Death
Heinrich Himmler used the misconduct of the Warsaw group as a pretext for having Kaminski and his leadership executed after trial by court martial in Litzmannstadt (Łódź). They were tried for stealing the property of the Reich, as the stolen property was to have been delivered to Himmler, but Kaminski and his men had attempted to keep it for themselves. Also executed with Kaminski was brigade chief-of-staff Waffen-Obersturmbannführer Ilya Shavykin.
The men of RONA were given a false explanation: that Kaminski had been killed by Polish partisans. When Kaminski's men rejected this explanation, the Gestapo took Kaminski's car, pushed it into a ditch, shot it up with a machine gun, and smeared goose blood all over it — offering that as evidence. The demoralized unit was soon moved out of town and stationed to the north of it, far from any partisan activity.
The death of Kaminski and the unreliability of his troops as a combat unit brought the plans to expand the Kaminski Brigade to a division to an end. After Kaminski's death his unit was placed under the command of SS-Brigadeführer and Generalmajor der Polizei Christoph Diehm.
Read more about this topic: Bronislav Kaminski
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror—on the things that I might have avoided.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)