Heinrich Himmler : A Life (102 page)

The efforts put into a comprehensive settlement plan can therefore be described as Himmler’s attempt to harmonize settlement planning as a whole throughout his various offices.
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The period in which he made these fundamental decisions, in May and June 1942, coincided, as must be emphasized once again, with the phase in which he was also laying the
foundations for the whole of Europe to be included in the Holocaust and even accelerated this process under the impact of Heydrich’s assassination.

In a speech on 16 September 1942 to the SS and police leaders from the Russia South area Himmler set out how he saw the settlement of the eastern territories. In the next twenty years the annexed Polish territories, the General Government, the Baltic States, White Ruthenia, Ingria (the area around Leningrad), and the Crimea were to be settled by ‘Teutons’. In the remaining occupied Soviet territories bases would be established on the main transport routes so that ‘settlement enclaves’ would arise—first of all ‘from the Don to the Volga’, but later ‘as far as the Urals’. ‘This Germanic east reaching to the Urals must’, according to Himmler’s vision, ‘be a seedbed for Germanic blood, so that in 400–500 years [ . . . ] instead of 120 millions there will be 500–600 million Teutons.’ The indigenous population would be sifted according to those of ‘inferior’ race and those ‘of good race’.
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What lay at the heart of the settlement of the east he had summed up succinctly in the summer of 1942 as the maxim of the ‘ethno-political monthly’
Deutsche Arbeit
(‘German Work’) in the words: ‘Our task does not consist in Germanizing the east in the traditional sense, that means by teaching the German language and German laws to the people who live there, but rather to ensure that only people of actual German and Germanic blood live there.’
¹³

By the end of 1942 Himmler had made considerable progress with his resettlement strategy: according to the report he sent to Hitler dated 20 January 1943, a total of 629,000 ethnic Germans had been resettled. Of those, 429,000 had come from territories previously under Soviet rule, 77,000 from Romania, 34,000 from Yugoslavia, and 79,000 from the South Tyrol. Of these 629,000 ethnic Germans, 445,000 had been ‘settled’, 332,000 of them in the annexed Polish territories, 13,500 in Carniola and Lower Styria, 6,600 in the Protectorate, 5,000 in Alsace and Lorraine, 17,000 in Lithuania (as part of a special scheme for returning Germans), and in addition 70,000 (apart from the South Tyroleans) in the ‘Old Reich’, including annexed Austria. In many cases, however, the settlers ended up not in neat farmhouses on their own bit of land, as Himmler’s planners had pictured them, but rather in resettlement camps or in mostly cramped accommodation in towns.

To create space for these people 365,000 Poles from the annexed Polish territories had been expelled into the General Government, 17,000 Slovenians had been deported to Serbia, and 37,000 as forced labour to Germany.
In addition, 100,000 people from Alsace, Lorraine, and Luxembourg had been deported to unoccupied France, Germany, or to the occupied eastern territories. Himmler’s assumption was that he could also resettle a further 400,000 ethnic Germans, consisting of 143,000 South Tyroleans and 250,000 from the occupied eastern territories.
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After this general survey we shall look in greater detail in the following sections at the most important resettlement projects. These also include Himmler’s vigorous efforts to identify ‘good blood’ among the non-German population in the occupied territories and to make a start at least in conducting a racial selection among the foreign slave labourers in the Reich.

In the Protectorate Heydrich had been pressing on with plans for Germanization from the autumn of 1941 onwards. A start was actually made in compiling the ‘racial inventory’ of the population that the Race and Settlement Main Office had been preparing since the previous autumn. It was disguised as an X-ray screening connected with the introduction of the German identity card in the Protectorate. The head of the RuSHA, Bruno Kurt Schultz, took on responsibility for the academic supervision of the operation as a whole, and to this end was appointed to a chair in racial biology specially created for him at Prague University. It is impossible to establish now how many people were examined in detail; certainly the racial examiners were occupied with ‘establishing the racial composition’ of the Protectorate until late 1942.
¹⁵

Even the Prague Land Office was reactivated on Heydrich’s orders as an instrument of racial policy: the director up to that point, Theodor Gross, a dietitian, was replaced by a member of the SD, as had happened before in 1939;
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Heydrich, significantly, reproached Gross with not having implemented the policy of expropriation consistently enough. Now the Land Office applied itself with renewed zeal to the preliminary steps towards requisitioning large tracts of land for German settlers.

By means of racial testing and settlement planning the intention was to have all the necessary documentation ready so that Germanization could begin immediately after the war. In November 1941 Heydrich received the cover for his back that he needed for these preparations: on Himmler’s urging, Hitler included the Protectorate in the former’s responsibilities as
Settlement Commissar and Himmler immediately entrusted Heydrich with carrying out these tasks.
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After Heydrich’s death Himmler accelerated what was already in progress. In the confidential address he delivered at Heydrich’s memorial service in Berlin he announced that Bohemia and Moravia also should have an ‘entirely German’ population within twenty years. A few days later he directed that Bohemia and Moravia, as well as Alsace, Lorraine, Upper Carniola, and Southern Styria were to be integrated into the general settlement plan. The corresponding detailed work carried out by the Reich Settlement Commissariat Main Office anticipated that about 50 per cent of the Czech population would be ‘Germanized’ and the other half expelled. In addition to the 236,000 Germans already living in the Protectorate, the intention was to bring 1.4 million German settlers into the country.
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What was to happen to the Czechs who were destined to be ‘expelled’? Heydrich had already made a clear statement on the matter: in February 1942, two weeks after the Wannsee conference, he had declared in a speech to representatives of the administration of the German occupation that in the process of the envisaged deportation of 11 million European Jews to ‘open up further the Arctic region’ the Czechs could be used ‘as supervisors and foremen, etc. as a positive indication of their pro-German orientation’. The ‘final solution to the Jewish question’, which at this point was still confined to the deportation of the Jews to the eastern territories, was therefore, as this comment makes clear, embedded in the gigantomania of the SS’s population-policy plans.
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But it all remained a fantasy: no concrete measures to resettle the Czechs were taken during the war. In the General Government, in the Soviet Union, and in France, on the other hand, Himmler did set settlement pilot projects in train in order to lend weight to his claim after the war to a leading role in the reordering of ‘living-space’. The key decisions for all these projects were taken, surprisingly, within a relatively short space of time, in July and August 1942.

At the end of 1939 Hitler and Himmler had already declared the General Government to be territory to which ‘inferior’ beings from the new eastern
provinces incorporated into the Reich, but also some from the Old Reich, were to be ‘consigned’, and by the end of 1942 365,000 Poles had in fact been deported to this territory, as has already been mentioned, while from the end of 1940 to the spring of 1941 the SS resettled around 30,000 ethnic Germans and ‘alien nationals of good race’ in the opposite direction, from the General Government to the Warthegau and the Old Reich: the General Government as dumping ground could simply not be a suitable home for people of German descent.
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Thus Himmler’s fundamental decision, dating from the summer of 1941, in future to ‘Germanize’ the General Government also marks a radical change of direction.

Significantly, the SSPF for the Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik, who was simultaneously organizing the mass murder of Jews, became the central figure in the settlement policy of the General Government. During his visit in July 1941 to Lublin Himmler not only made Globocnik his ‘appointee in charge of setting up the SS and police bases in the new eastern region’, but also empowered him to extend the district operation ‘Search for German Blood’ to the whole of the General Government and to establish a ‘large-scale settlement area’ near Zamosc,
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so that from there the whole Lublin district could be Germanized.

In the autumn of 1941 Globocnik, who for months had maintained his own planning office to look after his special responsibilities for ‘population policy’,
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introduced a series of measures and prepared his men for what was to come. ‘Enemy nations’ must ‘move slowly towards their own destruction’, and ‘in this territory a bulwark’ must ‘be created against the Slav nations through the settlement of German farmers and farmers of German descent’,
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he proclaimed in November 1941 at a leaders’ conference in Lublin.

The same month several thousand people were forcibly expelled from various villages in the Lublin district by SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, which was notorious for its brutality, so that the ethnic Germans of the district could be concentrated there.
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Simultaneously, a specialist adviser from the RuSHA specifically attached to Globocnik began a ‘general review’ of the Polish population and their property.
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In addition, from the autumn onwards Globocnik had been extending the system of SS and police bases, on which he had been working since 1940. Each base was to comprise several estates as well as the administrative offices of various branches of the SS and police, and thereby fulfil a dual function: as a centre
for the combating of partisans and as an outpost for Germanization thanks to exemplary agricultural production and training on the farms.

In March 1942, in parallel with the equivalent measures in the annexed eastern territories, the procedure of the Ethnic German List (
Volksliste
; see
Chapter 16
above) was applied also to those of German descent in the General Government.
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At roughly the same time five new commissions of the Central Office for Immigration began, in the wake of the ‘search for German blood,’ to register ethnic Germans throughout the General Government and also to investigate the ‘proportion of German blood’ in those people who between 1939 and 1941 had been expelled on account of their ‘inferiority’ from the annexed eastern territories into the General Government. The operation went on until the autumn of 1943.
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From 18 to 20 July Himmler was again staying in the Lublin district in order to find out about the progress of the Germanization process there. Immediately beforehand he had convinced himself in Auschwitz that the mass murder of the European Jews was in operation. In Lublin he now made further decisions concerning the Germanization of the district, in particular with regard to the settling of ethnic Germans in the Lublin and Zamosc areas. On 19 July, along with Krüger and Globocnik, he made a through inspection of the area identified for it and spent an afternoon with the ethnic German settlers. He showed particular interest in the process of racial examination: at his request, individual families from a variety of categories were presented to the Reichsführer.
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Himmler also used the opportunity to be brought up to date by Krüger and Globocnik about the progress of ‘Aktion Reinhardt’, the murder of the Jews in the General Government. The order, mentioned above, to Krüger to ensure that the ‘resettlement of the whole Jewish population of the General Government is accomplished by 31 December 1942’ dates from this day.
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The Zamosc settlement project got under way in November 1942, Himmler having given detailed instructions for it. At this point the Jewish inhabitants in the area had already been murdered; now 50,000 Poles were to be expelled in order to make room for around 2,500 families of settlers, in total about 10,000 people. The Poles, who were driven from their homes with violence by Globocnik’s men, were channelled into a camp in which employees from a branch office of the Central Office for Resettlement sorted them into the familiar four ‘racial groups’: those assigned to the first two groups, a small minority, were deported to the Reich to be ‘reGermanized’, but the vast majority were deployed in the Reich or on the
spot as forced labour. In this way the native Polish farmers were made to work for the German settlers. Anyone classified as ‘inferior’ was sent to Auschwitz; those unfit for work were consigned to so-called pension villages (
Rentendörfer
), in other words, death colonies. Progress as a whole was, however, slow. By the end of 1943 the racial examiners had dealt with only a third of the 50,000 people they were to cover. This changed when a series of ‘anti-partisan’ operations was initiated in the war zone: treatment of the Polish population became more brutal, the examination procedure was radically simplified and accelerated, and within a few weeks the target of 50,000 deportees had almost been achieved.
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Although the order that Himmler gave to Globocnik on 17 July 1941 to construct a network of SS and police bases in the newly occupied territories led to the creation of an extensive administration (the Office of the Representative Responsible for Setting up the SS and Police Bases in the New Eastern Region), because of a lack of resources there were no practical results. Globocnik therefore confined himself again to establishing bases in the General Government.
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Himmler’s attempt to use his police powers to introduce settlement measures in the occupied eastern territories thus had failed, but it had also become superfluous. He had, after all, managed to convince Hitler in September 1941 that the occupied Soviet territories should be placed under his control in his capacity as Settlement Commissar.