Army of Evil: A History of the SS (19 page)

A
S THE
S
PECIAL
Purpose Troops, the camp guard force of
Totenkopfverbände
(Death’s Head units) and the General-SS all continued to expand in the run-up to the Second World War, the Main Office under Heissmeyer accrued ever more responsibility and power. By September 1938, it was responsible for the inspectorates of all the militarised SS formations, including the concentration camps; the military formations; the officer-training schools; border guards; riding schools; all SS garrison commands; the SS command staff; the SS personnel office; the SS courts system; the SS administrative office; the SS medical office; the SS recruiting office; SS records and archives; procurement for the General-SS; and a range of minor offices.
¹³
In April 1939, Pohl’s administrative office was hived off from the Main Office to become a main office in its own right, but it was only after the outbreak of war that a major reduction in the scale of the Main Office took place.
¹⁴

The Main Office was primarily structured to administer a “civilian”
political organisation, and even though several of its sections had catered for the SS’s military formations, these arrangements had worked poorly. Consequently, when the formations went to war in 1939, they often exhibited serious deficiencies in organisation, equipment and training. Heissmeyer paid for these failings with his job at the beginning of April 1940. He was replaced by SS-Major General Gottlob Berger, who had hitherto been head of recruitment within the Main Office.
¹⁵
Then, in the summer of 1940, the Main Office’s military supervisory functions were transferred to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army. The heavily trimmed Main Office continued primarily as a recruitment agency.

Nevertheless, Berger became one of the most significant figures within the Waffen-SS, even though he was broadly disliked by many of the field commanders.
¹⁶
Born in Gerstetten, near Ulm, in 1896, he was a shrewd, forceful, dynamic man. He served as an infantry officer during the First World War but was wounded four times and classified as 70 per cent disabled. Despite this, he later trained and worked as a physical education teacher. He first joined the NSDAP in 1922 and was briefly arrested after the Munich
Putsch
, but he then drifted away from politics. However, he rejoined the party and the SA in January 1931. He was recruited into the SS by Himmler in 1936 as the officer responsible for sports and physical training in SS-Regional Headquarters South West, and subsequently joined the National Leader’s personal staff as head of the sport office.
¹⁷

From 1940, Berger
*
reorganised the Main Office to reflect its more limited—but still critical—role. In place of the previous multiple staff branches, he set up just four
Amtsgruppen
(business groups). Business Group A dealt with the administration of the Main Office itself. Business Group B was the Waffen-SS recruitment headquarters for Germans, and as such controlled regional Waffen-SS recruiting
“
kommandos
” throughout Germany. It also ran the records office for the General-SS. Business Group C dealt with non-military training and political indoctrination for all German members of the Waffen-SS. And Business Group D oversaw the recruitment and welfare of all “Germanic” volunteers from Western Europe and the Baltic States, which meant it controlled the recruiting offices in Brussels, Liège, Oslo, Copenhagen, the Hague, Riga and Tallinn.
¹⁸

Berger, then, more than anyone else, was responsible for the recruitment of large numbers of foreigners into Waffen-SS field units. Consequently, he was one of very few high-level SS men to retain Himmler’s confidence throughout the war. He would have preferred a field command, but Himmler always resisted appointing him to one, although he did serve for a few weeks as Senior SS and Police Leader in Slovakia in the autumn of 1944, when there was an attempted uprising against the German occupiers.
¹⁹

Once Berger had recruited men into the Waffen-SS, it was the job of the
Führungshauptamt
(FHA—Command Main Office) to organise, train and equip them. The FHA also had responsibility for the General-SS,
*
but, unlike the German Army High Command, it did not have command authority over Waffen-SS units in the combat zone. So it functioned in much the same way as the
Ersatzheer
(Replacement Army)—as a home command.

Relationships between the Berger’s Main Office and the Command Main Office were fraught. The latter was headed by an ex–army officer, Hans Jüttner, and he and his staff of professional soldiers wanted the Waffen-SS to be a relatively small, highly professional elite. By contrast, Berger, supported by Himmler, knew that Hitler was desperate for as much combat power as possible, even if that meant many Waffen-SS units would be second- or third-rate.

*
Berger was promoted to SS-
Brigadeführer
(major general) on 20 April 1940, to SS-
Gruppenführer
(lieutenant general) on 20 April 1942 and to SS-
Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen-SS
in June 1943.

*
The outbreak of war reduced the part-time, unpaid, political General-SS to a rump. Members of military age were called up into
all
branches of the armed forces, not just the Waffen-SS. Consequently, the General-SS’s wartime mission was primarily to provide pre- and post-military training for SS men.

A
s we have seen, the Race and Settlement Main Office began life in 1931 as the SS Race Office. Although small, it exercised a disproportionately large influence in the pre-war SS largely because it was led by Richard Darré, Himmler’s friend and adviser. In its first few years of operation, the Race Office had a primarily advisory function: setting basic racial criteria for recruitment into the SS, for officer commissions and for engagements and marriages of SS men. In practice, new recruits were admitted to the organisation, commissioned and given permission to marry by their local commanders, who then simply notified the Race Office.

Darré was also highly active in agricultural policy. Before he joined the SS, he had been central in setting up the NSDAP’s “Farm Policy Apparatus,” and it was his idea that the SS should become an agricultural aristocracy,
¹
with SS families settled in farms, smallholdings and “garden cities.” The “settlement” branch of the Race Office was created to implement this. Darré assiduously cultivated middle- and upper-class farmers—often influential local community leaders—and persuaded many of them to join the SS or, at least, the National Socialist
Party. He was installed as Minister of Agriculture at the end of June 1933, replacing Alfred Hugenberg, the Nationalist press baron, who had originally held the agriculture portfolio in the NSDAP-Nationalist coalition cabinet of January 1933.
²
The Farm Policy Apparatus effectively became a branch of the state, with Darré’s contacts installed as regional and local “farm leaders.” In subsequent years, Darré would often utilise these men as his regional race and settlement “experts” within the Race and Settlement Office.

On 30 January 1935, the Race and Settlement Office gained equal status to the SS-Main Office. It now had four main responsibilities: the ideological training of SS members; racial selection and filtering of members and their spouses; agricultural settlement and training for members; and family welfare.
³
The settlement branch was notably active, particularly once Curt von Gottberg—a minor East Prussian aristocrat who had joined the SS a few weeks before the National Socialists assumed power—became its leader in 1936. Von Gottberg started to use Agricultural Settlement Companies, wholly or partly owned by the SS, to gain control of large estates that could then be divided into small farms for SS members, and he imposed central control over all SS housing projects.
⁴

Another particularly active branch was the
Sippenamt
(Office for Family Affairs), which assumed responsibility for the racial vetting of all SS applicants, and for checking the racial background of members’ spouses. Any SS man who wished to marry had to produce a detailed family tree going back to at least 1750 for both himself and his fiancée, proving that neither had Jewish or any other “undesirable” antecedents,
*
together with medical reports, political references and other background information, accompanied by portrait and full-length photographs. In theory, all of this information would be checked in detail by local representatives of the Race and Settlement Office, by SS units and, in “difficult” cases, by the central office in Berlin; Himmler continued
to take a close interest in the racial exclusivity of the SS until 1945, and he was frequently called upon to act as final arbiter in problematic cases.
*

The Office for Family Affairs also oversaw the activities of one of the more controversial SS organisations: the
Lebensborn e. V.
(Well of Life Society), which was founded in 1935.
⁵
Post-war sensationalism has obscured this society’s true role—to increase Germany’s birthrate. (The rate had declined dramatically in the early 1930s because young men were reluctant to take on the financial burden of providing for a family in the midst of a depression.
⁶
) In 1936, Himmler wrote to SS members ordering them to support the society and explaining why it had been established:

The society built a number of maternity homes, where SS men’s wives could give birth and receive advice, help and medical treatment. The homes also cared for other “racially suitable” women, even if they were
unmarried, particularly when the father was in the SS. They were eventually built throughout Germany, in occupied North-West Europe (there were at least nine in Norway alone), and in Poland. Between 20,000 and 25,000 children were born within the system.

Post-war accounts of the society suggested that it was also involved in the forced adoption and relocation of supposedly “Germanic” children from occupied countries, and that the homes provided SS men to impregnate women whose husbands were infertile. However, neither of these claims is true. The society
did
arrange the adoption of children born to unmarried mothers, but this was always done with the consent of the mother (although some of the women might not have realised that their children would subsequently be taken to Germany). The confusion probably arose because up to 200,000 children were kidnapped in occupied territories and relocated to Germany, for adoption or fostering by German families, but this was never done by Well of Life personnel. Furthermore, there is no evidence whatsoever that SS men were ever “put out to stud.”

In keeping with the racial “mission” of the SS, the Well of Life was funded by substantial compulsory deductions from SS officers’ pay. This was highly unpopular and many sought to avoid it. (For example, the personnel file of the homosexual Waffen-SS General Felix Steiner indicates that he strongly resented the tax.
⁸
) Even so, the Well of Life was one of the few SS organisations that played a generally positive and beneficial role in German society, notwithstanding the fact that it worked within the framework of National Socialist racist ideology. In 1938, administration of the society was transferred from the Race and Settlement Office to Himmler’s personal staff.

F
ROM 1931 THROUGH
to 1938, Darré was one of the leading personalities in the SS, acting, in effect, as Himmler’s ideological mentor. However, his relationship with the National Leader began to deteriorate, and in September 1938 he was replaced as chief of the Race and
Settlement Office by Günther Pancke.
⁹
The ostensible reason for this was a dispute over ideological training. Himmler complained that much of the training material being produced by the
Schulungsamt
(Education Office) of the Race and Settlement Office was too theoretical and had little practical use for the regional and local training officers. In response, Darré refused to continue with his ideological training role and he was quietly dismissed. However, it is likely that Himmler manufactured this disagreement in order to oust Darré. His old friend had an independent power base as Agriculture Minister, and he was closely connected with Goering, Himmler’s main rival in the political dogfighting that determined pre-eminence within the Third Reich.