Heinrich Himmler : A Life (123 page)

Soon this new task was beginning to have consequences: in November 1944 Himmler had the recruitment offices for army officer candidates merged with those of the Waffen-SS and incorporated into the SS administration. The Waffen-SS was given a quota of 17.3 per cent of those potential recruits called for examination in 1944, and the Wehrmacht High Command finally conceded the right to the SS Main Office to reserve 20 per cent of those army volunteers born in 1927 and 1928. In addition, it became accepted practice to use Wehrmacht soldiers to fill up SS units.
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Gottlob Berger, Head of the SS Main Office, wanted to go further and take control of the entire process of deployment both in the military and in the civil realm, but time ran out for that.
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Prisoners of war were also Himmler’s responsibility as commander of the Reserve Army, though he delegated this area to Berger.
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Now that Soviet POWs fell within his field of responsibility the Reichsführer-SS was once more confronted with an initiative that he had hitherto rejected vehemently, namely, the recruitment of Soviet POWs as a separate auxiliary force of the Wehrmacht. In his speech in Posen on 6 October the previous year he had called General Vlasov, the main advocate of this idea among the Russians, the ‘Russian swine’.
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In July 1944 he nevertheless decided to cooperate with Vlasov as a result of mediation on the part of Gunter d’Alquen, the editor-in-chief of
Das Schwarze Korps
and commander of the SS-Standarte for war reporting. That same month, after his first contact with Vlasov, Berger set up a ‘Russian operations centre’, the head of which acted as Himmler’s liaison officer with Vlasov.
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On 16 September Himmler received the Russian general personally for talks.
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At the very beginning of the interview Vlasov raised the matter of Himmler’s theory of subhumans; the latter was evasive and immediately declared himself willing to have the brochure entitled
The Subhuman
that he had had circulated withdrawn (and indeed, Himmler did shortly after issue an internal instruction for all propaganda against subhumans to be stopped). Himmler and Vlasov agreed to establish a ‘Committee for the Liberation of the Russian Nations’, and Himmler made Erhard Kroeger, former leader of the ethnic German population in Latvia, who had been in command of an Einsatzkommando in 1941, political appointee responsible for the Vlasov initiative and put Gunter d’Alquen in charge of psychological warfare. He then had himself photographed with Vlasov (see Ill. 30).

Vlasov, whose activities were supported by Ribbentrop and Goebbels, was given the opportunity on 14 November 1944, in a ‘Prague Manifesto’, of issuing a call to liberate his homeland.
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Meanwhile Himmler cannily had Vlasov’s troops established under the umbrella of the Wehrmacht, by contrast with the Galician or Ukrainian SS volunteer units; he had not revised his position so radically that he was willing to integrate them into his Waffen-SS. In April 1945 Vlasov, who on 28 January 1945 was officially appointed supreme commander of the Russian forces, would have more than 45,000 men at his disposal. As far as the course of the war was concerned that was no longer of any significance.
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The fact that Himmler was now in control of the Wehrmacht penal system
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was indicated rapidly by a brutalization of military justice. According to the new commander of the Reserve Army, ‘the penal system will without exception be placed directly in the service of the war’.
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The Wehrmacht’s judiciary took this information on board: between January and May 1945 alone something like 4,000 death sentences were passed. Drumhead courts martial handed out 6,000–7,000.
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In the following months Himmler also saw to it that Wehrmacht armaments were merged on the level of personnel and organization with the SS. Thus the A4 rocket project seemed finally to have fallen into his hands. On 6 August 1944 he gave Kammler, the Head of department C in the Business and Administration Main Office, complete authority to ensure the ‘most rapid’ deployment of the A4.
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Kammler did as he was told,
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and on 6 September the first raid on London using the A4 (or V2, as it was also called) took place. In all more than 3,000 V2s were to be launched, more than half of which landed on the British capital.
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Himmler claimed to be convinced that the V rockets would bring about a turn in the war. At the end of July he had declared in a speech to the officer corps of a new grenadier division: ‘I know that we still have crises and shortages to get through. We should not forget, however that V1 and the V2, V3, and V4 to come are not a bluff [ . . . ].’ He had, he said, news from London according to which the constant bombardment of the city in the previous weeks with V1s (the ‘doodlebug’ flying-bombs developed by the Luftwaffe) had already led to 120,000 deaths, which ‘absolutely matches the numbers of V1s we have sent over and for which I have precise figures. For we know more or less what effect they have and thus we can work out ourselves the numbers of dead.’
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It remains Himmler’s secret how he could claim to know the damage done by a weapon whose impact on southern England could not be verified by the German side. At any rate, the figures he gave were almost fifty times larger than the actual number of victims.
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The drive with which Himmler in his new capacity attempted to expand his power in all directions did, however, meet with resistance. When, on 23 August, Goebbels suggested to Hitler that, as part of the measures to promote total war, Himmler should be put in charge of all the district headquarters of the Wehrmacht, Hitler’s reaction was negative: ‘But the Führer fears that Himmler is so overloaded with work that it will get too much for him and the same tragedy will befall him as befell Göring. He too had so many offices that he lost track of them.’ Himmler’s work would have to be ‘concentrated’. As Goebbels explained further, Himmler had ‘tried once more to take charge of the entire A4 programme, which the Führer had categorically rejected. To do this Himmler would have had to build up a new apparatus without being in a position to dismantle the existing apparatus. So nothing is going to change here.’
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In the end, in January 1945 Himmler was forced to give up not only the A4 programme but also armaments as a whole, having been put in charge of them in the meantime as commander of the Reserve Army. Thus the miracle weapon, the capabilities of which had been completely overestimated, had been placed once and for all beyond his grasp.
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The nearer the Third Reich came to its downfall, the more Himmler stepped up the use of terror in the occupied territories. On 30 July 1944
Hitler issued a secret order henceforth suspending completely any court-martial proceedings against the indigenous populations of the occupied territories. Instead, ‘terrorists and saboteurs’ caught in the act were to be ‘crushed on the spot’,
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while those caught later were to be handed over to the security police and SD. Himmler’s henchmen were now instructed to take independent action against resistance groups, in other words, to pronounce ‘administrative death sentences’. Thus, for example, in occupied Norway at least sixty-eight people were shot without any legal process on the orders of the Oslo security police and SD.
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Similarly, in August 1944 the commander of the security police in the Netherlands, Eberhard Schöngarth, had several hundred political prisoners in Vught concentration camp shot without trial.
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After an assassination attempt on HSSPF Rauter in March 1945, which, though severely injured, he survived, Schöngarth ordered the shooting of a further 250 people.
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In Denmark too the military courts were suspended and security police and SD boosted their anti-terror activities. In August alone eleven prisoners were shot ‘while escaping’.
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In September 1944 Himmler ordered that the entire Danish police force be arrested, claiming they were supporting the resistance and should therefore be deported en masse to Buchenwald. Thereupon more than 2,000 Danish police were taken into custody in an operation led by HSSPF Pancke and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.
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The extensive destruction of Warsaw that followed the suppression of the Polish uprising in August and September 1944 also seems to have been Himmler’s work. At any rate, in a speech to commanding officers of the military districts and commanders in charge of training he boasted that he had given the order to ‘raze Warsaw to the ground’. ‘Every block of buildings must be burnt down and dynamited’, he claimed to have said in his orders.
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Above all, however, this terror campaign was directed at Jewish minorities who had hitherto managed to escape deportation. In the summer of 1942 the Slovak government had increasingly dragged its feet with regard to the deportation of Slovakian Jews. As a result Himmler took care that, after the start of the uprising there and the country’s occupation by German troops in August 1944, this persecution was again advanced with violent measures. He appointed his head of the SS Main Office, Gottlob Berger, who up to that point had shone as a desk-bound perpetrator, as commander of German troops in Slovakia, named Hermann Höfle, who had played a
key role in ‘Aktion Reinhardt’, as HSSPF, and put in place a commanding officer for the security police, even though the country was not formally occupied but in fact still had the status of an ally. The latter had his own Einsatzgruppe at his disposal, and it embarked on a campaign of persecution of the Jewish community in Slovakia. In the face of opposition from the Slovak government the SS got its way and deportations were resumed. Between September 1944 and March 1945 eleven transports deported 8,000 people to Auschwitz, more than 2,700 to Sachsenhausen, and more than 1,600 to Theresienstadt.
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As we have already seen, in July 1944 the Hungarian government had ordered a stop to deportations. After Eichmann, acting on his own initiative, had had more than 2,700 Jews sent to Auschwitz in the second half of July,
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the Hungarian government finally gave way to strong German pressure and agreed at the beginning of August to their resumption.
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Shortly after, however, under the influence of Romania’s defection from the Axis on 23 August, Horthy again withdrew this agreement,
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and on 29 August expressly instructed the newly formed Hungarian government under Prime Minister Géza Lakatos to put a stop to the persecution of the Jews.

Surprisingly, however, Himmler himself had already issued an order on 24 August to cease further deportations from Hungary.
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Sonderkommando Eichmann left the country in September.
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At first sight, and in view of stubborn attempts by the Germans in the previous months to set the deportations in motion, Himmler’s decision seems incomprehensible.
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If, however, it is assumed that from the perspective of the Nazi regime the deportations represented an important means of pressurizing their Hungarian allies, as accomplices in an unprecedented crime, into binding themselves for good or ill to the Reich, then Himmler’s change of course becomes comprehensible. If in these circumstances he had insisted upon a resumption of the deportations, there was the threat of a severe political crisis, the end of the Horthy regime, and thus possibly the loss of the Hungarians as allies. And the Germans had as yet no political alternative to offer.

In the middle of October the situation changed. In the wake of secret negotiations with the Soviet Union Horthy had announced that Hungary would withdraw from the war, and the Arrow Cross Party under Ferenc Szálasi mounted a successful putsch with German support.
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Again the SS tried to resume the deportations, to implicate their new Hungarian partner too in mass murder and so bind it irrevocably to the Greater Germanic Reich.

Nevertheless, the original intention to deport the Jews of Budapest to Auschwitz was now out of the question. The transport situation was poor, and in addition the gas chambers in Auschwitz had already been dismantled; all traces of the annihilation process were supposed to be obliterated promptly and completely before any possible advance by the Red Army into Upper Silesia.
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Eichmann, who had returned to Budapest directly after the putsch, now reiterated the demand of April 1944 that 50,000 Jewish workers be supplied to the Reich so that they could be used in the underground production of armaments.
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From the end of October onwards those affected were marched towards the Hungarian border.
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As a result of the high death-toll from these marches (deaths which were not concealed behind camp fences but took place in full public view) Szálasi put a stop to them on 21 November. Those Jews remaining in Budapest were confined to the ghetto. Most of them managed to survive until the capital fell to the Red Army in February 1945.
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From the middle of 1944 onwards Himmler had been making various attempts to offer the Allies Jews who were in his power in exchange for foreign currencies or materials important for the war, presumably with the primary purpose of putting out feelers to probe the possibility of separate peace negotiations with the western powers. We cannot be absolutely certain whether he or Hitler would actually have been prepared to release a large number of Jewish prisoners in exchange for some suitable trade-off, or whether such negotiations were simply an excuse to establish contact with the western Allies. Presumably from the outset Himmler’s negotiating position was set to move in a number of possible directions: if the western Allies were prepared to enter into such negotiations one could attempt first of all to bypass such ‘humanitarian’ issues and sound out the political possibilities of ending the war. Secondly, these contacts could be exploited to sow mistrust between the western Allies and the Soviet Union. Thirdly, the United States and Great Britain could be ‘exposed’ as the puppets of Jewish interests and the negotiations broken off.