Heinrich Himmler : A Life (108 page)

Since the autumn of 1941 Nageler’s men had been at work in Blatschka, which had previously been Serbian but which had been annexed by Hungary, with their operations disguised as a racial-biological research project. By October 1941 they had recruited 2,000 Germans for the Waffen-SS. By the summer of 1941 hundreds of young men from the old Hungarian territory had already been sent to the Reich for ‘sports training’.
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On 18 November Himmler announced to Franz Basch, the leader of the ethnic German group in Hungary, that the Waffen-SS was now aiming to recruit to a far greater extent than before from the Hungarian German men who were living in the core part of Hungary.
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He showed little concern for the political and legal problems created by such a course of action, given that it involved people who had lived there a long time and had Hungarian citizenship. For him these people were merely pawns in his scheme to create a Greater Germanic Reich. The statement that he made in December to the effect that it would be possible to secure around 60,000 ethnic German volunteers from Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia
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is further proof that he regarded the very different conditions prevailing in these various countries as of secondary significance.

The Hungarian government agreed to the recruitment of 20,000 ethnic Germans. The recruitment programme lasted from 24 February to 3 April 1942, and was once again led by Nageler. A total of 25,000 men reported for inspection, 18,000 of whom were graded as fit for combat.
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In June 1942, under pressure from Himmler, Ribbentrop arranged another recruitment programme with the Hungarian government for 1943.
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(An agreement similar to that with Hungary was intended to be made with Romania in 1943.)
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However, from an ‘ethnic-political’ point of view the Hungarian programme had a flaw: the Hungarians had insisted that, on joining the Waffen-SS, the ethnic Germans would lose their Hungarian citizenship.
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This meant that the potential of the German minority for exercising influence was much reduced. Himmler was not only prepared to accept this, he even appears to have been willing to go a step further. Basch reported after the war that Himmler had confided to him that he was planning to resettle the Hungarian Germans in the Warthegau.
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Thus, what originally began as the recruitment of volunteers for self-defence units had led to the de facto military conscription of the ethnic Germans; in the course of this development the SS had not only acquired complete control of the national groups concerned but had even been able to recruit members of their leadership. However, the recruitment
programmes normally had the effect of weakening the national group concerned to the extent that the abandonment of the country in which they had lived for centuries came under discussion and in some cases was actually carried out.

This approach was opposed by the Foreign Ministry. Martin Luther, the head of its German department, had already objected to the resettlement of the German minority in Croatia, complaining in September 1942 that this step would ‘immediately weaken the sense of ethnic solidarity’ of the other 2.5–3 million ethnic Germans in the south east.
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Luther, who had joined the Foreign Ministry in a sideways move from the party and was one of the main figures responsible for the nazification of the ministry, was nevertheless sceptical about SS policy. At the beginning of 1943 Helmut Triska, who was responsible for ethnic policy in the Foreign Ministry, and like Luther had originally come from the party and therefore was basically in favour of the ‘revolutionary’ drive of Nazi ethnic policy, strongly criticized Himmler’s approach in a paper with the title ‘On Radical Measures Taken by the Reich Leadership of the SS Concerning the Policy Towards Ethnic German Groups Abroad’.

In particular Triska complained that, in recruiting 20,000 ethnic Germans from Hungary, Himmler had accepted the loss of their Hungarian citizenship and as a result the group had suffered the permanent loss of its most active members. In Croatia too ‘the physical threat to the German settlements was considerably increased. The German settlements in Bosnia had to be removed and resettled during the war.’ In Serbia, ‘the conscription that was originally going to be carried out by the leaders of the national groups [ . . . ] was carried out directly by the division itself and this was done rigorously, ignoring any political considerations’. As far as Romania was concerned, despite ‘all assurances to the contrary by the Reich leadership of the SS, [ . . . ] numerous ethnic Germans from Romania were illegally conscripted into the ranks of the Waffen-SS, which led to resistance from the Romanian government’ and made ‘Reich policy appear suspect’.

In conclusion, according to Triska, the fact was that

the Reich leadership of the SS […] has pursued policies towards ethnic German groups which have made it virtually impossible to plan future work involving these ethnic groups. [ . . . ] The measures taken have created such political confusion, not only among the foreign governments but also among the agencies of the Reich leadership of the SS, that nobody has any idea whether the ethnic groups in the
various countries concerned are to be prepared for future resettlement, consolidation, or political and economic expansion.

The Reich leadership had ‘either taken, initiated, or advocated measures that have promoted expansion, measures that have consolidated the status quo, and measures that have involved removal, in other words resettlement’. ‘These measures reveal no clear political line.’
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There could hardly be a more apposite description of the chaos that Himmler’s policies had created among the ethnic German minorities in south-east Europe (but not only there).
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For the ruthless policy of recruitment had drained the ethnic German minorities, threatening their very existence, while the Reichsführer’s plans for a new ethnic order remained too nebulous to offer these people an alternative life in another area.

In the second half of 1942 a whole series of developments coincided within Himmler’s empire. As has been shown in the two previous chapters, settlement policy and the increased recruitment of citizens of other countries for the SS were being vigorously pursued, as was the deportation and murder of the European Jews. However, for various reasons a number of obstacles were emerging. In this chapter we shall see how these measures of Himmler’s corresponded with those in other spheres in which he was active during the decisive summer months of 1942. Himmler was successful in securing the responsibility for ‘combating partisans’, in order above all to be in a position to drive forward the annihilation of the Jews in eastern Europe. Combating resistance in the occupied territories generally went hand in hand with an increase in Jewish persecution. He was also to make a serious attempt to establish an SS armaments concern. When that failed he turned to hiring out KZ prisoners as forced labour to industry. In order to increase their number, among other things he had the ‘asocials’ transferred from prison to concentration camp. By taking over the responsibility for punishing slave labourers from eastern Europe he was able to consign them to concentration camps for the slightest offence and thereby to increase his reservoir of labour. These measures, which were motivated partly by racial, partly by security, and partly by economic priorities, were also driven by the Reichsführer-SS’s concern to hold together and combine the various parts of his empire as it expanded in all directions, in order not only to increase his power but above all to be able to realize the political objectives of his grand project to establish a new order on the European continent under the leadership of the SS.

On 28 July, only a few days after the final launching of the European Holocaust, Himmler embarked on a journey to Finland.
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Despite a programme packed with meetings, he was intending to make time for a bit
of relaxation. After a stopover in Reval he landed in Helsinki on the morning of 9 July, where he was officially welcomed by the President, Risto Ryti, and in the evening attended a dinner given by the Prime Minister, Johan Wilhelm Rangell. On the following day he was given a tour of the city and in the afternoon flew to Mikelli, the headquarters of the Finnish Commander-in-Chief, Marshall Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim, whom he met in the evening. During the following days he had meetings with Colonel-General Eduard Dietl in Rovaniemi and with the commander of the SS Division ‘North’, Matthias Kleinheisterkamp, in Kananeinen, and inspected Waffen-SS units. On 2 August Himmler travelled for two days of relaxation on the island of Petays, which had been recommended to him by his masseur, Felix Kersten, for the ‘magnetic healing’ properties of its sunbathing. On 2 August he met Prime Minister Rangell on Petays and, according to the latter’s postwar testimony, raised the question of Finland’s attitude to its indigenous Jews. Rangell claims to have evaded the issue by remarking that that there was no ‘Jewish question’ in Finland, which had around 2,000 assimilated Jews.
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In fact the small Jewish minority was not affected by the Jewish policy of its mighty German ally. After a bit of sightseeing in Helsinki on 5 August Himmler flew back to his headquarters the following day.

In parallel with Himmler’s initiative in Finland, during July and August 1942 the RSHA tried to get other allies to hand over their Jews. When viewed together, these various actions clearly indicate that the RSHA was now determined to try to deport Jews from as many European states as possible in the course of 1942.

In July the police attaché at the embassy in Zagreb was instructed to initiate ‘the resettlement’ of the Croatian Jews to ‘Germany’s eastern territories’. The Ustasha regime had already created the preconditions for this: from the spring of 1941 onwards it had introduced anti-Semitic legislation modelled on Germany’s and interned more than half of the 30,000 Jews living in Croatia in camps, in which the majority were murdered or died as a result of the appalling conditions.
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In August the Germans organized four deportation trains to Auschwitz, where nearly 5,000 Jews were murdered.

Since the summer of 1941 Romania had been actively involved in the German policy of exterminating the Jews in the newly conquered eastern territories. In the territories of Bessarabia and the Bukovina, which had just been reconquered from the Soviet Union, the Romanians murdered around 50,000 Jews; the Jewish inhabitants of this area who survived, around 150,000 people, were deported to the territory occupied by Romania
between the Dniester and the Bug rivers. At least 65,000 of these people died of hunger and in epidemics or were shot.
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In July 1942 the Reich demanded control over the Jews in the core Romanian territory. The adviser on ‘Jewish questions’ at the German embassy in Bucharest, SS-Hauptsturmführer Gustav Richter, made an agreement with the Romanian government that the around 320,000 Jews affected, who since 1938 had been subjected to increasingly tough anti-Semitic legislation, should be deported from 10 September 1942 onwards. The German ambassador in Bucharest, Manfred von Killinger, informed the Foreign Ministry that the destination of the transports was to be the district of Lublin, where ‘those capable of working would be deployed in labour columns while the remainder would be subjected to special treatment’.
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In Hungary the situation was different. Although anti-Semitic legislation had been passed, in the view of the Germans it was not sufficiently effective, as it hardly went beyond the Nuremberg laws.
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When, in July 1942, the Hungarian military attaché in Berlin submitted his government’s proposal that all Jews living in Hungary ‘illegally’ should be resettled to Transnistria,
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Himmler decided to postpone the deportation of Jewish refugees requested by Hungary until the Hungarians had agreed to include their indigenous Jews in the proposed measures.
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As far as Bulgaria was concerned, in the summer of 1942 the RSHA considered that its Jewish legislation was also inadequate to initiate deportation.
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Moreover, they were making no progress in the case of Greece either. Attempts by the RSHA and the Foreign Ministry during the second half of 1942 to persuade their Italian allies to adopt a tougher anti-Semitic policy in their two occupation zones in Greece—namely, to introduce the marking of Jews with a badge—came to nothing.
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During July and August the RSHA also increased the tempo of deportations in the occupied western territories. Following Himmler’s order of June to deport all French Jews, ten initial transports with a total of around 10,000 people were sent to Auschwitz between 19 July and 7 August. Those being deported, stateless Jews who had often lost their citizenship only as a result of German Jewish policy, were arrested in a major raid that took place in Paris on 16 and 17 July.
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As had been agreed with the Vichy government in July, from August onwards they also began deporting Jews from the unoccupied zone. Moreover, between 14 and 26 August over 2,000 Jewish children were sent to Auschwitz in six transports, despite the fact that most
of them were French citizens. Both the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, and the RSHA had given their express approval for this action.
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The deportations from the Netherlands began in the middle of July: around 38,000 people had been sent to Auschwitz by the end of the year.
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From 4 August 1942 trains from Belgium travelled in the same direction.
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By the end of 1942 almost 17,000 people, all of them foreign or stateless Jews, had fallen victim to these measures.
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Meanwhile, at the end of July HSSPF Fritz Katzmann had once again begun the mass murder of Jews in the General Government, in accordance with Himmler’s order to make the territory ‘free of Jews’ by the end of the year. In the major ‘August action’, which took place between 10 and 25 August, he had more than 40,000 Jews arrested in the district capital of Lemberg (Lviv) alone, around half of the city’s population of Jews, and then deported in goods trains to Belzec, where they were murdered.
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