Last of the Wehrmacht

In a quiet suburb of Buenos Aires last week, one of Adolf Hitler's old generals held a staff conference with his top officers. Elsewhere in the city, some 200 other officers and men of the Wehrmacht Special Division R (for Russian) gathered in study groups and pored over military textbooks. By day, they were grocery clerks, railway engineers or textile workers; by night, they were heel-clicking soldiers unswervingly loyal to a general, who calls himself Arthur Holmston.

While the general and his men could claim to be the last openly functioning unit of Hitler's army, they grandiosely prefer to consider themselves the cadre of a future Russian army of liberation. All of them are White Russians. General Holmston was born Boris Smyslowski, near St. Petersburg, 55 years ago. He was a much-decorated Czarist lieutenant when he first started fighting the Reds in 1917. After the Bolsheviks won, he fled to Germany, adopted the name Von Regenau, and made a living as a timber inspector. In World War II, the Nazis sent him to the Balkan front, where he commanded a special division of 4,000 anti-Communist Russian guerrillas.

When the Wehrmacht began to surrender, the general led the remnants of his outfit to neutral Liechtenstein. The men scattered. Pressured by the Kremlin, the tiny principality ordered the general to leave. With the help of the Russian Orthodox archbishop of Argentina, a friend of Juan Peron, he got permission to take the last of his men to Buenos Aires.

Last week in his third-floor apartment, the general--who supports himself and his pretty Polish wife by managing a floor-wax company--was busy planning his future battles against the Red army. "By now the world should know that foreign armies will never conquer Russia," he said. "Only a nationalist army of Russians, fighting Communism but not Russia, can ever hope to succeed. The cadre of that army meets in this room every Saturday. One day the world will call us." Meanwhile, the floor-wax business is fairly brisk.

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