Soviet Nazi Collaborators Even the SS Could No Longer Tolerate JJ

22 June 1941, the western  border of the Soviet Union.  Before dawn, Nazi Germany launches Operation  Barbarossa, sending its armies deep into Soviet   territory and leaving behind a vast occupied zone  where German authority is thin, Soviet power has   collapsed, and partisan groups begin to gather in  the forests.

In places like Lokot, near Bryansk,   the chaos of occupation creates opportunities for  men willing to serve the Nazi invaders. Among them   are Konstantin Voskoboinik and Bronislav Kaminski  who offer the Germans a local administration,   a police militia, and help in the fight against  Soviet partisans. What begins as a small   auxiliary force soon becomes the armed wing of a  collaborationist enclave, used to maintain order,   hunt partisans, persecute suspected Soviet  loyalists, and serve German interests in   return for power and protection. Three years  later, in the summer of 1944, some of these

men are sent to Warsaw, where the Polish Uprising  against German rule has just begun and where their   brutality makes them notorious even among the  Nazi forces sent to suppress it. They are the   Kaminski Brigade, and they will ultimately  pay for their crimes with their own lives. The brigade was created in the chaos of the German  advance into the Soviet Union.

In October 1941 the   Wehrmacht – the German armed forces – reached the  small town of Lokot, near the city of Bryansk,   close to the borders with Ukraine and Belarus  in what is now western Russia. The area had   a peculiar history: under Soviet rule it had  served as a settlement zone for people barred   from returning to the major cities.

Among them was  a chemical engineer at the local distillery named   Bronislav Kaminski, a man of mixed Polish and  German descent who had himself been exiled there   and who nursed a deep hatred of the Soviet state.  When the Germans arrived, Kaminski and the local   physics teacher, Konstantin Voskoboinik, offered  their services, proposing to organise a civil   administration and a police militia to fight the  Soviet partisans already gathering in the woods.

The Germans accepted and Voskoboinik was  installed as the head of the district and   a militia of around 200 men, who from  the outset assisted in the persecution   and killing of civilians suspected of  loyalty to the Soviet government. In   January 1942 Voskoboinik was mortally wounded in  a partisan raid, and Kaminski took command.

Over   the following year the Germans granted him an  extraordinary degree of autonomy. His domain,   eventually covering eight districts, became known  as the Lokot Autonomy, or the Lokot Republic:   a self-governing collaborationist enclave with  its own administration, courts, newspapers,   and army-style militia which answered to  Kaminski alone.

The enclave was not simply a   German puppet – its administration dissolved the  hated Soviet collective farms, returned land to   private households, reopened schools, and kept  grain prices below those in either German- or   Soviet-held territory. In a district long used to  settle exiles and former camp inmates, the promise   of liberation from Bolshevism earned Kaminski’s  administration a measure of genuine local support.

That support was also connected to murder –  the local regime’s newspapers preached the   destruction of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” and Kaminski’s  militia shot the area’s Jewish population on its   own initiative, without waiting for German orders. Kaminski named this militia the Russian People’s   Liberation Army or RONA.

In the autumn of 1942,  he imposed compulsory conscription on the local   population, and the militia swelled into a brigade  of some fourteen battalions and nearly 8,000 men,   reinforced by recruits drawn from Soviet prisoners  of war. It was equipped, remarkably, with a small   number of captured Soviet tanks, T-34 and KV  tanks, artillery and armoured cars abandoned   by the Soviets in the great encirclements of  1941.

By 1943 it numbered up to 12,000 men,   the largest collaborationist formation of its  kind in the occupied Soviet Union at that time. This is where the work of our team of historians,   researchers and editors  becomes the story you hear. I’m Marchand Steenkamp and since 2022,  I’ve had the privilege of being the voice   behind World History.

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Now, let’s get into today’s story. What the brigade was for  became clear in its operations. Working alongside German forces in the Bryansk  forests, RONA took part in a succession of large   anti-partisan sweeps, in which the line  between fighting partisans and massacring   civilians was deliberately erased.

Villages  suspected of sheltering partisans were burned,   their inhabitants shot or deported for  forced labour, and the official tallies   of “bandits” killed were padded with the  bodies of farmers and their families. By   the most conservative post-war estimates, the  Kaminski formation was responsible for the   deaths of up to ten thousand civilians  during its existence in the east.

Discipline inside the brigade was held together by  terror. Kaminski survived repeated assassination   attempts and answered them with public  hangings. German officers passing through   Lokot reported bodies left on gallows outside  his headquarters. When the commander of one of   his regiments tried to defect to the partisans  with his men, Kaminski is said to have flown to   the regiment’s headquarters and strangled him and  several others in front of the assembled troops.

The brigade’s career in the Lokot area ended with  the German defeat at Kursk in the summer of 1943.   As the front moved westward, Kaminski ordered  the evacuation not only of his soldiers but   of the entire civilian population loyal to  him. By the end of August some 30,000 people,   including ten to eleven thousand fighting men,  had been moved to the Lyepyel region of Belarus,   where the brigade resumed its anti-partisan  work under the combat formation of Curt von   Gottberg and alongside the notorious Dirlewanger  unit, in operations that again left thousands of

civilians dead and villages in ashes. In January  1944 Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS,   personally awarded Kaminski the Iron Cross for  his work for Nazi Germany and his achievements.  In the June of 1944 the brigade was formally taken  into the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS,   and redesignated as the Waffen-Sturm-Brigade  RONA.

As the Soviet summer offensive, Operation   Bagration, shattered German Army Group Centre, the  brigade fell back again, regrouping in Neuhammer   SS training camp, now located in the Polish  village of Świętoszów, with somewhere between   three and seven thousand men. On this remnant  the SS planned to build a full division, the 29th   Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (Russian No.  1).

Heinrich Himmler signed the order to create   this unit on 1 August 1944. By coincidence it was  the same day the Warsaw Uprising broke out, and   the plan was at once overtaken by these events. On 4 August a combat regiment of the brigade,   around 1,600 to 1,700 men with a handful of tanks  and guns under the command of Kaminski’s chief of   staff Ivan Frolov, was ordered into Warsaw  as part of the pacification force assembled   under SS-Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth.

Their  assigned task was to clear the Ochota district,   held by a few hundred lightly armed insurgents.  Militarily they were a failure: the assault   was delayed because the men were busy looting  abandoned houses, and when it finally began, they   advanced only a few hundred metres. What followed  in Ochota was not combat but slaughter. Over the   following days RONA troops murdered thousands  of Polish civilians and raped women in numbers   that horrified even the German command itself.

Across the three weeks of what became known as   the Ochota massacre, around 10,000 inhabitants of  the district were killed and thousands more were   herded into a holding camp at the former Zieleniak  marketplace, where prisoners were robbed,   women raped, and hundreds of them were shot. The brigade’s conduct drew condemnation even   by the standards of the SS in Warsaw.

The German  commander in Warsaw Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski   later gave this assessment of the brigade:  “It had no military combat value whatsoever,   with both officers and soldiers lacking  even a basic tactical understanding. I   saw Kaminski’s men removing cartloads of stolen  jewellery, gold watches, and precious stones.   The capture of a liquor supply was more important  to the brigade than seizing a position on the same   street. Each assault was instantly halted,  as the units dispersed into looting mobs.

”  Kaminski himself took part in the plundering,  claiming the loot for what he called a “Russian   Liberation Fund.” By the end of August, the German  commanders had had enough and pulled the brigade   out of the city, having gained nothing and lost  some 500 men. The remnants of the RONA unit,   now notorious even among SS formations, were  reassigned to the Kampinos Forest to assist in   encircling Warsaw.

There, an artillery battery and  one infantry battalion were attacked by about 80   Polish partisans while stationed in the deserted  village of Truskaw. Nearly 100 RONA and German SS   personnel were killed during the midnight assault.  The survivors, many reportedly intoxicated in a   manner that made it impossible for them to fight,  fled in disorder, abandoning their weapons.  At this time Kaminski himself was dead.

A  few days earlier he was summoned to a German   conference at Łódź, but he never arrived. The  version put out to his own men was that he had   been ambushed and killed by Polish partisans on  the road. In truth he had been shot on the orders   of the SS leadership, his death dressed up as  a partisan attack, his usefulness exhausted   and his brigade an embarrassment.

Bronislav  Kaminski, the warlord of the Bryansk forest,   was killed at the age of 45 on 28 August 1944  by the regime he had so faithfully served.  His death ended the plan for a RONA division.  As the Eastern front moved west once more,   the surviving soldiers and the civilian refugees  travelling with them were to be evacuated south,   but the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising  at the end of August left them stranded in railway   sidings near the city of Racibórz in southern  Poland.

In the autumn of 1944 the remnants,   perhaps 2,000 men, were finally handed over to  General Andrey Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army,   a collaborationist force fighting alongside Nazi  Germany, and absorbed into one of its divisions. What became of the men themselves varied  considerably. Some were repatriated to the   Soviet Union after the war and shot.

Among them  was Ivan Frolov, who had commanded Kaminski´s   men in Warsaw, and was sentenced to  death by the Soviet court in 1946.  Some members of the brigade, who were  repatriated back to the Soviet Union   formed partisan groups around Lokot. These  groups gradually degenerated into what they   had always been – criminal organisations, with  the last major group being eliminated in 1951.

One of the last people connected to the  Kaminski brigade and its crimes to be   identified was Antonina Makarova, a young  woman who had served as an executioner at   Lokot and was credited with shooting at least 168  people, and possibly many more. She was traced,   tried in 1978 and executed the following  year, more than three decades after the war.

The Kaminski Brigade left almost nothing  behind it but the dead. It built no state   worthy of the name, won no battle of lasting  consequence, and was ultimately disowned   even by the SS that had armed and decorated it.  Today it is remembered for one thing above all:   of all the units the Germans unleashed  upon the civilians of occupied Europe,   few matched the brutality of men  who claimed to be liberating Russia.

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