Nazi Collaborators and Cold Warriors: America’S Belarusian Quislings

Nazi Collaborators and Cold Warriors: America’s Belarusian Quislings by Mark P. Alexander B.A. in History, January 2013, University of Vermont M.A. in History, October 2015, University of Vermont A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 19, 2019 Dissertation directed by Hope M. Harrison Associate Professor of History and International Affairs The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Mark P. Alexander has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of April 15, 2019. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. Nazi Collaborators and Cold Warriors: America’s Belarusian Quislings Mark P. Alexander Dissertation Research Committee Hope M. Harrison, Associate Professor of History and International Affairs, Dissertation Director Hugh L. Agnew, Professor of History and International Affairs, Committee Member James G. Hershberg, Professor of History and International Affairs, Committee Member ii © Copyright 2019 by Mark P. Alexander All rights reserved iii Abstract of Dissertation Nazi Collaborators and Cold Warriors: America’s Belarusian Quislings During World War II, opportunistic Belarusian nationalist leaders compromised the independence and integrity of their young movement by tying it to Nazi Germany and becoming culpable in the crimes of the Holocaust. Fighting among themselves for control of the anticommunist Belarusian diaspora after World War II, many Belarusian nationalist collaborators became involved in the early Cold War anti-Soviet campaigns of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Virtually all of the leaders of the Belarusian Nazi puppet regime immigrated to the US in the early Cold War and continued their hardline anti-Soviet political activism in their new homes. After decades living confidently in the US under their own names, these Belarusian collaborators became the focus of renewed government investigations into Nazi war criminals in the US and the center of a public scandal. This dissertation examines these understudied figures and their influence on world events from their place on the peripheries of power. It investigates leading Belarusian nationalists’ ties to Nazi Germany during World War II, their anti- Soviet covert operations with the CIA in the early Cold War, and their participation in American anticommunist politics. Finally, this dissertation explores how these figures affected the development of US government investigations into Nazi war criminals living in the US in the 1970s and 1980s. iv Table of Contents Abstract of Dissertation………………………………………………………………....iv Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One: Belarusian Nationalism, 1900-1943……………………………………………………...23 Chapter Two: The Belarusian SS State and the Fall of the Third Reich, 1943-1945…………………...70 Chapter Three: The Belarusian Anticommunist Diaspora, 1945-1950………………………………….107 Chapter Four: Belarusian Nazi Collaborators and United States Intelligence, 1950-1961…………….139 Chapter Five: Belarusian Collaborators in Cold War American Life, 1948-1991…………………….203 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...269 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………280 v Introduction As the Second World War ended, tensions between the Soviet Union (USSR) and its allies in the wartime coalition arrayed against the Axis Powers rapidly escalated. Soviet hegemony over the nations of Eastern Europe and the spread of communist movements in Asia caused the specter of imminent global communist encroachment to loom large in the imaginations of many Western policymakers in the late 1940s. In order to meet this perceived threat, the Western Allies would ultimately seek to strengthen West Germany and Japan against communist influence by restoring full rights and privileges to their defeated and disenfranchised former enemies. One important effect of this was to enable individuals guilty of wartime crimes to assume positions of authority and influence once again. This meant softening and reversing initial postwar policies that pursued high standards of justice for former members of the Nazi Party and of Imperial Japan’s government and business conglomerates (zaibatsu) accused of war crimes. By the early 1950s, the members of the previous war’s defeated rightwing regimes had become allies in the Cold War battle against the threat of worldwide communist expansion. In addition to reversing denazification policies and releasing accused war criminals, United States (US) officials also used former Nazis and Nazi collaborators as assets in the Cold War, fostering fifth column forces and anticommunist émigré groups that would work to undermine the Kremlin through paramilitary and propaganda operations. Operation Paperclip, the covert American project to bring Nazi rocket scientists to work for the United States after the war, has become a widely known example of the relationships between US intelligence and Nazi war criminals in recent 1 decades.1 Similar projects focused on Nazi officials with intelligence expertise on the Soviet Union. For example, Reinhard Gehlen had been the chief of Fremde Heere Ost (FHO, or Foreign Armies East), the military intelligence office of the German Wehrmacht concerned with the Soviet Union. After World War II, he worked closely with American intelligence agencies and became the first chief of West Germany’s foreign intelligence service. Gehlen and his colleagues shared their intelligence on the populations and territories of the Soviet Union with their new American partners. They also shared intelligence assets, including former collaborators of the Third Reich from the parts of Europe that had fallen under Soviet domination after the war. Political and military collaborators from the western territories of the Soviet Union under German occupation during the war were prized by Western intelligence officials for their knowledge of the region, their anticommunist convictions, and their ability to establish military and paramilitary forces among émigré communities abroad. Individuals from territories stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea became intelligence assets of various Western powers, and in many cases the United States became their ultimate sponsor and home. Belarusian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, and Ukrainian Nazi collaborators all became involved in these covert anticommunist intelligence operations. This dissertation focuses on the Cold War relationship that developed between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and influential Belarusian Nazi collaborators, many of whom became citizens of the United States after the war despite their notoriety and 1 Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Hunt for the Nazi Scientists (Boston: Little Brown, 1987); Clarence G. Lasby, Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War (New York: Atheneum, 1971); Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). 2 public calls for their prosecution. These Belarusian collaborators had been the figures most responsible for associating the Belarusian nationalist movement closely with Nazi Germany. Although they were neither the architects nor the executioners of the so-called “Final Solution,” these quislings facilitated the German invasion and occupation of their homeland and oversaw the persecution and mass murder of many of their former neighbors.2 The Cold War covert paramilitary operations conducted with these unsavory assets ended in disaster. The intelligence they produced for the CIA often proved outdated or fabricated, and their presence in the United States imported an organized and active extreme rightwing element into the American body politic and exacerbated the international tensions of the Cold War. In spite of the dismal results of these endeavors, the CIA helped protect these figures from prosecution for decades by providing whitewashed accounts of their Belarusian assets’ lives to other American agencies investigating their pasts. This history of Belarusian Nazi collaborators and their postwar sponsors in American intelligence engages with several different relevant areas of history and contributes to deepening understandings of both the Holocaust and the Cold War. Although several authors have engaged with the history of Belarusian nationalism, the impact that collaboration with Nazi Germany had upon the development of the Belarusian nationalist movement following World War II remains understudied. Scholars agree that Belarusian nationalism did not begin to blossom until the late 2 Since the end of World War II, the name of Norwegian fascist and Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling has become synonymous with traitorous collaboration with a foreign invader. Because the term “quisling” implies influential political collaboration rather than direct participation in the crimes of the Holocaust, it is a particularly appropriate label for the Belarusian politicians and officers who facilitated the invasion and occupation of their homeland during World War II. 3 nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, which meant that it developed later than comparable nationalist movements throughout Europe. Because the Belarusian people were dominated by their more powerful neighbors and had no state of their own until the late twentieth century, Belarusian language and

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