Heinrich Himmler : A Life (111 page)

Belgium was under military administration, and the Wehrmacht’s Secret Field Police, which was responsible in the first instance for the suppression of resistance, repeatedly shot hostages. Here the representative of the Chief of the Security Police and SD attached to the head of the military administration—Belgium was the only country in which Himmler did not succeed in appointing a HSSPF until 1944—pursued an independent policy of repression. From June 1941 until August 1942 he succeeded in getting the RSHA to issue 600 orders for protective custody and deporting those involved to concentration camps in the Reich.
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In France Himmler succeeded in appointing a HSSPF in March 1942, in other words, at the same time as the first transports of Jewish hostages to Auschwitz.
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Carl Oberg, who was appointed to the post on 1 June 1942, secured the right to issue directives to the French police and, through the transformation of the stations of the Secret Field Police, which were distributed throughout the country, into stations of the security police and SD, acquired an executive apparatus operating throughout the country. Helmut Knochen, who had been in charge of the Sipo commando in Paris since 1940, became the commander of the security police.
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In July 1942 Oberg used his strong position to secure an agreement with the French police chief René Bosquet for close cooperation between the German and French police, which in turn was granted greater freedom of action in the occupied zone.
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During the course of the summer Oberg and Knochen not only drove forward the anti-Jewish policy in the occupied and unoccupied zones but ordered further mass executions of hostages on 11 August and 21 September. However, as attacks by the resistance in September and October increased Oberg came to the same conclusion that the military administration had reached the previous year, namely, that from the point of view of the occupation authorities ‘reprisal’ executions were counter-productive (at the same time he successfully persuaded Himmler to take account of the
doubts of the Vichy government about the wisdom of deporting French Jews). Oberg now prepared other types of ‘atonement’, which from 1943 onwards took the form above all of the deportation of Jews and opponents to German concentration camps.
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The excessive revenge taken by the security police in the Protectorate after Heydrich’s death in June 1942 has already been referred to. After this wave of terror the HSSPF tried to calm the general situation. The most important priority of the occupation authorities was to exploit the country economically, and that required quiet on the political front. Although arrests were made and death sentences passed for resistance activities, the reprisals were far less severe than the terror that reigned in Poland or Yugoslavia.
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As is evident from the examples of France and the Protectorate, Himmler’s top functionaries in the occupied territories were by no means always in favour of a policy of boundless terror. That was not only a reflection of security police considerations but a result of the fact that another factor was becoming increasingly important: the growing need for forced labour in the concentration camps. In view of this it seemed more advisable to deport resisters to concentration camps rather than shoot them.

Until the beginning of 1942 the SS, in the shape of the official responsible for economic matters, Oswald Pohl, had largely been responding to requests from industry without developing a strategy for building up its own armaments capacity.
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That changed during the winter crisis of 1941–2, when the switch from ‘Blitzkrieg’ to a more substantial mobilization of all the resources required for fighting what looked like turning into a total war was becoming evident. As a contribution to solving the emerging shortage of labour, Himmler ordered the employment of Jewish workers en masse and, as has already been shown, with the establishment of the Business and Administration Main Office created the preconditions for the ‘economization’ of the concentration camp system.

On 16 March Richard Glücks, who was in charge of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, met representatives of the Armaments Ministry in order to discuss various possibilities of deploying prisoners. Glücks explained that the SS did not wish to have any influence on the decisions about what was
to be produced, but, in accordance with a ‘decree of the Reichsführer-SS [ . . . ] the actual production process itself [had to] take place within the camps’.
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Walter Schieber, the departmental head within Speer’s Armaments Ministry, then set about establishing such projects. For example, it was arranged that the Wilhelm Gustloff Works in Weimar would produce rifles in KZ Buchenwald, and a number of other projects were under discussion.
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In July 1942 Himmler seized the initiative. After a meeting with Schieber he produced for Pohl a list of various armaments projects (for example, apart from rifles, the production of pistols and anti-aircraft guns) to be carried out in four camps. Himmler was particularly interested in an Opel factory near Auschwitz which the SS was to construct and operate. He hoped that this would accelerate the SS’s motorization.
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It was not by chance that an SS armaments concern was being created at this juncture. For in this same month of July Himmler introduced de facto military conscription for ethnic Germans in south-east Europe, which he envisaged leading to a further expansion of the Waffen-SS. These recruits had to be armed and equipped.

In fact, however, all these initiatives more or less came to nothing. It was possible to begin producing rifles in Buchenwald only in the spring of 1943, and even then production was slow to get going. In August 1944 the production facilities were destroyed in an air raid. The plan to produce hand-guns in Neuengamme had to be aborted, and the same happened to most of the other projects. It was only in Auschwitz that fuses for shells were produced—instead of the planned anti-aircraft guns.
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Factory production never got going in the concentration camps because high-calibre machine tools were difficult to acquire, because productivity in the KZ plants was comparatively low as a result of the terrible living and working conditions,
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but above all because Himmler had overlooked the fact that the precondition for his plans—a cooperative relationship with industry
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—could not exist so long as the SS controlled production. For industry was determined to keep control of the manufacturing processes that had been transferred to the concentration camps.

On 15 September 1942 Speer and Pohl reached agreement on the need to deploy more KZ prisoners for armaments production. Pohl informed Himmler of the details, addressing the decisive point quite openly: ‘we must no longer narrow-mindedly insist on all the manufacturing processes being transferred to our camps. So long as we were engaged only in piddling things, as you Herr Reichsführer quite rightly described our previous
operations in view of their limited scope, we could demand that this should happen.’ But in the case of armaments plants with 5,000 or more prisoners this was no longer feasible; as Speer pointed out, these had to be situated ‘on green-field sites’. According to the agreement with Speer, Pohl went on, the SS should take over vacant or understaffed plants, fill them ‘100% with our prisoners’, and run them as SS armaments plants, but outside the camps. In this way Speer wanted to ‘accommodate 50,000 Jews capable of work in closed plants that already existed’. Pohl wanted these prisoners ‘withdrawn from the eastern emigration’.
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By doing this Pohl had ignored Himmler’s instruction that production should be moved to the camps. But in any case, the agreement was unrealistic since the KZ prisoners who were being thrown together and who were not adequately trained would not have been in a position to take over complete production processes at short notice. Moreover, the SS did not have the requisite experience to prepare and organize the production processes.

In the armaments conference, which ran from 20 to 22 September, Speer then alerted Hitler to the fact that it would be inadvisable to move the manufacturing facilities to the KZs and that Himmler’s demand that the SS should have a ‘decisive influence on these businesses’ was inappropriate. The more sensible solution would be to introduce a second shift of KZ prisoners in certain plants. Hitler agreed with Speer and, as compensation for the prisoners that he was placing at the disposal of industry, promised Himmler that between 3 and 5 per cent of production would be allocated to the Waffen-SS.
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That represented the end of the SS armaments concern. In future the SS restricted its role to hiring out prisoners, and for this purpose established satellite camps all over the Reich linked to the relevant plants.

In September 1942 Speer aborted one more ambitious armaments project that Himmler had been pursuing since the end of 1941. As already mentioned, according to a Führer order of January 1942 the Reichsführer had been promised ‘the establishment, equipping, and running’ of a light metal foundry in the VW works. From spring onwards hundreds of prisoners had been employed there: a special KZ (‘workers’ village’) had been built near the plant. In the middle of September 1942 Speer banned the construction of the building on the grounds that the economic relevance of the project to armaments production was dubious. This meant that Himmler’s attempt to engage in armaments production through this show project had also failed.
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When, in the autumn of 1941, it began to become clear that the war was not going to end soon the criminal police (Kripo) acquired new tasks. On the previous assumption that the war would soon be over, from the summer of 1940 onwards it had concentrated on the regime’s aims in the sphere of population policy. But now the effects of the air war, wartime economic offences, and the increased surveillance of young people and foreigners created new priorities for the criminal police, operating under the terms of a completely new interpretation of ‘preventive policing’.

The air war confronted the Kripo with a variety of problems: bomb victims had to be identified and looters brought to book. Above all, in the second half of the war property offences, facilitated by the black-out measures and the damage to or destruction of buildings, rose enormously in the cities that had been attacked. Moreover, many people’s normal inhibitions were removed by the immediate threat under which they were living and by the destruction of their usual way of life. Youth gangs emerged in the rubble of the bombed cities and the black market flourished. Cases of homicide and robberies also increased.
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The so-called delinquency of young people was of particular concern to the Reichsführer. On 26 January 1942 he sent Heydrich a report by the Reich Youth Leadership which described the leisure activities of the so-called ‘Swing Youth’ (
Swing-Jugend
) in Hamburg: young people from mainly middle-class backgrounds, who played banned ‘swing music’ at parties and elsewhere, expressed their opposition to the Hitler Youth and other institutions of the Nazi state. Himmler was livid:

All of the leaders, and that means both male and female leaders and those teachers who are hostile to us and support the Swing Youth, are to be sent to a concentration camp. There the young people must first receive a beating and then be made to perform the toughest possible exercises and forced to do hard work. I consider that a work camp or a youth camp is inappropriate for these blokes and these useless girls. The girls must be forced to do weaving and in summer to work on the land. These young people must be confined to a concentration camp for a lengthy period of two or three years. It must be made clear that they will never be allowed to study. Enquiries must be made to see how far their parents have supported them; if they have supported them then they too should be sent to a concentration camp and their property should be confiscated. Only if we act brutally will we be able to get
on top of this anglophyle [
sic
] trend at a time when Germany is fighting for its existence and prevent it from spreading.
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From 1942 onwards the regime was concerned that increasing criminality and evidence of social delinquency might damage Germany’s image as an orderly state and have a negative impact on the mood of the home front. In Hitler’s view, it was the ‘mob’ who were primarily responsible for starting the revolution of 1918. In his draconian opinion, in the event of a revolt breaking out, ‘within two days all criminals should be killed’.
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The transition to the systematic extermination of criminals and ‘asocials’ in the second half of 1942 was a logical consequence of this attitude. It was largely carried out by the Reichsführer-SS.

This new murderous form of ‘criminal prevention’ was also aimed at the east European forced workers in the Reich, who in the meantime numbered millions. In September 1941 Himmler had objected in vain to the decision to bring civilian workers into the Reich in addition to Polish workers and Soviet POWs. The amount of resources that were involved in pursuing escaped POWs or foreign workers who were returning to their home countries of their own accord was considerable. In the first six months of 1943 over 300,000 people were arrested as a result of this search activity.
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Himmler’s veto was, however, ignored,
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and so, on 20 February 1942, Heydrich issued the so-called Eastern Workers’ Decrees, which regulated the treatment and guarding of civilian Soviet workers. The Gestapo was now made solely responsible for combating criminality, sexual relations with Germans, and other offences, and it was to impose very harsh sentences on offenders. Consignment to a concentration camp or ‘special treatment’ were the two options. According to these regulations, offences by Soviet forced workers were to be dealt with by the judicial system only when a death sentence could be anticipated.
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