Heinrich Himmler : A Life (81 page)

As usual, Himmler had very detailed ideas as to how the process of ‘racial assessment’ should proceed: ‘1. The most important principle is that the racial assessment should be disguised as a medical examination [ . . . ] 2. The rooms used must be such that, at the end of the assessment, the person who is to be assessed returns to the dressing-room. 3. A shower facility for the purpose of personal hygiene is an essential precondition for the assessment procedure.’ Himmler also laid down that assistant assessors should be employed, that coloured boards should be used, that cheekbones, eyelids, and body hair should be examined, as well as other details of the physical examination, and, in addition, required that there should be a ‘proper
drill’ for the whole procedure in order that the ‘thorough assessment’ of up to 400 people a day could be managed.
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As usual, he made the final decision on any complaints.
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The main problem with the Ethnic German List was deciding on who belonged in groups III and IV, who was German and who was Polish. The Race and Settlement Main Office pursued the policy of subjecting these 2 million or so people to individual assessment, a task which in 1942 was to be handled by eleven offices of the Ethnic German List in the annexed Polish territories. It is unclear, however, how many people were actually assessed.
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For Himmler was to come up against considerable opposition to his plan for individual racial assessments from the Reich Governors in the Warthegau, Danzig–West Prussia, and Upper Silesia, who preferred a simpler procedure.
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In any case, during the war it proved impossible to carry out major resettlement programmes on the basis of the Ethnic German List.

Thus, all three Germanization programmes that Himmler had initiated in the autumn of 1939 in his role as Settlement Commissar had come to a halt in 1940–1, and had more or less failed. The settlement of ethnic Germans from the Baltic States in the annexed territories had only partially succeeded; re-Germanization achieved far poorer results than originally envisaged. The process of registration for the Ethnic German List does not appear to have been successfully concluded. The main obstacle to the realization of these programmes was the fact that the expulsions to the General Government could not be carried out to the extent required. The various population movements got in each other’s way to such a degree that even the ‘evacuation’ of the Jewish population from the Reich that had originally been envisaged and confidently announced could not be carried out directly after the defeat of Poland, as had been planned.

Three months after the deportations associated with the Nisko project had been halted in November 1939 because of the priority being given to the settlement of ethnic Germans, the Reich Security Main Office organized a further, limited expulsion. On 12 and 13 February 1940 over 1,100 Jews from the district of Stettin, comprising almost the whole of the city’s Jewish
community, were deported to the Lublin region, and on 12 March around 160 people were deported from Schneidemühl to Glovnev near Posen.
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On 19 February Himmler justified these transports to the Gauleiters by the need to find room for the Baltic Germans. According to Himmler, he was explaining this so that his audience did not have any ‘false hopes’ as to subsequent deportations from their Gaus.
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During the coming year, however, he intended, ‘provided the war goes on for the whole year’, to tackle ‘Jewish emigration’ ‘to the extent that the numbers permit’, in other words, to the extent that the conditions in the General Government allowed. Evidently this compulsory resettlement was to be distinguished from the ‘normal emigration from the Old Reich, the Ostmark, and the Sudetengau’. This would ‘continue [ . . . ] despite the war’. ‘We then still want to emigrate [
sic
] 6,000–7,000 Jews per month to Palestine, South America, and North America.’ However, working along these lines it was possible to expel at most 80,000 people annually. Thus the deportations into the General Government had to be restarted in accordance with the following priorities:

First, I must try to get the Jews out of the eastern provinces, Posen and West Prussia, eastern Upper Silesia, and southern East Prussia, from the four provinces. That’s the first thing to do. Then comes the Old Reich and then the Protectorate. Here too I want at some point to get the 150,000 Jews in the Protectorate out. The Gypsies are another problem. If I can, I want to get them out this year as well. There are around 30,000 in the Reich as a whole, but they do a lot of racial damage.
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Himmler had good reason to warn against ‘false hopes’, for expansive deportation plans to the General Government were increasingly coming up against the opposition of the Governor-General, Hans Frank. At a top-level meeting on 12 February Frank had opposed the ‘continuation of the resettlement programme as practised hitherto’ and had received a promise from Himmler and Göring that in future he would be consulted more about the evacuations.
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After a further conversation with Hitler, on 29 February, Frank reckoned that ‘at least 400,000–600,000 more Jews’ would be arriving, and on 4 March he informed the district and city chiefs in the Lublin area that their district continued to be envisaged as ‘a sort of Jewish reservation’.
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Thus, a few days later the German authorities postponed the planned creation of a ghetto in Warsaw; in view of the fact that the
General Government was going to act as a dumping ground, there no longer seemed any point in going ahead with it.
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On 24 March Göring made all deportations into the General Government subject to his and Frank’s express approval.
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This meant that de facto the transports had been halted. The project for a Jewish reservation in Lublin was permanently abandoned and the preparations for a ghetto in Warsaw were restarted.
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Himmler’s announcement to the Gauleiters had been far too rash.

In the autumn of 1940 the population of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was also subjected to a ‘racial stocktaking’.
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The initiative came from the Higher SS and Police Leader in Prague, Karl Hermann Frank, and received a positive response from Hitler. The investigation was the responsibility of the Race and Settlement Main Office, which, in October 1940, was ordered by Himmler ‘as soon as possible to draft a questionnaire for Czech school doctors’, which superficially was intended to assess school-children’s health, but in fact was designed ‘to clarify what are for us important questions’ concerning the ‘racial’ make-up of Czech youth. Himmler then laid down the criteria for the racial test: ‘exact height, age, weight, eye colour divided into three categories: 1. blue, blue-green—2. brown, dark brown—3. black, and finally the skin colour, which is to be divided into 1. Blond, dark blond—2. Brown, dark brown and black.’
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Himmler sent Frank the questionnaire that had been drafted by the RuSHA in accordance with his guidelines and, in addition, recommended that ‘profile and full-face photographs’ should be made of every child. In this way, according to Himmler, for the first time they would have ‘in practice a racial stocktaking of the Czech people’.
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In order to carry out this ambitious task, at the beginning of 1941 the RuSHA established a well-staffed branch office in Prague.
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In the meantime, a member of the RuSHA, Walter König-Beyer, had composed a memorandum on the racial-political conditions of the Bohemian–Moravian region which concluded that, after a thorough racial and political assessment of the indigenous population, around 55 per cent
should be resettled to the General Government.
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However, at this point Himmler’s assignment as Settlement Commissar did not yet apply to the Protectorate, so that initially no concrete steps could be taken to implement such a project. It was only when Heydrich was appointed deputy Reich Protector in October 1941 that plans for the Germanization of the Protectorate received a decisive impetus.

At this point Slovakia also became a target of the SS and its ambitious population policy. Independent Slovakia, which had been created in March 1939, had a German minority of about 130,000 people. The leadership of this group, which had Nazi views, sought affiliation with the Reich, which, in view of the areas of ethnic German settlement, would have implied the annexation of large parts of Slovakia. This was opposed to the official policy of the Nazi regime, which was much more in favour of a Slovakian state dependent on Germany than of bringing these ethnic Germans ‘home to the Reich’.
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In May 1940 Franz Karmasin, the leader of the ethnic German group, appealed to the RuSHA to join him on a visit to the ethnic Germans who were living dispersed in the Beskydy mountains in order to ‘assess and examine their racial value’. Günther Pancke, the head of the RuSHA, duly undertook a study trip to the area, informing the Reichsführer of its results: ‘The whole of Slovakia is a huge graveyard for ethnic Germans.’ On the basis of this observation Pancke developed a plan that, far from aiming to strengthen the ethnic German group, instead envisaged a fusing of the Slovakian population with ‘the ethnic Germans’. In Pancke’s view, after the removal of Jews and Gypsies, as well as the ‘exclusion’ of the population of Hungarian origin, amounting to around 500,000 people, it would be possible to win back this territory completely for German ethnicity, particularly if, in addition, some 100,000 ethnic German families were settled there.
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In March 1940 the SS not only began clandestinely to examine the ethnic Germans in Slovakia but at the same time set about forming an elite from the Slovakian Hlinka guards, which might act as the core of the fusion policy advocated by Pancke.

Apart from these plans for large-scale settlement and population movements, Himmler was still confronted with the problem of sorting out the
task Hitler had given him prior to his appointment as Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation, namely, the resettlement of the South Tyroleans.

A few days after the outbreak of the Second World War Himmler informed his ‘highly valued friend’, the Italian Minister of Police Bocchini, that he would stick to his original promise to oblige all Reich Germans to leave South Tyrol within three months (the first stage in the resettlement), ‘despite the changed conditions and tension inevitably created by the war’. Naturally, the South Tyroleans who decided to emigrate ‘should not be permitted to look down on’ those people who decided to remain in Italy, ‘thereby indicating that they wanted to become Italians both as regards their outward behaviour and as far as their innermost feelings are concerned’.
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After further negotiations Himmler interrupted the intensive planning for the population movements in Poland and, between 11 and 13 October, met Bocchini in Tremezzo on Lake Como in order to deal with the problems that had arisen in the meantime. He used the occasion to advocate a radical shortening and acceleration of the planned operation. Originally the South Tyroleans with Italian nationality had been given a deadline of 30 June 1940 within which to decide whether they wanted to become German or remain Italian. This was now reduced to 31 December 1939, with a corresponding simplification of the bureaucratic procedure.
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On the return journey from Tremezzo Himmler took some fundamental decisions relating to the resettlement of the South Tyroleans. He noted, in a piece that was intended for publication, that they should be ‘placed en bloc in a new settlement area’, for example in the lower reaches of the Netze (Notec) river or in an area on ‘the northern slopes of the Beskyda’, in other words, in the mountain range in southern Poland that bordered on Slovakia. In accordance with an order from Hitler, the resettlement was to be carried out in a ‘generous manner’. ‘Rural and urban communities will be reestablished under their old names.’ Himmler had already thought of a name for the settlement, which was not meant cynically: East Tyrol.
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On 21 October 1939, after further negotiations, the first agreement concerning the resettlement was reached,
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and five days later, on 26 October, the emigration guidelines were issued. However, this prompted a propaganda campaign by the Italians against the resettlement that was tolerated by the prefect in Bolzano. Moreover, the Italian authorities kept arresting South Tyroleans sympathetic to the Nazis who were supporting the emigration.
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On 14 November Himmler intervened, with
a pointedly friendly letter to Bocchini in which he nevertheless complained strongly about the propaganda campaign, the arrests, and about the fact that the Italians had not kept to certain parts of the agreement concerning the right to opt for German or Italian nationality
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On 15 November Wolff and the under-state secretary in the Italian Interior Ministry, Buffarini Guidi, came to an agreement in Rome which, in particular, ensured the release of those who had been arrested.
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The option process, which had been completed by the end of 1939, resulted in a large majority opting to emigrate.
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Of the 200,000 people who had opted for Germany or were German citizens, 56,000 had left their homeland by the end of 1940. However, during the last months of 1940 the numbers of resettlers were declining significantly. By the middle of 1942 only a further 20,000 people had left South Tyrol, and then the whole project came to a halt. The vast majority had emigrated to Austria, around 21,000 to other parts of the Reich.
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