Heinrich Himmler : A Life (117 page)

In June 1943 Himmler returned to the plan that he had been following since the beginning of the year, of persuading the French government to deprive French immigrant Jews of their French citizenship and thereby make them free for deportation. Himmler pressed Oberg, his HSSPF in France, for the immediate publication of the deprivation-of-citizenship law, which Laval had already signed.
¹¹¹
In the Reichsführer’s view the deportations ought to be finished by 15 July 1943.

Once again, however, Himmler’s order could not be carried out. This time it was Laval, not Oberg, who was responsible. On 25 July, the day of Mussolini’s fall, the Prime Minister decided to cancel the publication.
¹¹²
Laval managed to put off Oberg and Knochen for several weeks
¹¹³
before finally declaring, on 24 August, that he would not sign the law.
¹¹⁴
In response the security police began acting independently, seeking out Jews and deporting them. Also, when they acquired the opportunity to get their hands on Jews who had fled to the Italian zone of occupation in south-east France this was to have an impact on Jewish persecution throughout France.

At the end of 1942, as part of the programme of racial selection and systematic mass murder that applied throughout the area controlled by
Germany, Himmler and the SS began also significantly to increase the persecution of the so-called Gypsies.

After the outbreak of war Gypsies in the Reich had been kept in camps ‘pending their ultimate deportation’, as stated in the relevant RSHA directive.
¹¹⁵
In the autumn of 1939 the idea had been that, as part of the Nisko plan, the Reich German Gypsies would be deported to the General Government along with the German Jews.
¹¹⁶
In fact that happened only in May 1940; under a specific order of Himmler’s, 2,500 Gypsies were deported from Reich territory to the General Government.
¹¹⁷
However, after a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing about the progress of the deportations, in the summer of 1940 Himmler announced that the ‘evacuation of Gypsies and Gypsy half-castes from Reich territory’ was to be postponed ‘until the Jewish question [has] been generally solved’.
¹¹⁸
In November 1940 the Reich Criminal Police Office held out the prospect that the ‘the Gypsy question’ in Reich territory ‘would be finally settled’ after the war.
¹¹⁹

This remained the situation until 1942. During this period evidently neither Himmler nor the RSHA had concrete ideas about the future fate of those who had been deported. They were left to themselves; the majority—there are no exact figures—died as a result of the miserable conditions in the General Government. A minority survived or returned to the Reich during the war, where some of them were able to hide until the end.
¹²⁰

In November 1941 the halt to the deportations decreed in 1940 was lifted for a particular group of Gypsies: 5,000 Gypsies from the Burgenland were transported to the Ł
ó
ódź ghetto in the course of the deportation of Jews from the Reich. Himmler endeavoured to set aside concerns of the district governor responsible, Friedrich Uebelhoer, that the Gypsies might engage in arson by advising Uebelhoer to shoot ten Gypsies for every fire in the ghetto. ‘In this way,’ Himmler advised, ‘you will get the best possible fire brigade for the ghetto; it will be the keenest there has ever been.’
¹²¹
In January 1942 all those Gypsies who had not succumbed to living conditions in the ghetto were killed by gas vans in Chelmno.

On 20 April Himmler telephoned Heydrich with the order: ‘Gypsies not to be exterminated’, as is clear from his notes on telephone conversations.
¹²²
It is unclear whether this order of Himmler’s applied to the Gypsies who were still living in the Reich, to those who had been deported to the General Government, or whether it was a general directive applying to all Gypsies. It appears, however, that with this directive the Reichsführer-SS was initiating a more differentiated Gypsy policy. For in the summer of 1942
Himmler began to distinguish between settled and nomadic Gypsies. He ordered that ‘police measures should not be taken’ on principle against indigenous Gypsies in the General Government, provided they were settled;
¹²³
they were not, therefore—as had been the norm in occupied Poland since 1939—to be murdered. During 1942 the security police applied the same policy as in the General Government to the occupied Soviet territories, where in many places Gypsies had been shot by the Einsatzgruppen irrespective of their way of life,. Finally, in autumn 1943 Himmler ordered nomadic Gypsies in Soviet territories to be sent to concentration camps, and in spring 1944 Gypsies from Lithuania and Byelorussia were in fact deported to Auschwitz.
¹²⁴

From 1942 onwards Himmler also pursued a differentiated policy towards the Gypsies living in the Reich, though in a very different form. He imposed on the SS and police apparatus his view that in future they should distinguish between the ‘pure-race’ Sinti and Lalleri (including ‘half-castes’ capable of being integrated into these groups) as well as the Roma on the one hand, and the remaining ‘half-castes’ on the other. After the end of the war the Gypsies ‘of pure race’ should be placed in a ‘reservation’ and continue the way of life ‘peculiar to their kind’ there in isolation. The other Gypsies should be deported to camps.
¹²⁵

In order to provide a scholarly basis for this differentiation, in September 1942 Himmler assigned to the Ahnenerbe the task of researching the future of the Gypsy language and customs.
¹²⁶
In October 1942 the RSHA issued a directive on his instructions, according to which ‘pure-race Gypsies’ would ‘in future [enjoy] a certain freedom of movement’, that is to say, ‘to wander in a certain area’ and to live according to their ‘traditions and customs’ and to follow ‘an occupation peculiar to their kind’.
¹²⁷
At the beginning of November 1942 there is more evidence of Himmler’s personal interest in the plan to ‘reorganize the treatment of the Gypsies in the Reich’.
¹²⁸

Thus, as far as Germany was concerned, Himmler ensured that the persecution of Gypsies was focused primarily on Gypsy half-castes, who had become settled and, therefore, in his view had departed from the way of life ‘peculiar to their kind’; in Poland and the Soviet Union, on the other hand, it was precisely the nomadic Gypsies who were persecuted.

On 10 December 1942, therefore, Himmler ordered that ‘Gypsy half-castes, Roma Gypsies, and members of Balkan Gypsy clans not of German blood’ living in the Reich be sent to concentration camps.
¹²⁹
‘Socially adjusted’ Gypsies were not to be deported, although the criteria for this
classification remained unclear.
¹³⁰
Beforehand he had managed to meet the concerns expressed by Hitler and the Party Chancellery
¹³¹
—Himmler’s idea of a racially differentiated treatment of the various Gypsy groups in the Reich was directly opposed to the attitude of the state and party leadership, who regarded all Gypsies as ‘inferior’ and wanted them all murdered. With his decision of December 1942 to deport Gypsies the Reichsführer-SS demonstrated his implacable determination to implement the negative aspect of his policy towards the Gypsy population. By contrast, the positive measures to maintain ‘pure-race’ Gypsies were postponed until the end of the war.

If one bears in mind that since December 1942 the regime had been simultaneously preparing the last great wave of Jewish deportations from the Reich, and that, in autumn 1942, Himmler had agreed with Thierack to deport ‘asocials’ to concentration camps,
¹³²
one can appreciate the broader context within which he took his decision to deport the Gypsies in December 1942: the Reichsführer was relentlessly pursuing the ‘cleansing’ of the area that was one day to be the core territory of the Greater Germanic Reich.

On 15 January 1943 a meeting took place in the RSHA at which representatives of the Reich Criminal Police Office, the SD, the RuSHA, as well as members of the Research Centre for Racial Hygiene and Population Biology were present.
¹³³
The meeting was designed to establish the precise criteria for the differentiation of the two groups of Gypsies, as well as to deal with the question of what was to be done with those who were not to be deported. The ‘solution’ reached was to sterilize the great majority of the ‘half-castes’. A telex from the Reich Criminal Police Office dated 29 January 1943
¹³⁴
instructed the Kripo offices to register those ‘socially adjusted Gypsy half-castes’ who were not to be deported.
¹³⁵

Between February and July 1944 some 20,000 Gypsies living in the Reich—around three-quarters of the people who belonged to this minority—were transported to Auschwitz, where they were compelled to live in a special ‘Gypsy camp’.
¹³⁶
Together with those people who had been deported from territories occupied by Germany, the total number of Gypsies transported there amounted to around 23,000.
¹³⁷

From April 1944 onwards Gypsies ‘capable of work’ were transferred from Birkenau to concentration camps in the Reich, a total of barely 1,600 people. Of the other Gypsies deported to Birkenau, around 6,000 were still alive in spring 1944. In August the camp authorities took the decision—presumably in light of the deportation of the Hungarian Jews to
Auschwitz—to liquidate the ‘Gypsy camp’. In all, around 5,600 Gypsies were murdered with gas in Auschwitz.
¹³⁸
There is no evidence of a direct order from Himmler for this; however, in view of the detailed instructions for dealing with the Gypsy question that Himmler had given hitherto, it can be assumed that this decision was treated as ‘a matter for the boss’ and at the very least would not have been taken without his approval.

In the occupied Soviet territories at least 10,000 people and possibly many more were victims of the Gypsy persecution,
¹³⁹
in Poland around 8,000.
¹⁴⁰
In Serbia the Wehrmacht and police murdered around 1,000 Gypsies.
¹⁴¹
In Slovakia measures to arrest Gypsies were only seriously adopted after the German intervention in the summer of 1944: SS-Einsatzgruppe H may also have murdered up to 1,000 Gypsies.
¹⁴²
At the end of 1944, under the rule of the Arrow Cross, numerous Roma were deported from Hungary to forced labour in concentration camps in Germany.
¹⁴³

In the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, by contrast, the persecution consisted of control measures, bans on settlement, and the confinement of Gypsies and other members of the ‘travelling population’ to particular sites. Here a differentiated Gypsy policy was not pursued and the number of victims remained in the hundreds.
¹⁴⁴

All in all, as is clear from this overview, the SS murdered tens of thousands of Gypsies, but not with the same determination and systematic approach as was the case with the Jews. Himmler’s notion of a differentiated treatment of the Gypsies in the future Greater Germanic Reich affected specific Gypsy groups with its brutal arbitrariness, depending on whether the Reichsführer, operating in his fantasy world, considered them either particularly racially valuable or particularly dangerous.

In 1942 Himmler had extended the recruitment basis of the Waffen-SS both within and outside Germany; from the end of the year onwards he endeavoured to establish new divisions from German SS members. In February 1943 Hitler agreed to his setting up a division formed from members of the Hitler Youth (which later acquired the title ‘Hitler Youth Division’), and in October two more SS-Panzergrenadier divisions—‘Götz von Berlichingen’ and ‘Reichsfuhrer-SS’—composed of members of the Reich
Labour Service. In the same month the divisions ‘Leibstandarte’, ‘Das Reich’, ‘Death’s Head’, ‘Viking’, and ‘Hohenstaufen’, which were already substantially mechanized, were renamed SS-Panzer divisions.
¹⁴⁵

By recruiting from the Hitler Youth age cohorts and from Reich Labour service camps, which in some cases involved exerting considerable pressure—Himmler himself spoke of our ‘involuntary volunteers’
¹⁴⁶
—the SS had finally given up the voluntary principle in Germany as well. Members of the General SS were in any case drafted into the Waffen-SS en masse, and the recruitment of non-members of the SS, which had increased from 1942 onwards, now became the norm.
¹⁴⁷
The main focus of recruitment, however, continued to be abroad. It is clear from a register from the end of 1943 that at this point 54,000 ethnic Germans from Romania, 22,000 from Hungary, more than 5,000 from Slovakia, 21,000 from the Banat and Serbia, more than 18,000 from Croatia, and 1,292 from North Schleswig were serving with the Waffen-SS, the vast majority of them on account of the ‘duty of military service’ introduced by Himmler for ethnic Germans.
¹⁴⁸

On 12 May 1943 the German and Romanian governments signed an agreement that regulated the recruitment of ethnic Germans for the Waffen-SS and ensured that volunteers retained their Romanian citizenship.
¹⁴⁹
On the basis of this agreement, in the second half of 1943 an increasing number of ethnic Germans from the Romanian part of the Banat and from Siebenbürgen were transferred to the ‘Prince Eugene’ division.
¹⁵⁰
In fact the recruitment had already begun weeks before the agreement had been signed, and some of the ‘volunteers’ had been forced into military service.
¹⁵¹
As early as 30 July 1943 Berger reported that 41,560 men had been recruited. Himmler responded by sending him ‘hearty thanks’: ‘As with so many of your other actions and achievements you have done an enormous amount for our German fatherland and the Führer.’
¹⁵²