Where the Iron Crosses Grow

Yet not all Crimean Tatars were so cozy with the German occupation. Dr Ahmet Ozenbasli, a Crimean Tatar nationalist who had been imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag in 1928–34, was made chairman of the Muslim committee in Simferopol in 1942. Although appreciative that the Red Army was gone, he was suspicious of German motives and ultimate intentions in the region. Like many Crimean Tatars, he regarded himself as a nationalist, not a collaborator, since he owed no allegiance to Stalin’s regime. Ozenbasli pushed the Germans for more Crimean local autonomy, and when it was refused he began to speak out against German policies in the region. Unwilling to make a martyr of him and anger the Crimean Tatar populace, the Germans simply marginalized him. A few Crimean Tatars openly opposed the German occupation and ran off to the mountains to join the partisans.

As the war began to go against the Third Reich, the Wehrmacht and SS became increasingly eager to create Eastern European volunteer units for frontline combat duty. While the Crimean Tatars were regarded as “allies,” the existing Schutzmannschaft battalions were only recruited for local service in the Crimea. By late 1942, the SS were interested in forming a Crimean Tatar brigade, and used personnel from the SD and Einsatzgruppe D to interview members of the Schuma units and Tatar POWs to identify potential recruits.[15] The SS also used the Tatar local committees to assist their recruiting drive in the rural areas. However, most Crimean Tatars volunteered to defend their local communities, not to join the SS or fight outside the Crimea. Recruitment was slow, and once the German retreat in the Caucasus began in January 1943, many Tatars began to reconsider collaboration. As the Red Army closed in on AOK 17 in the Kuban, discipline in the Schutzmannschaft battalions became problematic, and desertions increased. Consequently, the Wehrmacht was forced to disband several Schutzmannschaft battalions and execute those who encouraged disaffection. Other unreliable Crimean Tatars were deported as forced labor.

In 1943, SS efforts to form Crimean Tatar regular units progressed slowly, and did not succeed in attracting enough volunteers until the Red Army returned to the Crimea in 1944. At that point, some volunteers “voted with their feet” and deserted, but many of the Schuma men could not afford to fall into Soviet hands and had little choice but to remain loyal to the Wehrmacht. As Sevastopol was falling in May 1944, about 2,200 Crimean Tatar volunteers were evacuated to Romania and then Germany, where they were formed first into the Tataren-Gebirgsjäger-Regiment der SS, then the Waffengruppe Krim. In July 1944, the unit was redesignated as Waffen-Gebirgs-Brigade der SS (Tatar Nr. 1), but this formation was disbanded in December 1944 without ever seeing combat. As the war ended, the Crimean Tatar volunteers were apparently dispatched to the Italian front in 1945, but the formation disappeared in the final months of the war.[16]

In the end, collaboration between the Crimean Tatars and the German occupation authorities in 1942–43 became a justification for the Soviet authorities to inflict collective punishment upon the entire Tatar population when the Red Army returned to the Crimea in May 1944. The Tatars were singled out as traitors and made the scapegoats for Red Army defeats in the Crimea in 1941–42; allegedly the desertion of Crimean Tatars, as well as Chechens and other Caucasian minorities serving in the Red Army, fatally undermined the Soviet defense. By blaming the Crimean Tatars for the German conquest of the Crimea, the Soviet leadership could absolve themselves of any responsibility for their own mistakes in the region.

It is difficult to assess the Crimean Tatars simply as victims, since some of their community willingly assisted the SS in the Holocaust, but one thing is certain: in cooperating with the Germans, they got far more than they bargained for.

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