Heinrich Himmler : A Life (82 page)

While the majority of South Tyroleans were housed in makeshift resettlement camps, Greifelt’s RKF office stuck to the plan for a settlement of the South Tyroleans en bloc. Himmler’s original idea of resettling the South Tyroleans in the Beskyda was dropped fairly quickly, in view of the negative response of those affected.
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After the victory over France in June 1940, Greifelt put forward a new plan. On 10 July he produced a memorandum which envisaged the resettlement of the South Tyroleans in Burgundy. A week later Himmler made a surprise revelation of this idea, which had allegedly already been approved in principle by Hitler, to a delegation of those who had opted for Germany. The delegation went on a tour of inspection to the proposed settlement area, and on 23 July was received by Himmler for a final meeting. Although work continued on the project during the following years, the annexation of French territory and the expulsion of the indigenous population in order to ‘free up’ the settlement area would have damaged German–French relations to an extent that made it inconceivable during the war.
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After the occupation of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941 a new settlement area was discussed and then rejected, namely Lower Styria, which had been annexed by Germany. Finally, in mid-1942 the most outlandish plan of all was mooted: to settle the South Tyroleans in the Crimea, a scheme proposed to Himmler in May 1942 by the former Gauleiter of Vienna, Alfred Frauenfeld, who had been designated as the future Commissar-General of the Crimea. Himmler discussed this project with Hitler and both men liked the idea. It was agreed, however, that its implementation would have to be
postponed until after the war. Himmler told Frauenfeld that ‘we shall simply find another national group or another population’ for Burgundy.
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The strategy developed by Himmler in October 1939 had involved committing himself to carrying out a rapid resettlement of a whole population to a particular area without an area actually being available. Conceived in the euphoria of Germany’s victory and inspired by the expansion of his resettlement task in his new role as Settlement Commissar, it proved to be a disaster with catastrophic consequences. However, the abortive resettlement of the South Tyroleans was not the only fiasco produced by Settlement Commissar Himmler.

At the beginning of 1940 Himmler was faced with massive criticism from the leadership of the Wehrmacht. At its heart were orders relating in various ways to Himmler’s radical policy of ethnic reordering but also affecting the status of the Wehrmacht, namely the mass murders committed by the SS in Poland, which in the view of the officer corps threatened to damage the honour of the Wehrmacht, and also Himmler’s so-called ‘Procreation Order’ of October 1939.

As has been shown above,
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from 1939 onwards there was an increasing number of complaints from Wehrmacht commanders about atrocities carried out by the SS in Poland. In particular, in November 1939 and January 1940 the Military Commander East, Colonel-General Johannes von Blaskowitz, complained to the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Walther von Brauchitsch, in two memoranda.
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After a meeting between Blaskowitz and von Brauchitsch in January the latter had two meetings with Himmler, on 24 January and 2 February, at which, among other things, he raised these complaints, though without trying to press Himmler too hard. During the second meeting Himmler was conciliatory, admitted ‘mistakes’, and emphasized that he was concerned to maintain good relations with the army.
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Brauchitsch was satisfied with this. Indeed, on 13 March he invited Himmler to give a speech to the senior commanders in Koblenz. Himmler used the opportunity to play down the reports of atrocities by the SS and, in addition, to indicate that he was doing nothing without Hitler’s knowledge. Thus, his radical population policy was covered by the authority of ‘the Führer’.
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In the end, the outrage
within the officer corps at the crimes of the Waffen-SS in Poland fizzled out without having made any impact, apart from the fact that in future the military was much more reserved in its response to proposals from the SS leadership to integrate SS command structures or agencies into the military command structures.

At von Brauchitsch’s meeting with Himmler on 2 February, Himmler’s ‘Children’s Decree’, as the Commander-in-Chief politely described it, was also the subject of discussion. This was the order of 28 October, which within the Wehrmacht was known as the ‘Procreation Order’ (
Zeugungsbefehl
), and which may well have caused more agitation than the crimes committed by the SS in Poland.
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On issuing this order Himmler had provided the following justification: ‘Every war is a bloodletting of the best blood. Many a military victory won by a nation has been at the same time a crushing defeat for its vitality and its blood.’ However, the ‘inevitable death of its best men, however sad, is not the worst thing’ about it; it is rather ‘the non-existence of the children who have not been produced by the living during the war and by the dead after the war [ . . . ] He who knows that his clan, that all that he and his ancestors have wanted and sought to achieve, will be continued through his children can die in peace. The best gift to the widow of a fallen soldier is always the child of the man she loved.’ And then Himmler came to the point: ‘Beyond the limits of bourgeois laws and conventions, which are perhaps necessary in other circumstances, it can, even outside marriage, be a noble task, undertaken not frivolously but from deep moral seriousness, for German women and girls of good blood to become mothers of the children of soldiers going to war of whom fate alone knows whether they will return or die for Germany.’

Thus Himmler had decided publicly to propagate the views on illegitimate births that he had pursued above all during 1936–7. Although he had addressed his order to procreate children ‘outside marriage’ to ‘the whole of the police and SS’, in fact he spoke generally about ‘soldiers going to the front’, and so it was also intended to be a general appeal to go beyond ‘the bounds of bourgeois laws and habits’.

Apart from that, Himmler recalled in his order—referring once again not only to the police and SS—the

sacred duty to become mothers and fathers. Let us never forget that the victory gained by our swords and the blood shed by our soldiers would be pointless unless it
were followed by the victory involved in the birth of children and the settlement of our new land. During the last war many a soldier decided out of a sense of responsibility to have no more children during the war so that his wife would not be left in need and distress after his death. You SS men need not have such concerns and anxieties.
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In January 1940, however, Himmler felt it necessary to elucidate the Procreation Order through a further order. His October order, which—how could it be otherwise!—‘was conceived with decency and construed in a decent sense and deals candidly with problems that can be anticipated in the future’, had ‘led to misconceptions and misunderstandings on the part of some people’. As far as this involved the question of illegitimate children, Himmler commented briefly and succinctly: ‘this is not a matter for discussion.’ However, the order had also been interpreted to mean that SS men were being encouraged ‘to approach the wives of soldiers serving at the front’, and Himmler emphatically denied this.
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On 30 January he issued a specific ban on members of the police and SS having sexual intercourse with the wives of front-line soldiers. Himmler made it clear in the order that breaches would be treated as disobeying a military order and punished accordingly.
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After the two meetings with von Brauchitsch in January and February 1940 Himmler also dealt with the murders in Poland and the controversial Procreation Order in a speech to the Gauleiters and other high-ranking party functionaries. Unlike the appearance before the senior commanders of the Wehrmacht arranged with von Brauchitsch, here Himmler was basically performing in front of his home crowd, and so did not have to adopt a remorseful pose.

As far as the Procreation Order was concerned, Himmler noted that, ‘with a very few exceptions’, he ‘had been clearly and correctly understood’ by the party, but outside the party he had ‘largely’ met with ‘criticism and opposition’. Himmler explained that he had issued the order because the father of an SS man who had been killed had asked him whether his son had left behind an illegitimate child. This enquiry had made him realize that, ‘in our hypocritical age, for we are still socially hypocritical, it is necessary for a chap to be dead and buried before his parents can be happy and suddenly understand the age-old truth that it is important for a family to go on and for its blood not to be lost’. In response he had ‘drafted this order and given it to the Führer, not—and I would ask you to appreciate this—because I wanted to tell the world that the Führer had approved it, but only in order to find
out: does the Führer agree with it or does he not? If he agrees with it then the order will be issued. If there’s a negative response we shall have to deal with it ourselves and not refer to the Führer.’

After having covered his back by citing the highest authority, he then gave them a lecture that was simultaneously grammatically confused and condescending:

Gentlemen theoreticians, you fail to see that this increase in the number of males born in the war years will bring nature back into balance by itself, but that this equilibrium will not be produced in the cohorts of women now aged between 35 and 40, but in fact will be produced by war widows, though not all of them in the legal sense of the word, but rather by women whose husbands or future husbands have fallen and are not there, women who are still of child-bearing age. I reckon that these amount to 100,000, it may be 2, 3, 4 or 500,000, indeed it may well be half-a-million who have a problem in that their husband is dead.

In addition, ‘there is a huge silent burden which unfortunately continues to weigh on our nation’ in the shape of homosexuality, a ‘lethal illness for a nation’. While Himmler naturally assumed that the fight he had been waging for years—he had previously estimated there were 2 million homosexuals—had made a significant impact, ‘I think we must still reckon there are half-a-million’ of them.

This problem, ‘that there are women here and no men for these women’, cannot ‘simply be solved with moralizing words’. ‘I am opposed and I think we are all opposed to this continuing social hypocrisy, to the fact that flirting or, if you like, friendship, or a relationship are socially acceptable but an illegitimate child is not socially acceptable and so the mother isn’t either.’ The attitude he was putting forward did not, he claimed, undermine marriage; on the contrary, ‘marriages which produce many children form the core of the nation’. Himmler devoted seventeen pages of his speech to the controversial order, before moving on to his second topic. The point was to ensure that ‘in the provinces which now belong to Germany [ . . . ] the problem of the existence of a Polish minority is dealt with and eliminated during our time’. And, in order to clarify matters, he emphasized: ‘I don’t want to be misunderstood: the Polish nationality and the Polish people must both be dissolved.’

After commenting on the supposed percentage of Germanic blood in the Slavs, he came to the point with a combination of half-hearted assertions of his innocence and relatively subtle counter-attacks:

Then there’s the question of alleged atrocities. It is of course quite possible that in the east a train gets frozen in and not only during evacuations and that the people freeze to death. That’s possible. Unfortunately that’s happened to Germans as well. You simply can’t do anything about it if you’re travelling from Ł
ó
ódź to Warsaw and the train gets stuck for hours on end. Then you can’t blame the railways or anybody. That’s the fault of the climate there. It’s regrettable for the Germans, it’s regrettable for the Poles, and, if you like, it’s regrettable for the Jews as well, if anyone feels like being sorry for them. But it’s not intended and it can’t be helped. I think it’s wrong to make a big song and dance about it.

Himmler continued:

Also, the fact that a lot had to be done on foot. Well, good God, I can’t help it. I couldn’t help the fact that the Germans had to go on route marches either. So my first concern is going to be for the Germans. If I can change things for them I will certainly do so. And then, if I have the time and opportunity, I will happily change things for the Poles and Jews as well. But that has the lowest priority. And I think it’s wrong for people to get excited here in Berlin and to tell a lot of stories about atrocities. I don’t deny at all—in fact, I’m well aware of it—that here and there in the east excesses have occurred, shootings when people were drunk, cases where people may well have deserved to be shot but shouldn’t have been shot by someone who was drunk, where looting has occurred throughout the east sometimes in a manner that I must say I didn’t believe possible. Done by every conceivable agency and by every conceivable person in every conceivable uniform. [ . . . ] When a case like that occurs, then one must calmly note it:—for example, if I’ve been informed by a few Gauleiters that police sergeant so-and-so has sent some parcels home, I’m very grateful for that. We shall note it and then deal with the man.
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In September 1940 Himmler referred once again to the murders in Poland, this time in a speech to the commanders of the ‘Leibstandarte’ and this time without attempting to describe the crimes as an accident. On the contrary: internally, he openly admitted the murders when he reminded people that in Poland, in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, ‘we had to cart off tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. We had to be tough enough—you’re going to listen to this and then immediately forget it again—to shoot thousands of leading Poles. We had to be tough enough to cope with bringing in tens of thousands of Germans this winter in –40° because otherwise we would later come to regret not having done it.’
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