Weber's Germany: The Veterinarian Totalitarian
- Thread starter Tom Colton
- Start date
Right, where were we? Correct me if I'm wrong 
Up to France things went more or less as OTL?
Halifax negotiated, but prepared for round 2, hopefully the Brits are doing interesting stuff with heavy elements? Did anything happen to Churchill?
Weber invaded Russia more or less on schedule, but stopped short with a manageable bite? He's reorganised Eastern Europe to his liking, but is thinking about second helpings of Uncle Joe?
I don't think the Italians were stupid enough to try anything in Africa when Germany was negotiating?
Something happened in China and the Pacific, 'cos there was an Asia-Pacific war, but I'm a bit hazy as to what...
Perhaps most original bit was an independent Arabist Syria, allying to Germany. Interesting possibilities ensue? Successful fascist Iraq, even Iran? Deutsche Levantekorps, Rommel in Baku (no, not with his logistics)?
Obviously I could read stuff and find out these things for myself, but I'm a lazy old git...
Up to France things went more or less as OTL?
Halifax negotiated, but prepared for round 2, hopefully the Brits are doing interesting stuff with heavy elements? Did anything happen to Churchill?
Weber invaded Russia more or less on schedule, but stopped short with a manageable bite? He's reorganised Eastern Europe to his liking, but is thinking about second helpings of Uncle Joe?
I don't think the Italians were stupid enough to try anything in Africa when Germany was negotiating?
Something happened in China and the Pacific, 'cos there was an Asia-Pacific war, but I'm a bit hazy as to what...
Perhaps most original bit was an independent Arabist Syria, allying to Germany. Interesting possibilities ensue? Successful fascist Iraq, even Iran? Deutsche Levantekorps, Rommel in Baku (no, not with his logistics
)?Obviously I could read stuff and find out these things for myself, but I'm a lazy old git...
It's been noted before that Weber's fatal flaw seems to be he doesn't crush his opponents enough.
7.5 The Axis Sphere of Influence: Ukraine
@DaveB Basically correct, except Churchill became PM roughly around the time of the Third Balkans War.
@torten Geez, time flies. Or this TL updates really slowly.
@ Everyone else: Don't call it a comeback, 'cause I've been here for years.
The previous section has detailed, although admittedly not exhaustively, the so-called “internal” policy of the Reich in its new territories, annexed in all but name. In these cases, the government was either a direct extension of the central Reich administration (Gothica) or the local administration served as a puppet for German interests (the Baltic Federation), with the Belarusian Free State muddying the waters between these two categories. The territories in the following section are differentiated from the above either purely by geographical estrangement (the Serbian Autonomous Republic and the Free State of Banat-Vojvodina), administrative autonomy (the Ukrainian Social Republic, in its early stages), or both, as in the case of the Syrian Social Republic.
The transition of Ukraine from a nominal co-belligerent and ally to puppet state is a matter which will be discussed first, given that it essentially changed from this latter category to the former, followed by developments in the former Yugoslavia then by the involvement of the Reich in the affairs of the Middle East, an arena which would overlap somewhat with that of the Great Asia-Pacific War, one of a small handful of times where the dealings of the nominal allies Germany and Japan would intersect at all during the Second World Wars.
As of the signing of the Treaty of Sofia, Ukraine had existed for only three brief years as an independent republic: it had declared itself part of the Russian Republic following the overthrow of the imperial government during February Revolution but then separated from this polity in 1918, before being forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1921, as per the Treaty of Riga. However, this legacy of independence would not be stifled, and resentment towards the central Soviet government (especially collectivisation policies) steadily rose, resulting in the deliberate negligence of the Holodomor in 1933-1934.
These actions only served to further infuriate the Ukrainian population, leading to the rise in popularity of organisations such as the OUN (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists), whose Banderaist faction (ergo the OUN-B) collaborated with the invading German and Axis armies in return for the promise of independence from the Soviet Union. However, it is arguable that in doing so Bandera and the OUN-B simply replaced one master of Ukraine over another – although the Reich initially did deliver on their terms initially, escalating tensions against the Soviet Union eventually resulted in the entire administrative apparatus shifting to Germany.
Ethnic Ukrainians and OUN-B collaborators in the General Government had been organised by Hermann Bauer, chief of the Abwehr then, into the volunteer battalions Nikita and Bogatyr, swelling in numbers as the Wehrmacht stormed into Ukraine and eventually consolidating into the “Ukrainian People’s Army”, the military of the newly-declared Ukrainian Social Republic. [2] This body represented both a powerful ally and a considerable threat to the Reich: although the initial popularity of the OUN-B essentially saved the Reich trouble in recruiting more collaborators, especially for the inevitable next round of hostilities, they also represented an essentially independent armed group.
While they were incredibly unlikely to declare for the Soviet Union, even their neutrality would be an unacceptable hindrance to the Wehrmacht, especially if they were to drive east and south, towards the critical Caucasus oilfields. While powers with somewhat more democratic traditions based on consensus and compromise might have appeased such a critical ally and offered incentives for the Ukrainians to throw their lot in with Germany come the next war, the Reich was all too used to getting its own way through deception and force of arms – a modus operandi practiced in Denmark, and which would be applied once again. [3]
Figure 38: OUN-B supporters in traditional Ukrainian dress salute Wehrmacht personnel at a rally in the General Government. Early 1941.
Tensions between the Reich administration and the OUN-filled government, termed the “Ukrainian State Board”, were manifest from the beginning. Bandera, whilst welcoming the aid from the Wehrmacht made it clear to Weber and the Reich authorities that his goal was nothing less than total Ukrainian independence, although with the benefits of Axis membership such as EWG membership and the guarantee of defence against the Soviet Union.
Weber’s aims towards Ukraine, namely exploiting its agricultural, industrial and human resources and shortening the front against the Soviet Union, while not totally incompatible with these aims, would almost certainly be hampered by them. Nonetheless, while German troops were present in Ukraine, the OKW decided that attempting Case Anton on this considerably larger scale would be a needless venture, and that the Ukrainians could be kept deliberately weak until the Wehrmacht regained strength for this task.
Although German propaganda tried its best to differentiate between Ukrainians and Russians, obviously declaring the former “superior” to the latter, the simple fact was that Weber saw the Ukrainians no differently from Belarusians or the Balts – nothing more than a body to be manipulated by the Reich for human and physical resources. Furthermore, while the OUN and NSDAP had a common ideological enemy in Soviet Russia (the OUN emphasising the latter and NSDAP the former) and Poland, at least as far as the Polish treatment of the Ukrainian minority population in the Second Republic went, their similarities essentially ended there.
Putting aside the barely-hidden racism of NSDAP against the Ukrainians, Weber’s vision of Europe totally purged of Jews was not particularly shared by Bandera and the OUN. [4] The newly-declared Ukrainian Social Republic was also [slow in handing] its Jewish population over to German authorities (although spontaneous acts of racial violence were rife even during Operation Barbarossa) and attempted some token resistance to the influx of Poles caused by the Ausschluss in the former Gothica, complaining that the war-ravaged country was ill-equipped to handle this wave of Polish émigrés, who were subjected to abuses and outbreaks of mass violence like in many of their other new homes. The rudimentary militias which Germany had permitted the OUN to set up were unable to stem the tide of Poles expelled by the Auswanderung policy. [5]
When the state apparatus broke down in Reichsgau-Weichselland, leading to the aforementioned abortive Warsaw Uprisings, the Reich seized the chance to fully puppetise Ukraine once and for all.
Figure 39: Dr.Marian Panchyshyn (seated at centre), non-partisan Minister of Health under the Stetsko government and puppet-president of the “Ukrainian Autonomous Social Republic”. [6]
The Stasi issued a report to Stetsko’s government, accusing “subversive” elements of the OUN-B of supporting partisans in Poland and especially Warsaw, somehow citing the Ukranian government’s unwillingness to accept the Polish refugees as further evidence of this “subversiveness”. The Reich government quickly sent an ultimatum to Stetsko and Bandera, stating that unless Ukraine permitted Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommando units to cross the border within 24 hours it would be perceived as an act of active resistance, with reprisals to come.
It appears that like so many ultimatums sent by Weber that it was merely a legalistic pretext, and when the Stetsko-Bandera cabinet hesistated, the Reich further sent accusations that the government had been “infiltrated by OUN-M elements” and the entire political system was compromised as a result, and Einsatzkommando divisions poured over the border in late August and early September, summarily executing anyone linked to the former regime and taking the opportunity to abduct or murder Jews while they were at it.
One of the few survivors of this purge was the non-partisan Minister of Health Dr. Marian Panchyshyn, who was figuratively, if not literally, held at gunpoint to lead the new government and made to publicly condemn his former colleagues and issuing severe punishments for those who continued to collaborate with them. The OUN in its entirety was outlawed, although some of the cabinet members were retained and Bandera was permitted to live, albeit under close scrutiny and in no official role, not even as the “spiritual guide” of the OUN, and the only legal party henceforth was the “Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Nationalists” (UPSN). The country’s name itself changed from to the Ukrainian Autonomous Social Republic, with the addition of an emblem similar to that of the OUN-M to the flag to further humiliate the now-defunct OUN-B. A new sun now rose over Ukrainian fields.
Figure 40: Flag of the Ukrainian Autonomous Social Republic. The deliberate removal of the emblem would be part of a general wave of “hole-in-flag” revolutions at the Reich’s close.
The OUN-B did not take kindly to the purge, and went underground. However, the factionalisms which had gripped the OUN prior to its split into the Banderaist and conservative factions proved stronger than any sense of unity, and the partisan factions appeared to spend more time combating each other than resisting the Reich authorities, which simply permitted the Einsatzkommando to wipe them out more effectively
While the border with Soviet Russia was relatively porous for subversive elements (at least eastwards), cooperation with the Communists was ruled out by all parties, even as the realisation had dawned that they had done nothing but exchange one master for another; such was the enormity of the legacy of Communism there, and the bitterness of its effects. The partisans thus emerged as a perennial thorn in the administration’s side, but never truly gained mass appeal as their continued internal conflicts alienated whichever public might have helped them, and while living conditions did drop over time, these were more easily blamed on the influx of expelled Polish nationals, in a continued example of the use of Scheuleder to hide inequities between the central Reich and its protectorates through “divide and conquer”.
The dismantling of the independent apparatus allowed the Reich the freedom to convert Ukraine both into the bread-basket and the staging-ground of the Greater German Reich. While the economic arguments concerning the effects of the NSDAP yoke on Ukraine have been discussed at length, it may be perhaps worthwhile to briefly recap them; while the Ukrainian Autonomous Social Republic was never totally incorporated into the Reich structure as the Baltic States or the German partition of Yugoslavia had been, it is undeniable that the Reich was purchasing Ukrainian grain for utterly meagre prices and otherwise “repaying” the Ukrainian state by allegedly investing in its heavy industries, which essentially amounted to more factories for the Wehrmacht, operated by underpaid and frequently-abused Polish workers, with Ukrainian bosses and German investors. [7]
Given the sorry excuse for economic development the Reich gave, it is not difficult to understand the total collapse of the Ukrainian front once the border was breached. In the meantime, Ukrainians and Russians were being prepared as cannon-fodder in the next war, with the German-controlled Ukrainian National Army as the official conglomerate of the various other collaborationist factions. Russian prisoners-of-war unwilling to return to Soviet Russia, or coerced into staying either by force or by propaganda concurrent with the Kryptos conspiracy (see below, “Return to Arms”) [8] which had rendered Stalin so paranoid that returning prisoners-of-war were being purged in droves, were collected into Russian Liberation Movement, led by Konstantin Voskoboinik, a former technical school-teacher in Lokot.
Figure 41: Konstantin Voskoboinik, Ukrainian-born leader of the Russian Liberation Movement and subsequent Reich “puppet-liberator”. 1942. [9]
The Russian Liberation Army (Русская освободительная армия¸ Russische Befreiungsarmee; ROA), the military/paramilitary wing of the Russian Liberation Movement, was a top-secret initiative of the Abwehr dedicated to causing as much havoc in the border regions as possible prior to the next round of hostilities. The ROA was comprised generally of Russian prisoners-of-war unwilling or unable to return across the Soviet Border commanded by Major-General Mikhail Meandrov, a Soviet officer who had been captured around Uman and subsequently defected to the Reich. [10]
In all other respects they were trained as the Karmaliuk (a historic Ukrainian outlaw analogous to Robin Hood [11]) division part of the Ukrainian National Army, but were in truth interrogated for information concerning border defences and were trained to sabotage and overcome these. The reliability of the compelled recruits was shaky, and Stalin had permitted the existence of the ROA given the famine in the USSR and relying on the fact that most would prove just as unreliable for the Reich in the next round as they had for the Soviet Union in the previous hostilities.
In all, the nature of the regime changes achieved most of the short-term military and economic aims of the Reich, but in the long run destabilised anything resembling internal self-government or sustainability. Although the front would be pushed leagues to the east, Ukraine collapsed just as quickly, if not even faster than, the territories of the Russian SFSR into which the Wehrmacht and the Karmaliuk were able to push in the continuation of the war. Weber and the NSDAP elite were accurate on one point though; the reprisals were savage, and not merely those exacted on the Ukrainians by the victorious Soviets, but between the various ethnic groups and especially unto the expelled Poles as the Red Army tore west.
[1] More on this later, but the popularity of the anti-Semitic aspects of Nazism in the Arab world has been covered earlier here and here.
[2] As covered earlier.
[3] As covered earlier, Case Anton was in Denmark in TTL.
[4] The relative ideological inflexibility of Hitler's Germany led to a much earlier purge of Ukrainian nationalists. Here Weber strung them along for a couple of years before letting the other shoe drop.
[5] As covered earlier in "The Warsaw Uprisings".
[6] This guy, giving him the dubious honour of being the second Axis leader MD.
[7] One more step towards Plantation Osteuropa.
[8] More on this later, which will be the Abwehr's magnum opus, greater even than Operation Schintzel.
[9] This guy, who died and led to Kaminski being be the most recognisable face of collaborationism.
[10] This guy, who was captured before Vlasov, who is known a heroic defender of the Motherland ITTL.
[11] This guy. I was this close to actually using "Koba" (a pseudonym of Stalin's in his wilderness days), but he's much more of a Georgian character.
Next update (hopefully mid-August): A little bit about Serbia and Slovenia. A big bit about the Iraq War.
"..wasn't us."
@torten Geez, time flies. Or this TL updates really slowly.
@ Everyone else: Don't call it a comeback, 'cause I've been here for years.
========
THE AXIS SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
Figure 36: Members of the “Iraqi Free Corps”, a paramilitary organisation armed and funded by the Reich through their client-state, the Syrian Social Republic. Mosul, early 1942. [1]
THE AXIS SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
Figure 36: Members of the “Iraqi Free Corps”, a paramilitary organisation armed and funded by the Reich through their client-state, the Syrian Social Republic. Mosul, early 1942. [1]
The previous section has detailed, although admittedly not exhaustively, the so-called “internal” policy of the Reich in its new territories, annexed in all but name. In these cases, the government was either a direct extension of the central Reich administration (Gothica) or the local administration served as a puppet for German interests (the Baltic Federation), with the Belarusian Free State muddying the waters between these two categories. The territories in the following section are differentiated from the above either purely by geographical estrangement (the Serbian Autonomous Republic and the Free State of Banat-Vojvodina), administrative autonomy (the Ukrainian Social Republic, in its early stages), or both, as in the case of the Syrian Social Republic.
The transition of Ukraine from a nominal co-belligerent and ally to puppet state is a matter which will be discussed first, given that it essentially changed from this latter category to the former, followed by developments in the former Yugoslavia then by the involvement of the Reich in the affairs of the Middle East, an arena which would overlap somewhat with that of the Great Asia-Pacific War, one of a small handful of times where the dealings of the nominal allies Germany and Japan would intersect at all during the Second World Wars.
===
UKRAINE
“The Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army which has been formed on the Ukrainian lands will continue to fight with the Allied German Army against Muscovite occupation for a sovereign and united State and a new order in the whole world.”
Stepan Bandera, OUN-B leader, in his “Act of Proclamation of the Ukrainian State”. 1941.
Figure 37: Ukrainian propaganda poster depicting a German soldier protecting a Ukrainian woman.
“The Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army which has been formed on the Ukrainian lands will continue to fight with the Allied German Army against Muscovite occupation for a sovereign and united State and a new order in the whole world.”
Stepan Bandera, OUN-B leader, in his “Act of Proclamation of the Ukrainian State”. 1941.
Figure 37: Ukrainian propaganda poster depicting a German soldier protecting a Ukrainian woman.
As of the signing of the Treaty of Sofia, Ukraine had existed for only three brief years as an independent republic: it had declared itself part of the Russian Republic following the overthrow of the imperial government during February Revolution but then separated from this polity in 1918, before being forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1921, as per the Treaty of Riga. However, this legacy of independence would not be stifled, and resentment towards the central Soviet government (especially collectivisation policies) steadily rose, resulting in the deliberate negligence of the Holodomor in 1933-1934.
These actions only served to further infuriate the Ukrainian population, leading to the rise in popularity of organisations such as the OUN (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists), whose Banderaist faction (ergo the OUN-B) collaborated with the invading German and Axis armies in return for the promise of independence from the Soviet Union. However, it is arguable that in doing so Bandera and the OUN-B simply replaced one master of Ukraine over another – although the Reich initially did deliver on their terms initially, escalating tensions against the Soviet Union eventually resulted in the entire administrative apparatus shifting to Germany.
Ethnic Ukrainians and OUN-B collaborators in the General Government had been organised by Hermann Bauer, chief of the Abwehr then, into the volunteer battalions Nikita and Bogatyr, swelling in numbers as the Wehrmacht stormed into Ukraine and eventually consolidating into the “Ukrainian People’s Army”, the military of the newly-declared Ukrainian Social Republic. [2] This body represented both a powerful ally and a considerable threat to the Reich: although the initial popularity of the OUN-B essentially saved the Reich trouble in recruiting more collaborators, especially for the inevitable next round of hostilities, they also represented an essentially independent armed group.
While they were incredibly unlikely to declare for the Soviet Union, even their neutrality would be an unacceptable hindrance to the Wehrmacht, especially if they were to drive east and south, towards the critical Caucasus oilfields. While powers with somewhat more democratic traditions based on consensus and compromise might have appeased such a critical ally and offered incentives for the Ukrainians to throw their lot in with Germany come the next war, the Reich was all too used to getting its own way through deception and force of arms – a modus operandi practiced in Denmark, and which would be applied once again. [3]
Figure 38: OUN-B supporters in traditional Ukrainian dress salute Wehrmacht personnel at a rally in the General Government. Early 1941.
Tensions between the Reich administration and the OUN-filled government, termed the “Ukrainian State Board”, were manifest from the beginning. Bandera, whilst welcoming the aid from the Wehrmacht made it clear to Weber and the Reich authorities that his goal was nothing less than total Ukrainian independence, although with the benefits of Axis membership such as EWG membership and the guarantee of defence against the Soviet Union.
Weber’s aims towards Ukraine, namely exploiting its agricultural, industrial and human resources and shortening the front against the Soviet Union, while not totally incompatible with these aims, would almost certainly be hampered by them. Nonetheless, while German troops were present in Ukraine, the OKW decided that attempting Case Anton on this considerably larger scale would be a needless venture, and that the Ukrainians could be kept deliberately weak until the Wehrmacht regained strength for this task.
Although German propaganda tried its best to differentiate between Ukrainians and Russians, obviously declaring the former “superior” to the latter, the simple fact was that Weber saw the Ukrainians no differently from Belarusians or the Balts – nothing more than a body to be manipulated by the Reich for human and physical resources. Furthermore, while the OUN and NSDAP had a common ideological enemy in Soviet Russia (the OUN emphasising the latter and NSDAP the former) and Poland, at least as far as the Polish treatment of the Ukrainian minority population in the Second Republic went, their similarities essentially ended there.
Putting aside the barely-hidden racism of NSDAP against the Ukrainians, Weber’s vision of Europe totally purged of Jews was not particularly shared by Bandera and the OUN. [4] The newly-declared Ukrainian Social Republic was also [slow in handing] its Jewish population over to German authorities (although spontaneous acts of racial violence were rife even during Operation Barbarossa) and attempted some token resistance to the influx of Poles caused by the Ausschluss in the former Gothica, complaining that the war-ravaged country was ill-equipped to handle this wave of Polish émigrés, who were subjected to abuses and outbreaks of mass violence like in many of their other new homes. The rudimentary militias which Germany had permitted the OUN to set up were unable to stem the tide of Poles expelled by the Auswanderung policy. [5]
When the state apparatus broke down in Reichsgau-Weichselland, leading to the aforementioned abortive Warsaw Uprisings, the Reich seized the chance to fully puppetise Ukraine once and for all.
Figure 39: Dr.Marian Panchyshyn (seated at centre), non-partisan Minister of Health under the Stetsko government and puppet-president of the “Ukrainian Autonomous Social Republic”. [6]
The Stasi issued a report to Stetsko’s government, accusing “subversive” elements of the OUN-B of supporting partisans in Poland and especially Warsaw, somehow citing the Ukranian government’s unwillingness to accept the Polish refugees as further evidence of this “subversiveness”. The Reich government quickly sent an ultimatum to Stetsko and Bandera, stating that unless Ukraine permitted Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommando units to cross the border within 24 hours it would be perceived as an act of active resistance, with reprisals to come.
It appears that like so many ultimatums sent by Weber that it was merely a legalistic pretext, and when the Stetsko-Bandera cabinet hesistated, the Reich further sent accusations that the government had been “infiltrated by OUN-M elements” and the entire political system was compromised as a result, and Einsatzkommando divisions poured over the border in late August and early September, summarily executing anyone linked to the former regime and taking the opportunity to abduct or murder Jews while they were at it.
One of the few survivors of this purge was the non-partisan Minister of Health Dr. Marian Panchyshyn, who was figuratively, if not literally, held at gunpoint to lead the new government and made to publicly condemn his former colleagues and issuing severe punishments for those who continued to collaborate with them. The OUN in its entirety was outlawed, although some of the cabinet members were retained and Bandera was permitted to live, albeit under close scrutiny and in no official role, not even as the “spiritual guide” of the OUN, and the only legal party henceforth was the “Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Nationalists” (UPSN). The country’s name itself changed from to the Ukrainian Autonomous Social Republic, with the addition of an emblem similar to that of the OUN-M to the flag to further humiliate the now-defunct OUN-B. A new sun now rose over Ukrainian fields.
Figure 40: Flag of the Ukrainian Autonomous Social Republic. The deliberate removal of the emblem would be part of a general wave of “hole-in-flag” revolutions at the Reich’s close.
The OUN-B did not take kindly to the purge, and went underground. However, the factionalisms which had gripped the OUN prior to its split into the Banderaist and conservative factions proved stronger than any sense of unity, and the partisan factions appeared to spend more time combating each other than resisting the Reich authorities, which simply permitted the Einsatzkommando to wipe them out more effectively
While the border with Soviet Russia was relatively porous for subversive elements (at least eastwards), cooperation with the Communists was ruled out by all parties, even as the realisation had dawned that they had done nothing but exchange one master for another; such was the enormity of the legacy of Communism there, and the bitterness of its effects. The partisans thus emerged as a perennial thorn in the administration’s side, but never truly gained mass appeal as their continued internal conflicts alienated whichever public might have helped them, and while living conditions did drop over time, these were more easily blamed on the influx of expelled Polish nationals, in a continued example of the use of Scheuleder to hide inequities between the central Reich and its protectorates through “divide and conquer”.
The dismantling of the independent apparatus allowed the Reich the freedom to convert Ukraine both into the bread-basket and the staging-ground of the Greater German Reich. While the economic arguments concerning the effects of the NSDAP yoke on Ukraine have been discussed at length, it may be perhaps worthwhile to briefly recap them; while the Ukrainian Autonomous Social Republic was never totally incorporated into the Reich structure as the Baltic States or the German partition of Yugoslavia had been, it is undeniable that the Reich was purchasing Ukrainian grain for utterly meagre prices and otherwise “repaying” the Ukrainian state by allegedly investing in its heavy industries, which essentially amounted to more factories for the Wehrmacht, operated by underpaid and frequently-abused Polish workers, with Ukrainian bosses and German investors. [7]
Given the sorry excuse for economic development the Reich gave, it is not difficult to understand the total collapse of the Ukrainian front once the border was breached. In the meantime, Ukrainians and Russians were being prepared as cannon-fodder in the next war, with the German-controlled Ukrainian National Army as the official conglomerate of the various other collaborationist factions. Russian prisoners-of-war unwilling to return to Soviet Russia, or coerced into staying either by force or by propaganda concurrent with the Kryptos conspiracy (see below, “Return to Arms”) [8] which had rendered Stalin so paranoid that returning prisoners-of-war were being purged in droves, were collected into Russian Liberation Movement, led by Konstantin Voskoboinik, a former technical school-teacher in Lokot.
Figure 41: Konstantin Voskoboinik, Ukrainian-born leader of the Russian Liberation Movement and subsequent Reich “puppet-liberator”. 1942. [9]
The Russian Liberation Army (Русская освободительная армия¸ Russische Befreiungsarmee; ROA), the military/paramilitary wing of the Russian Liberation Movement, was a top-secret initiative of the Abwehr dedicated to causing as much havoc in the border regions as possible prior to the next round of hostilities. The ROA was comprised generally of Russian prisoners-of-war unwilling or unable to return across the Soviet Border commanded by Major-General Mikhail Meandrov, a Soviet officer who had been captured around Uman and subsequently defected to the Reich. [10]
In all other respects they were trained as the Karmaliuk (a historic Ukrainian outlaw analogous to Robin Hood [11]) division part of the Ukrainian National Army, but were in truth interrogated for information concerning border defences and were trained to sabotage and overcome these. The reliability of the compelled recruits was shaky, and Stalin had permitted the existence of the ROA given the famine in the USSR and relying on the fact that most would prove just as unreliable for the Reich in the next round as they had for the Soviet Union in the previous hostilities.
In all, the nature of the regime changes achieved most of the short-term military and economic aims of the Reich, but in the long run destabilised anything resembling internal self-government or sustainability. Although the front would be pushed leagues to the east, Ukraine collapsed just as quickly, if not even faster than, the territories of the Russian SFSR into which the Wehrmacht and the Karmaliuk were able to push in the continuation of the war. Weber and the NSDAP elite were accurate on one point though; the reprisals were savage, and not merely those exacted on the Ukrainians by the victorious Soviets, but between the various ethnic groups and especially unto the expelled Poles as the Red Army tore west.
[1] More on this later, but the popularity of the anti-Semitic aspects of Nazism in the Arab world has been covered earlier here and here.
[2] As covered earlier.
[3] As covered earlier, Case Anton was in Denmark in TTL.
[4] The relative ideological inflexibility of Hitler's Germany led to a much earlier purge of Ukrainian nationalists. Here Weber strung them along for a couple of years before letting the other shoe drop.
[5] As covered earlier in "The Warsaw Uprisings".
[6] This guy, giving him the dubious honour of being the second Axis leader MD.
[7] One more step towards Plantation Osteuropa.
[8] More on this later, which will be the Abwehr's magnum opus, greater even than Operation Schintzel.
[9] This guy, who died and led to Kaminski being be the most recognisable face of collaborationism.
[10] This guy, who was captured before Vlasov, who is known a heroic defender of the Motherland ITTL.
[11] This guy. I was this close to actually using "Koba" (a pseudonym of Stalin's in his wilderness days), but he's much more of a Georgian character.
=======
Next update (hopefully mid-August): A little bit about Serbia and Slovenia. A big bit about the Iraq War.
"..wasn't us."
Last edited:
The only thing worse than Nazi psychopath murderers are somewhat competent Nazi psychopath murderers.
So now we've got Lithuanians, Belarussians, Ukrainians, and Soviets in addition to Germans committing ethnic cleansing against the Poles...
If Poland has any shred of independence after this war, she's going to turn into an entire country of homicidal paranoids. Dmowski will look downright tolerant compared to whoever rises up after.
Serbia on roids, as someone said a long time ago.
I wouldn't be an Ukrainian or a Balt after the NKVD purges the country or the TTL Operation Vistula is enacted.
And how will the Eastern and Western part relate after?
OTOH, Weber couldn't afford to have a strong and legitimate leader for a land they view as nothing more than a colony to exploit.
And how will the Eastern and Western part relate after?
OTOH, Weber couldn't afford to have a strong and legitimate leader for a land they view as nothing more than a colony to exploit.
Bloody good update. And by good, I mean chilling. Good to have you back, Tom.