Letters from Vienna #176
Letter to Niklas Frank V
Dear Mr. Frank,
After the 20th of July 1944, the assassination-attempt on Hitler by Stauffenberg, Treskow and Olbricht, many officers wanted nothing to do with the affair. Major Viebig undoubtedly spoke for the majority when he said:
“I’ve always taken the position that as a soldier one must obey one’s supreme warlord, no matter what; I also took the position regarding the revolt on the 20th and I still take the position that something like this shouldn’t be done under any circumstances.”[1]
One might argue that ultimately Stauffenberg, Treskow and Olbricht, from a psychological standpoint, felt exactly the same way, and that this was why they failed. They also knew that their chances of success, without the support of heavy-weights such as Manstein, were extremely slim. Ultimately their action had a symbolic character; they were more concerned with saving German honour than practical politics.
When discussing your father and Otto von Wächter one must remember that Germany was a dictatorship and was, to a certain extent, a “closed system”. There was no mechanism for change of government, which is why Stauffenberg, Treskow and Olbricht, all three extremely intelligent, capable and honorable men, true patriots, were driven to such extreme, drastic and criminal measures.
Could your father and Otto von Wächter have rebelled? Possibly. The best thing would have been to resign. Yet, Otto von Wächter knew perfectly well what would have happened had Himmler had a chance to depopulate the Ukraine, as he clearly wanted.
Ironically there is a link between Stauffenberg and Otto von Wächter: both realised that Germany needed to raise troops in the occupied territories if it had any chance of winning the war. Yet, prior to Stalingrad, this effort was vehemently resisted by Hitler and Himmler, both of whom feared armed formations outside of their control. When the effort came, in the form of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), in April 1943, it came much, much too late.
Should Horst be proud of the fact that his father created this division? Hardly… it seems to have been involved in at least one massacre of civilians I know of[2].The Huta Pieniacka massacre is still commemorated in Poland today:
“Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote on Twitter on Thursday that Poland owes remembrance to Poles who were murdered in Huta Pieniacka (today western Ukraine) by Ukrainians from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a Nazi SS division and other barbaric units.”
“Seventy-five years ago, under the German occupation, they died at the hands of their neighbours because they (Polish people – PAP) felt Polish, because they were Poles,” the PM noted.”
“The Huta Pieniacka massacre is considered to be the most serious crime committed by Ukrainian nationalists in that region of Eastern Europe. On Feb. 28, 1944, Ukrainian volunteers forming a unit of the German 14th SS “Galicia” Division massacred between 850 and 900 people in the village. The main reason for the massacre was that Poles killed two soldiers of the Ukrainian unit.”
“Victims of Ukrainian volunteers to the Waffen SS division and Ukrainian nationalist units were not only the inhabitants of Huta Pieniacka, but also many others who had escaped from Volhynia and from villages that the UPA had razed to the ground in 1943. Jews who were threatened by German extermination also hid in Huta Pieniacka. In the village inhabited by over 1,000 people, only 160 people survived.”
“The SS “Galicia” Division was formed in 1943 in Lviv, Eastern Galicia. The main founder of the division was the district governor SS Otto Waechter.”[3]
Horst seems to take the rather naïve position that the survivors of the division were saved solely due to the efforts of his father but this is questionable: the division was one of the few eastern units saved because the Anglo-American Empire knew it could employ it against the Russians (Churchill was already planning World War Three[4]).
It’s not without interest that the family of the deputy Prime Minister of Canada is rooted in the Ukrainian Nazi past or that there’s a Waffen-SS graveyard in Canada.
“On Jan. 26, 2022, in the midst of Russia’s preparations to invade Ukraine, Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland issued a statement outlining why Canada—home to the largest Ukrainian diaspora outside Russia—would support Ukraine unconditionally, outlining a Manichean view of a “struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.” “Canadians—our own parents and grandparents—fought and died,” she continued, “to establish a rules-based international order during and after the Second World War.”
Freeland’s Ukrainian grandfather on her mother’s side, Michael Chomiak, did nothing of the sort. During the War, he edited Krakivski Visti, a Nazi propaganda rag in occupied Krakow that was printed on a press confiscated from a Jewish newspaper. Freeland, of course, is not her grandfather, nor is she responsible for his actions.
…
The deputy prime minister and finance minister’s revisionist family history is part of a broader project of myth-making in parts of the Ukrainian diaspora, in which certain anti-Soviet Nazi collaborators are often rebranded as nationalist war heroes. In Edmonton, where Freeland was raised, there are two monuments commemorating Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. A bust of Roman Shukhevych, who massacred thousands of Jews and Poles, has stood outside the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex since the 1970s, in addition to a monument to the 14th Waffen SS Division—which was celebrated in the pages of Krakivski Visti—at a local cemetery.”[5]
Once one understands that the Anglo-American Empire financed the Nazis (as well as the Bolsheviks beforehand) and that Fascism was a perfect tool of imperial destruction and control one understands why a film like “What Our Fathers Did” could be made, and, more importantly: why Philippe Sands downplays the role of the Ukrainian Nazis in the film.
The obsession with the German (and to a lesser extent Austrian) Nazi past is simply the means of creating a (Ukrainian, NATO and EU) Nazi present (one in which the oligarchs have total control).
Fascism always was a creation of the Global Deep State and always was a tool for a distinct geopolitical and economic goal.
To quote Matthew Ehret:
“Were it not for a powerful network of financiers and industrialists of the 1920s –1940s with names such as Rockefeller, Warburg, Montague Norman, Osborn, Morgan, Harriman, or Dulles, then it can safely be said that fascism would never have been possible as a “solution” to the economic woes of the post-WWI order. To prove this point, let us take the strange case of Prescott Bush as a useful entry point.”
“The patriarch of the same Bush dynasty that gave the world two disastrous American presidents made a name for himself funding Nazism alongside his business partners Averell Harriman and Averell’s younger brother E. Roland Harriman (the latter who was to recruit Prescott to Skull and Bones while both were studying at Yale). Not only did Prescott, acting as director of Brown Brothers Harriman, provide valuable loans to keep the bankrupt Nazi party afloat during Hitler’s loss of support in 1932, when the anti-Fascist General Kurt von Schleicher was appointed Chancellor, but was even found guilty for “trading with the enemy” as director of Union Banking Corporation in 1942!”[6]
It would be wise and prudent on your part to do some research on this question.
There seem to be have been worse villains than either your father or Otto von Wächter and its high time to shine a light on them.
Best,
Michael
[1] p.345 Abgehört, Sönke Neitzel
Ich habe immer den Standpunkt vertreten, dass man als Soldat seinen obersten Kriegsherren auf alle Fälle gehorchen muss; ich mich auch bei dieser Revolte am 20ten auf den Standpunkt gestellt habe und auch noch jetzt auf dem Standpunkt stehe, dass so etwas auf keinen Fall gemacht werden darf.
[2] https://de-academic.com/dic.nsf/dewiki/635333
[3] https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/we-must-remember-the-huta-pieniacka-murder-victims---pm-4901
[4] https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/cold-war-on-file/operation-unthinkable/
[5] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/chrystia-freeland-needs-to-come-clean-about-her-nazi-collaborationist-grandfather