Heinrich Himmler : A Life (103 page)

Apart from that, Himmler had found yet another foothold in ethnic policy by which to secure his position in the Soviet Union: the ‘protection’ of ethnic Germans. He had already used the same method in Poland and Yugoslavia. The Sonderkommando R (Russia) he had set up in July 1941 under Brigadeführer Horst Hoffmeyer established an armed defence unit in the ethnic German territories, opened German schools, and appointed liaison officers. The investigations pursued by the Sonderkommando into ‘Black Sea Germans’ indicate that at the end of 1941 there was still an assumption in the SS that these people, like the ethnic German ‘settlers’ from the Soviet Union before them, were to be brought ‘home to the Reich’. In 1942, however, a change began in settlement policy: now ethnic Germans were to be gathered into settlement centres and act as pioneers within the project of Germanization.
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As in the General Government, in
the autumn of 1942 three race and settlement leaders were installed as part of the HSSPF group in the conquered Soviet territories. Their task was to ensure the preservation of ‘valuable blood’ and to help in the preparations for future settlement. They concentrated, for example, on gaining control of the collective farms.
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In August 1942 Himmler called his leading staff in the area of ethnic policy to a meeting in his headquarters in the Ukraine. Meyer, Greifelt, Lorenz, Berger, Prützmann, HSSPF for Russia South, and Stuckart, state secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, were present.
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In the Ukraine, 45,000 ethnic Germans in ‘around 486 villages’ had at first been looked after by the VoMi, but were now, as was generally acknowledged, being neglected since the transfer of responsibility to the civil administration. Here, ‘life as a völkisch community [ . . . ] was now dead’. In order to change this unsatisfactory situation Himmler announced that he was going to involve the HSSPF in looking after the German minority by setting up ‘ethnic German control centres’. In addition, he instructed that these people should be ‘settled together’; in the first instance 10,000 were to be based in and around Shitomir.

‘In accordance with the Führer’s order,’ Himmler continued, in his initiation of his audience into Hitler’s plans for the occupied eastern territories, ‘in the next twenty years parts of the Ukraine will be populated entirely by Germans.’ Settlements in any of the territories were to be established first and foremost on the main traffic routes—at intersections there should be towns of 15,000 to 20,000 inhabitants surrounded by ‘a rural population which is entirely German’. Settlements in the other territories were to be established as follows: first of all the Reich Commissariat Ostland, ‘in view of the Estonians’ capacity for Germanization’, while on the other hand ‘it is imperative that the Latgalians be expelled’ from Latvia and ‘there is no possibility of Germanizing the Lithuanians, as they are intellectually slow and have an extraordinary amount of Slavic blood’; secondly, so-called Ingria, the territory around Leningrad; thirdly, White Ruthenia, which would be comparatively easy, as the local population had ‘no intelligentsia or political ambition’; and finally, fourthly, the Crimea.

Only the projects relating to the Ukraine (including the Crimea) were set in motion. But as a preliminary the number of ethnic Germans living there had to be established. Reich commissar Lohse, whom Himmler put in charge of ‘Germanization’ on 9 September, therefore gave instructions for the Ethnic German List to be introduced in September 1942.
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The
population in question was split into three groups: first Germans, secondly Germans in mixed marriages and their families (insofar as they professed themselves to be German and their families made a ‘good impression’), thirdly people of German descent and their families who no longer felt themselves to be German, and in addition orphaned children of German blood. Those who, although they felt they were German culturally, were judged to be ‘racially alien’ and were not married to a German were not entered in the Ethnic German List. Thus Himmler’s racist policy had triumphed completely in this territory: being German was a matter of ‘blood’ and not of attitude.
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In November 1942, after a stay in the Crimea, Himmler gave the SSPF Crimea, SS-Sturmbannführer Heinze, the task of preparing for the settlement of the peninsula (including the neighbouring territory of Taurien between the Dnieper estuary and the Azov Sea). Thereupon Heinze set up an ethnic German control centre, the so-called Crimean Commando, which derived from Commando R and comprised around 10,000 ethnic Germans, and made preparations for the territory to be settled later.
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The plan temporarily floated to settle the South Tyroleans in the Crimea had had to be shelved in 1942. Instead, in 1943 the Crimean Commando hit on the idea of moving the Palestine Germans there who had been interned by the British. But in the meantime the Wehrmacht was in retreat, and when, from autumn 1943, the Crimea was being abandoned the settlers were also evacuated, for the time being to the Warthegau.

The second settlement project was in fact realized: the settling of a total of 30,000 ethnic Germans (for a time the assumption was there would be 43,000) in the General Commissariat of Shitomir, in three areas around Himmler’s headquarters in Hegewald.
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Between the middle of October and the middle of November 1942 a specially created Sonderkommando of the Reich Settlement Commissariat, the Henschel unit, expelled a total of almost 15,000 Ukrainians from the settlement areas of Hegewald and Försterstadt and moved 10,000 ethnic German settlers there. Himmler showed great interest in this: on 20 October he made a ‘journey to the ethnic German villages’ from his headquarters, accompanied by a group of SS leaders, among them his writer friend Hanns Johst, the ‘SS bard’, and Himmler’s former employer from Fridolfing, Alois Rehl, who in the meantime had become an Obersturmführer and was visiting for a few days. Both Johst and Rehrl also accompanied Himmler to the Crimea to inspect ethnic German settlements.
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Ill. 27.
During his visit to the Crimea at the end of October 1942 Himmler, who had studied agriculture, found the time to inspect the local cotton plantation.

In 1943, however, German resettlement policy in the General Commissariat of Shitomir had to go on the defensive: the special Henschel unit’s main task was now to withdraw ethnic Germans from territories threatened by partisans and from dispersed settlements. The plan was in fact to accommodate them in two further settlement areas around Shitomir, but even that turned out to be impossible, one reason being that any further large-scale expulsion of Ukrainians seemed inopportune in view of the tense overall situation. Thus, in the end 30,000 ethnic Germans were squashed into the settlements at Hegewald and Försterstadt and a few thousand were taken to the third settlement area of Kalinowka. The ‘settlement’ programme was a failure: apart from small garden plots, it had not been possible as a rule to give the settlers any land of their own. Instead they were put to work on large farms; many were living in camps. At the end of 1943 the settlements were abandoned and the ethnic Germans were brought in ‘treks’ by horse and cart to the Warthegau.
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In the summer of 1942 Alsace and Lorraine also claimed more of Himmler’s attention. In this case the Reich’s resettlement supremo was concerned above all to ‘remove’ those who were considered undesirable on racial grounds in a future greater Germanic Reich. The Gauleiters Robert Wagner and Josef Bürckel, who were established as heads of the civil administration in Alsace and Lorraine, simply wished to consign these people to the occupied eastern territories—regardless of the fact that Himmler had introduced pilot schemes here that were based on careful racial ‘selection’. In his view only truly ‘Germanic elements’ could be considered for settlement, and not those ‘inferior beings’ whom Bürckel and Wagner wanted to get rid of. It was, however, to be no easy job for Himmler to get his way in the face of opposition from these Reich governors.

In 1940 he had come off second-best against Bürckel in Lorraine when the latter, as already described, had more than 80,000 people deported to France and, in spite of great difficulties, settled Reich Germans and ethnic Germans. In the autumn of 1941, however, the situation changed. For in September Bürckel (who was the official representative of the Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation in Lorraine) appointed HSSPF Theodor Berkelmann as his representative for settlement matters in Lorraine, and thereby effectively handed his responsibility for ethnic issues back to Himmler. In doing so he was acknowledging that his settlement policy—he had had recourse, above all, to people from his home Gau of Saar-Palatinate—had largely been a failure.
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Berkelmann now set about organizing a comprehensive racial examination of the Lorraine population on the same lines as the Ethnic German List: in October 1941 the racial ‘suitability test’ was introduced.
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His aim of implementing a carefully prepared settlement policy on a racial basis was, however, in conflict with Bürckel’s plan to resettle 40,000 Lorrainers in the Ukraine—a request Hitler himself granted Bürckel in August 1942.
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Greifelt, the head of the Main Staff Office in the Settlement Commissariat, was extremely vexed by ‘the need to carry out such an immediate mass evacuation’ as a result of Bürckel’s initiative, for it necessarily jeopardized ethnic policy in Lorraine and in the Ukraine. But Himmler’s response was:
‘Nothing can be done about these things. The Führer has made his decision.’
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Himmler agreed with Bürckel that Lorrainers who were ‘racially worthless and asocial’ should emigrate to France, as should the female relatives of Lorrainers living in France, if they ‘are past childbearing age or are racially worthless’. The same applied to male relatives if they were no longer fit for military service. The opportunity generously granted to Lorrainers who were not opting for German nationality of going to France did, however, have a catch, as is clear from the agreement: ‘Those Lorrainers opting for emigration to France will be noted down at the receiving offices until this Saturday. They will then be immediately transferred to concentration camps as communist elements.’
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The plan to resettle 40,000 Lorrainers in the Ukraine, like many a grand ‘population project’, never came to fruition, as a result of wartime developments, with the result that Himmler’s men did get their way: in February 1943 10,000 Lorrainers, handpicked on the basis of racial tests, were resettled, mostly in the Old Reich. In May 8,000 of them were still in VoMi camps.
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In Alsace Robert Wagner, the Gauleiter, had by the end of 1940 deported about 100,000 people to unoccupied France. In the second half of 1941 Himmler gradually brought his influence to bear on resettlement policy. The precondition for this was the setting up of a Land Office in Strasbourg.
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On 19 March Wagner informed Himmler that he had recently received Hitler’s permission for a ‘final cleansing’ in Alsace. The timing, he said, was still open, but it was to involve ‘the removal of anybody unusable or racially inferior’; Hitler would determine, ‘according to the political situation’, whether ‘such elements’ should be ‘consigned to France or settled in distant parts of the east’.
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Three months later Himmler returned to this matter in a letter to Wagner. In principle he was, of course, in agreement with Wagner that Alsace must ‘be cleansed of unreliable elements of any kind’. Under no circumstances, however, could these be ‘consigned to the east’, as the east was being kept in view ‘by us as an area for Germanic settlement by good racial elements’ and so was not a ‘penal colony’. Wagner might also consider that if ‘some elements’ were deported to France there was a danger of, ‘by this means putting people of German blood at the disposal of the French and thus promoting the rebuilding of the French nation’.
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As Himmler saw it, dealing with ‘undesirable elements’ was therefore essentially a racial problem: among the Reich’s political enemies there could be valuable ‘Germanic blood’ that in France and in the occupied eastern territories might cause damage in the long term. Wagner adopted Himmler’s standpoint on this and proposed a solution that promised not only to free his territory from ‘undesirables’ but also to avoid the loss they feared of ‘valuable blood’: ‘racially valuable’ persons were to be ‘resettled’ in the Old Reich, while the ‘racially inferior’ were to be ‘resettled’ in France.

This principle was accepted on 7 August 1942 by the representatives of various SS offices responsible for ethnic policy who met in Berlin in order, on the basis of Wagner’s detailed proposals, to issue ‘Guidelines for the Treatment of Resettled Alsatians’. Wagner had drawn up a list of those ‘inferior people’ whom he intended to get rid of by means of a ‘second resettlement operation’ (the first had taken place in October 1940): ‘Negroes and coloured people of mixed race, Gypsies and their descendants, Jews from half-Jews upwards, those in Jewish mixed marriages’, and in addition, ‘those of alien races and their descendants’, the ‘patois population’,
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‘asocials’, and ‘the incurably mentally ill’.
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