On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, sending its armies deep into Soviet territory and leaving behind a vast occupied zone with only weak German authority. Soviet power collapsed, and resistance groups began to gather in the forests. In places like Lokot, near Bryansk, the chaos of occupation created opportunities for men willing to serve the Nazi invaders.
Among them were Konstantin Voskoboinik and Bronislav Kaminski, who offered the Germans a local administration, a police force, and help in fighting Soviet partisans. What began as a small auxiliary force soon became the armed wing of a collaborationist enclave used to maintain order, hunt partisans, persecute Soviet loyalists, and serve German interests in exchange for power and protection.
Three years later, in the summer of 1944, some of these men were sent to Warsaw, where the Polish uprising against German rule had just begun, and where their brutality made them notorious even among the Nazi forces sent to crush it. They were the Kaminski Brigade, and they would eventually pay for their crimes with their lives.
The brigade was founded amid the chaos of the German advance into the Soviet Union. In October 1941, the Wehrmacht reached the small town of Lokot near the city of Bryansk, close to the borders of Ukraine and Belarus in what is now western Russia.
The area had a strange history. Under Soviet rule, it served as a settlement zone for people banned from returning to major cities. Among them was a chemical engineer at the local distillery named Bronislav Kaminski, a man of mixed Polish and German origin who had been exiled there and harbored a deep hatred of the Soviet state.
When the Germans arrived, Kaminski and the local physics teacher, Konstantin Voskoboinik, offered their services by proposing to organize a civil administration and a police force to fight the Soviet partisans who had begun gathering in the forests. The Germans accepted the offer, and Voskoboinik was appointed head of the district with a police force of about 200 men who from the start helped persecute and kill civilians suspected of loyalty to the Soviet government.
In January 1942, Voskoboinik was fatally wounded in a partisan raid, and Kaminski took command. Over the following year, the Germans granted him an exceptional degree of autonomy. His territory, which eventually covered eight districts, became known as the Lokot Self-Government or the Lokot Republic, a self-governing collaborationist enclave with its own administration, courts, newspapers, and military police answering to Kaminski alone.
The enclave was not merely a German puppet. Its administration dissolved the hated Soviet collective farms, returned land to families, reopened schools, and kept grain prices lower than in German- or Soviet-controlled territory. In a region long used to house exiles and former camp prisoners, the promise of liberation from Bolshevism earned Kaminski's administration a measure of genuine local support.
That support was also tied to killing. The regime's local newspaper promoted the destruction of "Bolshevik Jewry," and Kaminski's militia shot Jewish residents of the area on its own initiative, without waiting for German orders. Kaminski called this militia the "Army of Liberation of the Russian People," or RONA.
In the fall of 1942, conscription was imposed on the local population, and the militia swelled into a brigade of about 14 battalions and nearly 8,000 men, reinforced by recruits from Soviet prisoners of war. It was remarkably equipped with a small number of captured Soviet tanks, such as T-34s and KVs, along with artillery and armored cars left behind by the Soviets in the great encirclements of 1941. By 1943, it numbered 12,000 men, making it the largest collaborationist formation of its kind in the occupied Soviet Union at the time.
The brigade's purpose became clear through its operations. Working alongside German forces in the Bryansk forests, RONA took part in a series of large anti-partisan sweeps in which the line between fighting armed fighters and massacring civilians was deliberately erased. Villages suspected of sheltering fighters were burned, their inhabitants shot or deported for forced labor, and official counts of dead "bandits" were inflated with the bodies of peasants and their families. According to the most conservative postwar estimates, Kaminski's formation was responsible for the killing of up to 10,000 civilians during its existence in the east.
Discipline within the brigade was maintained through terror. Kaminski survived repeated assassination attempts and responded with public hangings. German officers passing through Lokot reported bodies hanging from gallows outside his headquarters. When the commander of one of his regiments tried to defect to the partisans with his men, Kaminski was said to have flown to the regimental headquarters and strangled him, killing others in front of the assembled troops.
The brigade's path in the Lokot area ended with the German defeat at Kursk in the summer of 1943. As the front moved west, Kaminski ordered the evacuation not only of his soldiers but of all loyal civilians. By the end of August, about 30,000 people, including 10,000 to 11,000 fighters, had been moved to the Lepel region of Belarus, where the brigade resumed operations against partisans under the command of Curt von Gottberg and alongside the Dirlewanger unit, in operations that again left thousands of civilians dead and villages burned.
In January 1944, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, personally awarded Kaminski the Iron Cross for his efforts on behalf of Nazi Germany and his achievements. In June 1944, the brigade was formally absorbed into the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the SS, and renamed the Waffen-Sturm-Brigade RONA.
As the Soviet summer offensive, Operation Bagration, shattered the German Army Group Center, the brigade retreated again, assembling at the SS training camp Neuhammer, located in what is now the Polish village of Świętoszów, with ranks ranging between 3,000 and 7,000 men. On these remnants, the SS planned to build a full division, the 29th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (Russian No. 1). Heinrich Himmler signed the order establishing this unit on August 1, 1944.
By coincidence, that was the same day the Warsaw Uprising erupted, and events immediately overtook the plan. On August 4, a combat regiment of the brigade, numbering between 1,600 and 1,700 men with a handful of tanks and guns under Kaminski's chief of staff, Ivan Frolov, was ordered into Warsaw as part of the pacification force assembled under Gruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth. Their assigned task was to clear the Ochota district, held by a few hundred lightly armed insurgents.
Militarily, they failed. The attack was delayed because the men were busy looting abandoned houses, and when it finally began, they advanced only a few hundred meters. What followed in Ochota was not combat but a massacre. Over the following days, RONA troops killed thousands of Polish civilians and raped women in numbers that shocked even the German command itself. Over the three weeks of what became known as the Ochota massacre, about 10,000 residents of the area were killed, and thousands more were crowded into a detention camp at the former Zieleniak market, where prisoners were robbed, women raped, and hundreds shot.
The brigade's behavior drew condemnation even by the standards of the Nazi SS in Warsaw. The German commander in Warsaw, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, later offered this assessment of the brigade. It had no military combat value whatsoever, as officers and men lacked even basic tactical understanding. He saw Kaminski's men carrying carts loaded with stolen jewelry, gold watches, and precious stones. Seizing a stock of liquor mattered more to the brigade than controlling a position on the same street. Every attack stopped immediately as units scattered and turned into looting gangs. Kaminski himself took part in the plundering, claiming the spoils would go to what he called a "Russian Liberation Fund."
By the end of August, the German commanders had had enough and withdrew the brigade from the city after it had achieved nothing and lost about 500 men. The remnants of the RONA unit, notorious even among SS formations, were reassigned to the Kampinos forest to help encircle Warsaw. There, an artillery battery and an infantry battalion were attacked by about 80 Polish insurgents while stationed in the abandoned village of Truskaw. Nearly 100 RONA and German SS personnel were killed during the midnight attack. The survivors, many of whom were said to have been too drunk to fight, fled in chaos, leaving their weapons behind.
By then, Kaminski himself was already dead. A few days earlier, he had been summoned to a German conference in Łódź but never arrived. The story given to his men was that he had been ambushed and killed by Polish insurgents on the road. In reality, he had been shot on orders from the SS command, and his death was described as an attack by insurgents. His usefulness had run out and his brigade had become an embarrassment.
Bronislav Kaminski, the warlord of the Bryansk forest, was killed at the age of 45 on August 28, 1944, by the regime he had served faithfully. His death ended the plan to create the RONA division. As the Eastern Front moved west again, the surviving soldiers and the civilian refugees accompanying them were to be evacuated south, but the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising at the end of August left them stranded on the railway lines near the town of Racibórz in southern Poland.
In the fall of 1944, the remnants, perhaps 2,000 men, were finally handed over to the Russian Liberation Army led by General Andrey Vlasov, a collaborationist force fighting alongside Nazi Germany, and were merged into one of its divisions. The fate of these men afterward varied greatly. Some were repatriated to the Soviet Union after the war and shot. Among them was Ivan Frolov, who had led Kaminski's men in Warsaw and was sentenced to death by a Soviet court in 1946. Some members of the brigade who were returned to the Soviet Union formed insurgent groups around the Lokot area. These groups gradually degenerated into what they had always been, criminal organizations, until the last major group was eliminated in 1951.
Among the last to be identified as connected to the Kaminski Brigade and its crimes was Antonina Makarova, a young woman who served as an executioner in Lokot and was credited with executing at least 168 people, and possibly many more. She was tracked down and tried in 1978 and executed the following year, more than three decades after the war ended.
The Kaminski Brigade left behind almost nothing but the dead. It built no state worthy of the name, won no battle of lasting significance, and was ultimately disowned even by the SS that armed and decorated it. Today, it is remembered for one thing above all else. Among all the units the Germans unleashed on civilians in occupied Europe, few match the brutality of men who claimed to be liberating Russia.