Heinrich Himmler : A Life (75 page)

On 23 June a meeting between German and Italian officials, chaired by Himmler, took place in Berlin; the Italian delegation was led by the ambassador, Bernardo Attolico. Himmler noted that the meeting had resulted in an agreement to begin the ‘return’ of those people who were citizens of the German Reich (that included numerous Austrians who had changed their citizenship as a result of the Anschluss). A central ‘Office for Emigration and Returnees’ was to be established in Bozen (Bolzano), with four branch offices in other parts of South Tyrol, in order to organize this population-transfer of several thousand people within the space of a few weeks, but also to prepare the other South Tyroleans for their future emigration. After the conclusion of this first operation ‘those Tyroleans who were not bound to the soil’ were to move to Reich territory and, in particular, to North Tyrol; the peasant population would follow later.

Moreover, according to Himmler, the Italians had agreed to help ensure that the real-estate of the South Tyroleans was not sold off at knock-down prices. The Italian state would therefore introduce a special commission into the sales process. Himmler, on the other hand, had made a commitment to the Italians to stop the small amount of motor traffic on the frontier between North and South Tyrol, in order to avoid damaging ‘popular morale’. He also had requested the Italians to ask the Vatican, with which ‘I have only inadequate contacts’, for support so that the Catholic clergy in both parts of Tyrol could ‘prevent the whipping up of chauvinistic nationalism and the demand for Anschluss with Germany’. According to Wolff’s minutes, Himmler was ‘irritated’ by Attolico’s question as to where the Germans intended settling the Italians: ‘What’s it got to do with the Italians where we resettle the South Tyroleans?’
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At the beginning of August 1939 Himmler received ‘a number of South Tyrolean men’, representatives of the minority, ‘in order to explain to them quite frankly the Führer’s intentions and the purpose of the whole resettlement programme’, and to request them, ‘despite the great sadness they must feel at the loss of their homeland, to obey the order to leave and to show the utmost discipline in carrying it out’.
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Despite a few problems, in fact the German–Italian negotiations over the implementation of the resettlement programme, initiated by the Berlin meeting of June 1939, reached a conclusion acceptable to both sides in October 1939.
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Those people with German citizenship living in South Tyrol were expected to resettle within three months. The South Tyroleans of Italian nationality who opted for Germany would leave by the end of 1942. Those who did not would remain in their homeland and become Italians; in other words, speak Italian and adopt Italian culture.
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The so-called option procedure by which the South Tyroleans had to opt for Germany or Italy was, as envisaged, basically completed by the end of 1939. This did not, however, resolve the issue of where the South Tyroleans were to settle; indeed, it was to preoccupy Himmler for years.

In the spring of 1939 Himmler’s attention was initially focused on the Protectorate. On 18 April 1939 an ‘Einsatzgruppe Land Office’, composed of representatives of the State Police Office, the SD, and the RuSHA, had taken over the department in the Czech Ministry of Agriculture responsible for keeping the records of landholdings, the so-called ‘Land Office’. It had been established after the end of the First World War in connection with the programme of land reform in the Republic of Czechoslovakia.
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On 17 May Curt von Gottberg, head of the Settlement Office in the RuSHA, was appointed head of the Land Office by the Reich Protector. By the time of his dismissal in December 1939 he had confiscated a total of 256,000 hectares of land for the SS and its settlement associations, and had secured for the Land Office, through transfer to an intermediate foundation, a total of 145,000 hectares of state forest. Property was expropriated from Jews, as well as from the Catholic Church and the state.
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The aim was to settle Germans and expel ‘non-Germanized’ Czechs to the Reich, where they would be used as labour. Responding to a query from Himmler, in July 1939, only two months after his appointment, Curt von Gottberg could announce that they were ready to settle 12,000 South Tyroleans.
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In his role as Reich Minister of Agriculture and Reich Peasant Leader, Darré was primarily interested in ‘peasant policy’, and he now protested in vain at the appointment of a representative of the SS as head of the Land Office and at the resultant gearing of future settlement in the Protectorate to the requirements of population policy. The working-group, which Reischle, the head of Darré’s staff office, had already set up in 1938 to prepare for the settlement of Bohemia and Moravia, had long been aware of the fact that control over the Land Office would be the decisive administrative prerequisite for the transfer of agricultural property in the Protectorate, and had, therefore, also sought to secure it.
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However, the SS had beaten Darré’s people to it, for they had the impression that Darré and his agrarian experts considered the settlement issue too much in terms of ‘food policy’.
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During the following months Darré, supported by the Reich Protector’s office, kept complaining about Gottberg’s policy and, as Pancke reported to Himmler, trying to ‘torpedo’ it.
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A particular problem was the fact that the acting headship of the Land Office lacked clear administrative authority, as ‘hitherto its legal position [has been based] exclusively on the policing role assigned to the Reichsführer-SS’.
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Gottberg aimed at ‘promoting’ his Czech Land Office to be ‘the Reich Protector’s supreme settlement authority’.
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By trying to take over the DAG (German Settlement Society), founded by Darré, through an association of which he was the chairman, Gottberg sharpened the conflict with Darré, who in response tried to have it transferred to the state.
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Darré may well not have been entirely innocent in Gottberg’s involvement in a dubious financial affair in connection with the purchase of the DAG. As a result, the latter was first relieved of his post as head of the Settlement Office in November 1939 and then, in December, also of the headship of the Land Office.
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The views on settlement policy of Gottberg’s successor, Theodor Gross, who came from the Reich Protector’s office, were much closer to those of the Ministry of Agriculture than to those of the SS.
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Thus Himmler’s move to take over settlement policy failed initially, above all as a result of the opposition of Darré. After the latter had been kicked out, Himmler had envisaged a comprehensive settlement policy based on effective cooperation between the individual parts of his organization. His contacts and responsibilities as Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police had appeared to make him predestined to become commissar for the resettlement of the South Tyroleans, and his control of the police in the Protectorate, which was not constrained by any legal restrictions,
enabled him to take over the Land Office. Nevertheless, his attempt had failed. Himmler appears to have learnt one thing above all from this experience: if he was to achieve his goal of completely controlling settlement policy, he would have to deploy his police powers far more brutally than he had done in Prague.

The role that Himmler’s SS played in the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland and in the occupation of the Czech parts of Czechoslovakia, his involvement in the resettlement of the South Tyroleans for the purpose of strengthening the German–Italian alliance, as well as the extensive confiscation of land by the SS in the Protectorate—all of these developments show that, during 1938–9, Himmler was placing the SS more and more at the service of a policy of expansion, preparation for war, and the permanent occupation of conquered territory.

When, in March 1939, the Polish government, strengthened by an Anglo-French guarantee, declined to accede to Germany’s demands for the integration of Danzig into the Reich and for concessions over the Polish Corridor, Hitler decided to resolve the issue by going to war with Poland. The following months saw careful preparations for the military conflict: through various forms of provocation of Poland, through the strengthening of the alliance with Italy, and finally through the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which sealed the fate of the Polish state, Hitler believed that he could exclude the possibility of the western powers entering the war in the event of renewed German aggression, despite the fact that they had indicated they would do so. At any rate, he did not imagine that the military action against Poland would immediately lead to the major European war that he had envisaged since 1937, and which, since the beginning of 1939, Himmler had reckoned would occur at any moment.

Himmler was prepared for war: he controlled armed units with 40,000 men; the police was ready to deploy a substantial number of its personnel for military purposes and to fill the gaps with reservists; his concentration camps had a large capacity for containing actual and potential opponents of the regime.

Five days before the start of the war mobilization was in full swing, and affected a wide range of people. Among others, Professor Werner Jansen, author of the Teutonic novels that Himmler liked so much and a member of the SS since 1935, reported to his Reichsführer for duty. A physician and professor at Berlin University, he requested Himmler, ‘with warm greetings, to let me participate in the great struggle as your historian’.
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Himmler responded positively, assigning Jansen to the staff of the division which
had been formed in the meantime from the Death’s Head units, where in fact he remained during the next few months.
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For Himmler, things had come full circle: the man who had been a major inspiration for the development of his Teutonic fantasy became his chronicler at the very moment when the SS set out to realize this fantasy. Jansen, however, did not succeed in writing this epic. He died in December 1943 following a long illness, two days after Himmler had appointed him SS-Standartenführer.
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The start of the Second World War represented an extraordinary opportunity for Himmler. During the previous years, under the slogan ‘State Protection Corps’, he had endeavoured to integrate his various functions to make them as coherent and unified as possible. In this way, under the pretext of pursuing a policy of general prevention, an ever-expanding and oppressive police apparatus had been created, which was intended to be merged with the SS ‘order’, supplemented, in particular, by armed units, by responsibilities in the field of ethnic population policy, and—from 1938 onwards—by various settlement and resettlement activities. Now he could begin expanding and reorganizing his various power centres, and directing the various individual parts of his empire to undertake complementary tasks, thereby producing synergies.

The military engagement of the various armed SS units at last offered him the opportunity of realizing his long-held idea of a large, unified, and autonomous military force, the Waffen-SS. Its ‘blood sacrifice’ in war must increase the aura of the SS as an elite organization and underpin its role as the ‘State Protection Corps’. Moreover, in the context of the war he could move against all ‘enemies of the state’, at home but also in the territories to be conquered, with the utmost brutality and in this way expand his power base. Above all, the war offered the option of greatly expanding the SS’s settlement policy in conquered territory, thereby providing the foundations for that ‘ring’ of 80,000–100,000 peasants that he had envisaged as protecting the frontiers of the Reich. With the outbreak of war this vision, that he had originally envisaged as a task for future generations, appeared to Himmler to be increasingly relevant to his own ‘settlement’ activities: the future of the Greater Germanic Reich lay in the present, and to a large extent in his own hands.

In July 1939, at the ceremony which took place annually in Quedlinburg to commemorate the German emperor, Henry I (the Fowler), Himmler had the idea of commissioning the Ahnenerbe to investigate ‘how quickly major achievements have been carried out in German history’. He was particularly interested in discovering whether his idol, Henry, could be used as a measure of comparison for the political achievements of Adolf Hitler. Nine days after the outbreak of war he had the first results of the Ahnenerbe investigation, which, however, did not begin to provide an answer to his question.
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However, Himmler, who when in doubt invariably preferred his own ideas to those of the experts, did not allow this to prevent him from viewing the war as the fulfilment of a historic mission.

The Gestapo and SD were substantially involved in the preparations for war.
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A Central Office II P (Poland) had already been set up in the SD Main Office in May 1939, in order to handle centrally the affairs of ‘ethnic Germans in Poland’ and to create a register of those persons against whom they would want to proceed in the event of war. From July 1939 onwards the Gestapo and SD took concrete measures for the event of war by once more forming Einsatzgruppen.
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The SD was assigned the important role of staging a number of frontier violations directly before the planned attack, which would be blamed on the Poles and used to justify the outbreak of war.
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Heydrich directed the highly secret operation himself, and Himmler made a short visit in the middle of August to inspect the sections of the frontier that had been selected.
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After careful preparation, on 31 August, the night before the invasion, SD commandos attacked the Gleiwitz radio station, a customs post, and a forestry house on the German–Polish border, in order to fake Polish provocations. Statements in German and Polish were broadcast by the Gleiwitz station. They left behind a number of KZ prisoners who had been dressed in Polish uniforms and then killed. This was to provide the justification for the German ‘retaliation’.
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