Heinrich Himmler : A Life (121 page)

German troops had hardly arrived in the country before Himmler had organized an SS and police apparatus along the lines of those in the other occupied territories. In the ‘Führer’s Instruction Concerning the Appointment of a Plenipotentiary of the Greater German Reich in Italy and the
Organization of Occupied Italian Territory’, provision was made for the appointment of a ‘special police adviser to the Italian national government’.
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The post was filled by Karl Wolff, previous head of Himmler’s personal staff, who simultaneously acted as HSSPF for Italy, later even as the ‘Highest SS and Police Leader’.
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Wolff established a network of SSPF in his area of responsibility. Mussolini, who was now head of a Fascist government based in northern Italy, became merely a puppet of the Nazi regime. As his ‘special police adviser’ Wolff supervised the contacts between the Italian authorities and the German SS and police and controlled the establishment, armament, and deployment of Fascist combat units. From July 1944 onwards, as General Plenipotentiary, he was also responsible for combating partisans behind the front line.
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After the occupation of Italy Himmler also pursued the idea of getting his SS to ‘collect’ members of the Fascist militia and party for later ‘formations’.
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In October 1943 he wanted to begin by integrating two divisions into the Waffen-SS.
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But the project made little progress: at the end of 1944 only 5,000 men were ready for action in an Italian Waffen-SS division instead of the 20,000 originally planned.
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It was not only in Italy itself and the area hitherto occupied by Italy that Jews became caught up in the extermination programme; the same thing happened in other countries where Jews had managed to survive up until then.

In the first place the RSHA was determined ruthlessly to deport the around 33,000 Jews from those parts of Italy that were now controlled by Germany.
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In October Dannecker arrived in Rome at the head of a small Einsatzkommando.
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After a raid on 16 October he had more than a thousand Jews deported from the Italian capital to Auschwitz; by the end of the year, after further raids in other cities, the SS had managed to deport nearly 1,400 people to Auschwitz. The RSHA, however, considered that this way of proceeding had produced ‘no significant results’, for in the meantime the vast majority of Jews living in Italy had managed to hide.
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Therefore, at the beginning of December representatives of the Foreign Ministry and the RSHA agreed to involve the Italian authorities in the persecution and thereby make them complicit.
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Since the Fascists could in any case hold their own against a widespread resistance movement only with the help of a terror regime, domestic political considerations no longer played a part in German plans. At the beginning of 1944 Dannecker’s mobile commando was replaced by a special Jewish department attached
to the commander of the security police in Italy, which dealt with the deportation of the Jews who had already been interned by the Italians. During 1943–4 a total of 6,400 Jews were deported from Italy; the total of those killed was 5,596, which meant that every sixth Jew who had been living in Italy in 1943 was murdered.
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Operating with a section of the ‘Einsatzkommando Reinhard’, Odilo Globocnik, who came from Trieste and was one of those mainly responsible for the extermination of the Polish Jews, wreaked havoc from September 1943 onwards among the Jews in the ‘Adriatic Coast zone of operations’, the area round Trieste that had been incorporated into the territory of the Greater German Reich. Himmler had appointed him HSSPF, and Globocnik ensured that between December 1943 and February 1945 twenty-two transports with more than 1,100 Jews left Trieste in the direction of Auschwitz. Over 90 per cent of those deported were murdered.
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In the former Italian occupation zones in Greece, Albania, and in the Dodecanese (the group of islands in the eastern Aegean which had belonged to Italy since 1912) around 16,000 Jews fell into the hands of the Germans.
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Between March and April 1944 the new occupiers deported a total of 5,000 people from the Greek mainland alone.
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Between May and August 1944 around 3,800 members of the Jewish communities in the Greek islands, mainly from Crete, Rhodes, and Corfu, were deported.
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In Croatia, which up until September had also been under Italian occupation, the majority of Jews, who in the meantime had been interned on the island of Rab, managed to escape into the area controlled by the people’s liberation army. The Gestapo caught a few hundred people and deported them in the second half of March to Auschwitz.
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On 8 September 1943 the Germans also moved into the zone previously occupied by the Italians in southern France. Eichmann’s colleague Alois Brunner, who had already organized the deportation of Jews from Vienna, Berlin, and Saloniki, arrived hot-foot with his Sonderkommando.
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Without French support, however, he was unable to deport more than a fraction of the Jewish refugees, 1,800 people in all, to Drancy.
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In the eyes of the Germans the existence of the Italian occupation zone had hindered Jewish persecution in the whole of France.
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Now that it was gone, measures could be drastically radicalized throughout French territory. From now on all Jews living in France were to be deported to the east, irrespective of their citizenship.

In August 1943 the Gestapo had already begun to arrest more and more Jews in France.
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From December 1943 on it was being supported by the French police in the provinces, since in the meantime the head of the Vichy militia, Joseph Darnand, had replaced René Bousquet as general secretary of police, not least owing to pressure from Himmler.
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However, it was only after the reshuffle in the Vichy government had been concluded in March 1944
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that the Germans could at last ignore French concerns about the deportations. The new government was, in any case, so disliked by the population that the country could now be controlled only by a terror regime.

On 14 April 1944 Brunner and Knochen, the commander of the security police in France, ordered that all Jews should be arrested, irrespective of their citizenship. In the four months until the fall of Vichy in August 1944 more than 6,000 people were deported.
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In all, the occupying authorities had deported a total of almost 76,000 Jews from France to the extermination camps and killed a further 4,000 in other ways. Himmler’s SS men had murdered every fourth Jew living in the country, including around 24,000 French citizens.
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In October 1943, as previously mentioned, the RSHA also wanted to deport the small Jewish minority in Denmark. The Reich plenipotentiary appointed in November 1942, Werner Best, former administrative chief of the Gestapo, had prompted the ‘action’ in order to bring about a fundamental change in German occupation policy, which had hitherto been relatively restrained. However, fearing failure as he lacked sufficient police, he allowed the date of the planned deportation to leak out, and so the great majority of the around 7,000 Jews living in Denmark were able to escape.
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The Hungarian Jews were less fortunate. During 1943 the Nazi regime put more and more pressure on the Hungarian government to persuade them to deport the Jews living in Hungary.
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As it became increasingly clear that the Kallay government was not prepared to hand over the Jews to the Germans,
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the Nazi authorities decided to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish question’ without Kallay.

At the beginning of 1944 German–Hungarian relations increasingly deteriorated. It was clear that Hungary too wanted to leave the alliance with Germany. In March 1944, therefore, German troops occupied the country. Prime Minister Kallay was replaced by the man who had hitherto been head of the Hungarian mission in Berlin, Döme Sztójay. Hitler appointed SS-Brigadeführer Edmund Veesenmayer to be the new envoy and plenipotentiary of the Greater German Reich in Hungary, and Himmler
established an SS organization there. This created the political and technical preconditions for the deportations.
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Under the pretext of labour deployment from now on the SS organized the comprehensive deportation and extermination of the Hungarian Jews. Prompted by Veesenmayer, as early as April the Sztójay government was offering the Reich 50,000 Jews for armaments projects, with the promise of another 50,000 to follow.
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The system of concentration and deportation developed over the years by Himmler’s persecution machine was instituted and operated to perfection with the active support of the Hungarian authorities. During March and April the Germans had the Hungarian government introduce a comprehensive set of anti-Jewish legislation.
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A Jewish council was established, initially for the capital and then for the whole country, in accordance with instructions from the RSHA Sonderkommando which had been sent to Budapest and was led by Eichmann in person.
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The country was divided into zones, and later it took only a matter of days to clear the Jews from each zone; they were then sent to Auschwitz zone by zone.
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The first trains began rolling at the end of April. At the beginning of May the tempo of the deportations was speeded up considerably. From 14 May onwards as a rule four transports left the country every day, each carrying 3,000 Jews. By the beginning of July a total of 437,000 people had been deported from the five zones. When, at the beginning of July, the deportations from the last zone, Budapest, were scheduled to begin
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Sztójaj informed Veesenmayer that, in response to world-wide protests,
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the Reich Governor, Horthy, had ordered a halt to the deportations.
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To begin with, Himmler was powerless in the face of this decision: if he had demanded the immediate resumption of the deportations he would have risked Germany losing another ally. The opportunity to continue the deportations was only to occur under changed domestic political circumstances.

Against the background of the continuing deportations from Hungary, and in the course of a programme of ‘ideological-political indoctrination’ lasting several months, Himmler now frequently referred openly to the murder of the European Jews in front of Wehrmacht generals and declared his belief in the need for the genocide. By means of a whole series of speeches the Reichsführer wanted to make it clear to senior officers, among whom rumours and bits of information about the Holocaust had been circulating for years, that, in the event of a military defeat, they would
not be able to pretend they were unaware of the fact that the murder of the European Jews was one of the regime’s war aims.

‘The Jewish question has in general been solved in Germany and in the countries occupied by Germany’, Himmler declared to Army officers on 5 May. ‘It was solved uncompromisingly, as was appropriate in view of the struggle in which we are engaged for the life of our nation, for the survival of our blood [ . . . ] You may appreciate how difficult it was for me to carry out this military order that I was given, that I have followed and carried out for the sake of obedience and with complete conviction.’ Once again Himmler referred to the murder of women and children:

In this conflict with Asia we must get used to condemning to the past the rules and customs of past European wars which we have grown fond of and which are more natural for us. In my view, despite all our heartfelt sympathy, as Germans we must not permit hate-filled avengers to grow up, with the result that our children and grandchildren will then be obliged to confront them because we, the fathers and grandfathers, were too weak and too cowardly and left it to them to deal with.
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A few weeks later, on 24 May 1944 he informed the generals:

The Jewish question was […] solved ruthlessly in accordance with orders and a rational assessment of the situation. I believe, gentlemen, that you know me well enough to know that I am not a bloodthirsty person or a man who enjoys or takes pleasure in having to do something harsh. On the other hand, I have sufficiently strong nerves and a sufficiently strong sense of duty—I think I can claim that for myself—that if I consider something to be necessary then I will carry it out uncompromisingly. I did not consider myself justified—I’m referring here to the Jewish women and children—in allowing avengers to grow up in the shape of the children who will then murder our fathers and grandchildren. I would have considered that a cowardly thing to do. As a result the question was solved uncompromisingly.
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‘It was the most fearful task and the most fearful commission that could be assigned to any organization: the commission to solve the Jewish question’, he emphasized on 21 June in another speech. ‘I would like once again to say a few frank words about it in this company: It’s good that we were tough enough to exterminate the Jews in our area.’
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He could not have expressed it more bluntly. He had now made sure that the Army knew about it.

The failed attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944 made it possible for Himmler to accumulate an unprecedented range of powers. He was to succeed for a final time in redefining his and the SS’s role within the Nazi state, namely, as the guarantor of internal security and embodiment of executive power in its entirety.
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Again Hitler enabled him to do this by authorizing individual actions in the weeks and months following 20 July. Himmler’s reputation had clearly not been damaged by his failure either to expose the extensive preparations for the coup or to prevent the attempt on his Führer’s life. Obviously the (overwhelmingly conservative) opponents of the regime and resistance groups had not managed to keep the Gestapo completely in the dark about their various deliberations and activities, and some members of these circles had already been arrested in the months running up to the assassination attempt.
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But in July 1944 Himmler’s henchmen were not remotely close to uncovering the actual coup.
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