Heinrich Himmler : A Life (110 page)

In view of the increasing threat posed by Soviet partisans, in July 1942 Hitler decided that in future the police should be responsible in the first instance
for combating them.
⁵¹
This decision was made at precisely the moment when Himmler was involving the whole of Europe in the extermination programme, and it underlines once more the close link between the Holocaust and ‘combating partisans’. The maxim that Jews were ‘to be exterminated as partisans’ had been in force ever since the invasion of the Soviet Union; as already mentioned, Hitler had specifically confirmed it to Himmler on 18 December 1941 and, by transferring to him this responsibility, provided him with further room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis the programme of mass murder.

However, that was not the only point. Himmler had already proved how brutally he could act against ‘bandits’ even when the murder of Jews was not the main priority. On 25 June 1942 he had ordered that ‘bandit activity’ in Upper Carniola and Lower Styria—in other words in the territory annexed from Yugoslavia—should be ‘totally’ crushed in a ‘four-week-long campaign’ under the direction of the HSSPF for the Alpine region, Erwin Rösener. ‘Every last German man in this territory but also from outside this area from the old Gaus of Kärnten and Styria, who is capable of bearing arms and aged between 17 and 55, is to be mobilized for this campaign [ . . . ] The campaign is to be purposeful, tough, and ruthless.’

Himmler spelled out what this involved in detailed ‘guidelines’.

The campaign must neutralize all elements of the population who have willingly supported the partisans by providing manpower, food supplies, weaponry, and shelter. The men of a guilty family, in many cases even the clan, are to be executed as a matter of principle; the women of these families are to be arrested and sent to a concentration camp and the children are to be removed from their home and to be collected together in the Old Reich part of the Gau. I shall expect separate reports about the number and racial quality of these children. The possessions of the guilty families are to be confiscated.

‘The campaign’, according to Himmler, ‘will require from the leaders and men the utmost in the performance of their duty and in discretion as well as in physical performance and exertion in the difficult mountain terrain I expect leaders and men of the SS and police to fulfil the expectations that have been placed in them.’
⁵²
In fact the coming months saw a large number of executions, arrests, and compulsory adoptions in this occupied territory.
⁵³

On 28 July 1942 Himmler made an official announcement that the ‘Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police’ had now, ‘in agreement with the OKW’, become ‘the supreme agency for combating the so-called
partisans’. ‘I am personally assuming [command of this] struggle against bandits,
francs-tireurs
, and criminals.’
⁵⁴
A few days later he ordered that the term ‘partisan’ should not be used in future, and that instead the term to be used should be ‘bandits’ (
Banden
).
⁵⁵
On 18 October Hitler confirmed Himmler’s general responsibility for ‘combating bandits’, and stated specifically that Himmler should be ‘solely responsible’ in the Reich Commissariats, whereas in the districts under military administration the Wehrmacht should be in charge.
⁵⁶

Already on 9 July the Reichsführer-SS had summoned high-ranking SS functionaries to Berlin to a meeting about the future combating of partisan activity. As usual Himmler was not slow to put forward proposals: for example, the population of the occupied Soviet territories should be forced to cut down trees and bushes on either side of the roads and railways to a depth of 400 to 500 metres in order to deprive the partisans of cover. For a variety of reasons the Reich Ministry for the Eastern Territories failed to implement this.
⁵⁷

He had more success with another suggestion. On 17 August Himmler, with the Führer’s approval, imposed on those Germans living in the General Government and occupied Soviet territories who were not serving in the Wehrmacht, police, or SS the ‘duty of honour’ ‘to increase the combat strength of the SS/police by placing themselves at its disposal in their free time, and particularly during emergencies’, by serving in ‘alarm units’. Himmler admitted that this would mean that in future they would lose their weekends because of having to carry out exercises, but he was convinced that those affected ‘would be happy, even if they were not liable for military service,
⁵⁸
to be able to serve the Fatherland in some capacity by bearing arms’.
⁵⁹
It is clear that this provided the local SS and police agencies with a powerful weapon for putting pressure on members of the civilian administration or employees of German firms; the total mobilization of all Germans in the occupied east strengthened the power of the SS and police.

On 7 August Himmler issued detailed orders for two major campaigns against partisans in the General Commissariat of White Ruthenia and the district of Bialystok.
⁶⁰
The operations ‘Marsh Fever’ and ‘Wisent’ took place during August–September and September–October 1942. However ‘Marsh Fever’, which was commanded by the HSSPF for Russia-North, Jeckeln, proved to be something of a failure as far as combating partisans was concerned. In order to make the result appear more impressive, in addition to 389 ‘bandits’ who had allegedly been shot in combat and 1,274 bandits
who had been ‘found guilty’, Jeckeln had more than 8,000 Jews shot out of hand, among them almost the whole population of the Baranowicze ghetto. Although this mass murder fitted in with Himmler’s aim of pushing on with the murder of Jews under the cover of ‘combating bandits’, at the same time he wanted to see more dead ‘bandits’. As a result, the responsibility for ‘combating bandits’ in White Ruthenia was transferred to the HSSPF for Russia-Centre, von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was considered more effective.
⁶¹

Ernst von dem Bach-Zelewski was to become Himmler’s most important commander in the field of ‘combating bandits’. However, at this point, as HSSPF for Russia-Centre, the dynamic Bach was responsible only for territory under military administration. But, according to the Führer directive of 18 August, the Wehrmacht was responsible for ‘combating bandits’ in this area. Bach, therefore, requested Himmler to appoint him ‘Inspector for the Combating of Bandits in the Whole of the Eastern Territories’.
⁶²

On 22 September Himmler discussed this proposal with Hitler in the context of a conversation lasting several hours which, apart from the threat from partisans, covered the settlement of ethnic Germans in the eastern territories and ‘Jewish emigration’,
⁶³
a further indication of the extent to which these three topics were linked in Himmler’s conception of the reordering of living-space in the east. Hitler agreed, and on 24 October Himmler appointed his HSSPF Russia-Centre not only as ‘The Reichsführer-SS’s Plenipotentiary for Combating Bandits’ but also signed a total of five edicts regulating this new office.
⁶⁴

Above all, Himmler subordinated to him the General Commissariat White Ruthenia, which was under civilian administration, for the duration of the planned ‘pacification campaign’. This was followed in November by the appointment of Curt von Gottberg as the new SS and Police Leader in White Ruthenia. Thus, Gottberg, who had been in the political wilderness since 1939 as a result of the Prague ‘Land Office affair’,
⁶⁵
was being given the chance to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of his Reichsführer by particularly ruthless action. By transferring the Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, which was largely composed of criminals,
⁶⁶
to Byelorussia Himmler was placing at von dem Bach-Zelewski’s and Gottberg’s disposal a particularly brutal force for carrying out the planned ‘pacification campaign’.
⁶⁷
Thus Himmler had appointed a handpicked trio for ‘combating bandits’ in this area: three former losers who wanted to earn the respect of their superior. Between November 1942 and the beginning of May 1943 alone the SS,
police, and Wehrmacht killed over 40,000 people in White Ruthenia in the course of eighteen major campaigns.
⁶⁸

On 30 October 1942 Himmler ordered that during all the campaigns against partisans in the occupied Soviet territories ‘every member of the population who can be spared and is capable of work should be taken prisoner and sent to work in Germany’.
⁶⁹
In this he was following a directive from Göring, about which he was evidently not happy. As late as February he was refusing to transfer the men who had been taken prisoner during the anti-partisan campaigns to the Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization, Fritz Sauckel; the people locked up in concentration camps were ‘suspect bandits’, and should not be released as ‘free workers’.
⁷⁰
However, in view of the acute labour shortage in the German war economy, from the summer of 1943 onwards he had to give way.

By being given the responsibility for combating bandits, Himmler had acquired the authority he needed to suppress all opposition in the occupied eastern territories. In the ‘east’, as a matter of principle, the security police and SD did not confine themselves to responding to acts of resistance that had already occurred but rather proceeded prophylactically: at the latest from 1942 onwards they were instructed to kill all communists in the occupied Soviet territories, even if there was no evidence that they had committed any actual acts of resistance. This practice became routine.
⁷¹
Moreover, in the Polish territories which had been temporarily under Soviet occupation from 1939 to 1941 the ‘eastern types’ and ‘Soviet people’ who had come to this area during this period were often murdered or put in forced labour camps simply because of the suspicion that they might be loyal to the Soviet state. Those functionaries who had been evacuated eastwards by the Soviets were particularly affected by these measures. Furthermore, all those who were assumed to be of ‘asiatic’ descent were suspect. They were considered per se to be agents of the Soviet regime and were killed arbitrarily and without pity.
⁷²

Himmler’s policy in the eastern territories was basically quite simple: by acting with extreme brutality he aimed to reorganize the ‘living-space’ that had been conquered. He rejected concessions or favours to the indigenous population. Thus, he not only objected in April 1942 to Rosenberg’s proposal for a ‘new agrarian order’ offering the rural population the prospect of having private property (a scheme which failed anyway);
⁷³
he also vehemently opposed any attempt to promise the Russians a ‘nation state’.
⁷⁴
The pamphlet
The Subhuman
issued by Himmler’s SS Main Office clearly
illustrates—with photographs to demonstrate the inferiority of the Soviet peoples—their view of ‘eastern people’: ‘a frightful creature [ . . . ] just an approximation to a proper human being [ . . . ] but intellectually and spiritually inferior to any animal.’
⁷⁵

The ‘new agrarian order’ was not the only bone of contention between Rosenberg and Himmler. Responsible in the meantime for the liberally interpreted ‘police measures for guaranteeing the security’ of the occupied eastern territories, the ‘consolidation of the ethnic German nation’, and the combating of bandits—a responsibility that he was to extend to the whole of the Soviet Union in 1943—Himmler could envisage neutralizing Rosenberg. His correspondence with the Minister for the East concerning disputes over responsibility fill several files, but the extensive memoranda Rosenberg composed in the course of these disputes merely document his inexorable retreat.
⁷⁶

In April 1942 Himmler even went so far as openly to express his total contempt for Rosenberg in a letter to Alfred Meyer, of all people, who was the state secretary in the Ministry for the East and Rosenberg’s deputy. After expressing a hypocritical regret at his frankness, he went on to write that, of course, Rosenberg was ‘not a soldier and none of us expects him to be or to become one. We party comrades value and honour him for making his name as the Reich leader of the NSDAP responsible for ideology. But, even if he is Minister for the East, Party comrade Rosenberg must leave soldierly matters to the people who are responsible for them and who have to answer for them.’
⁷⁷
As far as Himmler was concerned, Rosenberg was nothing but a wimp. At the beginning of 1943, since Heydrich, his original contact-man with Rosenberg, was no longer available, he agreed with the Minister for the East that in future the head of the SS-Main Office, Berger, would fulfil this role in the rank of a state secretary.
⁷⁸

Although not directly affected by Himmler’s responsibility for combating bandits, during 1942 the occupied countries of central, western, and northern Europe were also exposed to repression at the hands of the SS and security police.

In Norway the SS and police court intervened in the political persecution of the population for the first time from the middle of 1942 onwards; that is to say, it dealt with cases in which the investigations were carried out and the charges were brought by the security police. By the middle of 1944 a total of 127 death sentences had been passed in such trials.
⁷⁹
Moreover, in
response to acts of sabotage, in October 1942 the German occupation authorities declared martial law in the district of Trondheim. Thirty-four people were summarily executed. At the same time the security police ordered the arrest of all male Jews in this district, a measure that two weeks later was extended to every Jew in the country and led finally to the deportation of the Norwegian Jews. Once more, as in France and in the Protectorate, an ‘act of reprisal’ in a German-occupied country had concluded with violent anti-Jewish measures.
⁸⁰