Heinrich Himmler : A Life (109 page)

This mass murder was in full swing on 17 August when Himmler arrived in Lemberg for a meeting that was attended by, among others, Governor Otto Wächter, Katzmann, and Globocnik. On this day alone Katzmann had had 3,051 people arrested, who were then deported to Belzec.
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On the following day Himmler, as usual, wanted to see for himself; to begin with he inspected various SS offices and then a number of camps for Jewish forced labour working on the Transit Road IV. In the evening he flew back to Berlin.
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Three days later he once again met Globocnik, this time in Lublin, and travelled with him to the area round Zamosc to see what progress had been made towards its ‘Germanization’.
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Between 31 August and 3 September Himmler had to deal with a completely different issue: air-raid damage. He undertook a journey lasting several days to cities in north and west Germany which had been hit particularly badly by the increasing Allied air raids, gained a clear picture of the extent of the damage, and then issued instructions for its clearing-up. In the process he demonstrated once again how flexible he was in linking his various responsibilities. Teams of KZ prisoners, who had originally been intended for building-projects in the east, were now utilized for the clearance of air-raid damage in the west and KZ workshops were used to provide door- and window-frames.
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A few weeks later Himmler had to face the fact that his plan to make the whole of the General Government ‘free of Jews’ by the end of the year could not be achieved. At the armaments conference held between 20 and
23 September 1942 Hitler agreed with the proposal of the head of labour mobilization, Fritz Sauckel, that in view of the dramatic shortage of labour Jewish skilled workers in the General Government should continue to be employed.
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Himmler, who evidently discussed the consequences of this decision with Hitler on 22 September,
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reacted quickly. Since his attempt from the beginning of the year to integrate forced labour into the extermination programme had resulted in his now having to slow down mass murder in favour of slave labour, he would now have to increase the number of KZ prisoners who could be forced to work. He would do this through mass arrests of non-Jews (which will be discussed below), as well as by confining ghetto inhabitants in concentration or forced labour camps. On 9 October 1942 he ordered that ‘so-called armaments workers’ in textile and other plants in Warsaw and Lublin should be gathered together in concentration camps. Those Jews who were employed in ‘real armaments plants’ should be removed in stages so that there would be only ‘a few big Jewish concentration camp plants’ left, preferably in the east of the General Government. ‘However, even there, according to the Führer, the Jews should disappear one day.’
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Police regulations issued in October and November 1942 confined ‘Jewish residential districts’ to restricted areas.
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For all those Polish Jews who were not engaged in armaments production these regulations represented certain death. At the end of 1942, according to official German data, only 298,000 of the 2.3 million Jews who had been originally living in the General Government were still alive.
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Himmler also intervened directly in the extermination process in the Soviet Union, to which the basic instructions for the systematic murder of European Jews issued in May and June 1942 had particularly applied. In doing so he made use of the fact that in July 1942 Hitler had given him responsibility for ‘combating bandits’.

In May 1942 the Einsatzgruppen had resumed their murderous activity systematically and on a large scale in the General Commissariat of White Ruthenia. At the end of July Commissar-General Wilhelm Kube reported that ‘during the past 10 weeks around 55,000 Jews [have] been liquidated’.
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In the Reich Commissariat Ukraine, where a new wave of murders had also begun in May, the scale of murder was stepped up in July, a development exactly matching that in the General Government, where Himmler had ordered the annihilation of the Jewish population by the end of the year, and which was also directly linked to the responsibility for ‘combating bandits’. This involved, as we shall see, not simply the elimination of actual
partisans but all ‘suspect elements’, and by definition these included the Jewish population. A letter from Himmler to Berger dated 28 July 1942 provides documentary evidence that this responsibility was the equivalent of an order from Hitler for the systematic murder of the Soviet population in the occupied Soviet territories: with a hint of self-pity, he declared: ‘The occupied eastern territories will become free of Jews. The Führer has placed the implementation of this very burdensome order on my shoulders. Nobody can relieve me of this responsibility.’
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At the end of August 1942 there was a further escalation in the Ukraine: the aim was now the complete annihilation of the Jewish population. It is worth remembering in this context the settlement plans Himmler was pursuing at the same time for the Ukraine, where he had based his headquarters throughout the summer months. These involved ‘the settlement together’ of 10,000 ethnic Germans in and around Shitomir and the idea that parts of the Ukraine would be completely ‘German’ within a period of only twenty years. Against this background it is not surprising that the occupying authorities concentrated on systematically murdering, district by district, all the Jews living there, in particular in the General Commissariats of Volhynia-Podolia and Shitomir, centres of Jewish life in the Ukraine.
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It is true that the settlement of ethnic Germans occurred directly at the expense of the Ukrainians (and not of the Jews). However, the indirect link between the future of the ethnic Germans and the ‘Jewish question’ within the context of a ‘new ethnic order’ is obvious.

The SD office in Pinsk began to dissolve the city ghetto at the end of October. This was prompted by a written order from Himmler of 27 October 1942:

According to my information, the ghetto in Pinsk can be regarded as the headquarters for all the bandit activity in the Pripet marshes. I therefore recommend that, despite any economic concerns you may have, you immediately dissolve and liquidate the ghetto in Pinsk. If possible 1,000 male workers are to be secured and transferred to the Wehrmacht for the construction of the wooden huts. The work of these 1,000 workers must, however, be carried out only in a closed camp under the strictest guard. If this guard cannot be provided then these 1,000 workers should also be annihilated.
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The instruction was immediately carried out. Between 29 October and 1 November at least 16,200 people were murdered, in a massacre lasting four days.
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Ill. 29.
This is how Himmler liked to see himself: constantly on the move in order to take decisions on the spot, drive things forward, and personally intervene to sort things out. The photo comes from a collection of private photos that Himmler sent his daughter Gudrun, in order to keep in touch with her.

At the end of 1942 there were only a few thousand Jewish skilled workers still left in the Ukraine.
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The HSSPF for South Russia, Hans Prützmann, reported to Himmler on 26 December 1942 that in the course of ‘combating the bandits’ in the area for which he was responsible, which included the Ukraine and Bialystok, between 1 September and 1 December 1942 a total of 363,211 Jews had been ‘executed’. On 29 December Himmler passed on the report to Hitler, who took note of it.
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From September onwards, however, there were increasing signs that the deportations, which since the summer of 1942 had come to involve the whole of Europe, would by no means proceed smoothly. The problems were not confined to the General Government. In a number of places there were even intentional delays and resistance.

At the armaments conference from 20 to 22 September 1942 referred to above Hitler had spoken of the ‘importance of removing the Jews from the
armaments plants’.
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A few days later he emphasized to Goebbels his determination, ‘under all circumstances to get the Jews out of Berlin’; Jewish workers were to be replaced by foreigners.
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At that point, however, it was simply not possible. It was only the increased recruitment of foreigners and POWs for armaments production from the beginning of 1943 onwards, and the general toughening of domestic policy after Stalingrad, that provided the preconditions for a new wave of deportations from the Reich. Nevertheless, Himmler did all he possibly could to realize Hitler’s aim of making the Reich ‘free of Jews’. In September he made an agreement with the Reich Minister of Justice, Otto Georg Thierack, that he would take over all ‘asocial elements’ who were in prison, including all Jews, Gypsies, Russians, and Poles, for ‘extermination through labour’.
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On 29 September he inspected Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and on the same day instructed Glücks, the Inspector of Concentration Camps, ‘to make all concentration camps based in the Reich free of Jews and [ . . . ] to transfer all Jews to Auschwitz concentration camp and the POW camp in Lublin’, an instruction which, on 5 October, the RSHA passed on to the relevant offices and which was substantially carried out during the following months.
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In France, after the transports in July and August the deportation programme came to a halt. As a large number of children were held in the camps, the attempt to continue the deportations aroused public opposition from the Catholic Church and the population was vehemently hostile. Thus, at the beginning of September the Vichy government informed the Germans that further arrests and deportations could no longer be carried out in the unoccupied zone.
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Thus, in view of the threat to the domestic reputation of Prime Minister Laval, in September HSSPF Carl Oberg persuaded Himmler, as a kind of gesture of good-will towards the French, not to deport any more French citizens from the occupied zone for the time being.
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This was a remarkable change of policy, given the fact that as recently as June the Reichsführer had demanded the complete deportation of all Jews from France by the end of the year. Now the occupation authorities increasingly concentrated on arresting foreign Jews in the occupied zone, who were deported to the east during November in four more transports. After that there was a stop to the deportations; by then 42,000 people had been deported from France.
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In Norway a wave of arrests began on the 25 October after the RSHA had been pushing for the deportation of the small Jewish minority. In November the first of a total of 770 Jews were deported—930 had fled to Sweden.
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The Foreign Ministry and the RSHA also had little success with their allies in the autumn of 1942. Despite several initiatives it became clear that, apart from Croatia, all the allies who during 1942 had been included in the German deportation plans had by the autumn frustrated their intentions. In Slovakia the deportations had come to a complete halt by October 1942;
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Romania was evidently stalling the procedure that had been agreed in July.
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In January 1943 Himmler finally realized that there was no point in pushing the Romanian government to deliver up its Jews; he therefore suggested that the ‘Jewish adviser’ at the German embassy in Bucharest should be withdrawn.
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Bulgaria
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and Hungary
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also showed a lack of commitment in October 1942.

At the end of November Himmler had still believed that the deportations from Hungary could soon be set in train. For this purpose he offered Ribbentrop the services of an experienced expert, for example Dieter Wisliceny, to act as the ‘desk officer for Jewish questions’ at the German embassy in Budapest. As a ‘first instalment’ 100,000 Jews could be deported from the territories annexed from Slovakia and Romania.
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However, in December he had to accept that the Hungarians had no interest in deporting their indigenous Jews.
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In October 1942 under-state secretary Luther’s attempts, made via the German missions in Rome and Zagreb, to clarify the Italians’ attitude towards the deportation of Croatian Jews from their occupation zone met with no more success.
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Even Himmler could not make a difference. At a meeting with Mussolini during a visit to Italy in October 1942 the two men discussed the ‘Jewish question’. On this occasion Himmler gave Mussolini an insight, partly realistic and partly glossed over, into its violent ‘solution’. However, before he could get round to discussing Italian Jewish policy, Mussolini ended the interview with a ‘friendly enquiry about the programme for my stay in Rome and my next travel programme’.
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By this time the Jews living in Croatia had already been interned by the Italian occupation authorities. This had removed them from German clutches.
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