Heinrich Himmler : A Life (105 page)

As far as the Soviet Union was concerned, as early as July 1941 Himmler had charged Guntram Pflaum, the administrative head of the Lebensborn, with taking care of ethnic German children ‘of good race’. Pflaum set up a
children’s home in Bobruisk for children ‘of good race’, who were offered for adoption in Germany.
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These were by no means all from ethnic German backgrounds, but also included ‘racially valuable’ children from Byelorussian families, and the home was not confined to orphans. In the Ukraine children ‘without parents’ were also gathered in camps and subjected to ‘racial selection’.
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During a journey through the Reichskommissariat Ostland in autumn 1941 Himmler had in addition given instructions to gather information on the children of people deported by the Soviets, establish whether they were ‘capable of Germanization’, and if so to move them to the Reich.
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On Himmler’s orders, ‘those of German origin’ in the General Government who were unwilling to be entered in the Ethnic German List were punished by being put in concentration camps and having their children removed.
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In addition, at least 4,500 Polish children from the Zamosc district, whose parents had been ‘resettled’—in other words, turned into slave labour or sent to Majdanek—were transported to the Reich.
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Himmler regarded the whole matter as extremely simple. ‘It is our task’, he emphasized to the SS and Police Leaders from Russia-South on 16 September 1942, ‘to remove everybody of good race from here.’
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And on 4 October 1943, at the conference of Gruppenführer at Posen (Poznań), he spoke openly in favour of the forcible removal of children: ‘Whatever we find in the way of good blood from our race we will take, if necessary by stealing children and raising them ourselves.’
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This also applied to the children of resistance fighters and partisans who had been killed or imprisoned (or those suspected of such activities).
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The best-known case is the barbaric action taken at Lidice. As part of the ‘retribution’ for the assassination of Heydrich eighty-eight children, whose fathers were shot and whose mothers were put in a concentration camp, were first taken to a camp belonging to the Central Office for Resettlement in Ł
ó
ódź, where seven were identified as being ‘capable of Germanization’ and the remaining eighty-one deported to the Chelmno extermination camp and murdered.
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Shortly after, on 25 June 1942, Himmler issued ‘Guidelines for Action Against Partisans and Other Bandits in Upper Carniola and Lower Styria’. They clearly stated that, ‘in principle men in any culpable family, in many cases even those of the entire clan, are to be executed, the women from these families are to be arrested and sent to a concentration camp, the children to be removed from their homeland and collected together in the part of the Gau belonging to the Old Reich. I shall expect additional reports on the number and racial value of these children.’
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On 6 January 1943 he ordered that in ‘operations against the bandits’ men and women suspected of such activity were in future to be deported to the camps in Lublin and Auschwitz and their children to an ‘internment camp for children and adolescents’. The ‘racial and political inspection’ that was to take place there can be interpreted as an indication that those racially ‘valuable’ children who did not understand their situation and so were not potential avengers of their parents were also considered for ‘Germanization’.
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Ill. 28.
On his Minsk trip in August 1942 Himmler is shown demonstrating to his two companions, Josef Kiermaler, the head of his personal security service (first from left), and Karl Wolff (second from left), the racial examination of a local boy. The photo was taken by the ‘Führer’s photographer’, Walter Frenz, who was accompanying the group.

A further group of ‘Germanic children’ that Himmler refused to relinquish were those children fathered by German soldiers in the occupied countries.
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He was particularly concerned about ‘Germanic’ countries. Assessors from the Race and Settlement Office took on responsibility for the racial examination of children born in the Netherlands and Norway, and from 1942–3 the Lebensborn organization was involved in their care. In Norway alone Lebensborn maintained six maternity homes, in which an estimated 6,000 such children of the occupation were born.

Even the children of German soldiers and Russian women became an object of Himmler’s desire, above all because it was assumed that there was a colossal number of such births; even if the mothers were in principle considered to be ‘racially inferior ethnic aliens’, there was a chance that the superior racial genetic make-up of the father would produce passable results.
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Hitler had brought his attention to the problem, the Reichsführer-SS explained in his address to the SS and Police Leaders from Russia-South in September 1942, ‘that in Russia probably a good 1 to 1½ million children had been fathered by German soldiers’. He conceded that it was possibly slightly fewer, ‘but it will certainly be several hundred thousands or almost a million’. These children were, he said, ‘an unheard-of boost, both in quantity and in racial quality, to the Russian nation, which at this point has lost a great deal of blood’. For that reason Hitler had let him know ‘that we, the SS, must first of all establish where all these children are, so that they can be inspected. The children who are of good race and healthy will be taken away from their mothers and taken to Germany, or if the mothers are of good race and healthy we shall take them too.’

The ‘children of poor race’, on the other hand, were to be left behind. ‘My view is that even that is damaging to us. For even a child produced by a German father and a Russian mother of poor race gives something positive
to the Russians; for we cannot tell what may suddenly emerge from his blood in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and even later generations, if it combines again with similar blood.’ According to another record of the speech, he already had a solution to hand for this problem: He spoke of the ‘eradication’ of the undesirable progeny.
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Hitler and Himmler may, however, have greatly overestimated the virility of German soldiers stationed in the east. Realistic estimates suggest that no more than 10,000–11,000 children were fathered by German soldiers with local women.
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In this case too the Race and Settlement Main Office played its part in conducting racial examinations; the children were handed over to the National Socialist Welfare organization (NSV). In all the German occupied territories probably more than 10,000 children of German soldiers were taken into NSV institutions.
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As the previous sections of this chapter have shown, in 1941–2 Himmler began to define racial criteria in a highly flexible manner. And it emerged that the flexibility he prescribed was highly compatible with the examination process. For the vast majority of people examined by the racial assessors were diagnosed as being a ‘mixture’ of European ‘principal races’ as defined by racial theory: the subjects were therefore people showing ‘traces of blood’ of a variety of races—‘Nordic’, ‘Faelish’, ‘Mediterranean’ (
westisch
), ‘Dinaric’, ‘Alpine’ (
ostisch
), or ‘East Baltic’. The racial criteria were met either if the ‘Nordic’ element could be clearly recognized or if the other components were ‘well balanced’ (in other words, even if there were no ‘Nordic’ elements at all). An applicant was given a clear negative appraisal if, in the view of the assessor, ‘Slavic’, Negroid’, ‘oriental’ (‘Jewish’), or other ‘alien’ influences were demonstrable (or were ‘presumed’), or if the traces of European elements ‘resulted in an ‘unbalanced’ appearance—in other words, one in which the features were too ‘Dinaric’, ‘Alpine’ or ‘East Baltic’.
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This overview by itself reveals the arbitrariness of the whole procedure and the absurdity of the so-called racial doctrine underlying it. If the overwhelming majority of those tested were classed as ‘of mixed race’ (
Mischling
), then the German population could neither be defined unequivocally on the basis of ‘racial’ criteria nor could it be clearly distinguished in
racial composition from neighbouring nations. The evident differences in appearance among those tested were, however, not simply accepted as variants but rather the attempt was made to relate them back to specific ‘ideal types’, which in their pure form—the ‘Nordic’ type, the ‘Dinaric’ type, and so on—existed only in the imagination of race theorists. For racial theory was based on the proposition that the origins of human beings in the twentieth century could be traced back to prehistoric, pure ‘primal races’ (
Urrassen
)—an assumption that was essentially a historical myth with no anthropological foundation.

The arbitrariness of the racial examinations is not only reflected in these results but characterized the process as a whole: the decisive element in the assessment was, in the end, the ‘overall picture’ presented by the candidate, the immediate impression gained by the assessor at the examination. Family context (the preference was for examining the whole family), geographical origin, religious affiliation, nationality, and possible membership of the Nazi Party were noted and formed part of this ‘overall picture’. Yet even the purely biological criteria were subject to interpretation. If, for example, the shape of the head (‘short’) and the amount of body hair (‘abundant’) indicated negative racial characteristics, the criterion ‘erect bearing’ could fully compensate for these inadequacies. In the final analysis, where there were so many criteria, it was virtually always possible in assessing a candidate presenting a ‘mixed’ racial appearance to give weight to one or several as clear ‘proof’ of a ‘positive’ (or ‘negative’) overall picture.

A sober appraisal would put Himmler himself in the racially average band, or to some extent even below it: his face was round rather than oval, his nose more broad than slim, his normal bearing more ‘sagging’ than ‘erect’, and his chin—and for the racial assessors this was a particularly negative feature—fell clearly into the ‘receding’ category.

During this summer of 1942 that was proving so promising for Himmler—he had, after all, succeeded in including the whole of Europe in the systematic mass murder of the Jews, while at the same time advancing his settlement plans—the Reichsführer-SS made progress in another area as well: the expansion of his Waffen-SS. He succeeded in massively extending its basis of recruitment both inside and outside Germany.

In May 1942 Himmler had managed to persuade Hitler to establish an SS army corps under Colonel-General of the Waffen-SS Paul Hausser, composed of the ‘Leibstandarte’, ‘Das Reich’, and ‘Death’s Head’ divisions, which were withdrawn from the front in order to fill the gaps left by their losses and to re-equip them as Panzer grenadier divisions. By the end of the year the army corps had been renamed the SS Panzer Corps.
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This meant that Himmler had brought together his most effective divisions under a unified command, and right up to the end of the war SS divisions were used as a ‘fire brigade’, always being deployed where critical situations developed on any of the fronts. In this way, through deployments involving very heavy losses, the Waffen-SS was able to build up its reputation as a superior elite force.

Finally, in August 1942, Himmler succeeded in persuading Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of the Wehrmacht High Command, to triple the quota of recruits for the Waffen-SS from the 1924 age cohort. This measure provided the SS with new divisions. In September 1942 Hitler ordered that the SS Cavalry Brigade should be expanded to form the SS Cavalry Division ‘Florian Geyer’.
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In December he ordered the creation of two new German SS divisions from which, in 1943, a new SS army corps was to emerge.

However, as has already been described, in 1940 the Waffen-SS had already begun to try to recruit outside Germany, in the so-called Germanic countries and among ethnic German minorities in south-eastern Europe. The Reich’s intervention in the Balkans and the attack on the Soviet Union, which in propaganda terms was fought as a crusade of civilized Europe against ‘Bolshevism’, changed the context in which recruitment took place. It was now necessary to spread the net widely in the search for allies in the war against Bolshevism. As Himmler regarded the recruitment measures among ethnic German minorities in south-east Europe and in the occupied countries in northern and western Europe as anticipating the future Greater Germanic Reich and the new order which this new power would impose on Europe after the end of the war, the recruitment policy of the Waffen-SS forms part of the same project as Himmler’s other racial and foreign-policy ambitions. It is clear from the numerous relevant entries in his office diary just how seriously he took issues involving the recruitment, establishment, and equipment of the Waffen-SS. These matters also figured prominently in his ‘leader’s lectures’.
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