On another occasion, in Minsk itself,
the SD one day took about 280 civilian prisoners from the gaol,
led them to a ditch, and shot them.
Since the capacity of the
ditch was not exhausted
, another thirty prisoners were pulled out
and also shot . . . including a Belorussian who had been turned in to
the police for violating the curfew by fifteen minutes . . . and
twenty-three skilled Polish workers who were quite innocent but had
been sent up to Minsk from the Government-General [i.e., Poland] to
relieve the shortage of specialists and had been billeted in the jail
. . . because there were no other billeting facilities.
In this particular case Kube's protest got as far as Rosenberg,
and in due course wound its way from the
Ostministerium
to
Lammers, who presided over the withered rump of the German judiciary.
[Hans Lammers, Chief of the Reich Chancellery 1933-45.]
The essence of Rosenberg's case was not (need it be said)
humanity, but administrative protocol:
It impinges most emphatically upon the responsibility entrusted
to me by the Führer for the administration of the occupied
Eastern territories.
But when Lammers' reproof finally reached Heydrich, the SS liaison
officer brushed it off. "The executions were due to a danger of
epidemics."
All the same, Kube continued to grumble. Not only was the SS
competing in its efforts to run the territory by issuing its own
decrees, but the wholesale slaughter which it practiced daily was
already having its effect on the economy:
Jewish artisans simply cannot be spared because they are
indispensable to the maintenance of the economy.
The confusion was being aggravated by Goering, who was eagerly
extending the net of his own administrative machine and finding to
his annoyance that he was being forestalled by Himmler. Throughout
European Russia the SS was "requisitioning various industrial
and commercial enterprises."
Forced to operate through the corrupt and rickety machinery of the
Reich commissars and without a private army of his own (a state of
affairs which he was soon to remedy), Goering was compelled to bow
out with as good a grace as he could muster, but the effect of this
triangular rivalry in the fields of murder, plunder, and
administration on the smooth running of the occupied territory needs
no emphasis.
[On 26th August, 1941, Goering wrote to Himmler (Doc. NO-1019), "I
have asked the Reichskommissar for Ostland to handle your requests
for the supply and disposal of service and consumer goods with the
requisite understanding . . ."]
In the Ukraine the Reichsmarschall was better served, for at the
16th July conference his own nominee, Erich Koch, had been chosen for
the commissariat. Rosenberg had protested vigorously against this
choice, believing with some reason that the whole of his delicate and
crackbrained scheme for racial discrimination would be placed in
jeopardy by a man who was already notorious for sadistic taste and
corrupt practices.
[Gisevius, in
To the Bitter End
, London, 1948, has
described how, while Gauleiter of East Prussia, Koch had established
the "Erich Koch Institute," and "cheerfully watered
the stock whenever he needed money for his palaces or similar
amusements . . ."]
The Ostminister had also considered the close personal friendship
between Koch, Bormann, and Goering, and the direct link which his
(nominal) subordinate would thereby enjoy with the Führer.
In fact, Koch agreed with Goering that 'The best thing would be to
kill all men in the Ukraine over fifteen years of age, and then to
send in the SS stallions," and the two of them made an informal
deal with Himmler that the SS would be allowed a free hand in its
extermination program in return for allocation of the economic
resources and "general loot" to Goering.
Koch had begun as a railway official in the Rhineland (and his
subsequent career may be studied with some misgivings by persons who
have had the misfortune to attempt travel in Germany or Switzerland
with tickets that are out of order). Under Goering's patronage he had
risen to be Gauleiter of East Prussia, and he retained this title
even after being "given" the Ukraine. He had his own
notions of colonial-style government, and liked to carry a stock
whip.
He persuaded Goering to extract certain provinces of Belorussia
and the Bialystok forests from the general carve-up that took place
in the first weeks of the German advance, and added these to his
dominion, frequently boasting that he was the "first Aryan to
hold sway over an empire from the Black Sea to the Baltic." The
essence of Koch's theme was that propounded to him by Himmler:
Like the skimmed fat at the top of a pot of bouillon, there is
a thin intellectual layer on the surface of the Ukrainian people; do
away with it and the leaderless mass will become an obedient and
helpless herd.
Against this attitude Rosenberg kept up a running fight,
handicapped by the disloyalty and incompetence of his own staff, and
by his periodic tiffs with Hitler. After one such scene, at which
Rosenberg complained:
Koch, through various remarks to officers of the OKW, has given
the impression that he has the privilege of reporting directly to the
Führer and, in general, that he intends to reign without
reference to Berlin [i.e., to the
Ostministerium
. . .
Similar remarks to the effect that
he
made policy have
been made to my associates ... I have made it clear to him that a
distinct relationship of subordination exists . . .
Hitler agreed to receive Koch "only in my [Rosenberg's]
presence."
This, however, was a meaningless concession, for Koch could always
obtain access at the shortest notice through Bormann, who himself
nurtured personal schemes of empire building through "nominees."
Bormann encouraged Koch to issue a proclamation to the effect that
the Reichskommissar was
the sole representative of the Führer and the Reich
Government in the territory entrusted to him. All official agencies
of the Reich must therefore ... be subordinated to the
Reichskommissar.
Poor Rosenberg! At the very moment when he was locked in combat
with Koch he was distracted by interference from a new and unexpected
quarter. For he found that his principles—or a rationalisation
of his principles—were being taken up and pushed hard by yet
another organisation, which, although the last to climb on the
bandwagon, was nonetheless determined to take its share of the spoils
and the power.
This latest intruder was none other than the Reich's Foreign
Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. In the weeks immediately preceding
the start of
Barbarossa
, Ribbentrop had been hastily
accumulating a diversity of "experts" and émigré
leaders within the confines of his offices at the Wilhelmstrasse.
Their purpose was to identify and encourage separatist movements in
Russia, whether they existed on a basis of nationality (Baits, White
Russians, Galicians, and so forth) or simple "anti-Bolshevism."
The most civilised of these "experts" was the former German
Ambassador in Moscow, Count Werner von der Schulenburg, who believed
[ Not to be confused with his kinsman Count Fritz von der
Schulenburg, the Deputy Police President of Berlin. Both men were
subsequently members of the 20th July plot.]
the definitive status of the Ukraine can only be settled after
the conclusion of the war. As possible solution [I] envisage a strong
autonomy of the Ukraine within a Russian confederation, or under
certain circumstances an independent Ukraine within a confederation
of European states.
This, of course, was the only policy which could, in the fullest
sense, solve the problem of "pacification" in the rear
areas and bring the occupied territories solidly into the German war
effort. Ribbentrop was pressing it, not because of its obvious
justice and humanity but because he thought that within weeks the war
would be over and within months the whole world would be at Hitler's
feet. Then the only
raison d'être
for the Foreign Office
would be as the apparatus which continued to dabble in nationalities
and play with countries in a world of make-believe diplomacy, where
the Reich Foreign Minister would always have the last word.
[A week before the invasion Ribbentrop had addressed a pompous
note to Lammers:
The territory to be occupied by German troops will on many
sides border foreign states, whose interests will thereby be most
strongly affected. . . . The Foreign Office cannot acquiesce in the
absence on the spot of representatives schooled in matters of foreign
policy and versed in local conditions.
(NMT, NG-1691, xiii
1277-79)]
It is this feeling, amounting to a conviction, that the war would
be over in a week or so, that conditioned the attitude of every
person concerned with the administration of occupied Russia in 1941.
There was no cause to fear retribution, no restraint on the
grossest indulgence of personal greed and lust—whether for
blood, torture, or "blondies."
Only Rosenberg, half mad with vanity, continued with his plans to
separate and purify the racial strains in his kingdom, and it is
precisely because the theories of Ribbentrop and Schulenburg came
nearest to, and thereby carried a direct threat to supplant, his own
schemes that Rosenberg opposed them with all his resources.
After several months of correspondence, urgent and clandestine
approaches to the Führer, complicated and at times farcical
manoeuvres in a steadily rising temperature, Rosenberg got his way.
[In April 1942 a "conference" of émigré
leaders was arranged by the Foreign Office at the Hotel Adlon. Some
forty persons attended, drawn from governments in exile as far away
as Ankara, and including Count Heracles Bagration, Pretender to the
throne of Georgia, and the grandson of the Caucasian bandit, Said
Shamil.]
Hitler sent for Ribbentrop and put him straight in a
"down-to-earth" talk. The Foreign Minister returned to
Berlin and declared to his bewildered aides, "It is all
nonsense, gentlemen! In wartime nothing can be achieved with your
sentimental scruples."
The decision was codified by a Führer directive to the effect
that "The Foreign Office is not to concern itself with countries
with which we are at war." The files on all the émigrés
in Berlin were turned over to Rosenberg and in due course fell into
the hands of Himmler, who threw most of the persons named there into
concentration camps.
(Much later, as will be seen, some of the survivors were hauled
out and allowed to restart their movements, but by then there was
little incentive for them to do so, as the probability of German
defeat loomed large.)
This, then, was the brief tale of the only policy that might have
achieved solid gains for the Germans in the occupied East. It had
originated in grounds not of justice but of expediency, and was
rejected because, on the shortest possible view, it was not so much
inexpedient as inconvenient. Rosenberg regarded its rejection as a
personal victory, and if it was such, it was certainly his last. But
even then he would scarcely have been reassured to hear Hitler's
private opinion:
Anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and
civilising him goes straight off into a concentration camp . . . my
one fear is that the
Ostministerium
will try to civilise the
Ukrainian women.
While the
Ostministerium
was occupied in repelling the
usurpers from the Foreign Ministry, Koch tightened his hold on the
Ukraine. Daily there were executions—if that term, with its
overtones of judicial rectitude, can still be used of the rattling
machine guns and haphazard mass graves that characterised the
terror—and nightly the trucks of the SS rumbled through the
streets, collecting "suspects." Whippings (usually to
death) were a feature of Koch's regime, and they were conducted, for
"exemplary" reasons, in public places such as squares and
parks. In these first weeks of the occupation there was no systematic
plan of exploitation. It was pure recreation for the Germans,
"scraping the icing off the cake."
Nor was there any resistance worthy of the name on the part of the
local population. Yet in this orgy of sadism and mis-government it
required no gift of prescience to see, as Rosenberg explained in one
of his many letters of reproof to Koch, that
There exists a direct danger that if the population should come
to believe that the rule of National Socialism would have even worse
effects than Bolshevik policy, the necessary consequence would be the
occurrence of acts of sabotage and the formation of partisan bands.
The Slavs are conspiratorial in such matters. ...
In contrast to the regime in the Ukraine and Belorussia, that
which prevailed in the Baltic provinces at the northern end of the
front seems easygoing. Lohse, the Commissar, was the German
bureaucrat par excellence. He liked good food, and overindulgence of
this taste compelled him to take frequent leaves of absence at
curative spas. But when he was at his office his appetite for detail
was insatiable. He sent out "A flood of decrees, instructions,
and directives which covered thousands of pages. Lengthy
correspondence took place between Riga [Lohse's headquarters] and the
four general commissariats on the most trivial administrative
problems. Price control was established for [
inter alia
] metal
wreaths for geese 'with' and 'without' heads, alive and dead. A
decree of 'maximum prices for rags' was promulgated, with differences
of ten pfennigs per kilogram between light brown and dark brown rayon
rags in Latvia. Even NO SMOKING signs had to be signed by Lohse
personally."
The commissar's attitude to the "subjects of Ostland"
was summarised in an address to his staff the following year: