Heinrich Himmler : A Life (115 page)

In occupied eastern Europe, however, where in Himmler’s view they were dealing with ‘subhumans’, the methods of repression were far more brutal. In the spring of 1942 he had already effectively emasculated Hans Frank through the appointment of Krüger as state secretary for security and omnipotent RKF representative, and with the aid of Bormann and Lammers he continued to put Frank under pressure, among other things by carrying out major police and resettlement operations in order to demonstrate Frank’s incompetence and that of his administration. Hitler was not, however, prepared to dismiss Frank, who had in fact become disillusioned, for fear of a loss of German prestige in the General Government. Meanwhile, Himmler was hoping that an increase in terror would strengthen the SS’s position in this region.

In November 1942, following reports about a Polish uprising that was alleged to be about to take place, Himmler ordered that a large number of Poles suspected of subversion should be sent to concentration camps.
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The uprising did not take place, and yet in January 1943 Himmler raised the
matter again. Now, however, he associated the ‘bandit activities’ with unemployment in the General Government. As with the 1938 ‘asocial operation’ in the Reich, his main concern was to increase the numbers held in concentration camps through a programme of massive arrests: ‘I therefore order that from now onwards all proletarian types whether male or female should be sent to the KL [concentration camps] in Lublin, Auschwitz, or in the Reich. The numbers arrested must be sufficiently large to decrease significantly those people who are not in employment in the GG and thus achieve a distinct alleviation of the threat from bandits.’
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As a result, between 15 and 22 January Himmler’s men arrested around 20,000 people indiscriminately; the ‘action’ affected above all people who were not unemployed, producing considerable unrest among the population and thereby increasing the potential threat of resistance. The civilian population, who had not been warned in advance, objected strongly, and Krüger not only had to admit that mistakes had been made but eventually felt obliged to reassure the civilian administration that such actions would not be carried out in future.
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Himmler did not allow himself to be affected by this. ‘We must not be put off such actions by unavoidable mistakes, since all in all the removal of asocial, criminal types will in the final analysis alleviate the situation.’
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Apparently among the ‘mistakes’ was the fact that, in the course of the mass arrests, Himmler had wanted to ‘transfer’ to concentration camps the 20,000 Polish officers who were still held as prisoners of war. In the event, the Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, intervened to prevent this.
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On 19 June 1943 Himmler was able to persuade Hitler to extend his range of responsibilities for ‘combating bandits’, and to convince him for this purpose to ‘return’ to him a number of SS and police units that had been transferred to the front. As in the previous September, in order to achieve this he utilized a meeting in which the ‘partisan problem’ and the ‘Jewish question’ formed the subject of discussion. Himmler’s commission to expand the ‘combating of bandits’ was evidently linked to Hitler’s order to him ‘to carry out ruthlessly [ . . . ] the evacuation of the Jews [ . . . ] in the course of the next three to four months’.
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Two days later Himmler appointed von dem Bach-Zelewski commander of the units involved in combating bandits. At the same time he declared the territories of Upper Carinthia and Lower Styria, the General Government, the district of Bialystock, the regions of Russia-Centre and Russia-South/Reich Commissariat Ukraine, as well as Croatia to be ‘bandit combat
areas’.
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He was now in a position to engage in unrestricted terror over large parts of south-east and eastern Europe. In April 1944 upper and central Italy were added to the ‘bandit combat areas’.
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In the case of the General Government its classification as ‘a bandit combat area’ meant that among other things the powers of the security police courts martial were extended. Now, on principle, Poles who were guilty of the slightest offence ‘against the work of German reconstruction’ could be shot on the spot without any formal legal process.
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Between October 1943 and July 1944 (in other words, before the Warsaw uprising) the occupation authorities murdered 8,000 people in Warsaw alone.

The extent of the terror, disguised as ‘combating bandits’, that was exercised in the occupied Soviet territories and the very varied motives that lay behind it may be illustrated by the following example. In the course of 1943 the Nazi leadership developed the notion that the threat posed by the partisans in occupied Soviet territories could be effectively combated by the creation of ‘dead zones’, an idea that was also affected by economic considerations. Initial experiments were undertaken.
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On 10 July 1943 Himmler announced in an order that Hitler had decided ‘that the territories of the northern Ukraine and Russia-Centre plagued by bandit activity’ were to be ‘cleared of all their population’. The whole of the male population capable of work was to be ‘transferred’ to Sauckel, ‘on the basis of POW conditions’. The women would be assigned to Sauckel ‘for work in the Reich’. ‘Part of the female population and all children without parents will be placed in our reception camps.’ The territories that had been emptied in this way were to be managed by the Higher SS and Police Leaders, with some areas being planted with Kok-Sagys, a rubber-type plant in which Himmler was particularly interested, and others ‘exploited for agriculture’. ‘The children’s camps are to be established on the borders of these territories so that the children can be used as labour for Kok-Sagys cultivation and for agriculture.’
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Anyone who remained in the ‘dead zones’ after the civilian population had been deported or murdered, their property plundered, and their houses destroyed, would then automatically be considered ‘a bandit suspect’ and shot on sight. In the General Commissariat of White Ruthenia in August 1943 the ‘dead zones’—contiguous territories—already made up 16 per cent of the arable land; in July 1944 in the area under military administration in eastern Byelorussia as much as 75 per cent!
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Thus the order benefited security through the depopulation of territories ‘suspected of harbouring bandits’, and the economy by providing forced labour; the establishment of camps for the ‘bandit children’ corresponded to Himmler’s racial principles; and with the production of Kok-Sagys he hoped to be able to deliver a raw material important for the war economy. (The day before, Himmler had had himself appointed by Göring as ‘Special Representative for Plant Rubber’ in order to be able to embark on large-scale Kok-Sagys production.)

Himmler had already issued the order to transfer people from ‘territories plagued by bandits’ to the Reich as labour in October 1942, but the operation had not got under way. His order of 10 June was, however, actually put into effect. In September 1943, in his role as commander of the units involved in combating bandits, von dem Bach-Zalewski gave the requisite instructions and ensured that they were carried out during the coming months.
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In the process the motives for and methods of combating partisans had changed radically by comparison with those of the previous year. Whereas in 1942 ‘combating bandits’ was primarily motivated by the aim of murdering the Jews as ‘bandit suspects’, now, since the murder of the Jews in eastern Europe had been largely achieved, it was primarily a matter of securing labour. This developed into a key motive for the combating of partisans.
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By contrast, an alternative strategy, continually discussed within the German leadership, of trying to gain allies among the indigenous population by promising them some form of political autonomy or other privileges invariably met with strong resistance from Himmler. ‘We must never’, he noted in a minute from November 1942, ‘promise the Russians a national state. Otherwise we may be making commitments [ . . . ] which one day we shall have to keep.’
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In his notorious Posen speech to the SS-Gruppenführer of 4 October 1943 he adopted a similar tone, when he firmly rejected the idea that was current in the Wehrmacht that they could work with the Russian general Andrei Andreyevitsch Vlasov, who was a German POW, to recruit Russian auxiliaries to fight Stalin. The motto: ‘We can’t defeat the Russians; that can be done only by the Russians themselves’, would lead to defeatism.
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A year later, however, having in the meantime become commander of the Reserve Army and personally responsible for providing Wehrmacht replacements, Himmler was to reconsider his position. Yet, in Posen he reiterated to his leadership corps: ‘I don’t care in the least what happens to the Russians or the Czechs [ . . . ] Whether other nations are prosperous or die of hunger only interests me in so far as we have slaves for our culture; otherwise it doesn’t interest me.’
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Ill. 30.
On 16 September 1944 Himmler, now commander of the Reserve Army, came to an agreement with General Vlasov on the deployment of Russian troops alongside the Wehrmacht. The photograph taken afterwards showing the men shaking hands was purely for show, as in private Himmler had never concealed his contempt for the general.

From the autumn of 1942 onwards, in the light of the change in the war situation, Himmler had also been intensifying the repressive policy in the Reich. In the first place this affected the millions of foreigners who were living there, as already described in the previous chapter.

In December 1942 Himmler decided to transfer the leadership of the RSHA, which he had taken on himself after Heydrich’s assassination, to Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner, who had been HSSPF Danube in Vienna since 1938, had little experience of police command but had the reputation of knowing something about secret intelligence matters, and was regarded as absolutely loyal to Himmler. In view of the military and political changes that were likely to happen, the Reichsführer valued these qualities particularly highly. Moreover, he approved of Kaltenbrunner’s robust
behaviour when dealing with other institutions of the Nazi state.
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The official appointment occurred on 30 January 1943.

One of the challenges facing the new head of the RSHA came from the Reich Ministry of Justice. In November 1942 Thierack had withdrawn from the agreement he had made in September that in future Poles and eastern workers would be subject to punishment by the Gestapo. He had responded to objections from the Reich governors in the eastern territories.
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However, after negotiations lasting several months Kaltenbrunner managed to force the ministry once more to give up this responsibility. On 30 June 1943 the RSHA informed the Stapo offices that, as a matter of principle, the punishment of Polish and Soviet Russian forced workers was ‘to be carried out’ by the Gestapo using ‘Gestapo methods’ or ‘special treatment’. The RSHA laid down in this edict that cases involving Soviet and Polish forced workers should be handed over to the judiciary only if a sentence by a court was considered necessary ‘for political reasons of morale’, and if assurances had been given by the court that a death sentence could be anticipated.
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The RSHA had already ensured in March 1943 that it could arrest Poles who had been released from prison after serving a sentence of more than six months and order that they should be consigned to a concentration camp.
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Escaped POWs, the crews of aircraft that had been shot down, or Allied paratroopers who had been caught also faced harsh treatment. In the summer of 1943 Himmler issued an edict which could be interpreted as a licence for lynch justice. It was ‘not the task of the police to interfere with conflicts between German national comrades and British and American terroristic airmen who have bailed out’.
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On 4 March Gestapo chief Müller decreed that, following their capture, escaped POWs (except for Britons and Americans) were to be transferred to the security police and SD, who should send them to Mauthausen, where they were to be shot. The internal code-name for this procedure was ‘Operation Bullet’.
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With the Anglo-American landings in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942 the Jews throughout Europe also came under further pressure. Initially that applied particularly to the Jewish minorities in the Mediterranean. As a counterstroke to the Allied landings in North Africa German troops occupied Tunisia and brought around 85,000 Tunisian Jews under their control.
A specially formed Einsatzgruppe Tunisia introduced a regime of forced labour, and around twenty Jewish men were deported to the extermination camps. The total victory of the Allies in North Africa in May 1943 prevented a catastrophe.
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