Heinrich Himmler : A Life (77 page)

Mental patients, however, were shot by Himmler’s commandos in the Reich as well, in neighbouring Pomerania. In September–October 1939 Gauleiter Franz Schwede had evidently offered to place the Stralsund sanatorium at Himmler’s disposal. In November and December 1939 between 1,200 and 1,400 psychiatric patients were ‘transferred’ from the Pomeranian asylums to West Prussia and executed there by the Wachsturmbann Eimann. At the beginning of 1940 patients began to be deported to the Kosten asylum in the Warthegau, which had just been ‘cleared’, where they were murdered in gas vans.
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The asylums in the annexed territories in Poland and in Gau Pomerania, which had been ‘cleared’ in such a murderous manner, were then occupied by SS units, used as accommodation by the Wehrmacht or as prisons, as well as for accommodating ethnic German being resettled from the Baltic States who were in need of care.
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The murder of mental patients in the occupied territories continued until the middle of 1941. The Sonderkommando Lange, named after its commander, criminal commissar and SS-Untersturmführer Herbert Lange,
which was responsible, killed thousands of people with the aid of gas vans, above all in May and June 1940 as well as in June and July 1941.
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In the autumn of 1941 Lange’s commando began to murder the Jewish population of the Warthegau. At the end of 1941 it established a gas-van base in Chelmno in order to carry out these murders on a larger scale.
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In the process Lange’s unit became an important organizational link between the systematic murder of the handicapped and of the Jews. In the winter of 1939–40, however, Himmler and his henchmen were not yet contemplating the mass killing of Jews with poison gas. At this point the ‘final solution’ they were seeking involved ghettoization and expulsion, and, although in 1939–40 the SS had already killed thousands of Jews in Poland, there was no question yet of the systematic murder of the Jewish population in special extermination camps.
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Ill. 18.
During the war with Poland Himmler kept in close proximity to Hitler to demonstrate clearly the key role that his SS was playing in this Nazi ideological war of annihilation. The photo shows Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant Nikolaus von Below (standing on the left), and his army adjutant Gerhard Engel (standing next to him), to the left of Hitler Martin Bormann, and to the right of Hitler his Wehrmacht adjutant, Rudolph Schmundt.

During the war with Poland members of the Wehrmacht had not only taken part in the murder of civilians in the occupied territories, but—much more seriously—at the beginning of the war the Wehrmacht leadership had agreed to a ‘division of labour’ with the SS and police. When, on 12 September 1939, Admiral Canaris, the head of military intelligence, spoke to the chief of the Wehrmacht High Command, General Keitel, about the plans for wide-ranging executions in Poland, the latter referred him to a decision of Hitler’s. The Führer had made it clear that ‘if the Wehrmacht didn’t want to have anything to do with it, it must accept that the SS and the Gestapo would act alongside it’.
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On 21 September the Commander-in-Chief of the army, von Brauchitsch, informed army commanders that Hitler had assigned the Einsatzgruppen in Poland certain ‘tasks of an ethnic-political nature’ that lay outside the army’s area of responsibility.
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The Wehrmacht had thereby made a significant contribution towards creating the preconditions for the war in Poland to acquire the features of an ideologically driven extermination campaign. However, it left the vast majority of the mass murders to Himmler’s henchmen.
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It was only after the end of this war that the military, but also the civil, administration opposed the uncontrolled behaviour of the Einsatzgruppen and the Selbstschutz.
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There had been repeated confrontations between their leaders and Wehrmacht officers. In the middle of November the army commander in the newly created military district of Danzig, Lieutenant-General Fedor von Bock, complained to the Gauleiter and Reich Governor Albert Forster that, despite a promise made to him in the middle of October,
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murders were continuing to be carried out by the Selbstschutz.
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Although on 8 October Himmler had ordered the dissolution of the Selbstschutz by the end of the month, in some occupied districts this process lasted until the spring of 1940.
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The commander of the military district in the Warthegau, General Walter Petzel, also contacted the Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army and informed him of the arbitrary shootings, looting, and acts of violence being carried out by the SS special formations.
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In February 1940 the military commander in the southern section of the frontier, General Wilhelm Ulex, used the word ‘bestiality’ to describe the atrocities.
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In November 1939 and January 1940 the military commander in the east of Poland, Johannes Blaskowitz, complained to the Commander-in-Chief of the army about the murders of Jewish and non-Jewish Poles.
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The behaviour of the SS in Poland caused so much concern among the officer corps that, as we shall see, at the beginning of 1940 Himmler felt compelled to respond to the issue of SS terror.

Himmler instructed the Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) to send three special Einsatzkommandos to western Poland, the so-called RuS-Advisers, small groups of eight or nine SS members, who worked in close cooperation with the Einsatzgruppen of the security police.
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In September 1939 they advanced with the German troops and began registering all Polish and Jewish agricultural land as well as confiscating farms that appeared valuable. The names of the owners were passed on to the security police, ‘so that the owners of the farms can be arrested’. Thus, already during the war the SS was making practical preparations for the policy of Germanization and, as the head of one of the adviser commandos put it, in order ‘to secure the necessary land for the impending appointment of the Reichsführer-SS as Reich Commissar for the Settlement of the East’.
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This evidently happened in a great hurry in order to pre-empt any measures by the Reich Ministry of Agriculture, which considered itself responsible for settlement policy and was regarded with suspicion by the RuSHA.
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As has already been shown, the Ministry under Darré had succeeded in frustrating the ambitions of the SS’s settlement experts in the Protectorate and was preparing, at the latest from August 1939 onwards, to take over settlement matters in occupied Poland.
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At the beginning of October 1939 the Reich Ministry of Agriculture discovered that, in pursuit of their settlement activities in the conquered territories, the SS were referring to a ‘Führer edict’. During the following days this edict acquired concrete form, despite the bitter opposition of Darré and his great disappointment, which he was to express in letters to Lammers and Himmler. But Darré was engaged in a fruitless struggle. For, on 7 October, on Himmler’s thirty-ninth birthday Hitler made Himmler ‘very happy’, as Margarete noted in her diary: ‘The Führer has made him Settlement Commissar for the whole of Germany. The crowning acknowledgment of his work. He works day and night.’
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With the Decree for the
Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation, Hitler gave Himmler responsibility for the two tasks of ‘admitting into its territory and arranging the settlement within the Reich of [ . . . ] those Germans who were hitherto obliged to live abroad’, as well as ‘arranging the settlement of the ethnic groups [within the area under Germany’s control] so as to improve the lines of demarcation between them’. In practice this involved ‘repatriating’ Reich and ethnic Germans, ‘eliminating the harmful influence of those alien sections of the population which constitute a threat to the Reich and the German national community’ (for which purpose, it stated below, Himmler could ‘assign specific areas of settlement to the population groups in question’), as well as ‘forming new German settlements through the resettlement of populations’. In order to carry out these tasks the Reichsführer-SS was to make use of ‘the existing authorities and institutions’.
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However, Himmler, who in future called himself ‘Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation’, was successfully thwarted by Lammers in his attempts to turn the Reich Commissariat into a ‘supreme Reich authority’.
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A few days before Hitler was supposed to assign Himmler the new task, Lammers had received a concerned letter from Darré who, ‘in the interests of our great settlement project’, expressed ‘the urgent wish’ that ‘this task, to which I am particularly committed, should not be restricted by any special commissions assigned to some other agency’. After all, ‘everybody in Germany’ knows ‘that the precondition for the organization of this task being located in the SS was my seven years of devoted work as head of the Race and Settlement Main Office. Without my work the SS would not be remotely in a position to raise the whole issue.’ Darré explicitly opposed Himmler’s idea of ‘military peasants’. He argued that the historical examples of Austria and Russia showed that this model was suitable only for weakly defended borders or territories that lay outside one’s own borders that needed to be protected. But the new border with Russia would be defended by the Wehrmacht.
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On 5 October Himmler received a letter from Darré, in which he was still addressed as ‘Dear Heini!’ Darré’s exclusion from the eastern settlement programme was, he wrote, ‘one of the greatest disappointments of my life’. Furthermore, he complained that Himmler had failed ‘to inform me of what had already been going on for two weeks in relation to the re-creation of the German peasantry in Poland’. ‘In order to have it documented’, Darré concluded with the following statement: ‘This past summer I have been carefully observing the goings on in this matter and those involving von
Gottberg, as well as the most recent events concerning the re-creation of the German peasantry in Poland. I have been aware of them and I have made a careful note of them.’
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Darré met Lammers and Himmler on 7 October, and from their conversation concluded that Himmler had agreed that he, Darré, should perform the ‘executive functions’ in the settlement programme.
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When, a few weeks later, it became clear that Himmler had no intention of letting Darré participate in settlement policy in Poland, the latter turned to Göring, complaining he was bitter about the fact that, ‘on the question of settlement the Reichsführer is throwing me on the scrapheap like a squeezed lemon after he has sucked out from my brain and my talents what seemed useful to him and his SS’.
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But this intervention by the Agriculture Minister could not alter the fact that, shortly after the beginning of the war, Himmler had succeeded in taking substantial control of settlement policy in the newly conquered territories and outmanoeuvering Darré in the process.

As Reichsführer-SS, Chief of the German Police, and Settlement Commissar Himmler now had all the instruments in his hands necessary for subjecting the conquered territories to a radical ‘ethnic reordering’. To begin with he started to construct an organizational setup in the conquered territories along the same lines as the one in the Reich.

In October 1939 Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger was appointed Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) East and thereby as Himmler’s representative in the General Government.
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There was a change to the usual organizational arrangements, in that Himmler sought to improve the coordination of his various responsibilities by appointing SS and Police Leaders in the four districts of the General Government. Himmler saw them as ‘advisers of the government district chiefs’, who would be obliged to follow the latter’s instructions ‘as long as they are not countermanded by orders from the HSSPF or his representatives’.
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Krüger, who was ‘directly’ subordinate to the Governor-General, Hans Frank (which, according to his and Himmler’s interpretation, meant that he was not subject to any bureaucratic control by Frank’s office
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), soon acquired a special position for his office within the administration of the General Government. In September 1941, as his relationship with the Governor-General reached a critical point, Himmler reserved the right to subject instructions which Governor-General Frank gave to Krüger on police matters to prior examination before they were implemented. Frank naturally rejected this.
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In November 1939 Himmler appointed Bruno Streckenbach commander of the security police in the General Government. The former inspector of the security police in Hamburg had commanded an Einsatzgruppe during
the war with Poland. Streckenbach, to whom the commanders of the security police in the four districts of the General Government were subordinated, commanded about 2,000 members of the Gestapo and Kripo. Alongside them there was an equivalent organization of the order police.
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As far as the Polish territories annexed to Germany were concerned, SS-Gruppenführer Wilhelm Koppe was appointed HSSPF for the new Warthegau, and SS-Gruppenführer Richard Hildebrandt HSSPF for the new Gau of Danzig–West Prussia, while the territories annexed to Upper Silesia and East Prussia were assigned to Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, based in Breslau, and Wilhelm Rediess, based in Königsberg, respectively.