Heinrich Himmler : A Life (100 page)

In the spring of 1942 Himmler also made great efforts to reduce the number of Jews who were ‘deployed in work’ and therefore for the time being still protected. The fact that he issued an order to this effect is revealed in a letter that the Gestapo chief Müller wrote to the commander of the security police in Riga, Karl Jäger, on 18 May. Müller wrote that, in accordance with a ‘general order from the Reichsführer and Chief of the German Police’, ‘Jews and Jewesses aged 16 to 32 who are capable of work are to be excluded from special measures until further notice. These Jews are to be put to work en bloc. KZ or labour camp.’
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The letter makes it clear that the ‘special measures’—in other words, the murder of the prisoners—was now the rule, ‘deployment for work’, which was ultimately designed to be equally lethal, the exception.
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At the same time, the pressure on the Jews still working in the Reich increased still further. The Reich Security Main Office interpreted the special regulations for the Jews who were ‘deployed in work vital for the war effort’ with increasing strictness,
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and on 28 May Hitler promised Goebbels that he would request Speer ‘to ensure that Jews employed in the German armaments industry are replaced by foreign workers as soon as possible’.
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It was only a lack of transport that prevented this order from being implemented in the summer, and in the autumn Hitler once again urged that it should be carried out.

At the same time as these events were occurring the Einsatzgruppen resumed on a large scale the mass murder of Soviet Jews that had begun the previous summer. This applied in particular to Byelorussia, where
Heydrich, on a visit to Minsk in April,
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evidently provided the impetus for it, as he did for the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.
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However, while the Jewish persecution, which had followed the turning-points that took place during the last days of April and the first days of May, was still escalating an event occurred that within weeks led to a further radicalization of the whole extermination process and to Himmler showing his determination to murder the vast majority of European Jews in the course of 1942: the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s most important aide in the organization of the Holocaust.

On 27 May 1942 two Czech agents, who had been trained by the British Secret Service and dropped by parachute in the Protectorate, carried out an assassination attempt on the deputy Reich Protector, Heydrich, seriously injuring him, though at first it appeared that the injuries were not life-threatening.
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On the same day as the assassination attempt Hitler ordered that anyone who had assisted the assassins should be ‘shot together with his whole family’. Furthermore, 10,000 Czechs who were suspect or politically incriminated should be arrested or, if they were already in custody, ‘shot in the concentration camps’.
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On the same evening Himmler pressed for ‘the whole of the opposition intelligentsia to be arrested’. That same night ‘the hundred most important’ opposition figures should be executed.
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A state of emergency was declared for Prague, and a few hours later this was extended to cover the whole of the Protectorate.

Daluege had already arrived in Prague on the afternoon of 27 May, and that evening he received instructions to take over the work of the Reich Protector which hitherto had been being carried out by Heydrich for von Neurath. Substantial units of the order police entered the Protectorate the following day and carried out raids lasting for days. However, on 28 May Hitler revoked his order to shoot 10,000 Czechs after Karl Hermann Frank, HSSPF in the Protectorate, advised him against it.
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Although seriously injured, Heydrich appeared to be recovering until, after a few days, septicaemia set in and he died on 4 June. On 31 May Himmler said his farewells to the dying man and then, on 4 June, immediately after his death, once again visited Prague in order to see the deceased
for the last time and to meet his widow. On 7 June he attended the funeral there.
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On 9 June Hitler received the Czech government of the Protectorate in the presence of Frank, Himmler, Bormann, and others. After receiving its declaration deploring the assassination, Hitler gave an address which culminated in the threat ‘to resettle a few million Czechs [ . . . ] if necessary during the war’,
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a plan that was as impossible to carry out as the mass shooting of Czechs that had already been dismissed. Instead of that, it was decided to focus Germany’s revenge on a particular place, but to do so with extreme brutality.
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Immediately after the meeting with Hitler, Frank ordered the commander of the security police in Prague ‘to shoot [ . . . ] all the male inhabitants’ of the village of Liditz (Lidice) and to ‘transfer all the women [ . . . ] to a concentration camp’. The children should be ‘collected and, in the case of those who are fit to be Germanized, should be given to SS families in the Reich’; the village itself should be ‘burnt down and razed to the ground’. The fact that Frank issued this order expressly ‘on the basis of a meeting with the Führer’ indicates that this idea of carrying out an act of revenge came from the senior SS functionaries who were closeted with Hitler at this juncture. It is not clear why the village of Lidice near Kladno was selected. No particular link with the assassins could be proved. Nevertheless, as Frank had ordered, 199 men were shot, the women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, and after a few of the ninety-eight children had been selected as ‘racially valuable’ the rest were murdered in Chelmno extermination camp.
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A further ‘act of retaliation’ was aimed directly at the Prague Jews: on 10 June 1942 thousands of them were deported to Majdanek and held here and in surrounding camps.
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Nevertheless, at this time the Nazi leadership must have had the idea of exacting even harsher retaliation on ‘the Jews’ for Heydrich’s death. The decision-making process can no longer be reconstructed in detail. However, the numerous meetings between Hitler and Himmler at the end of May and beginning of June suggest that the intensification of Jewish persecution that was to occur was worked out in close agreement between the two men.
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The fact that the head of the security apparatus and absolute ruler of the Protectorate should have been the victim of an assassination came as a serious shock to the Nazi leadership. There was a mood for revenge. On 9 June Heydrich received a pompous state funeral (see Ill. 13). The service
took place in the new Reich Chancellery, in the presence of Hitler and the entire leadership of the Third Reich; Himmler gave the funeral oration. Reflecting the measures taken in the Protectorate, the Reichsführer emphasized the motif of revenge: ‘We have the sacred duty to atone for his death, to carry forward his work, and now, even more than before, mercilessly to annihilate the enemies of our people without showing any weakness.’
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With Heydrich, Himmler had lost his most important colleague, the man who during the 1930s had built up the security police apparatus, who after the outbreak of war had established the Einsatzgruppen, who in past months had been largely responsible for organizing the mass murders in the Soviet Union, and who had prepared and initiated the deportations from various European countries. Himmler had always been sure of Heydrich’s loyalty, even if, with Hitler’s assignment to Heydrich of preparations for the ‘final solution’, a second chain of command had been created alongside Himmler’s general responsibility for combating all ‘enemies of the Reich’. These competing chains of command do not, however, appear to have led to serious rivalry between Himmler and Heydrich. On the contrary, Himmler considered that in the first instance and above all it was his own power that had been adversely affected by his colleague’s murder.

Heydrich was buried in the Invaliden cemetery. In the evening Himmler made another speech to the leaders of the SS-Oberabschnitte and the heads of the SS-Offices. Apart from the admonition not to neglect their own security—‘for we want to kill the enemy, the enemy mustn’t kill us’—Himmler spoke about the future tasks of the SS: the further ‘amalgamation with the police’, the ‘bringing in and amalgamation of the Germanic peoples with us’, as well as ‘settlement and ethnic migration in Europe’. ‘We shall certainly have concluded the ethnic migration of the Jews within a year,’ he continued, ‘then no one will be migrating any more. For now things have finally got to be sorted out.’
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From the weird perspective of Himmler and the Nazi leadership the assassination of Heydrich had to be avenged with a further radicalization of Jewish persecution; they were in a ‘war against the Jews’, and felt massively challenged by the assassination and especially by
this
enemy. The SS leadership—Himmler took over the RSHA himself—immediately began to press for the further stepping-up of mass murder that had begun in May. The planners in the RSHA and on Globocnik’s staff benefited from the fact that, because of the summer offensive, a transport ban was imposed between 19 June and 7 July. During this period they could revise the existing
deportation plans. Under the title ‘Operation Reinhardt’ (in honour of the dead Heydrich), Globocnik’s responsibility was now extended to cover the murder of all Jews in the General Government.
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After the death of Heydrich the deportations from the Reich continued with undiminished intensity. When the transport ban was imposed in the east those Jews who had hitherto been exempted from the ‘transports to the east’ became the focus of the planners: the elderly and infirm, decorated war veterans and their dependants, as well as other ‘privileged’ groups. Between June and October 1942 around 45,000 people were deported to Theresienstadt, which now served as a ‘ghetto for the elderly’.
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In view of the transport ban, Himmler had the idea of deporting more Jews from western Europe ‘for labour deployment’. Following his orders, on 11 June 1942 the SS Jewish experts in the various countries arranged to transport ‘15,000 Jews from the Netherlands, 10,000 from Belgium, and 100,000 from France’. They also obeyed Himmler’s instruction that ‘10% of Jews incapable of work’ could ‘be included’.
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According to Himmler’s order of May 1942, this meant that these people would be subjected to ‘special measures’, in other words, would be murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz immediately on arrival.

On 23 June, when informed that the total planned for France could not be achieved for organizational reasons, Himmler responded indignantly: the tempo envisaged hitherto (of three transports of 1,000 people each per week) would have to be ‘significantly increased [ . . . ] with the aim of completely freeing France of Jews as soon as possible’.
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This order must be seen as part of the acceleration of the extermination of the Jews throughout Europe that had been initiated in May and June. The appointment of Carl-Albrecht Oberg, hitherto SS and Police Leader in the Polish district of Radom, as HSSPF in France from 1 June will have convinced Himmler that the organizational preconditions for such a comprehensive deportation of the Jews were now in place.
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In fact, following Himmler’s order, the tempo of deportations from France was significantly increased. Whereas in March and June, prior to his intervention, only five transports
had been achieved, between July and November 1942 a total of fifty-three transports, most of them containing 1,000 people, left France bound for Auschwitz.
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And on 21 July, for the first time, ‘Jews incapable of work’, whom Himmler had insisted be deported, were separated from the other deportees immediately on arrival and murdered in the gas chambers.
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The first ‘selection’ had, however, already occurred in Auschwitz some weeks earlier. From the beginning of July 1942 onwards transports from Slovakia no longer went to the district of Lublin but to Auschwitz, where on 4 July ‘those incapable of work’ were for the first time murdered immediately on arrival. There is evidence that by 21 October deportees from eight transports from Slovakia had been murdered in this way.
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After the lifting of the transport ban most of the transports from the Reich were sent to Minsk, and in the following months also to Riga, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. Most of the deportees were now killed immediately after the trains had arrived.
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After the lifting of the transport ban in July deportations from occupied Poland also began again in large numbers. The aim of making the General Government ‘free of Jews’ in the near future corresponded to the Germanization policy that was being simultaneously initiated. On 12 June Himmler had already ordered the ‘Germanization’ of large areas in the east, including the General Government, to be speeded up and completed within twenty years. At the beginning of July HSSPF Krüger advocated approving the settlement of Germans in the General Government.
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Deportations from the district of Cracow to Belzec began again in the second week of July, after the period of the transport ban had been used considerably to enlarge the capacity of the gas chambers.
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On 9 July Himmler discussed with Krüger and Globocnik the latter’s proposals of 3 July. Although these have not survived, we know that they were particularly concerned with Jewish policy in the district of Lublin.
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On 11, 12, and 18 July Himmler had frequent meetings with Hitler. Afterwards he pressed for increased transport capacity. Karl Wolff, the head of his private office, telephoned the state secretary in the Reich Transport Ministry, who assured him that from 22 July there would be ‘every day a train with 5,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka, as well as a train from Przemysl (Lublin district) to Belzec twice weekly’.
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While we can only assume that Himmler discussed the details of the mass murder of the Polish Jews with Hitler, we can be certain that, as far as the occupied Soviet
territories were concerned, Himmler had received explicit instructions from Hitler to make these ‘free of Jews’.
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