Heinrich Himmler : A Life (101 page)

On 17 and 18 July Himmler visited Auschwitz and used the opportunity to witness a demonstration of how people were murdered in a gas chamber.
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On the evening of 17 July, at a social occasion put on by the Gauleiter of Upper Silesia, contrary to his normal habits he drank several glasses of wine and gave the appearance of being relaxed and content. His behaviour and comments led one of those present to assume that the Nazi leadership had now decided to murder the European Jews—a piece of information that was passed on to Switzerland and from there was telegraphed to the west via the representative of the Jewish World Congress, Gerhart Riegner.
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Himmler travelled on from Auschwitz to visit Globocnik in Lublin, where, on the following day, he ordered Krüger to ensure that the ‘resettlement of the whole Jewish population of the General Government has been carried out and completed by 31 December 1942’. After this date Jews would no longer be permitted to reside in the General Government, apart from in four large camps.
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Three days later the dissolution of the Warsaw ghetto began, which was to take place in stages. The majority of the inhabitants were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp, which had just been built and was located only 50 kilometres from Warsaw.
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By 12 September over 250,000 people had been deported, a rough average of 5,000 per day.

At the same time Himmler’s organization took over the whole system of Jewish forced labour, in other words, the area of operation that represented the only barrier to the complete annihilation of the Jewish population. In the hands of the SS forced labour, in the sense of ‘extermination through labour’, now became an integral part of the murder programme in the General Government.
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In May and June 1942 it had looked as if Jewish workers would still be deployed in large numbers in the General Government, that is to say, that the extermination policy in the General Government was still targeted primarily at the Jewish population that was ‘incapable of work’. However, hardly had HSSPF Krüger taken over responsibility for all ‘Jewish affairs’ at the beginning of June when the policy changed radically. His July order to the effect that only Jews aged between 16 and 32 were permitted to be employed proved decisive. This restriction, which is reminiscent of Himmler’s directive of May 1942 (which referred to people aged between 16 and 32), represented a death sentence for all those outside this age cohort.
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On 14 August Krüger went a step further and ordered the dissolution of all
Jewish forced-labour camps. Also, on 5 September, Field-Marshal Keitel ordered the Wehrmacht to replace all Jewish workers in the General Government with Poles.
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All Jews in the General Government were now exposed to the strategy that Himmler had been pressing for since the beginning of 1942, of combining forced labour and mass murder to form a comprehensive extermination programme.

As this chapter has shown, in the summer of 1942 Himmler’s anti-Jewish policy had culminated in the inclusion of a whole series of European countries in the policy of systematic mass murder. However, in the second half of the year he was to press for the murder-rate in those countries that had already been included in the Holocaust to be stepped up still further and, in addition, to extend the deportation programme to more countries.

The following chapters will show that for Himmler the launching of the Holocaust in Europe was only the first step on the path to a much more comprehensive vision of a new order. For it is clear from an assessment of his ceaseless activities during these months that the final decision to murder the European Jews was just the first of a number of fundamental turning-points that Himmler was to engineer during the coming months, and which had the object of securing the central role in the establishment of the Nazi empire for his SS and an unique historical position for himself.

To this end, the Reichsführer sought to combine what, at first glance, seem completely different topics to form a political programme, geared to the racial domination and reordering of Europe. Thus, in the next two chapters we shall examine more closely two fields in which Himmler also took important decisions in the summer of 1942: settlement policy and the recruitment of non-German citizens for his Waffen-SS. However, in order to explain the importance of these turning-points in the summer of 1942, it is necessary first to look at the chronology both before and after this period. Only then will we turn our attention to the second half of 1942.

The events of 1942 strikingly demonstrate that Himmler was a man who knew how to combine ambitious ideological notions with a sure instinct for power. And this is apparent in the way he systematically exploited the functions he had acquired as Reichsführer-SS. What begins to become evident in 1942 is a fantasy world displaying the most extreme degree of brutality, inhumanity, and absolute ruthlessness in power politics, a fantasy world that has Himmler’s characteristic stamp upon it and which he believed he could turn into reality in a very short space of time.

Precisely at the point when he was setting about drawing the whole of Europe into the Holocaust, in May and June 1942 Himmler took decisive steps to standardize the diverse SS settlement plans and extend them to the whole territory of the future Reich. The systematic murder of the Jews was only the beginning (as the coincidence of these decisions makes clear) of his project to subject the whole of Europe to a radical racial ‘reordering’.

Himmler had a mental picture of the European map separated into a number of zones, distinguished by the ‘racial calibre’ of their inhabitants and the latter’s future role in a Greater Germanic Reich. By comparison, national boundaries were of secondary importance for him. In the top rank according to his estimation were the countries whose inhabitants he classed as ‘Teutons’ (
Germanen
): these were places where ‘Germanic’ volunteers could be recruited into the Waffen-SS and where later potential settlers for the east could be found. In a Greater Germanic Reich these countries would stand side-by-side with the German Empire as equal partners. In practice, however, he could treat only Norway and the Netherlands, which were administered by civil commissars, fully as Germanic territories, and thus he intervened in the internal politics of those countries. The fascist movements he supported and their leaders, Quisling and Mussert, met with little success, however. In Belgium conditions were more difficult: only the Flemish could really count as Teutons, whereas by origin the Walloons could not. Yet a process of mental revision seems to have occurred in him, for he reacted very positively to attempts by the Walloons to present themselves to him as ‘romanized Teutons’, and he supported research projects designed to prove this theory. The fact that the Belgian
territories were subject to military rule was, however, an obstacle for it was less open to his influence. He also in fact regarded Denmark as ‘Germanic’, but in this case the restrained German occupation policy prevented him from taking any significant action. Sweden was undoubtedly ‘Germanic’, but neutral, and so in the case of this potential ‘brother country’ he also had to exercise severe restraint. All in all, therefore, his attempts at Germanic integration remained pipe-dreams; the only degree of success he achieved was in recruiting volunteers and bringing national police forces into line with the German pattern (as discussed elsewhere in this volume).

The second zone on Himmler’s map of Europe consisted of those areas the Reich had already annexed or was going to annex, where the inhabitants would have to be sorted on the basis of racial criteria: the Protectorate belonged to this zone, also the occupied Polish and Soviet territories, as well as Alsace and Lorraine (which were under the authority of German Gauleiters as chiefs of the civil administration and thus already half integrated into the Reich) and the Yugoslav territories annexed in 1941.

The third zone was made up of those eastern and southern European states allied to the Third Reich in which there were significant ethnic German minorities. Acting on Hitler’s instructions, Himmler assumed the leadership of these ethnic Germans and represented their ‘interests’ (as he himself defined them) with regard to the governments of these countries. The countries in question were Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, and Romania; Serbia, which was under military rule, was a special case. Even here his main concern was in the final analysis the recruitment of ‘volunteers’ from the ethnic German population; though he did not state it openly, at bottom he became more and more convinced that these populations should be dispersed and those belonging to them used to further his settlement projects in eastern Europe.

The remaining European territories that were not to become part of the racially based empire that was to be created interested him by comparison far less: thus France was significant to him above all because he was responsible for the security of the occupying forces. Italy was German’s most important ally, and its autonomy had to be respected at all costs, which is why he gave complete support to Hitler’s policy of strengthening this alliance by abandoning the claims of the ethnic Germans to South Tyrol. Finland was regarded as a loyal ally, to whose population he accorded high status because of its particular racial ancestry, even if they were not ‘Teutons’.

The settlement policy that will be discussed in this chapter therefore related exclusively to the territories designated here as the second zone, namely, territories that the German Reich had annexed or intended to annex.

In an earlier chapter we have traced the early stages of Himmler’s racist, ‘selection’-based settlement policy and seen that his efforts were concentrated at first on Poland and then extended to the Protectorate as well as Alsace and Lorraine.

After the Balkan war Himmler also included Yugoslav territory in his endeavours—more precisely, the territories that under the names of Lower Styria and Upper Carniola had been annexed by the Reich. In his capacity as Settlement Commissar Himmler subjected the Slovenian population to a racial ‘selection’ and had almost 40,000 people—members of the intelligentsia and immigrants from other parts of Yugoslavia—relocated to Serbia and Croatia. In June 1941 he ordered that all racially ‘suitable’ persons from Lower Styria and southern Carinthia be ‘included in the measures to deploy persons capable of re-Germanization from the eastern territories and General Government’.
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As a first step, however, these people were to be taken to west and central Germany. In November 1941 and January 1942, after a preliminary selection, a total of more than 33,000 people were transferred to VoMi camps in the Reich, where in spring 1942 a more thorough racial examination was conducted. In this process 15,000 people were identified as being ‘capable of re-Germanization’, in other words, suitable for settlement in the east. Most, however, remained in the VoMi camps until the end of the war.
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The German ethnic minority from Gotschee, an area near Ljublyana now part of the Italian zone of occupation, was in turn forcibly resettled in the now-vacant areas of Lower Styria and southern Carinthia.
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The outbreak of the war against the Soviet Union compelled Himmler to revise his entire settlement planning.
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Two days after the Germans launched their attack, on 24 June, he gave his head of planning, Konrad Meyer, in the Main Office of the Settlement Commissariat the task of adapting the planning to the new circumstances.
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Meyer was ready in July with a first version of the revised ‘General Plan East’. It was now envisaged that the General Government and the territories being annexed to the east of it would be Germanized, though only two days later this project turned out already to be outdated, because Hitler, at a meeting about the future of the east, sketched out more extensive plans for annexation.

Meanwhile the Reich Security Main Office was working on its own general plan for the east. It was presented in 1941 and assumed that, in addition to the annexed Polish territories and the General Government, the Bialystok district, the Baltic States, the western Ukraine, and Byelorussia would also be settled by Germans. The precondition for this was the expulsion of 31 million inhabitants of these territories.
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On 28 May 1942 the Reich Settlement Commissariat Main Office produced a new version of its General Plan East. The suggestion was now that so-called ‘settlement marches’ be set up in the Baltic area, the Ukraine, and the Leningrad region, as well as thirty-six settlement bases, which would function also as SS and police bases. In the meantime there was no more talk of extensive relocation of indigenous populations, and instead discussion focused on ‘decimating’ the urban population above all by means of starvation and forced labour.
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Himmler read the plan, which he considered ‘very good on the whole’, and charged Meyer with enlarging it into a European ‘Comprehensive Settlement Plan’ incorporating the older projects for the annexed eastern territories but also including Alsace and Lorraine, Upper Carniola and Southern Styria, and Bohemia and Moravia. In addition Himmler ordered the complete ‘Germanization’ of Estonia and Latvia. The period envisaged for this settlement process was, he instructed, to be reduced from between twenty-five and thirty years to twenty years.
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From documents Meyer presented at the end of 1942 it is apparent that the plans now aimed to ‘transfer’ within thirty years a ‘pool of settlers’, amounting to more than 10 million people from the Reich, more than a million from the ‘Germanic’ countries, and 200,000 more from overseas, to the territories to be settled. A process of ‘complete Germanization’ was envisaged; further details about the fate of the native, non-German population were, in the author’s view, clearly superfluous.
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Himmler responded by instructing Meyer to include Lithuania, White Ruthenia (Byelorussia), the Crimea, and Taurien in the comprehensive plan also.
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Work to refine these plans continued until some time in mid-1943.