Heinrich Himmler : A Life (69 page)

At the same time, Himmler assumed that a life-and-death struggle would occur in the course of the next ten years, as he explained to the Gruppenführer in November 1938:

We must be clear about the fact that during the next ten years we shall be faced with extraordinary and critical conflicts. It won’t be simply a struggle among nations; that’s merely a smokescreen put up by our opponents. It will be an ideological struggle waged by all the Jews, Freemasons, Marxists and church people in the world. These forces—and I am assuming that the Jews are in the driving seat as the embodiment of everything that is negative—are aware that if Germany and Italy are not destroyed, then they themselves will be destroyed. That is a simple conclusion. The Jews cannot survive in Germany. It’s only a matter of years—we shall be increasingly driving them out with unparalleled ruthlessness [ . . . ]

Be in no doubt that if we succumb in this decisive struggle they wouldn’t even allow a few Germans to survive in a reservation; everyone would be starved and slaughtered. Everybody will be affected, whether they are enthusiastic supporters of the Third Reich or not; it will be enough that they speak German and have a German mother.
⁴

Only a few months later, in February 1939, Himmler had changed the timing he envisaged for the outbreak of a great war, a world war: now it could be expected to occur not within the next decade but in the foreseeable future, if not immediately, and as a direct result of the Jewish policy initiated by the November 1938 pogrom. Himmler’s notes for a speech given to Oberabschnitt Rhine in Wiesbaden read as follows: ‘Radical solution of the Jewish problem is prompting Jewry to fight us, if necessary by unleashing a world war.’
⁵
There is a clear link here with Hitler’s well-known ‘prophecy’ in his speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, in which he stated that a ‘world war’ unleashed by ‘international finance Jewry’ would result in the ‘annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’.
⁶

Himmler probably used the term ‘greater Germanic empire’ for the first time in the presence of SS leaders when referring to his fantasy of a future Germanic Reich in his 1938 speech to the Gruppenführer at the annual commemoration of the 9 November 1923 putsch: ‘Germany’s aim for the future is either the greater Germanic empire or it is nothing. I believe that if we in the SS do our duty then the Führer will be able to achieve this greater Germanic Reich, the greatest empire that has ever been achieved by human beings and that the earth has ever seen. So, bearing this in mind, now go off and do your duty and get to work.’
⁷

Himmler does not appear, however, to have believed that this empire could be created during the lifetime of Adolf Hitler; when referring to ‘the Führer’ he must have meant a successor. That becomes clear if one draws on another text from this period. In 1939, before the start of the war, Himmler once again spoke of a ring of settlements surrounding Germany composed of 80–100 million ‘Germanic peasants’. But this was intended merely as the starting point for considerably more gigantic plans, ‘so that starting from that basis Germany can create the great Germanic empire that we are dreaming of and that the Führer is aiming for’.
⁸

The vision of the settlement of 100 million peasants with the subsequent establishment of a great empire, mentioned here once again, evidently referred to the distant future and was not envisaged as the outcome of the world war, which Himmler was expecting to break out at any moment. For, in 1938, the Third Reich did not possess the 80–100 million ‘Germanic peasants’ and would not do so even in thirty or fifty years’ time. At the end of 1938 and beginning of 1939, world war and the creation of an empire appear to have been distinct ideas in Himmler’s mind. At this point he evidently regarded the military conflict that was expected as, in the first instance, a struggle for the existence of National Socialist Germany that would then provide the basis for the later empire.

Although this empire was still a distant prospect, during 1936–7, Himmler had begun to launch a number of initiatives to prepare for its creation. Opportunities were provided by ethnic policy, that is to say, relations between the Reich and ethnic German minorities mainly in eastern and south-eastern Europe, by his contacts with Hitler’s foreign policy advisers, as well as through international police links; furthermore, he tried to gain influence within the diplomatic service.

Himmler had already gained experience in the field of ethnic policy after the SD had begun to take an interest in the Sudeten Germans in 1934. Himmler’s intelligence agency ran the so-called Sudeten German Control Centre, which Hitler’s deputy, Hess, had set up in December 1933 with the help of a Gestapo functionary from Dresden in order to identify any Czech spies among Sudeten German refugees.
⁹
During the following years the SD also became involved in Czechoslovakia itself; above all it focused on the
internal affairs of the Sudeten Germans with the aim of using the Sudeten-land as its base for the surveillance and pursuit of German émigrés in Czechoslovakia. For example, the murder of the engineer Rudolf Formis, near Prague in January 1935—Formis was a former colleague of the Nazi dissident Otto Strasser—was carried out by an SD commando. The SD also supported the ‘Aufbruch’ circle, a group opposing Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Heimatfront.
¹⁰
The German consul in the Bohemian town of Reichenberg, Walter von Lierau, had been a member of the SS since 1932 and was registered as a member of the SD Office.
¹¹

From the end of 1937 onwards Himmler intervened personally to direct the regime’s ethnic policy. The situation was confused because in some cases Nazi ethnic politicians found themselves in irreconcilable disagreement with those with more traditional views on ethnic politics.
¹²
This requires a brief explanation.

Since 1933 the Nazi regime had made considerable efforts to take over so-called ethnic work; that is to say, to look after the affairs of and acquire influence over the roughly 10 million members of German minorities in the rest of Europe. At the time of the Nazis’ takeover of power there were a number of organizations and institutions, the majority of which were conservative and nationalist in outlook, that were actively involved in developing relations with the ethnic German minorities, including in particular: the Verein—from 1933, Volksbund—für das Deutschtum im Ausland (Association—since 1933, the National League—for Germans Abroad); the Deutsche Schutzbund (German Protection League); the Deutsche Ostmarkenverein (German Association for the Eastern Marches); the Bund Deutscher Osten (BDO) (League of the German East); and the Deutsche Auslands-Institut (German Foreign Institute) in Stuttgart. However, a number of Nazi politicians claimed a leading role in ethnic policy or at least the right to have a say. That was true of the head of the Nazi Party’s Auslandsorganisation (Foreign Organization), Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, who tried to extend his responsibility for dealing with Germans abroad to include ethnic Germans with a foreign nationality;
¹³
it was also true of Hitler’s ambitious special representative for foreign affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop, as well as of Alfred Rosenberg, who was head of the Nazi Party’s foreign policy department.

A few months after the takeover of power Hitler assigned to his deputy, Rudolf Hess, wide-ranging powers in the sphere of ethnic policy.
¹⁴
Hess’s task was a difficult one. A ruthless coordination of the existing, not genuinely
Nazi, ethnic organizations appeared inopportune, since the Nazi leadership had no interest in alienating the large numbers of conservative ethnic activists and thereby possibly creating a movement opposed to the Nazi regime among German minorities abroad. Moreover, in view of the extent of the new regime’s diplomatic isolation, it wanted to avoid creating the impression that it intended to use the Germans abroad as a means of causing disruption or even as a fifth column.

In the autumn of 1935, however, Hess decided to reorganize ethnic policy and set up an office under the direction of Otto von Kursell, a painter and art teacher who had been an active supporter of the Nazis since the early 1920s and had been appointed to the Reich Ministry of Education in October 1934. Its function was to coordinate ethnic policy. Formally the ‘Kursell Office’, which was soon renamed the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle or VoMi (Coordination Centre for Ethnic Germans), was subordinated to Hess’s representative for foreign affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in order to provide him with a vehicle for his ambitions in the sphere of ethnic policy.
¹⁵

In 1936 Kursell, who had the rank of an SS-Obersturmbannführer, had a disagreement with Himmler. When Kursell learned that the SS was favouring a Sudeten German group, which was in opposition to Henlein’s Sudeten German Party, which Kursell supported, he persuaded Göring to issue an edict which made the issuing of foreign currency in matters involving ethnic politics subject to his, Kursell’s, approval. In this way he hoped to be able to control Himmler’s activities in the Sudetenland. Irritated by Kursell’s high-handedness, Himmler now evidently sought an excuse to get rid of Kursell and to intervene in ethnic policy directly himself. He accused Kursell, in his role as head of the Baltic Brotherhood, an association of Baltic Germans living in the Reich, of engaging in activities hostile to the state and involving Freemasonry.
¹⁶
And at the beginning of 1937 Kursell was in fact replaced as head of VoMi by Himmler’s man, SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Lorenz.

Lorenz, who had been a member of the SS since 1930, had been substantially involved in establishing the SS in Danzig (Gdansk), had taken over SS-Oberabschnitt North in Königsberg in 1931, and Oberabschnitt Hamburg in 1934, in the latter case as the ‘permanent representative of SS-Obergruppenführer Ambassador von Ribbentrop’.
¹⁷
Although inexperienced in ethnic politics, he was chosen because he had excellent social contacts, a self-confident bearing, and a friendly manner. His close contacts
with Ribbentrop, who was regarded as ‘the coming man’ in the regime’s foreign policy, were also in his favour, for VoMi was still answerable to Hess via Ribbentrop.
¹⁸
Hermann Behrends, who had been involved in the SD, became Lorenz’s deputy, and in his new capacity continued to act as Heydrich’s agent.
¹⁹
Behrends, who became the real strong-man in VoMi, recruited a number of SS leaders into it, among them Walter Ellermeier, who was to become Lorenz’s adjutant.

Under its new leadership VoMi, which according to Lorenz was ‘the supreme agency dealing with all matters concerning ethnic Germans’,
²⁰
soon succeeded in subjecting the various organizations involved in this sphere to stricter control.
²¹
Thus, in 1937 Behrends took over control of the Bund Deutscher Osten from Theodor Oberländer and thereby became largely responsible for ‘borderland activities’.
²²
Evidently Himmler had already been planning, in connection with the dismissal of Kursell, to get rid of Hans Steinacher, the conservative chairman of the most important ethnic German organization, the Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland (VDA), as well and to replace him with a ‘very senior SS leader’.
²³
In fact, on 19 October 1937 Hess suspended Steinacher from his post as head of the VDA after Lorenz had informed him that Steinacher was not sticking to various agreements made with VoMi.
²⁴

As far as cooperation with the ethnic German organizations abroad was concerned, although the new VoMi leadership favoured Nazi organizations,
²⁵
it refrained from subordinating them formally to itself. The organizations remained de facto independent, which, among other things, reflected foreign policy considerations.
²⁶

On 2 July 1938 Hitler made VoMi responsible for ‘overseeing the work of all state and party agencies involved in ethnic and borderland issues (German minorities abroad and alien minorities at home) and for the efficient deployment of all the resources at their disposal’. VoMi, which was not a state organization, was thereby given the right to issue directives to Reich ministries. This represented an important invasion of the Reich’s responsibility for foreign affairs.
²⁷
On 3 February 1938 the VDA was ‘coordinated’ and turned into a ‘cover organization’ of VoMi, as the Führer’s Deputy put it in his directive. All the other ethnic organizations, with the exception of the Bund Deutscher Osten, which was responsible for borderland issues, were to be incorporated into the VDA, whereas in future all party organizations were to be banned from getting involved in any ‘ethnic activity’.
²⁸

Lorenz and Behrends also managed to put an end to, or at least mitigate, conflicts among the leaderships of the German organizations abroad.
²⁹
In general they restricted themselves to working with those ethnic German organizations that supported the Third Reich, and in most cases they ensured that these groups dominated the political work of the ethnic German minorities. In Romania VoMi succeeded in getting the Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party), which was opposed to the Deutsche Volksgemeinschaft (German National Community), to join its competitor.
³⁰
In Yugoslavia VoMi recognized the Schwäbisch-Deutscher Kulturbund (Swabian-German Cultural League) as the official representative of the ethnic Germans after imposing a change of leadership.
³¹
In Hungary it favoured the Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn (National League of Germans in Hungary), which was founded in November 1938.
³²

In the Sudetenland from 1937 onwards VoMi regarded Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Party as the official representative of the Sudeten Germans,
³³
particularly after Henlein had radically altered his position in November 1937. Instead of demanding more autonomy for the Sudeten Germans within Czechoslovakia, Henlein now demanded their absorption into the Reich.
³⁴
In doing so he was adopting the line of his deputy, Karl Hermann Frank, who had close links to Himmler.
³⁵
In 1938 VoMi, in partnership with Henlein, introduced a ‘strict system of command’ into the organization of the Sudeten Germans.
³⁶