The Belarusian Black Cat partisans (Belarusian: Чорны кот, Čorny Kot) was a German-trained Belarusian nationalist and anti-Soviet guerrilla unit of the SS-Jagdverbände during World War II. It was a part of the German clandestine operation known as Liebes Kätzchen stretching from the Baltics to the Black Sea. The Belarusian Black Cat guerrilla group led by Michas' Vitushka was parachuted behind Soviet lines in late 1944. They operated in Belavezha Forest (Białowieża) throughout 1945 but with limited success. Infiltrated by NKVD, they were destroyed in 1945.
History
During the Soviet counteroffensive of 1944, special German sabotage units of local Eastern European collaborators were trained in Dahlwitz near Berlin, by SS-Standartenführer Otto Skorzeny to infiltrate the Soviet rear.
Skorzeny arranged a meeting with the leaders of the former administration in Byelorussia [Weißruthenien], all of whom had beat a hasty retreat to Berlin in June and July 1944. These men, Radislaw Ostrowsky, V.I. Rodko and Mikola Abramchyk, agreed to cooperate in finding recruits and staff for several sabotage schools that could train infiltrators. Such line-crossers, it was felt, could serve as rallying points for partisans who had already fled to the woods. Two SD facilities were established, one at Dahlwitz, near Berlin, and a second at Walbuze, in East Prussia. Radio communications, encoding, demolitions and assassination techniques were taught at these schools. FAK 203 also established a Byelorussian camp at Insterburg, which was run by Major Gerullis. This facility was later evacuated to Boitzenburg, in Pomerania, and was eventually transferred to Jagdverband Ost.
In the late summer and autumn of 1944, FAK 203 sent several teams into Soviet-liberated area of Byelorussia, and these detachments were followed by a thirty-man paratroop unit codenamed the 'Black Cats' and led by Michael Vitushka. A number of groups with radio transmitters were also air-dropped into the area east of Vilna, where they operated so effectively that the Germans made plans for large-scale parachute drops in the region, although such operations were impossible to execute because of the shortage of aircraft. Other detachments filtered through the dense Bielavieza Forest, near Byalistok, and such squads had considerable success in rousing the 'forest fugitives' to greater levels of insurgency.
The Front Reconnaissance Units (Frontaufklärungskommando, or FAK) 202, 203 and 204 were deployed by Abwehr near the front lines. Each group of the Unternehmen Wildkatze was equipped with four all-purpose Ninolit charges, hand grenades, Nipolit pressure-release bomb, and Nipolit incendiary bomb (hexagonal) with pushpull igniter. The Wildkatze paratroopers came from Reichskommissariat Ostland. They were led by an intelligence staff officer (Ic), and split into FAK commandos based on the country of origin. Latvians were called "Forest Cats", Ukrainians, "Steppe Cats", and the Belarusians, "Black Cats". As part of the Nazi effort to combat the growing Soviet partisan movement in Belarus during the war, some thirty Belarusians from the espionage and sabotage outfit known as "Čorny Kot" (Black Cat) led by Michał Vituška age 37, were airdropped by the Luftwaffe on November 17th 1944 behind the lines of the Red Army. At that time, the German forces had already been expelled from the present-day Belarus during Operation Bagration.
Black Cats experienced some initial successes due to disorganization in the rear of the Red Army. In the city of Minsk they engaged in gun robberies causing death. Other German-trained Belarusian nationalist units also slipped through the Białowieża Forest in 1945. However, the NKVD secret police informants infiltrated these units in June 1945. As the result, they were ambushed and killed in short order. According to Belarusian nationalist historian Siarhiej Yorsh some armed anti-Soviet resistance continued in Belarus by mid-1950s. American intelligence agents described the Black Cats as “a loose alliance of bandit groups with little strength as a controlled movement.”
Vituška himself eventually managed to escape to the West along with several other Belarusian Central Rada leaders, and the subsequent reports of his death differ greatly. According to some reports, he was killed in action on 7 January 1945 airdropped back behind the Soviet front. Other reports claim he was still alive in 1946. Vituška was eventually hunted down according to British historian Perry Biddiscombe, captured and executed. He continued to live on in Belarusian nationalist ideology.