Heinrich Himmler : A Life (112 page)

On 18 September 1942 the Reich Minister of Justice, Otto Thierack, and his state secretary, Curt Ferdinand Rothenberger, met Himmler in his Ukrainian headquarters to deal with a number of agreements involving the judicial authorities. The results of this meeting were far-reaching. In the first place, in future ‘inadequate’ judicial verdicts were to be subject to ‘correction’ by ‘police special treatment’, with Himmler and Thierack reaching agreement on individual cases. If they failed to agree then Hitler’s opinion was to be sought via Bormann.

Secondly, they agreed on the ‘handing over of asocial elements from the prison system to the Reichsführer-SS for extermination through work’. This was to affect, without exception: ‘those in preventive detention, Jews, Gypsies, Russians and Ukrainians, Poles serving a sentence of over three years, Czechs, and Germans serving a sentence of over eight years with the approval of the Reich Minister of Justice.’ It is not surprising that, as already mentioned, the ‘handing over’ of these prisoners was agreed at the very same moment when the decision was made increasingly to employ KZ prisoners in armaments production. Moreover, Himmler and Thierack were in agreement that in future ‘Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, and Ukrainians [should no longer be tried] by the normal judicial process’; instead, in future such cases would be ‘dealt with by the Reichsführer-SS’.

In addition, during the meeting Himmler proposed that ‘many more special institutions should be established in the prison system in accordance with the principle that those who were incapable of rehabilitation should be confined together, while those who were capable of rehabilitation should be confined together according to their particular offence (e.g. fraudsters, thieves, violent criminals)’. While the Justice Minister considered the proposal to be ‘correct’ in principle, he objected to Himmler’s more farreaching demand that the prosecution service should be integrated into the police apparatus. He agreed to look into Himmler’s further demand that criminal records should in future be kept by the police.
¹⁰³

On the basis of this agreement, from the autumn of 1942 onwards commissions of assessors composed of officials from the Justice Ministry visited prisons to select which prisoners should be sent to a concentration camp—by mid-1943 a total of 17,307 judicial prisoners. By 1 April 1943 5,935 of them were already dead. The selections continued.
¹⁰⁴

Furthermore, in summer 1942 the regulations for political surveillance were made more strict. Anyone considered ‘unworthy of serving in the armed services’ was in danger of being taken into preventive detention if he committed the most minor offence.
¹⁰⁵
Moreover, in December 1942 the Reich Criminal Police Office issued orders that those ‘criminals and asocials who cannot be arrested’ were to be sent to the camps, where they ‘should be appropriately detained’, a formulation which must be seen as an indication that this group of people should be murdered.
¹⁰⁶
It has been estimated that in the middle of 1943 there were far more than 20,000 prisoners in preventive detention in concentration camps. By the end of 1943 a total of between 63,000 and 82,000 had been in preventive custody, of whom
between 26,000 and 34,000 are estimated to have died.
¹⁰⁷
Himmler himself remarked, in a speech on 14 October 1943, that at that time there were 40,000 political prisoners as well as 70,000 ‘asocials’, ‘career criminals’, and ‘preventive detainees’.
¹⁰⁸

However, the agreement between Thierack and Himmler of September 1942 was not restricted to the substantial emptying of German prisons and the ‘relief’ of the judiciary from the trouble of prosecuting east European forced workers. It also helped Himmler to achieve a goal that he had been pursuing for two years: police control of the prosecution of Poles in the annexed eastern territories. The Reich governors were strongly opposed, because they feared that this would worsen an already tense situation, and Thierack finally revoked his approval. However, typically, the RSHA ignored this and instructed the Stapo offices to ‘deal with’ such cases themselves, although, in view of the Reich governors’ opposition,
¹⁰⁹
to do so with some discretion.

As has been shown in detail in the preceding chapters, between April and September 1942 Himmler took a number of far-reaching decisions covering a whole range of areas; some of these had very serious consequences.

First, at the end of April and beginning of May the Reichsführer-SS made the final arrangements for the inclusion of the whole of Europe in the murder of the European Jews. At the end of May and beginning of June, after Heydrich’s assassination, he decided to extend and speed up this programme of mass murder to the extent that the ‘final solution’ would essentially be achieved by the end of the year. During the following months he was exceptionally preoccupied with pursuing this goal. Moreover, the extension of the deportation programme to the whole of Europe from the middle of March 1942 also strengthened the position of the apparatus of repression that he had built up in the occupied countries concerned and of his ‘advisers’ in the allied states.

Secondly, in July 1942 Hitler assigned to Himmler responsibility for ‘combating bandits’ in the occupied eastern territories. The fact that at the end of the year Himmler reported to him that, as the result of this
assignment, over 363,000 Jews had been shot in the area of Russia-South alone (well over 90 per cent of all the victims of his ‘combating bandits’) clearly indicates how he understood this task.

Thirdly, in June 1942 Himmler ordered his chief planner, Konrad Meyer, to broaden the settlement plans in order to develop an ‘overall settlement plan’ for the whole of Europe, which would cover Poland, large parts of the occupied Soviet Union, Alsace and Lorraine, Upper Carniola and South Styria, as well as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. At the same time, he ordered that the period during which settlement was envisaged as taking place should be reduced by five–ten years to a period of twenty years. In June he announced the Germanization of the Protectorate; in July he laid down parameters for the settlement of the district of Lublin; in August he was taking decisions concerning settlement policy in the Ukraine and at the same time was intensively involved in the ethnic ‘cleansing’ of Alsace and Lorraine.

Fourthly, in the summer of 1942 Himmler was able significantly to broaden the basis of recruitment for the Waffen-SS. In July 1942 he declared that, ‘on the grounds of the iron law of ethnicity’, ethnic Germans throughout eastern Europe were liable to military conscription, and therewith initiated a systematic policy of recruiting the ethnic Germans of south-east Europe. In August1942 Hitler assigned to Himmler sole responsibility for ‘relations with all Germanic ethnic groups in Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands [ . . . ] involving the NSDAP’, which strengthened his position for the recruitment of ‘Germanic volunteers’. Also in August 1942 Himmler mobilized all Germans in the General Government and the Soviet Union who were capable of bearing arms into ‘alarm units’ subordinate to him; and he created special militias for those ethnic Germans who were not recruited into the SS. During August he was also able to expand recruitment into the Waffen-SS within Germany itself.

Fifthly, in July 1942 Himmler made another attempt to establish an SS armaments concern in order to free the Waffen-SS from dependence on Wehrmacht allocations. However, when these attempts failed in September 1942, and when the SS’s major construction projects, for which it wanted to utilize most of the KZ prisoners, were postponed, he moved to hiring out KZ prisoners to industry. He immediately concentrated on increasing the number of prisoners; they were to double during the following six months.

Sixthly, on 18 September 1942 he made an agreement with Justice Minister Thierack for ‘asocial elements’ among judicial prisoners (in
particular those from ‘racially inferior’ population groups) to be transferred to concentration camps. His aim of subjecting these people to a regime of ‘extermination through work’ was in accordance with both his strategy of racial extermination and his merciless utilitarian policy of exploitation.

Seventhly, by simultaneously removing from Thierack the responsibility for the prosecution of Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians in Reich territory he had created the opportunity of filling his camps. For now, if civilian forced workers made themselves in the least suspect they were liable to be sent to a concentration camp. The same is true of the regulations he issued in October, that in future persons suspected of being partisans were on principle to be punished with KZ incarceration, and that ghetto inhabitants in Poland who were required for armaments projects should also be confined to concentration camps or forced labour camps.

It is clear from these turning-points that, believing the victory of the Third Reich was in sight, Himmler was pushing forward certain developments and was combining them in such a way that, taken together, they represented an attempt to create a qualitatively new regime and one in which the SS would have the key role. It should once more be emphasized that in the case of the majority of these decisions there is evidence of prior consultation with Hitler, and in the other cases we can assume that he was acting in the spirit of his ‘Führer’, a procedure that had characterized Himmler’s political style since his earliest days in the NSDAP. In order to describe the new regime that he envisaged Himmler fell back on the term ‘Greater Germanic Reich’ that he had already used at the end of the 1930s. But now, in 1942, his image of this regime had acquired far clearer contours.

The Greater Germanic Reich was not to be simply a Greater German Reich enlarged by annexed territory, but a qualitatively new supranational regime under totalitarian rule that was systematically constructed on the basis of a racial hierarchy. A ruling elite composed of members of the Germanic nations would in future dominate the European continent and assign to other nations their respective places according to their racial quality: as allies of the new empire, as nations under its ‘protection’, or—the role envisaged for the Slav nations—as work-slaves who would not have the right of an independent national existence.

In the meantime, however, Himmler had ensured that without the SS this empire would be inconceivable:

- The SS had constructed a Europe-wide apparatus of repression, which not only brutally suppressed all opposition tendencies and any resistance but, in addition and above all, systematically and massively murdered all
potential
opponents and ‘racial inferiors’ on the basis of alleged biological criteria, a policy that in the first instance was directed at the Jews but also targeted, above all, east European Gypsies and sections of the Slav population. Basically it represented a version of the policy of racial ‘general prevention’ that Himmler had developed for the Reich during the late 1930s but which in a radicalized version was now being extended to the whole of Europe. The victims of this policy were now no longer being placed in preventive detention but murdered. But this bloody task, the difficulty of which he often complained about in tones bordering on self-pity, was, as far as he was concerned, an unavoidable aspect of a more far-reaching project to transform Europe and secure the future of the ‘Teutons’ (
Germanen
).

- The SS worked on an overall plan to Germanize large areas of central and eastern Europe, and had either begun or already carried out a number of resettlement projects. It controlled the ethnic German groups in southeast Europe and was responsible in the first instance for relations with the ‘Germanic forces’ in north-west Europe. This provided it with important sources of future settlers.

- By opening the Waffen-SS to ethnic Germans, ‘Germanic volunteers’, and non-Germanic legionnaires from European countries, Himmler had created a model for the new regime within the SS itself, in which the individual was already being graded in accordance with his racial ‘value’.

- With the massive amount of forced labour carried out by KZ prisoners, and the idea of ‘extermination through work’, the SS was providing proof that it was in a position not only usefully to employ an army of slave workers, but also to utilize this deployment as an effective instrument of repression and for the liquidation of all political and racial undesirables.

- The SS had successfully enforced its claim that it alone possessed the necessary expertise authoritatively to define the new racial hierarchy and, using the ‘proven’ instrument of racial assessment, to determine on what level of this racial hierarchy each individual was placed. The SS was not concerned about the fact that racial assessments were largely arbitrary, as the criteria with which they were operating in fact represented racial fantasies. For it had both the power to force through this policy of racial segregation and the ‘world-view’ to legitimize these measures.

Furthermore, the turning-points between spring and autumn 1942 indicate that Himmler’s view of how this new regime should be constructed had shifted dramatically. While at the end of the 1930s he had assumed that the Reich would be able to achieve the status of a world power only in the course of several generations, now his view of the period involved had been reduced as if in a time lapse. The huge Reich was already in the process of being created, and he must act now in order to secure a decisive role for himself and his SS. The motive of speeding up developments that were already in progress was decisive here, for in view of the Wehrmacht’s impending victory a window appeared to be opening which would permit the realization of ideas that had previously appeared utopian. The ‘final solution’ of the European ‘Jewish question’ had to be implemented
now
and not after the end of the war. Further settlement projects in eastern Europe had to begin
at once
and not in the distant future. The extermination of the ‘asocials’ had to happen
immediately
. Himmler wanted to initiate a dynamic which, within a few months, would have subjected the area controlled by Germany to a process of quasi-revolutionary change.