Heinrich Himmler : A Life (107 page)

Himmler, at any rate, was thinking along the same lines. In 1943 he initiated racial-biological investigations in Wallonia which, according to a report by Professor Frank Petri, appeared to confirm that ‘the whole of the north and west of France reaching right into the Paris basin contains a very significant proportion of Germanic-north German bloodlines’. Petri, who was a medievalist and leading ‘researcher of the west’, held the rank of senior councillor for military administration and acted as the expert for ‘ethnic German and ethnic Flemish affairs’ on the staff of the military administration. He provided Himmler with the intellectual backing for his attempt to claim that Wallonia should belong to the future Greater Germanic Reich.
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Himmler’s Flanders expert, Gottlob Berger, could already see a ‘Reich Gau Wallonia’, in other words, another Germanic province, beginning to emerge.
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In July 1944 Himmler explained his views on the Wallonia question to Hitler in the following terms:

We must take care in our dealings with the movement for Wallonian renewal. Its leader, Léon Degrelle, is an extremely clever but very adaptable politician, who has at last persuaded the Rexist movement to take on board the idea of a Greater Germanic Reich but who is capable of suddenly reverting to the notion of a Greater Burgundian Reich of the Walloons. Degrelle’s idea that the Walloons are romanized Teutons is a view that we could very well adopt ourselves.
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However, given the way the war was developing such plans soon proved irrelevant: a few weeks later Himmler’s romanized Teutons were already outside his control.

At the same time, on occasion Himmler contemplated assimilating young Slovaks through service in the SS. In October 1941 he adopted a project which Nageler, his adviser with the Hlinka Guard, had been pursuing for some time.
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During a meeting with the Slovak President Tiso, and his
Interior Minister Mach, Himmler proposed recruiting volunteers for the Waffen-SS from the Hlinka Guard. According to Himmler, Mach responded ‘enthusiastically’. This was the same visit during which he proposed to his Slovak guests that ‘their’ Jews should be deported to the General Government, a further example of how seamlessly the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ sides of Himmler’s racial policy meshed together: integration on the one hand, exclusion and mass murder on the other. After the meeting Himmler immediately issued detailed instructions for the recruitment of Slovaks. They should be ‘subject racially to the strictest Germanic criteria’. One should ‘never be able to distinguish a Slovak volunteer in the Waffen-SS from a German or a Germanic volunteer when in uniform’.
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The idea was that, through such a process of racial selection, an elite could be created in Slovakia that could be merged with the majority population of a future Greater Germanic Reich.

On 1 September 1942 Himmler appointed Nageler his special representative for the recruitment of volunteers in Slovakia. In fact, from January 1943 onwards, with the support of the Slovak government, several thousand men were to be ‘recruited’ for the Waffen-SS, sometimes under considerable pressure, although these came mostly from among the German minority. Himmler’s idea of ‘Germanizing’ a Slovak elite through service in the SS was dropped.
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Under the changed circumstances of the war Himmler now benefited from the fact that in 1936–7 he had acquired the primary responsibility for ethnic German policy and during the following years, with the help of VoMi, had managed to bring the individual ethnic German communities increasingly under his control. As early as April 1941 the Waffen-SS began recruiting among the German minorities in western Banat (which, as part of Serbia, was under German military administration); in the new state of Croatia, which was dependent on Germany; as well as in Blatschka, which had been transferred from Yugoslavia to Hungary.
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This was rapidly extended to other countries: Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia where Himmler’s recruiters were already active. Since Himmler regarded the German ethnic groups in the first instance not as citizens of their respective countries but as Germans, who were living in those countries purely as a result of historical
accident, his methods could easily be transferred from one ethnic group to the next, as will become clear in what follows. He had little interest in the fact that his recruitment of people who, in terms of international law, were foreigners would have serious repercussions for bilateral relations; conflicts with the Foreign Ministry were thus inevitable.

While stationed in Yugoslavia in April 1941 the ‘Das Reich’ division received the order to go ahead and recruit ethnic German volunteers into its ranks. The divisional commander, Paul Hausser, began systematically to carry out medical examinations in ethnic German villages of the Banat and to train the recruits. Ethnic German soldiers of the Yugoslav army who had been captured by the Germans were released if they agreed to join the Waffen-SS. As a result, in one way or another around 1,000 men became members of the Waffen-SS during the spring of 1941.
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From April 1941 on an SS recruitment agency was operating among ethnic Germans in Croatia.
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However, this provoked protests from the Foreign Ministry, which wanted to follow a different path. On 16 September 1941 the German envoy, Siegfried Kasche, made an agreement with the War Minister, Slavko Kvaternik, about the recruitment of ethnic Germans. According to this, 10 per cent of ethnic German recruits were to be reserved for the Wehrmacht (Berger, however, claimed them for the Waffen-SS), but the bulk of the ethnic Germans were to serve in special ethnic German units of the Croatian army.
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Himmler, however, was unimpressed by this. In the late summer of 1941 he established a ‘German Force’ along the lines of the General SS as a security militia as well as a task formation for combating partisans, both of which were formally attached to the Croatian militia, the Ustasha.
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In November 1941, responding to a request from Hess issued in February, Himmler established an Office for Ethnic Questions within the NSDAP, which was to ‘deal with all ethnic issues involving the NSDAP’ with representatives from all four of the main offices that in the meantime had acquired responsibilities for ethnic issues: VoMi, the RuSHA, the RSHA, and the Staff Main Office of the RKF.
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The precise definition of his party responsibilities for ‘settlement issues’, which involved difficult questions of competence, particularly in relation to the Soviet Union, proved problematic, and Himmler was unable to realize his aim of now being able to act as ‘the representative of the NSDAP for the consolidation of the ethnic German nation’.
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Nevertheless, by establishing the office he was clearly expressing his claim to be the main point of contact within the
NSDAP for all ethnic German matters. In March 1942 the office was even raised to the status of a Main Office for Ethnic Questions within the NSDAP’s headquarters.
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Hardly had the office been created when, in November 1941, Himmler met the leaders of the ethnic German groups in Croatia, Slovakia, and Serbia. On this occasion Sepp Janko, who represented the Germans in Banat in Serbia, offered to establish an ethnic German home guard in regimental strength for the purpose of relieving the Wehrmacht units based in Banat. In view of the relevant experience he had gained there, Branimir Altgayer, the leader of the Germans in Croatia, was to provide assistance with the training.
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A few weeks later Hitler approved this plan.
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Moreover, in January 1942 Himmler appointed August von Meyszner as the first HSSPF in Serbia.
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Meyszner not only acquired command over all the police in Serbia,
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but was also given the task of recruiting ethnic Germans for the Waffen-SS.
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In February Himmler ordered von Meyszner to call upon the German ethnic group in Banat to join a self-defence force attached to the Waffen-SS.
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However, de facto the recruitment of volunteers turned into compulsory recruitment by agencies of the ethnic group. Those members of the German minority of military age were also recruited for a new division of the Waffen-SS, which finally received the name ‘Prince Eugene’.
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In this way, by April 1942 some 10,000–15,000 men had been recruited from the Banat, who did not in fact have to meet the SS’s ‘racial’ criteria. They counted as ‘SS volunteers’, not as ‘SS members’.
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In addition, also at the beginning of February 1942, the ‘Banat Staff Guard’ was set up, an ethnic German auxiliary police force, which was formally subordinate to the Serbian Interior Ministry but in fact answered to the German commander of the order police in Belgrade.
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Thus, within a very short period Himmler had managed to mobilize large sections of the German minority in south-east Europe for his military ambitions. That may have been responsible for the fact that, from spring 1942, he floated the idea that in principle ethnic Germans were subject to military conscription just like the Germans in the Reich. However, Berger vetoed that idea in June. He warned that the introduction of military conscription was ‘not possible’ under international law, but in any case it was ‘not at all necessary’, for ‘those who do not volunteer will simply have their houses smashed up’.
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As a result, in July Himmler modified his position accordingly: he now declared that the ethnic German groups throughout south-east Europe must be clear that, although they might
not be subject to it in legal terms, they were subject to military conscription by the ‘iron law of their ethnicity’, and indeed ‘from the age of 17 to 50’.
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From September 1942 onwards all ethnic German males aged between 17 and 60 in Banat who were not already on active military service were in fact required to perform service in the ‘German Force’, a militia similar to the SS, which, like the one in Croatia, performed security duties. Himmler’s order to establish the German Force corresponded to an order (to which we shall return) that he had issued the previous month for the mobilization of the Germans in the General Government and occupied Polish territories.
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All these instructions were designed to achieve a single goal: the total mobilization of all ethnic Germans under the command of the SS.

On 17 October 1942 Himmler visited the ‘Prince Eugene’ division in Kraljevo on his way back from a visit to Italy. On the following day ethnic Germans in the Balkans celebrated the birthday of the person whose name their division bore.
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Recruitment for the division was carried out throughout the Balkans. In the autumn of 1941 the Waffen-SS had already recruited so many ethnic German men in Croatia that the quota of 10 per cent settled on in the agreement of 16 September 1941 was soon exceeded. However—and this point was emphasized by Martin Luther, head of the German department in the Foreign Ministry—this recruitment was jeopardizing the existence of the ethnic German task formation, which had been created to combat the continually increasing partisan movement. Thus, in October 1941 the SS Main Office agreed to cease recruitment.
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However, when it became apparent that the ethnic Germans who, according to the agreement of 16 September, were supposed to serve with special units of the Croatian army were in fact receiving their training from Wehrmacht units, Himmler made a strong complaint to the Wehrmacht and finally succeeded in ensuring that in future the recruitment and training of ethnic Germans throughout south-east Europe would be in the hands of the SS.
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In June 1942 Himmler permitted recruitment to begin again. All 17–30-year-old ethnic Germans from Croatia were to be inspected for admission to the ‘Eugene’ division. In consequence, around 20,000 members of the ethnic German minority who lived in the Bosnian territories which belonged to Croatia, and which had been made insecure as a result of the activities of Yugoslav partisans, had to be resettled because they had been rendered virtually defenceless as a result of the recruitment of their young men. Moreover, putting an end to such ‘scattered settlements’ and their replacement by ‘concentrated settlement’ in closed areas reflected the policy
that Himmler was simultaneously pursuing in Poland and the Soviet Union in his role as Settlement Commissar. The Foreign Ministry temporarily stopped or slowed down the recruitment,
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but then gave way after massive pressure from Berger.
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Voluntary recruitment was in reality a farce, as is clear from the principle enunciated by Himmler in July that ethnic Germans were subject to the ‘iron law of ethnicity’. In fact, all members of the relevant age cohorts were inspected by commissions organized by Obersturmführer Nageler, and the organizations of the ethnic group concerned also applied pressure.
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By the end of November 28,000 men had been inspected and over 6,500 conscripted.
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In December 1941 Hitler ordered the transfer of the ‘Eugene’ division to Croatia in order to fill it with the new recruits. During the first months of 1943 the ethnic German troops of the Croatian Wehrmacht and the task formations were integrated into the division.
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Meanwhile, in December 1942, however, new complications had arisen: the Croatian government wanted to withdraw Croatian citizenship from those ethnic Germans who had joined the SS. But the Germans finally managed to persuade it to agree to postpone dealing with the matter until the end of the war.
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In September 1942, while recruitment was going on, the Reich and Croatian governments made an agreement that, as Himmler had planned, more than 18,000 ethnic Germans were to be resettled. The majority of them ended up in a camp near Ł
ó
ódź; the others were housed in camps scattered throughout the Reich.
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Himmler, however, wanted more: the removal of all Germans living in Croatia. His proposal can be explained partly in terms of his irritation at the difficulties that had arisen in relation to recruitment in Croatia. But he justified his proposal with the argument that this would be a way of demonstrating to their Italian allies (with whom they shared the occupation of Croatia) that the Reich was not pursuing any long-term interests of its own in the country. Himmler’s real motive, however, was probably his overarching Lebensraum project. For in the meantime Himmler had abandoned the idea of using the German minority to exercise influence in Croatia and instead planned to move them to settlement areas in eastern Europe for which there were not yet nearly enough potential settlers. At this point he also proposed the ‘resettlement’ of the ethnic Germans living in Transnistria, which indicates that his plans for ethnic Germans covered the whole of south-east Europe.