Heinrich Himmler : A Life (76 page)

Another, much smaller commando, composed of members of the Death’s Head units, played a key role in the early hours of the war. The SS men had been smuggled into the Free City of Danzig in order to strengthen the ‘home guard’ (
Heimwehr
), a force composed of Danzig SS members which,
after secret preparations, the Nazi-controlled Danzig Senate had officially established on 18 August 1939 as the ‘SS-Danzig Home Guard’. On the morning of 1 September 1939 the Home Guard participated among other things in the attack by German troops on the Westerplatte, the Polish fortress in Danzig. It also had the task of capturing the post-office. However, armed post-office officials, who were Polish army reservists, had barricaded themselves in the building, which was not finally taken until the evening.
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Himmler, who liked to see himself as a soldier, could at last now ‘go to the front’. But he did this in a rather comfortable manner, appropriate to his high rank. At the beginning of September he left Berlin with his mobile headquarters in the special train ‘Heinrich’ (which he had to share with Ribbentrop and the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans-Heinrich Lammers). During the next few weeks he tried to keep as close to Hitler’s headquarters as possible, which at this point was also in a train, and which changed its location several times in the course of the war.
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Publicly, and particularly vis-à-vis the Wehrmacht, Himmler had always justified the establishment of armed SS units in terms of the SS’s role in maintaining internal security. In fact, however, since 1934 he had been systematically constructing a military force, training a large number of potential officers in the officer-training colleges and militarizing the Death’s Head concentration camp guard units.
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Now, in the war against Poland, he could at last strengthen the various armed units, create more of them, and thereby establish a unified SS military force. His aim was to create an autonomous SS army corps, as he had already explained to the Gruppenführer in November 1938. This would, he said, underpin the ‘moral’ position of the SS as an organ of repression:

If I may describe the overall task of the SS as being, together with the police [ . . . ] to guarantee Germany’s internal security, then this task can be performed only if a section of the SS, of this leadership corps, serves and sheds blood at the front. If we did not make a blood sacrifice and if we did not fight at the front we would have lost the moral right to shoot those at home who avoid serving and are cowards. That is the role of the Verfügungstruppe [military SS], which has the most glorious duty of being able to serve at the front.
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In August 1939 Hitler had ordered the integration of the units of the Verfügungstruppe (VT) into the field army, as had been envisaged in the
event of mobilization. The ‘Leibstandarte’, the regiments ‘Germania’ and ‘Deutschland’, as well as other units, were distributed among various armies and participated in the war against Poland.
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With the end of hostilities came the next step: the VT
division
, which had long been planned, was created out of the units of the Verfügungstruppe; it was later to be called ‘Das Reich’.
¹²
Right at the beginning of the war Himmler made Theodor Eicke commander of the Death’s Head Standarten. The KZ guards now went into action as military formations; their role in the concentration camps was taken over by the so-called police reinforcements. Three Death’s Head Standarten operated in the rear areas of the 10th and 8th Armies and carried out ‘cleansing and security measures’, in reality using the most vicious methods to terrorize the civilian population, and murdering countless people. Eicke carried out the operations using Hitler’s special train as his base.
¹³

As early as September 1939 Himmler received permission from Hitler to form the Death’s Head Standarten into a division. When the three Standarten left Poland in October for Dachau, where the division was formed, they were replaced by new Death’s Head units that had been established since 1938.
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In the same month Himmler ordered the creation of a police division from members of the order police and Wehrmacht units.
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Thus, shortly after the outbreak of war Himmler controlled an SS armed force comprising three divisions as well as the ‘Leibstandarte’. In the course of 1940 the force acquired the collective name Waffen-SS.
¹⁶
The name signified the existence of a force independent of the Werhrmacht, and suggests that the various SS units were regarded as being of equal value to it.

The war against Poland was fought by the Nazi leadership to some extent as a war of racial extermination. Here too Himmler played a central role from the start.
¹⁷

On 22 August Hitler had spelled out unmistakably to the generals how he wanted this war to be fought, as is clear from a record of his speech in note form taken at the time: ‘The destruction of Poland has priority. The aim is to eliminate active forces, not to reach a definite line [ . . . ] Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. 80 mill. people must obtain what is their right.
Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is always right. The greatest harshness.’
¹⁸

On 3 September Himmler gave an order that ‘armed Polish insurgents, who are caught in the act’, were to be ‘shot on the spot’. In the event of insurgents emerging, senior officials in the local administration should be taken hostage. His permission should be sought if large numbers of insurgents were captured or if it was intended to shoot hostages. Four days later Himmler issued an order by telephone that the shootings should be carried out by the police and not the army.
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On 7 September Heydrich announced, at a meeting of departmental heads, that ‘the leading elements in Polish society should as far as possible be rendered harmless’,
²⁰
and on 14 October he demanded in front of the same group that the ‘liquidation of leading Poles’ that was already under way should be concluded by 1 November.
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In accordance with these instructions, special police and SS units, as well as Wehrmacht units, murdered tens of thousands of Polish citizens during the hostilities and in the first months of the occupation. The pretext for this was provided by claims of Polish atrocities, according to which more than 50,000 people were alleged to have lost their lives. In fact the total number of all ethnic Germans who died in various ways during the war amounted to between 4,500 and 5,000, among them about a hundred victims of the ‘Bromberg Bloody Sunday’, which was portrayed by Nazi propaganda as a Polish atrocity with thousands of deaths.
²²

The planned mass murder of particular groups of Poles, which was disguised as ‘retaliation’, was to a significant extent controlled and carried out by the Einsatzgruppen of the security police, which had once again been established as in the previous annexations. There were seven Einsatzgruppen in all, comprising around 2,700 men, of which five were assigned to the high commands of the five armies deployed in Poland.
²³
Officially they were supposed to combat all those ‘elements hostile to the Reich and anti-German in enemy territory behind the front line’, as was stated in the agreement reached with the Army High Command in July. However, a minute by Heydrich from July 1940 indicates that they had received further instructions that ‘were extremely radical (for example, an order to liquidate numerous members of the Polish elites running into thousands)’. In practice this meant legitimizing the murder of members of the intelligentsia, the clergy, the aristocracy, and the Jewish community.
²⁴
The Reich Security Main Office had been preparing relevant search lists since May 1939.
²⁵

It is not clear who issued the instructions referred to by Heydrich, or when they were issued. Leading members of the Einsatzgruppen stated after the war that a meeting had already taken place in August, at which Himmler and Heydrich had made it clear that it was to be left up to their own initiative how they eliminated the Polish intelligentsia,
²⁶
a procedure that was to be typical of the way in which orders were issued within the SS throughout the war.

The Einsatzgruppen received support above all from the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz (Ethnic German Self-Defence Force). Himmler had given orders for the creation of this force shortly after the start of the war.
²⁷
The matter was taken in hand by Gottlob Berger, the head of the SS Recruitment Office responsible for recruiting members of the armed SS. The Selbstschutz recruited the greater part of the German minority who were ‘fit for action’ (amounting to a total of 100,000 men within a few weeks) was heavily dependent on the SS for its organization, and in September was integrated into the order police.
²⁸

During the actual hostilities the Einsatzgruppen and the Selbstschutz, but also the order police, the Waffen-SS, and elements of the Wehrmacht, shot thousands of Polish civilians,
²⁹
among them hundreds of Polish Jews, who in a number of cases were locked in their synagogues and burned alive.
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These murders represented the culmination of the unrestrained violence to which the Jews had been subjected since the start of the war.
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After September 1939 the Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht drove tens of thousands of Jews by force over the demarcation line into the Soviet-occupied zone.
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On occasion Himmler intervened directly in the actions of the Einsatzgruppen. Thus, on 3 September, responding to the news of alleged disturbances in the industrial district of eastern Upper Silesia, he ordered SS-Obergruppenführer Udo von Woyrsch to establish an Einsatzgruppe z. b.V. (‘for special assignments’) and made him responsible for ‘radically crushing the Polish uprising that is flaring up [ . . . ] with all available means’.
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After it had become clear that there was no significant uprising in the ‘area of operations’, Himmler extended von Woyrsch’s mission. He appointed him ‘Special Police Commander’ in the area of the 14th Army and ordered him to ‘disarm and crush the Polish bandits. Executions.’ Himmler was offering von Woyrsch, whom he had had to dismiss as leader of Oberabschnitt East for being involved in unauthorized murders associated with 30 June 1934, a chance to ‘prove himself’ by taking radical
action in Poland. What was required was murderous initiative, and in fact Einsatzgruppe z.b.V. was to carry out numerous pogroms against Jews in its path through Poland.
³⁴
On 11 September, prompted by Hitler, Himmler gave Einsatzgruppe IV the order ‘to arrest 500 hostages to be drawn mainly from the Polish intelligentsia in Bromberg and additionally from communists and, in the event of the slightest sign of insurrection or attempts at resistance, to act ruthlessly by shooting the hostages’.
³⁵

After the end of the German–Polish war this terror was systematized. From the end of October onwards the Einsatzgruppen and the Selbstschutz, directed by the Reich Security Main Office, carried out the so-called ‘Intelligentsia Operation’,
³⁶
which was in fact a campaign of murder directed above all at teachers, university graduates, former officers and officials, clergy, landowners, leading members of Polish nationalist organizations, and above all Jews.
³⁷

As mentioned already, during the first four months of the German occupation tens of thousands of people were murdered in this way. The new Reich Gau of Danzig–West Prussia was a particular focus of the operation.
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Here, in addition to members of the Polish elites and Jews, asylum patients, ‘asocials’, prostitutes, women who allegedly had sexual diseases, as well as Gypsies were shot; here it became clear to what extent subordinate bodies, acting on their own initiative, could carry out a ‘cleansing’ of the conquered territories on the basis of ‘racial hygiene’.
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From mid-September onwards the leader of the Selbstschutz in Danzig–West Prussia who was responsible for these murders was Ludolf von Alvensleben, previously Himmler’s adjutant.
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The ‘reward’ that Himmler thought up for this mass murder represented not only an expression of his gratitude to and recognition of von Alvensleben, but also had a pedagogic purpose. On 20 March 1940 Himmler informed Heydrich that he had assigned to von Alvensleben, of whose precarious financial position he had been well aware since the 1930s,
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two estates in the territory that had been annexed which until 1918 had belonged to his family. However, this was only a provisional measure and by no means represented a transfer of property; he did not intend to give von Alvensleben preferential treatment. Rumours to that effect that had been circulating among ethnic Germans in the Gau, and had presumably prompted Heydrich to contact Himmler, were without foundation. Rather, he, Himmler, had agreed to Alvensleben’s taking over the running of the estates ‘in order to provide SS-Oberführer von Alvensleben, who, as leader of the Selbstschutz had played
a significant part in the executions but of whom it was said by some ethnic Germans that he was not really bothered and would soon be leaving, with the opportunity to return as a citizen and inhabitant and thereby to be a good and courageous example to the ethnic Germans’.
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Himmler’s henchmen also set about systematically murdering Polish patients in mental hospitals, at least 7,700 people in total.
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This action has clear parallels with the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme in the Reich. There the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP, operating under the code title T4, was responsible; in Poland it was the SS. Those who took part in the shooting of patients between the end of September and December 1939 in the new Reich Gau of Danzig–West Prussia included members of the ‘Wachsturmbann Eimann’, a unit composed of SS men from Danzig, the Ethnic German Self Defence force, as well as members of Einsatzkommandos. In November patients from the Owinska (Teskau) asylum in the new Reich Gau of Wartheland were murdered.
⁴⁴
From the end of November onwards patients from two asylums were deported to Posen, where the Gestapo had a base in Fort VII, part of a nineteenth-century fortress. Here a new murder technique was applied, whose effects Himmler was able to observe for himself when he paid a visit on 12 December 1939. The victims were poisoned with carbon monoxide gas in a hermetically sealed room—the first mass murder carried out by the Nazis with poison gas.
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At the beginning of 1940 this facility was replaced by gas vans.
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