Heinrich Himmler : A Life (120 page)

Moreover, the Reichsführer could not stop thinking about the cultivation of Kok-Sagys. From the beginning of 1942 onwards he had been hoping that this rubber-containing plant, which was cultivated in eastern Europe, could make a major contribution to the provision of rubber for the German war economy.
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When, during an interview with Hitler in February 1943, Himmler pointed out the benefits that wide-scale cultivation of this plant would bring, the Führer immediately made him responsible for achieving these production goals. In response to Himmler’s objection that he was only marginally concerned with this question, Hitler replied, as the baffled Reichsführer noted at the time, that ‘he was not interested in organizational matters and he was giving me responsibility for it!’
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Himmler immediately formed the organizations involved into a Kok-Sagys working group,
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organized a Kok-Sagys conference,
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and after Göring had appointed him on 9 July ‘my special representative for all matters involving rubber plants’,
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created an ‘administrative office’ to run the show.
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An experimental farm was also established in Auschwitz.
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Although it quickly became clear that the plant could cover only a tiny amount of Germany’s overall requirements for rubber (a maximum of 1.7 per cent),
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Himmler made great efforts to secure an extensive area for its cultivation. We have already referred in this chapter to the attempts made to utilize areas in northern Ukraine and Russia-Centre ‘plagued by bandits’ for
this purpose.
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Himmler reckoned initially on using a total of 30,000 hectares in the annexed eastern territories for its cultivation, in the General Government,
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in the Ukraine, in Reich Commissariat Ostland, as well as in France. In September 1943 Romania also became a target for the KokSagys planners as a potential area of cultivation.
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After the occupation of Hungary the SS sought another 10,000 hectares there to compensate for the recent loss of territory in the east.
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Himmler advised that they should focus in particular on former Jewish landed property.
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The more the occupied territories had to be given up, the more the cultivation of Kok-Sagys had to be concentrated in Reich territory, where in 1944 a total of 16,700 hectares were provided, with 18,500 envisaged for 1945—land that was urgently needed for planting with foodstuffs.
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The practical results of the cultivation were catastrophically bad. At the end of 1943 the person responsible for reporting from the west of Ukraine noted ‘a complete failure’, since ‘95% of the acreage’ had ‘not produced anything’.
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In the Reich as well, in 1944 almost everywhere it was reported that the harvest had failed.
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In March 1944 the head of the raw-materials and planning office in the Armaments Ministry, Hans Kehrl, advised Himmler in future to give up cultivating Kok-Sagys completely.
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Himmler replied sharply, and reminded Kehrl of his duty of obedience: ‘I myself am not prepared to break with this tradition of obedience, which I have regarded as sacred ever since I joined the movement, in the interests of some sort of capitalist speculations.’ He considered Kehrl’s objections to be a ‘typically narrow-minded big-capitalist attitude, which obviously regards plant-sourced rubber as undesirable competition for the IG Farben invention of Buna’.
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But who was it, Himmler continued, who had enabled IG Farben to construct a big Buna works in Auschwitz? He, the Reichsführer! Himmler did not mention the total lack of success of the Kok-Sagys enterprise; the whole thing had become purely a matter of prestige. The plantations of the ‘Special Representative for all Matters concerning Plant-sourced Rubber’ had not produced any significant yields by the end of the war.

As the SS failed to establish its own armaments concern, from autumn 1942 onwards the Business and Administration Main Office shifted its focus towards hiring out prisoners to armaments factories. The employment of prisoners by the Oranienburg Heinkel works became a trial project in which, in the end, almost 7,000 prisoners, who were accommodated in a
camp located directly next to the works, were employed. Numerous industrial concerns followed this example.
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By September 1942, through his agreement with Thierack concerning the ‘handing over of asocial elements from the penal system to the Reichsführer-SS for liquidation through work’, Himmler had attempted to fill his camps in order to satisfy the growing demand for prisoners as workers. His order of 31 December to consign 35,000 additional prisoners to the concentration camps must be seen in the same context.
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As a result of this policy the number of prisoners in the camps doubled between September 1942 and April 1943, from 110,000 to 203,000.
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It was, however, only from autumn 1943 onwards that the really massive deployment of prisoners occurred, as the number of forced workers recruited by Sauckel began gradually to fall. Now the system of satellite camps, situated directly next to industrial plants, began rapidly to expand.

Moreover, in summer 1943 it looked as if the SS would succeed after all in moving beyond the hiring-out of prisoners and a modest amount of production to becoming involved in a promising major armaments project, namely, in the development and production of the so-called A4, the first ballistic missile.

Militarily, the A4 with its conventional warhead of 1,000 kilograms of explosives, was of relatively little value; the much cheaper and technically less advanced Luftwaffe competitor, the flying bomb, Fi 103, could carry almost the same amount of explosives. However, from a technical point of view neither the Fi 103 nor the A4 represented a reply to the Allied bomber fleets, which in a single attack could drop thousands of tons of explosives with increasing accuracy on their planned targets. It was presumably Himmler’s penchant for exotic, utopian-type projects that made him so enthusiastic about the Army’s idea for a rocket. Moreover, he was probably also tempted by the thought that, with the help of prisoner labour, he would at last be able to get hold of a major armaments project.

Himmler’s interest was aroused after Hitler had given his basic approval to the A4 rocket programme in November 1942. On 11 December he attended a rocket trial launch at the Peenemünde testing ground; he was not put off by the fact that the trial ended with the rocket exploding four seconds after take-off. On the contrary, he supported the head of the project’s attempt to gain an audience with Hitler, though without success.
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In March 1943 he had the military commander at Peenemünde dismissed. There were doubts about his reliability because of his alleged
links to the Catholic Church, and vague accusations were made, which later turned out to be without foundation. Himmler installed a successor who could be relied upon to toe the line.
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This example shows how he was prepared to use his police powers ruthlessly when bent on gaining an advantage. On 28 June Himmler was received at Peenemünde by Wernher von Braun wearing the uniform of an SS-Hauptsturmführer. The visit went off satisfactorily: Himmler appointed von Braun Sturmbannführer and backdated the promotion to the day of his visit.
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In the meantime the A4 special committee of the Peenemünde test facilities responsible for rocket production had decided to request KZ inmates from the SS for the envisaged manufacture of the rockets, and this was approved in June.
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However, when a British air raid on Peenemünde in August 1943 caused some damage, Himmler suggested to Hitler that rocket production should be placed entirely in his hands. The A4 rocket was to be produced underground with the aid of KZ prisoners—the SS had already agreed to a request from the A4 Armaments special committee—and the development programme could be carried out at a testing ground of the Waffen-SS in Poland. Hitler approved this proposal and Himmler assigned the responsibility to Hans Kammler, the head of Department C (Buildings) in the Business and Administration Main Office. A cave system near Nordhausen in Thuringia was selected as the production site, the so-called Mittelwerk, where in autumn 1943 an autonomous concentration camp was established named Mittelbau.
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On 20 August Speer and his deputy Karl-Otto Saur met the recently appointed Interior Minister, Himmler, to discuss the details. The following day Himmler summed up the main result of the meeting in a note to Speer: ‘I, as Reichsführer-SS, [..] am taking over responsibility for the production of the A4 equipment.’
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This statement was, however, a little premature, for while Hitler had ordered that Himmler should support Speer with this work, he by no means wished to give him responsibility for the production process.
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Himmler, however, did not allow himself to be put off: in March 1944 von Braun and two of his leading colleagues were arrested and imprisoned for several weeks. They were accused of making comments in which, among other things, they had criticized the conduct of the war and emphasized the importance of civil space exploration.
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Braun’s army superior managed, however, to get the technical director freed, albeit only on a temporary basis. According to von Braun, Himmler’s aim in doing this was to gain
control of the development work on the rocket, though he was to prove unsuccessful.
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In spring 1944, however, Himmler’s man Kammler became heavily involved in the transfer of German aircraft production underground; Mittelwerk became the model for this. On 4 March 1944 Göring appointed Kammler his ‘Representative for Special Building Work’, whereupon, supported by the SS and with the aid of KZ prisoners, he set about transferring aircraft production underground in mines, tunnels, and so forth. This meant that the SS had in fact at last managed to get a foothold in Luftwaffe armaments production, but at a time when German planes could no longer compete with those of the Allies.
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On 4 October 1943 the SS-Gruppenführer gathered in Posen for one of their regular meetings. Himmler gave a speech lasting several hours covering the political and military situation. In the process he came to talk about a subject that he usually refrained from discussing in his speeches:

Today I am going to refer quite frankly to a very grave chapter. We can mention it now among ourselves quite openly and yet we shall never talk about it in public. I’m referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. Most of you will know what it is like to see 100 corpses lying side by side or 500 or 1,000 of them. To have coped with this and—except for cases of human weakness—to have remained decent, that has made us tough. This is an unwritten—never to be written—and yet glorious page in our history. For we know how difficult we would have made it for ourselves if, on top of the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of the war, we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, as agitators and troublemakers.
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Two days later the Gau and Reich leaders, the party elite, came to Posen. Once again Himmler referred to the issue, ‘which for me has become the most difficult question I’ve had to face in my life, the Jewish question’. Once again, to justify the genocide he emphasized ‘that we would not have been able to withstand the burdens of the fourth and would not withstand the fifth and sixth years of war that are perhaps still to come, if we had still had this corrupting plague in our national body’. Later on in his speech he dealt specifically with the murder of women and children:

For I did not consider myself justified in exterminating the men—in other words, killing them or having them killed—and then allowing their children to grow up to wreak vengeance on our children and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to make these people disappear from the face of the earth. For the organization that had to carry out this duty it was the most difficult that we have ever had to undertake.
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Himmler’s aim in making these two speeches was clearly, by being ‘frank’, to confirm officially the widespread rumours and bits of information that were going around about the true scope of the Jewish policy; in this way his audience were to be turned into accomplices, complicit in the unparalleled crime. To make quite sure, he had a list prepared specially of those Gruppenführer who were not present at his speech on 4 October 1943.
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The fact that Himmler made this confession in October 1943 was not a matter of chance. For at this point, in the aftermath of Italy’s breaking her alliance with Germany and the consequent German occupation of Italy and of Italian-occupied territory, Himmler initiated a further escalation of his Europe-wide extermination policy. On 1 October, only a few days before his speech, he had tried to get hold of the Danish Jews; but the majority of his potential victims had already fled to Sweden.

Himmler became involved in the aftermath of Italy’s breaking of the Axis alliance in various ways. On 19 July he had prophesied to Bormann and Ribbentrop that Mussolini was about to fall, which then actually happened on 25 July.
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He had acquired his information from a German archaeologist working in Italy, and not, as he claimed, from ‘intelligence sources’—in other words, the SD’s foreign department. His Waffen-SS took part in the occupation of Italy in September in the shape of the ‘Leibstandarte’ division. Originally, Hitler had ordered the deployment of the whole SS Panzer corps with three divisions, but the situation on the eastern front made that inadvisable.
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The SD not only organized the kidnapping of Mussolini from his imprisonment in the mountain hotel on the Gran Sasso, but a small commando under the leadership of Otto Skorzeny, who was in charge of Group S (Sabotage) in the SD’s foreign department, actually took part in the action to free the Duce, which was carried out by German paratroopers.
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