Heinrich Himmler : A Life (78 page)

The Higher SS and Police Leaders were to play a key role in population policy in the east. Himmler not only made them responsible for transporting the people who were to be ‘outsettled’ and of settling the ethnic Germans, but above all placed the whole executive responsibility for population policy in their hands. In East Prussia, Silesia, and the Warthegau he appointed them ‘permanent representatives’ of the Reich Governors whom he had appointed as his ‘representatives’ in the sphere of population policy. In Gau Danzig–West Prussia and in the General Government the HSSPF were even to act as Himmler’s representatives in his role of ‘consolidating the ethnic German nation’, as he did not have sufficient trust in either Reich Governor Forster or Governor-General Frank.
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The reality of these, in some cases, complicated arrangements was that, as in the Reich, Himmler had created in Poland a network of responsibilities, lying outside the orbit of the civil administration, which he essentially controlled.

From the beginning his police apparatus in Poland pursued a policy of brutal suppression. Blissfully ignorant of the country—it was, for example forbidden to learn Polish—a negative selection of police officials set about crushing any Polish insubordination through a policy of exceptionally tough punishments, mass arrests, and summary executions. In the spring of 1940 this strategy reached its initial unhappy high point when the security police killed around 3,500 members of the Polish intelligentsia and political functionaries, as well as around 3,000 people who were described as criminals.
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Against this background any attempt to penetrate the Polish underground, let alone try to play off the various factions of the Polish underground movement against each other, was hardly possible.
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Within a very short time the Germans had succeeded in alienating the very people who, in view of their anti-Russian and anti-Soviet attitudes, might have been won over in the summer of 1941.

In February 1940, with the aid of a ‘Decree for the Combating of Acts of Violence in the Annexed Eastern Territories’, Himmler undertook a first attempt at introducing a massive increase in penalties for the Polish and Jewish populations and in certain cases the ‘immediate passing and carrying out’ of sentences through police courts martial. In other words, the arbitrary violence of the previous months was to be retrospectively legitimated. Although this initiative was opposed by Lammers and Göring, the Reich Ministry of Justice adopted the increases in penalties proposed by Himmler in one of its decrees. In response Himmler agreed to put an end to the police courts.
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However, his restraint did not last long. Since Himmler did not wish to dispense with a judicial responsibility for the police in the annexed eastern territories, in December 1941, with significant support from Bormann, he compelled the Reich Justice Ministry to issue a penal code for Poles in the annexed territories. This was a special penal code for Poles and Jews, which, although implemented by the judiciary, was so draconian that it applied the death penalty even for minor cases of insubordination. The Reich Minister of Justice could not prevent Himmler from using the negotiations preceding this decree to reintroduce SS and police courts martial, albeit restricted to certain situations.
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Given this background, it is hardly surprising that, right from the start, and based on Himmler’s wide-ranging powers, the new gentlemen of the black order aimed to target the approximately 1.7 million Jews who had come under German rule as a result of the war. Himmler and the SS leadership had already developed far-reaching plans for what to do with them.
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Heydrich reported to the meeting of departmental heads of the security police on 14 September that Himmler was currently putting to Hitler proposals for dealing with the ‘Jewish problem in Poland’, which, because of their major diplomatic implications, could be decided only by the Führer himself.
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A week later, on 21 September, Heydrich informed the departmental heads that Hitler had approved Himmler’s plans for ‘deporting the Jews into the foreign Gau’, for ‘driving them over the line of demarcation’.
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It is clear from a telex to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen
from the same day exactly what was envisaged in practice.
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The Polish Jews were initially to be ‘concentrated’ in large cities and then deported to an area near the eastern border of occupied Poland, where a ‘Jewish state under German administration’ was envisaged, as Heydrich explained to Brauchitsch the following day.
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In addition, Heydrich mentioned in his telex a—top-secret—‘final goal’ of the anti-Jewish measures. This presumably referred to the comprehensive programme that Heydrich had explained to his departmental heads on 21 September in bullet-point form: the deportation of the Jews from the ‘Greater German Reich’ into the ‘Jewish reservation’ and their possible ‘expulsion’ into the part of eastern Poland occupied by the Soviet Union.

The Soviets and the Germans reached agreement on 28 September about the demarcation line between their respective occupation zones. The territory between the Vistula and the Bug, the later General Government district of Lublin, had been assigned to the Germans, and the future ‘reservation’ was planned for this area, with its role expanded. The ‘Nature-conservation area’ or ‘Reich ghetto’, as Heydrich called it, was intended to absorb those Poles from the territories annexed to Germany who were regarded as ‘undesirable’ in addition to the Jews.
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On 29 September Hitler informed Alfred Rosenberg that he wanted to divide the newly conquered Polish territory into three parts. The area between the Vistula and the Bug was to be separated from the west by an ‘eastern wall’, and the Jews from the whole of the Reich, as well as ‘all elements who are in any way unreliable’, were to be settled there. A broad strip on the old German–Polish border was to be Germanized and colonized, and between these two territories there was to be a ‘form of state’ for the Poles.
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In fact, during the coming weeks the Nazi leadership treated the idea of a ‘Jewish reservation’ as anything other than ‘top secret’.
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At the beginning of October 1939 the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) began to make concrete plans for the deportation of the Jews living in the Reich to the ‘reservation’. As early as 6 October, the day before the signing of the Decree for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation, Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Prague, was ordered by Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller to prepare for the deportation of 70,000–80,000 Jews from the government district of Kattowitz (Katowice)—in other words, from annexed Polish territory that was now part of Silesia. According to Müller, the Jews from neighbouring Mährisch-Ostrau (Ostrava) in the Protectorate could also be deported.
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Eichmann, however, was already engaged in a more far-reaching task. Hitler, he told the Silesian Gauleiter, has, ‘to start with, ordered the transfer of 300,000 Jews from the Old Reich [pre-1938 Germany] and the Ostmark [Austria]’. He, Eichmann, had to report to Himmler on the first deportations and, on the basis of this report, Hitler would then make a final decision.
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In view of the wider perspective opened up by this, Eichmann extended the preparations for deportation to include the Jews of Vienna and requested a list of all the Jews who had been registered in the Reich.
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The deportations planned by Eichmann were also intended to include Gypsies.
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In mid-October Eichmann and Walter Stahlecker, the commander of the security police and SD in the Protectorate, decided on Nisko on the river San as the railway station to which the Jews should be sent and as the location for a ‘transit camp’. This camp, which lay directly on the border of the district of Lublin, was intended to be a staging post through which the Jews would arrive in the ‘Jewish reservation’.
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A conscious decision was taken not to go through with the original plan to house the deportees in barracks.
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Between 20 and 28 October 4,700 people from Vienna, Kattowitz, and Mährisch-Ostrau were in fact deported to Nisko, where their guards simply forced them to disperse into the autumnal countryside.
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However, on the day of the very first transport the RSHA banned further transports.
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An important reason for the ban will have been the fact that, in the meantime, Himmler, as Settlement Commissar, was developing much more far-reaching resettlement plans which the Nisko action would have interfered with. For Himmler was not primarily concerned with the rapid deportation of the Jews from the Reich, but rather with his plan to deport undesirable Poles and Jews from the annexed eastern territories so that they could make room for the settlement of ethnic Germans. However, despite Himmler’s new priority and despite the halt to the Nisko action, the RSHA remained basically committed to the deportation of Jews from the Reich to the district of Lublin.
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With his intervention in the Germanization policy in the east Himmler had in fact achieved a coup, as is clear from Darré’s horrified response. Up to this point Himmler had strongly supported the rapid deportation of the Jews
from the whole of the Reich. However, as we have seen, in his role as Settlement Commissar he had called a halt to these measures after a few weeks. The ‘Jewish question’ was now to be ‘solved’ within the much wider framework of the ethnic ‘reordering’ of Poland.

In his new sphere of activity, as the historian Isabel Heinemann puts it, Himmler relatively quickly achieved a ‘strategic division of labour’ with the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost (Main Trustee Office East).
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This body, which had been established by Göring in October 1939, had the task of registering, confiscating, and administering commercial property in those parts of Poland that were to be annexed. Göring respected Himmler’s responsibility for the confiscation of agricultural property. Moreover, in the course of the planning for South Tyrol, an agency for immigration and resettlement had been established under Ulrich Greifelt, and this now developed into the headquarters for carrying out the task of ‘consolidating the ethnic German nation’. From June 1941 onwards it had the title Staff Headquarters of the RKF (Reichskommisar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums).
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Hardly had he been appointed when Himmler leapt into action. As early as 11 October he signed ‘provisional planning guidelines’:

One Gau will be settled with Swabians, another with Franconians, and a third with Westphalians, Lower Saxons, Schleswig-Holsteiners, and so on. A village with around twenty-five farms will have a hard core of ten to twelve farms from a particular clan. These will be joined by ten to twelve ethnic German ones so that, with the aid of the Germans from the Old Reich, the ethnic Germans can once more be integrated into German life. Two or three SS military peasants will be settled in each village who can fill the posts of local peasant leader, parish councillor, and suchlike.
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On the same day he informed the heads of the main departments, Lorenz, Heydrich, and Pancke as well as Greifelt and the Reich Governors, Artur Greiser and Wilhelm Forster, of his views:

I envisage the [ethnic German] population of Riga forming the clan basis for the cities of Gotenhafen [Gdynia] and Posen [Poznań]. The urban population of Dorpat [Tartu] and Reval [Talinn] can be deployed in the same way. The selection of the population will be carried out by the chief of the security police in agreement with SS Obergruppenführer Lorenz. In order to settle Germans in those cities it will be essential to expel the Poles and clear their dwellings. Members of the Polish intelligentsia should be the first to be expelled.
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On 24 October Himmler visited Arthur Greiser, recently appointed Reich Governor in Posen. In the evening he spoke about settlement plans in the club of the civil administration. To begin with, he tried to elucidate the historical dimension of settlement:

As early as 3,000 years ago and during the following period Teutons lived in the eastern provinces in which we now find ourselves. Despite the poor transport conditions of those days and the other primitive conditions that existed, it was possible to settle Germans. These ancient German settlements have more or less survived racially to the present day in closed communities and as islands, even if in some cases they no longer speak the language. What was possible then must be even more feasible today.

Himmler explained the ‘concept of the military peasant’, for whose creation concrete preparations had already been made: ‘It involves, among other things, the compulsory saving that I introduced into the SS. An SS man, who in due course saves 2,000 to 3,000 Reich marks, has thereby laid the foundation for a settlement. The brickworks and stone quarries that I have established were begun with the aim of providing the basis for future peasant settlements.’ With his penchant for going into detail, Himmler explained to his audience how he envisaged the life of the future settlers:

The settlements that I envisage should not be built of clay, with walls one course of stone thick, but rather we should build houses as in the old days, two or three stone courses thick and with good foundations. We don’t need to buy the land for settlement; settlement land already exists [ . . . ]. Polish workers must provide the cheap labour for settlement and for ploughing the fields. [ . . . ] The Germans will always provide the leadership for everything; the Poles will do the dirty work.