Introduction

The German army occupying Crimea on New Year's Eve 1941 was caught off guard. Despite the presence of an experienced and professional German force, the Soviet army began a series of seaborne invasions on the Crimea in an attempt to recover territory using mainly untested troops recruited in the Caucasus. They attacked the easternmost town of Kerch, the major crossing point across the narrow Taman Straits into the Caucasus. A second Soviet assault took place at nearby Feodosia on the southern coast and a third on the western side of the Crimean peninsula at Evpatoria. The two latter attacks were easily repulsed, while the first, on Kerch, required several weeks for the German army to recapture the town and surrounding area. Large numbers of new Soviet prisoners of war overcrowded the POW camps. It did not take long before German counterintelligence services, the Abwehr and the SS-Einsatzgruppe, realized the prize that had fallen into their hands. Among the captured troops from the Caucasus, they found an underlying hatred of czarist Russia going back centuries and more recently of Soviet Russia, which had occupied and incorporated their homelands into the Soviet Union just twenty years earlier. German intelligence officers preyed on these anti-Soviet sentiments to recruit a thousand or more Caucasian POWs (Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians, and others) for their own purposes. Some became agents dropped by parachute by the Abwehr and the RSHA (respectively, the “Walli” and “Unternehmen Zeppelin” operations) into their homelands on intelligence gathering missions. Many more would become involved with German troops in the future ground operations. But about two hundred Caucasians were recruited by Einsatzgruppe D and subordinated to the SD and the Security Police based in Simferopol, Crimea, under the banner of a “common goal,” that of liberating their homelands. These young men were established under SS control as the Kaukasier Kompanie, collaborated in the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” and became Holocaust perpetrators by helping the Einsatzgruppe and its subunits (Kommandos) to kill the Jews of the Caucasus during 1942, then elsewhere in 1943–44.

This article examines the relationship between the Kaukasier Kompanie and Soviet minorities in the Caucasus and their involvement in mass murders, with a special emphasis on the Holocaust through the use of gas vans (Gaswagen) in mobile gassing operations.