviv together with the 1st battalion of the special purpose regiment "Brandenburg-800". The Gestapo and SB units (imperial security services) had not yet arrived in the city, and therefore the internal order was assigned to the military commander, General Renz, and his field commander's office. This gave grounds to Polish and Soviet publicists and historians in the 1950s and 1970s to accuse the Brandenburgers and Nachtigallers of punitive actions during the first days of the occupation of Lviv. As the well-known scientist and public figure of the NIR A. Norden testified at a press conference in Berlin on October 22, 1959, regarding the investigation of the crime of the Bonn Minister T. in particular, the Tamara-1 and Tamara-2 detachments in Chechnya), from July 1 to July 6, 1941, the Abwehrs from the Nachtigall, controlled by Oberlander-Herzner-Shukhevych, together with the Fireburgers, Feljandarmes and Bohvkars of the regional executive of the OUN- b, killed 3,000 people in Lvov, mostly Soviet activists, Jews and Poles, among them over 70 famous scientists and cultural figures.
It is believed that in the near future all this will be fully investigated, despite the former "fog" and "smoke screen", both in Polish and Soviet literature, and in Ukrainian nationalist literature.
However, even now there are some clarifications. Recently, a book by the Polish author Alexander Korman "From the Bloody Days of Lvov 1941" was published in London. The author cites numerous facts, names, eyewitness accounts of this tragedy. The researcher states unequivocally: from June 3 to July 6 in 1941 (the time of the stay of the special battalion "Nachtigal" in Lviv), Polish scientists, Jews and communists were destroyed by the Nazis, Nakhtigalists and militants from the OUN-Bandera.
Korman cites in the book a photocopy of Stepan Bandera's appeal, which was distributed in Lvov from June 30 to July 11, 1941 in the form of flyers and posters: "People! Know! Moscow, Poland, Magyars, Jews - these are your enemies! Destroy them!" In another interpretation, this postcard sounded like this: "Destroy the Poles, Jews, Communists without mercy, do not pity the enemies of the Ukrainian people's revolution!"
The author claims that the extermination action was led by SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Hans Krueger (Krieger), who later led the Gestapo in Stanisław. The murders took place according to a list prepared by the services of E. Vretsena (SB OUN-b) and "Legends" (I. Klymiv), the head of the regional executive of the OUN-b. The arrests were carried out by the departments of the Abwehr (Brandenburgers), field police and Nachtigall. The shootings were carried out by them. E. Wretsena himself personally participated in the executions of Polish scientists.
A. Korman cites many testimonies in the book. Here are a few of them: "Nakhtigalevtsy" dragged communists and Poles out of their houses, who were hanged on balconies here"; "Ukrainian soldiers of the Nachtigall battalion" were called "poultry houses" by the residents of Lvov; "The poultrymen were in German uniforms and with German military distinctions. They spoke Ukrainian"; "On the streets of Russkaya and Boimov, several Polish students were shot dead, who were brought by militants of Ukrainian nationalists"; "..500 Jews. Ukrainians muzzled them all," etc.
The author also cites the fact that the wife of the arrested professor of the Lviv Polytechnic Kazimir Bartel (former Prime Minister of Poland) visited Sheptytsky, an artsibiskup, with a request to help release her husband, but he replied that he "could not do anything."
In general, Alexander Korman's book is a reliable, meaningful study. However, it is one-sided, because it is imbued not with universal, but mainly Polish passions.
Despite the lack of weighty and comprehensive documents and analytical studies, we now know for certain that the Bandera action of the first days of the occupation of Lviv is large-scale and rather desperate: from the proclamation of the "June 30 Act" to the bloody massacre - the extermination of Soviet activists, representatives of the Polish intelligentsia and the Jewish population . Undoubtedly, this action was led by N. Lebid, the chief of the OUN security service, and a little later, the conductor of the entire OUN-Bandera in the region. His henchmen were: his deputy in the security service of the OUN E. Vretsena and the head of the regional executive of the OUN-b "Legend" (I. Klymiv), the Gestapo lieutenant J. Moroz and the leaders of "Nachtigal" T. Oberlender, A. Hertsner and R. Shukhevych . Although the heavy hand of the Gestapo (G. Krieger) and the Abwehr (T. Oberländer) gravitated over all this.
The Abwehr special battalion "Nakhtgal" together with the 1st battalion of the "Brandenburg-800" regiment, detachments of the Feldgendarmerie and OUN militants from the "Legends" resort - Klymiva took a direct part in the bloody orgies of the first days of the occupation of Lviv.
The further "fate" of the special battalions
After an unsuccessful "mutual understanding" with the Nazis during the proclamation of the "Act of June 30, 1941", that is, the so-called proclamation of an independent Ukraine in Lvov, which was carried out by J. Stetsko ("Karbovich", Bandera's first deputy), with the help of "Nachtigal" named after S. Bandera, and on the orders of Bandera, and after the arrests of the participants in this venture, both special battalions were withdrawn from the front and at the end of October merged into one formation, which immediately began training for a new assignment.
In mid-March, in 1942, the combined (now Schutzmannschaft) battalion under the command of E. Pobigushchy ("Ren") was sent to Belarus and operated in the Mogilev-Vitebsk-Lepel triangle as part of the 201st police ("security") division of General Jacobi against Belarusian partisans and civilians.
In the collection "Squads of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1941-1942" (published in 1953), E. Pobigushchy writes: "Artists would have excellent motives for drawing", describing and admiring the beautiful Belarusian landscapes of the places where they were brought.
But they were sent here, of course, not to draw on the open air, but in order to "guard the bridges," notes Pobigushchy. We know very well that the "bridge guards" did not fight the partisans, but only guarded the bridges constantly, carrying out this service day after day. At the same time, we are well aware that the "army guards" of Nazi Germany did not guard bridges, but carried out security service in the rear of the Nazi troops, which meant that they constantly carried out punitive actions against "bandits" (as the Red partisans called the Red partisans ) and local residents who helped the "bandits".
It is also known that the schutzmannschaft battalion, with four companies commanded by R. Shukhevych, M. Brigider, V. Sidor and Pavlik, became a subdivision of the 201st police division and brigades and separate operational battalions commanded by von dem E. Bach-Zelewski, Obergruppenführer (Colonel-General) of the SS troops. This SS Obergruppenführer led the fight against partisans in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union and Poland, especially in Belarus and in the northern part of Ukraine. The units reporting to him were predominantly SS men, and therefore the 201st Police Division was forced to act like them.
It becomes somewhat clearer when the Beating "Ren" writes about "combat operations" (which, of course, were not carried out in any way by the "bridge guards") and that SS Obergruppenführer von Bach "said at a meeting of all commanders that this is my best department , then he did not say this for a red word, that the merit in that is the foremen. It is also known that those foremen, including Shukhevych and Pobigushchiy, were marked by the Nazis with "iron crosses" not for "guarding bridges", but for "combat prowess". The beating one stated: "the legion fulfilled its task by 100 percent." Here he boasts that the command of the division asked the "legion" to protect the division commander. Therefore, the former Nakhtigalevites and Rolandites deserve such an honor! Useless, of course: such differences!
The same E. Pobigushchiy is more frank in his memoirs: “Of course, there were frequent battles against partisans, combing forests, attacks on their places of standing. guarded the middle rear of the Eastern Front - our chicken did the job best of all.
Now it is completely clear that they were not "guarding the bridges", but "guarding the middle rear" of the Nazi army group "Center", which was advancing on Moscow.
Another author, M. Kalba, in the book "Nachtigal" (DUN smoke) in the light of facts and documents "(Denver, 1984) writes that the Nachtigall was never a sabotage formation and did not carry out any acts of sabotage, although he also determines here that kuren "was attached to the" Brandenburg ". And then Kalba refers to the German author Werner Brockford, who wrote about the formation of Brandenburg and, incidentally, pointed out that Nachtigall "performed fantastic deeds" in the spirit of "an American-made war film." What exactly Brockford had in mind is still unknown, remains behind the scenes, but "fantastic deeds" in the spirit of "a war film of American production" intrigue not only the author's imagination.
However, it is already quite clear today that the Schutzmannfaft Battalion did not "guard the bridges" in the partisan region in Belarus, but acted as part of the punitive formations of SS Obergruppenführer von dem Bach-Zelewski against Belarusian partisans and civilians, participated in the punitive operations "Bolotnaya fever", "Triangle", "Cottbus" and others. That the neighbor of the 201st security division and an enterprising partner in the fighting against the partisans and peasants of Belarus was the notorious “Dirlivanger brigade”, known during the war, formed from criminals, professional sadists and murderers. Several Chotas of the "Ukrainian" formation as part of the 15th police regiment participated in the punitive action described in Vladimir Yavorivsky's documentary story "Eternal Kortelis", as a result of which animals with human names wiped off the face of the earth, along with the inhabitants, the Volyn villages of Borki, Zabolotye, Borisovka and Cortelis.
Abwehr battalions "Nachtigal" and "Roland"
The same Killing "Ren" recalls that before Christmas in 1943, "the legion was disbanded." The reasons for this have not yet been elucidated. They served wonderfully, received "iron crosses", were the best in the punitive troops of the SS von dem Bach-Zelewski and suddenly .., "disbanded"! Pobigushchiy also recalls that SS Obergruppenführer von Bach told him personally that "all legionnaires" (as Pobigushchy and other authors call the punitive policemen) "would go home in small groups and must register with the police in Lvov."
"Demobilization" took place, but under very mysterious circumstances. However, in Lvov, some of the Ukrainian officers and non-commissioned officers, including Pobigusche, were kept "under arrest" by the Nazis, but "a change in political conditions saved us." Here we are talking, of course, about the fact that during the formation of the 14th SS Grenadier Division "Galitsien" they were called up as junior officers of the now SS formation, where Pobigushchiy-"Ren" was first the commander of the regiment, and then the battalion with the rank of Sturmbannfuehrer (Major ) SS. So, finally, the officer cadres from the Abwehr-police turned into SS men.
"What is the use of DUN"? - Stepan Bandera asked in one of his articles and answered here: "The special thing that they brought with them is the knowledge of the organization, strategy and tactics of the partisan struggle used by the Bolsheviks in the Second World War, and the German methods of destroying partisan detachments. This knowledge was very useful in the creation of the UPA."
As you can see, Bandera was interested in the experience of the struggle of the Nazis against the Soviet partisans. And we must also add that the head of the UPA, its "commander-in-chief" was the recent captain of the Abwehr and the Schutzmannschaft of the formation R. Shukhevych, who in the UPA immediately became a cornet general.
Consequently, the former Nakhtigalevites and Rolandists did not learn the experience of "protecting bridges", but the fight against partisans and civilians of Belarus on the German methods of "von dem Bach-Zelewski and Dirlivanger".
Vitaly Ivanovich Maslovsky
Translation from Ukrainian RM.U
