Heinrich Himmler : A Life (73 page)

Between May and July 1938 there were renewed attacks on Jews by party activists in various parts of the Reich. In Berlin, in particular, Goebbels attempted to create a real pogrom atmosphere. However, the Sudeten crisis persuaded the Nazi leadership to stop anti-Jewish attacks for the time being in order to demonstrate Nazi Germany’s peaceful intentions. At the beginning of October, though, the moment the crisis was ended by the Munich Agreement, the attacks began again with full force. Among other things, at least a dozen synagogues were damaged during these weeks. There were increasing signs that the party’s rank and file were moving in the direction of a full-scale pogrom.

On 28 October, in the midst of this charged anti-Semitic atmosphere, Himmler ordered the expulsion of Polish Jews resident in the Reich within three days, in order to pre-empt the Polish government’s move to deprive them of their nationality.
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During the next few days, in the first major deportation, 18,000 people were arrested and driven over the German–Polish border in inhuman conditions.
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On 7 November 17-year-old Herschel Grynspan assassinated Ernst vom Rath, the legation secretary in the German embassy in Paris, in revenge for the deportation of his parents, who came from Poland. This provided the Nazi regime with a welcome excuse to satisfy the militant anti-Semitic sections of the party’s rank and file by launching the pogrom for which they were pressing. Already on 7 November, the day of the assassination, the Nazi press began issuing threats to the Jews living in Germany, and, in
accordance with the instructions of the Propaganda Ministry, announced that Grynspan’s deed, an attack by ‘world Jewry’, would have unforeseeable consequences for the situation of the Jews in Germany.
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On 7 and 8 November, in Hesse in particular, party activists attacked synagogues and Jewish shops.
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In this situation, on 8 November Himmler made his annual speech to the SS-Gruppenführer, who had assembled in Munich to take part in the ceremonies commemorating the putsch of 1923 on the following day. In his speech Himmler referred to the ‘Jewish question’. ‘During the next ten years,’ he announced, ‘we shall undoubtedly face extraordinary and critical conflicts’, for it was a question of surviving the ‘ideological struggle’ with ‘all the Jews, Freemasons, Marxists, and churches in the world’. He did not omit to add that ‘I consider the Jews as the driving [force], as the essence of everything that is negative [ . . . ] the Jews cannot remain in Germany—it’s only a matter of years—we shall increasingly drive them out with unparalleled and ruthless brutality’.
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However, Himmler made no reference to the actual situation, and the formulation that they would drive the Jews out in the course ‘of years’ does not suggest that at this point he was working on the assumption that there was about to be a dramatic new development in the persecution of the Jews.

The following day, 9 November, vom Rath died of his wounds. The news, which was not unexpected, arrived in Munich in the afternoon. His death was officially announced that evening during the usual commemoration ceremony for the ‘old fighters’ in the Munich town hall. Hitler left the event, while Goebbels roused the party leaders who were present with a fiery tirade and in this way initiated the pogrom. The chronology of these events, however, indicates that before the meeting took place Goebbels had already agreed with Hitler on how to proceed.
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Himmler was also present in the town hall.
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It is not clear what he did after Goebbels’s speech or whether he issued any orders to the SS. In any case, throughout the Reich members of the SS, who had come together that evening for the commemoration, took part in the attacks. It is impossible to establish whether special orders would have had to be issued centrally by the Reichsführer-SS or whether the SS simply joined in the local attacks.
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Later that evening Himmler went to Hitler’s Munich flat and was present when, shortly before half past eleven, reports came in about the extent of the destruction.
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Presumably he then gave instructions to the Gestapo chief Müller, based in Berlin, who then informed his officials shortly before
midnight that soon ‘action would be taken against the Jews, in particular against synagogues’; no one should interfere. Looting and major acts of violence should, however, be prevented. And, more important: the concentration camps should prepare to receive 20,000–30,000 prisoners.
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At midnight Himmler joined Hitler for the oath-taking ceremony for SS candidates on Odeonsplatz and then returned to his hotel, the Vierjahreszeiten, where he met Heydrich. Put in the picture by Himmler, Heydrich then sent a telex to the offices of the security police and SD in which he announced that ‘demonstrations against the Jews are to be expected throughout the Reich’, which the police should not hinder. Instead, the police should restrict themselves to preventing the burning of synagogues where there was a threat to neighbouring buildings, as well as to stopping looting and attacks on non-Jewish businesses.
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Müller’s order and Heydrich’s telex, sent about one-and-a-half hours later, show that the police reacted relatively late to these events and were evidently surprised by the extent of the violence. Throughout the Reich Nazi activists—members of the SA and SS, members of the party and other Nazi organizations—had begun to destroy synagogues, Jewish institutions, and businesses; to smash the furniture in Jewish houses; to drag Jews from their homes by force, to humiliate, mistreat, and in many cases to murder them. The official death-toll was later put at ninety-one, which is probably too low. There were numerous suicides, and of the 25,000–30,000 Jewish men who were arrested during the night and taken to concentration camps many did not survive their imprisonment or died later as a result.
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During the following weeks further steps in so-called ‘Jewish policy’ were discussed at a number of conferences attended by high-ranking officials.
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At the meeting held on 12 November 1938 Heydrich raised the question of Jewish emigration, and among other things mentioned the experience of the SD with the ‘Jewish Emigration Office’ in Vienna. He proposed the establishment of a similar agency to cover the whole of the Reich. Göring accepted the idea. Furthermore, Heydrich proposed an ‘emigration programme for the Jews in the rest of the Reich’, covering a time-span of ‘at least 8–10 years’.
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The fact that his proposal for an organized expulsion of the Jews met with general approval at this meeting was the decisive precondition for Heydrich’s future leadership role in Jewish policy. The idea of a programme for the comprehensive expulsion of the Jews developed by the ‘Jewish department’ of the SD during the previous
years, which had thoroughly assessed its domestic, diplomatic, and economic implications, now became the official policy of the regime.

On 24 January 1939 Göring ordered the establishment of a ‘Central Office for Jewish Emigration’ along the lines of the emigration agency created by Eichmann in Vienna, and put Heydrich in charge of it. In parallel with this, Göring began the amalgamation of all the various Jewish organizations and associations to form an integrated compulsory organization in the shape of the Reich Association of the Jews in Germany (Reichsvereiunigung der Juden in Deutschland), under the supervision of the Reich Interior Ministry.
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It replaced the Representative Council of the Jews in Germany (Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland) created in 1933. On 4 July 1939, under the 10th Decree for the Implementation of the Reich Citizenship Law, all Jews living in Germany and all Jewish organizations were obliged to become members of this body.
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The pogrom was followed by a wave of anti-Semitic legislation. Jews were largely excluded from further economic activity, their businesses were compulsorily ‘aryanized’, their insurance claims arising out of the damage caused by the pogrom were nullified. Instead, they were obliged to pay an ‘atonement contribution’ amounting to 1 billion Reich marks.
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Himmler too issued a number of decrees during these weeks. Thus, on 10 November he banned Jews from possessing firearms, a measure which the Reich Minister of the Interior confirmed the following day by issuing an official decree to that effect.
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On 2 December, on the basis of a general police decree issued the day before,
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he ordered a curfew for all Jews to coincide with the ‘National Solidarity Day’. Since Jews ‘had no part to play in the solidarity of the German people’, they were not permitted to leave their place of residence between the hours of 12.00 and 8 p.m.
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On 3 December 1938 Himmler signed a decree which banned Jews from possessing motor vehicles, with immediate effect. Their driving licences and permits were declared invalid and had to be handed in.
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This continuing and increasingly threatening harassment had its effect. The negotiations with the International Committee for Political Refugees, which Schacht began on Hitler’s instructions at the end of 1938 in order to realize Heydrich’s proposal for a large-scale ‘emigration programme’, in the end collapsed.
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However, the panic produced by the November pogrom and the loosening of the restrictions on immigration in several countries led to increasing numbers of Jews leaving Germany.
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At the beginning of April 1939 Himmler’s daughter Gudrun received a letter from Karl Wolff, her father’s adjutant: ‘Dear Püppi,’ he began, ‘I’m writing this letter in order to give you and, in particular your children and grandchildren, a valuable document.’ According to Wolff, on 15 March he had personally witnessed the Führer’s entry into the old imperial castle of Prague, the Hradschin. He described it as follows: ‘The Führer went into a barely furnished room, turned to your father, and embraced him, delighted that it had been granted to him to win Bohemia and Moravia for Germany. The Führer then said: “Himmler, isn’t it wonderful that we are standing here, here we are and we shall never leave”. Later on the Führer once again said to your father: “I don’t want to praise myself, but I really have to say: it was very elegantly done”.’ ‘I hope, dear Püppi,’ Wolff concluded his letter, ‘that I will have made you very happy with my story.’
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There was a good reason why Hitler turned to Himmler in his euphoria, for the SS and police had in fact played a leading role in the largely smooth occupation of the Czech part of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, just as they had in the invasion of Austria and the Sudetenland. In addition to two regiments of order police,
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Himmler had assigned two Einsatzgruppen of security police to the occupying force, who immediately began seizing documents and—as part of ‘Operation Iron Bars’—arrested large numbers of communists and German émigrés—by the beginning of May around 6,000 people. It took until 1 September before the status of the security police in the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’ had been legally defined. In the meantime the security police could impose an arbitrary regime unrestrained by legal limits.

In fact legalization changed little, because effectively it simply legalized the arbitrary regime already established by Himmler and Heydrich. The decree laid down that not only the Czech authorities but also the German administration were obliged to follow the orders of the Gestapo, and that ‘the Reichsführer-SS, in agreement with the Reich Protector, [. . .] can [implement] [. . .] the administrative measures necessary for the maintenance of law and order outside the normal limits’. The Reich Protector, the former Foreign Minister von Neurath, was, however, de facto excluded from security matters, because the Deputy Reich Protector, Karl Hermann
Frank, who had been appointed Higher SS and Police Leader, was subordinate to Himmler as far as his practical responsibilities were concerned. Moreover, the security police were authorized to give instructions to the regional authorities in the Protectorate on ‘matters concerning the state police’, and it was Himmler who appointed the commander of the security police. In fact, the first appointee to this post, Otto Rasch, was replaced after only a few weeks by Stahlecker. The order police operated with the same degree of autonomy.
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Up until 1938 Himmler showed very little interest in the settlement activities of his Race and Settlement Main Office. It is true that, on 3 September 1935, he issued an order to the effect that the Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) was responsible for all matters concerning the settlement of SS members. This applied to the choice of settlers for both the project ‘Re-establishment of the German Peasantry’ and the ‘homestead settlement’ programme, in other words urban settlement,
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and in 1938 the head of the Race and Settlement Main Office had extended this order to the police.
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In fact, however, the SS’s settlement activities were initially on a modest scale. Thus, in 1938, for example, only fifty-five peasants had been settled on a total area of less than 5,000 hectares as part of the ‘New Peasant Settlement’ programme, while 102 SS houses were planned in the SS-Oberabschnitt West as part of the homestead programme.
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This minimal amount of activity, and the limited personal interest shown by the Reichsführer-SS in the settlement issue, can be attributed to the fact that, by appointing Reich Minister of Agriculture Darré as head of the Race and Settlement Main Office at the beginning of the 1930s, Himmler had intended to ensure that he would be made responsible for ‘eastern settlement’. Although at the time it looked as though this would become important only in the distant future, his aim was to ensure that, through the alliance with Darré, the SS would have a strong position in a key sphere of the Nazi fantasy empire.