Heinrich Himmler : A Life (113 page)

It is important to bear in mind the exceptional amount of power that Himmler had concentrated in the SS leadership in the months between spring and autumn 1942. Despite the reverses and delays referred to, he had installed an unbridled system of terror and mass murder throughout Europe; using the instrument of ‘extermination through work’, he ruled over an army of slave workers; he had begun the resettlement of millions of people, selected according to racial criteria, and was in the process of setting up a second army alongside the Wehrmacht, whose composition ignored national boundaries and whose structure prefigured the future Greater Germanic Reich.

In September 1942 Himmler could assume that he had successfully laid the foundations of the Greater Germanic Reich of which he dreamt. However, this situation lasted only a few weeks. For, with the landing of the Allies in North Africa in November 1942 the fortunes of the war began to change, and as a result the prospects of further decisive steps in the direction of a Greater Germanic Reich rapidly disappeared. In particular, large-scale settlement projects were even less viable than they had been before and, in view of the war situation, it was inadvisable to differentiate too obviously between the ‘Germanic brother nations’ and other Europeans.

Himmler, however, was not frustrated by this development, nor did it mean a decline in his power. His original idea might not succeed, but nevertheless, as far as he was concerned, he was still a winner. For in many areas the dynamic of the development that he had unleashed or driven forward could not be stopped. The mass murder in the camps, the slave labour, as well as the ‘combating of bandits’ and merciless repression in the occupied territories were, not least thanks to his own efforts, so firmly integrated into the Nazi conception of war that they continued undiminished, all the more so as the situation deteriorated.

Thus Himmler soon found a new role. Now he projected an image of himself as the man who, through the use of exceptional terror, was guaranteeing the internal security of the Reich and of the territories occupied by Germany. In the two-and-a-half years remaining to him as Reichsführer-SS he accumulated a monopoly of power for this purpose that he had never previously achieved. The more the Third Reich headed towards its downfall, the more powerful became the Reichsführer-SS.

With the landing of Allied troops in North Africa in November 1942 the military initiative was passing more and more to the Allies. From now onwards the southern flank of Axis-dominated Europe was increasingly exposed and, on 11 November 1942, Germany and Italy decided to occupy the unoccupied zone in the south of France. As a result Himmler acquired a new task: the elimination of all ‘enemies’ of the Reich who, under the protection of the Vichy regime, had hitherto been able to evade persecution.

He envisaged that a crushing blow against this army of ‘enemies’ who were allegedly concentrated in the south of France would mark the start of a generally harsher policy of repression. This would now have to take precedence over the vision of a Greater German Reich that had so preoccupied him during the previous months. Now that the threat to the Reich from outside was growing Himmler felt it incumbent upon him to secure the ‘internal theatre of war’,
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and that meant the merciless elimination, using all available means, of all enemies within the area controlled by Germany. This would be carried out by crushing political resistance in the occupied territories, by including countries in the campaign of Jewish persecution that had not hitherto been involved, along with a renewed escalation in the murder programme, as well as by extending the ‘campaign against bandits’ to the whole of eastern Europe. Moreover, during the coming months Himmler was able substantially to increase his power. He considerably enlarged the Waffen-SS by recruiting ‘ethnic alien’ volunteers; he was appointed Reich Minister of the Interior, thereby acquiring control over the Reich’s internal administration; he significantly increased the slave army in the concentration camps; and, when he took over responsibility for the
missile programme, it looked as if he was going to get his hands on a substantial part of the armaments industry. However, his impact as head of the Waffen-SS, Interior Minister, and organizer of armaments production turned out in fact to be modest. The more the Third Reich came under military pressure during the coming years, the more Himmler’s role became reduced to that of head of a merciless terror machine.

This development began at the end of 1942, when he tried to bring the south of France, which had just been occupied by German troops, under his control. On 14 November, four days after the occupation, he instructed the commander of the security police in France, Helmut Knochen, to send him ‘daily reports of arrests of politically dangerous elements and leading figures in the previous regime. Every effort must be made to catch these dangerous opponents.’
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As always when he wished to enlarge his sphere of responsibilities or to give it a new focus, he appealed directly to Hitler. On 10 December, in the course of a long interview, he explained the situation in the south of France to his Führer, and why as radical a policy as possible was required to deal with it. It was minuted that Himmler had been informed that

there are currently at least 1.5 million deadly enemies of the Axis living and moving around freely in the previously unoccupied part of France, namely 600,000–700,000 Jews, 500,000–600,000 anti-Fascist Italians, 300,000–400,000 red Spaniards, around 20,000 Anglo-Saxons, 80,000 Poles, Greeks, etc. They represent a not inconsiderable threat to the supplies and security of the German–Italian Mediterranean army. In addition, there are hostile French amounting to a number many times larger than that and consisting primarily of communists, Gaullists, and church people.
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Hitler was impressed with this account of the situation. He instructed Himmler, as the latter carefully noted, to ‘get rid of’ the 600,000 to 700,000 Jews in France, including North Africa. The ‘red Spaniards’ were to be ‘made to work’, the Gaullists, English, and Americans were to be arrested, and the Italians in the unoccupied area were to be deployed as forced labour and their leaders locked up in concentration camps.
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A few days later Himmler once again approached Hitler. He wanted the whole of the French police force to be centrally organized under Bousquet, the police secretary-general of the Vichy government. Moreover, what was needed in order to ‘strengthen its effectiveness’ was for ‘every brave and manly French policeman to have the absolute backing of his superior’
(which was equivalent to giving them carte blanche for arbitrary behaviour), for ‘officers to have financial security’, for Himmler’s own police apparatus ‘to have the right to use all the facilities of the French police in the way of records and for search operations’, the creation of a special police unit for combating the ‘political enemies of Europe’, and the deportation to Germany of ‘all those others guilty of destroying the unity of Europe such as Blum, Gamelin, Daladier’.
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During the following days Himmler developed the idea of making an example of the south of France, which had just been occupied. In order to leave no doubt about the new radical policy, he wanted to carry out a ‘major operation’ and one that would involve the French police. He calculated that this would enable him to make it complicit in his policy of persecuting what were, after all, 1.5 million ‘deadly enemies’ and binding it closer to the occupation authorities. Marseilles was selected as the location of the operation. In Himmler’s mind this Mediterranean port was a labyrinthine ‘nest of criminals’ that simply needed exterminating.

In the middle of December 1942 a police regiment specially established for this purpose arrived in Marseilles and, from this point onwards, Himmler became personally involved in the ‘measures’ to eliminate ‘the criminals’ in the city, referring to a commission from Hitler to the SS.
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On 3 January several bombs went off in Marseilles; the communist resistance had carried out a number of attacks on the occupation authorities. The following day Himmler ordered his most senior representative in the country, HSSPF Oberg, to launch an energetic and concerted operation to be carried out by the order and security police: ‘I demand the toughest and most radical action. Naturally, you are also responsible for the part of France that has hitherto remained unoccupied. However, the image of the French government and its definite independence must be preserved.’
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On the same day, however, the Wehrmacht—as Himmler presumed, after consultation with Oberg—had already declared a state of emergency in Marseilles, so that it would be responsible for any retaliatory measures. Himmler was annoyed, and reminded Oberg on 5 January that ‘the Führer has definitely given us the responsibility for Marseilles’.
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The ‘Marseilles affair’, he insisted to Oberg in a telex sent on the same day, is ‘a purely police
matter dealing with sabotage by a subhuman insurgency going on there’. Oberg should kindly leave his Paris office and get down to Marseilles. He also sent Daluege, the chief of the order police, and Major-General of Police Walter Schimana, using this opportunity to inform Oberg of Schimana’s appointment as chief of the order police in France.
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On the following day Oberg received another telex from his Reichsführer, once again reproaching him for having ceded the impending operation in Marseilles, contrary to the Führer order:

The moment something happens in Marseilles, without consulting me, you, Herr Oberg, change the Führer order, run after the Wehrmacht, and ensure that a divisional commander takes command in Marseilles. I must say I didn’t expect such bureaucratic-type behaviour from you. Any other SS man, above all, any other Higher SS and Police Leader, would have been glad for the SS to be able to tackle such a difficult task on its own and would have taken care of it himself and would have felt able to leave his comfortable office in Paris.

Moreover, Oberg had also contravened another Führer order: four tanks, which on Hitler’s instructions had been sent to reinforce the order police in France, could not be put into operation there, allegedly on account of a lack of suitable personnel.

You have had the honour of becoming a Higher SS and Police Leader and so you should also have been prepared to take on the burden, just as I have, of seeing to everything personally, from whether the prostitutes in a small French town are subject to inspections to prevent our troops from catching diseases, to whether there are men available to drive tanks that have been placed at your disposal. But this cannot be done simply through meetings or at soirées.

‘Disobeying any more Führer orders or changing them in a bureaucratic manner’ would lead to his dismissal.
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A few days later he ordered Oberg to deploy the French police ‘to clear out this French nest of criminals’. After all, they could expect losses and he wanted to avoid them being German ones.
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On 18 January he urged Oberg to ‘arrest the great mass of criminals in Marseilles and put them in concentration camps’—he gave a figure of ‘around 100,000’! Moreover, Himmler demanded ‘the extensive dynamiting of the crime district. I do not want German lives to be put at risk in the underground alleys and cellars.’ The ‘lower part of Marseilles’ should be blown up in such a way that ‘those living there are killed simply by the effects of the blast’. The French police should not only be obliged to
participate but should also understand that ‘they ought to be deeply grateful to us for doing it’.
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Hitherto there had not been a comparable police action in the occupied western territories. Had Himmler got his way, German occupation policy would have been reduced to that of a brutal regime of terror, which would undoubtedly have had serious consequences for the relationship between occupiers and the indigenous population in the rest of the western territories. Oberg appears to have been only too conscious of the fact. Despite Himmler’s increasingly urgent requests and threats, he pursued his own policy. In his negotiations with the French police during the following days he managed to evade Himmler’s draconian instructions,
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and reached agreement with his interlocutors on the following course of action: on 22/3 January 1943 the French police carried out raids in Marseilles and, instead of the figure of 100,000 that had been requested, arrested 6,000 people; the 20,000 inhabitants of the harbour quarter were driven from their homes and had to undergo an inspection. The German security police delivered up 2,200 people, most of them Jews, to the police prison camp at Compiègne near Paris, and 782 Marseilles Jews were deported to Sobibor. Part of the harbour quarter was then in fact blown up. Surprisingly, Himmler expressed himself satisfied with Oberg’s minimalist version of his massive cleansing plans. Evidently the German and French security authorities had found a compromise through which Himmler’s strategy of extermination could be modified.

Himmler, however, stuck rigidly to one feature of the Marseilles cleansing operation: he was determined to send 1,500 French prisoners to build a railway in the Narvik district in Norway, and put the RSHA under pressure with a stream of telexes so that his ‘firm’ promise to Hitler could be kept.
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The reasons why Himmler was only partially successful in enforcing his extremely brutal policy in Marseilles, and why his orders were evaded by Oberg, even though the latter was already a target of Himmler’s disapproval, may have had nothing to do with events in the south of France. For, at the beginning of 1943, it cannot have been a secret within the security apparatus that, immediately after he had managed to persuade Hitler to agree to his hard line over Marseilles, Himmler had fallen into bad odour with his ‘Führer’; for a time the authority of the Reichsführer appeared seriously damaged.