Army of Evil: A History of the SS (34 page)

Similarly, the Death’s Head units were neither part of the
Wehrmacht
nor part of the police, but were an armed SS force at Hitler’s disposal for the resolution of internal political problems. At this stage, service in the Death’s Head units did not count as compulsory military service, but the decree made a clear link between them and the Special Purpose Troops, and envisaged that members of the former would be transferred into the latter in time of war to act as their reserve.

In the aftermath of the
Anschluss
, a third Special Purpose Troops regiment,
Der Führer
, was established in Vienna and Klagenfurt, as was an Austrian Death’s Head regiment. So the peacetime strength of the SS armed formations was now set as:

Elements of the Special Purpose Troops were again mobilised under army control for the march into the Sudetenland in October 1938, and for the occupation of the remainder of Bohemia and Moravia the following March. Once more, the army had some minor quibbles about their performance, but generally there seemed to be few problems.

Two months later, Hitler attended a demonstration by
Deutschland
at the Münsterlager training area. He was so impressed that he finally gave orders to the army’s High Command to assist the Special Purpose Troops in creation of a full divisional organisation with integrated artillery support. This should have been fairly straightforward, as the
SS-Artillery Regiment had already been established and placed under the command of Herbert Gille. However, the reorganisation was postponed in the summer of 1939 to avoid disruption in the run-up to the invasion of Poland.

When that offensive was launched in September 1939, it was the first time that the armed SS had faced serious opposition. In many respects, it was a baptism of fire. Their marches into Austria and Czechoslovakia had been practically unopposed, but the invasion of Poland was a real shooting war against a determined, if massively outgunned, enemy. Once again, the Special Purpose Troops were committed piecemeal, attached to army formations.
Deutschland
was grouped with the SS-Artillery Regiment, the SS-Reconnaissance Battalion and an army tank regiment in the 4th Panzer Brigade under command of an army general.
Germania
was allocated to the 14th Army in East Prussia. The
Leibstandarte
, together with the SS-Engineer Battalion, were assigned to von Reichenau’s 10th Army, which attacked into western Poland from Silesia. In Danzig, a new unit had been created in July and August from local General-SS members, the 3rd Battalion of the Death’s Head
Ostmark
Regiment (which was based in Berlin-Adlershof), and members of other Death’s Head units smuggled in by ship from Oranienburg. This motley group of between 1,500 and 2,000 men was named the
Heimwehr Danzig
(Danzig Home Guard) and took part in covert actions in and around the city as soon as the invasion began.

Again, the SS armed formations received mixed reviews from army commanders. They were criticised for taking heavy casualties (the
Leibstandarte
, for example, suffered around a hundred men killed in action and three hundred wounded during the campaign
⁷
); for poor performance within a division; and for their inability to conduct complicated “combined arms” operations.
⁸
The SS’s response was to say that the army kept them starved of support, supplies and even their own heavy weapons, and denied them the opportunity to train in a divisional context. All of this was largely true.

More friction was caused by the actions of the special task groups and police units operating in the rear. Then, as now, it was difficult to draw a clear distinction between the strictly combat formations of the SS and their comrades in the “special” units, if indeed there was any difference: the Special Purpose Troops may have been militarised members of the SS with a specific wartime role, but the basis of their existence was exactly the same as that of the men who were engaged in killing politicians, priests, intellectuals and Jews in the wake of the advancing forces.

As a consequence of the problems thrown up by the Polish campaign, it was decided to press ahead immediately with the formation of the Special Purpose Division. Furthermore, members of the SS and the police would no longer be tried through the military court martial system. Instead, the military penal system would be applied in their own special courts.

Hausser, still the Inspector of the Special Purpose Troops, had secured a position as liaison officer to the army in the field. Having returned to Berlin, on 10 October 1939 he was appointed chief of the newly formed
SS-Verfügungsdivision
(Special Purpose Division). At this point, he was an SS-major general, but the fact that he was now in command of an armed division meant that he had to be given formal rank equivalence with his army counterparts. This was the first time that a rank in the SS—which, it should be remembered, was still primarily a voluntary political organisation—was officially equated with a military rank.

The new division was created by the simple expedient of officially combining the three Special Purpose Troops foot regiments—
Deutschland
,
Germania
and
Der Führer
—with the artillery, reconnaissance, engineering and medical elements. Meanwhile, the
Leibstandarte
was reinforced, but kept separate from the division: it received a fourth battalion of infantry, a motorised “infantry gun” battalion, and ultimately (in April 1940) a full artillery battalion.

Detachments from the unit still provided personal security for Hitler,
and in January 1940 he ordered the creation of a “light”
Leibstandarte
battalion to do the job on a permanent basis.
*
It was to be based in Berlin.

In spite of the army’s criticism, the armed units of the SS therefore survived and even profited from their baptism of fire in Poland. But it was left to other SS groups to start to forge the organisation’s notorious wartime reputation during that campaign. Their mission went far beyond the occupation of a neighbouring territory: it began the process of putting the merciless SS ideology into practice.

*
They resisted this official designation even though they were well aware that the Special Purpose Troops were now of divisional strength.

*
This came about after he spent Christmas Eve with the
Leibstandarte
at their barracks in Koblenz.

T
he invasion and occupation of western Poland in September 1939 signalled a major change in German policy towards the Jews. Hitherto, National Socialist racial policies had targeted
German
Jews: people who were assimilated into mainstream German society, spoke German, and, to a large extent, “looked” German. However, despite their loathing for all things Jewish, Hitler and other senior National Socialists had been forced by institutional constraints and public opinion to make limited concessions towards Germany’s Jews. For instance, they appreciated that there would be an outcry if they unleashed unrestricted attacks on Jewish veterans of the First World War, or on those who had served Germany in the civil service or public life. So the persecution of Germany’s Jews had been pursued carefully, gradually and usually within the framework of German law, debased as it had become. Measures against the Jews had to be given considerable thought in order to stop them rebounding on ethnic Germans, who, for example, might have close business relationships with Jewish partners.

In Poland, the situation was entirely different. The National Socialists regarded the Poles themselves as an inferior race who were deserving of
no particular consideration. So the country’s Jews—who made up some 10 per cent of the population of 33 million—were regarded as the lowest of the low:
Untermenschen
(sub-humans), in National Socialist terms. Their persecution began suddenly, violently and with very little restraint. First, though, the rest of Germany’s eastern neighbour had to be subdued.

As the plans for the invasion of Poland had been finalised in August, Hitler had summoned Himmler to entrust him with a special task. Hitler was not really invading Poland to resolve the issue of the “Free City” of Danzig and the so-called “Polish Corridor,” his pretext for action. In fact, his intention was to destroy Poland and reduce its people to German slaves. This was to be phase one of his drive to acquire
Lebensraum
(living space) in the East. The main role for the SS and the police would be to cut off the head of the Polish nation by eliminating its ruling class: politicians, clerics, aristocrats and the intelligentsia were all to be liquidated. Hitler knew that the generals of the army would baulk at this task—code-named “Operation Tannenberg”—which was why he handed it over to Himmler and the SS.

Heydrich set up five special task groups of personnel drawn from or seconded to the SD, and commanded by SD officers: Bruno Streckenbach (who had commanded the Hamburg Gestapo), Dr. Emanuel Schäfer, Dr. Herbert Fischer, Lothar Beuthel and Ernst Damzog. These groups were assigned to the five armies of the invasion force, with each being of roughly battalion strength, subdivided into four
Einsatzkommandos
(special task units) of between 100 and 150 men (equivalent to company strength). Each of these task units was then allocated to an army corps. Two more special task groups were created shortly after the beginning of the invasion, including one commanded by SS-Major General Udo von Woyrsch, which was ordered to follow the German 14th Army into Galicia. Additionally, a battalion of Daluege’s uniformed Order Police joined each army corps, with orders to secure the army’s rear by sweeping up any remnants of the Polish forces bypassed by the rapid army assault.

Although their mission had come directly from Hitler, Himmler
and Heydrich felt it necessary to conceal the true nature of their role from the
Wehrmacht
. As a result, they operated under the cover that they were securing the army’s rear through counterespionage, the arrest of political opponents, the confiscation of weapons and so forth. In fact, both their men and the police battalions unleashed a wave of terror against Poland’s ruling classes. Working from prepared lists, they rounded up their targets, took them to hastily prepared “reception camps” at Stutthof (near Danzig), Muhltal (near Bydgoszcz), Soldau, Torun and Fort VII in Poznan, and then, largely out of sight of the army, executed them. On 27 September, Heydrich reported: “Of the Polish upper classes in the occupied territories, only a maximum of 3% is still present.”
¹
In other words, tens of thousands of civilians had been murdered in less than a month.

A secondary role for the special task groups was to secure the active military cooperation of the local German population through the formation of local self-defence units. At the onset of the invasion, Poles, particularly in western Prussia, had fallen upon the ethnic German population, driving them from their homes and killing several thousand.
²
As soon as the
Wehrmacht
started to gain the ascendancy, the remaining ethnic Germans demanded revenge. The special task groups gave them the organisation to achieve it.

As we have seen, there was already a German military formation within Danzig: the Home Guard. For the most part, it operated and fought as a military unit “behind enemy lines,” but one of its sub-units, a guard battalion commanded by thirty-nine-year-old SS-Major Kurt Eimann, supported the special task group operating in the Danzig area. Some of Eimann’s men became guards at local POW and concentration camps, including Stutthof, while others formed a mobile killing squad. In early October, they executed thirty or so Polish postal officials who had been captured at the Polish Post Office in Danzig on 1 September (the Polish postal workers had been attempting to resist the German takeover. They surrendered after the—German—Danzig Fire Brigade had pumped petrol into the cellars and ignited it). They
were also ordered to “clear” the inmates of a number of Pomeranian asylums that Himmler had designated for other purposes (one of them, at Lauenburg, became a Waffen-SS NCO training school). This involved none of the pseudo-medical procedures that were being employed by T-4. Eimann’s men simply took the patients into some woods and shot them. They were then thrown into ditches dug by prisoners from Stutthof. Once the three thousand patients had been executed, the gravediggers were killed, too, and thrown into their own ditches.
³