Heinrich Himmler : A Life (84 page)

Although its research contribution—in other words, the Office’s
raison d’être
—was in the final analysis minimal, the officials tasked with dealing with the various issues were very industrious. In the academic sphere they exercised considerable influence on the assessment of qualifications and on appointments, and in the occupied territories they pursued a systematic policy of plunder, ‘acquiring’ libraries, archives, and collections on a large scale.
¹⁶

The development of the Reich Security Main Office was characterized by a certain amount of fragmentation of responsibilities, which meant that the pre-war years had seen the work of the Gestapo and the Kripo increasingly overlapping. From now on the Gestapo concentrated on the actual pursuit of political opponents, which during the war was extended above all to cover the increasing number of foreigners living in Germany. In view of the imminent outbreak of war, Heydrich had already considerably restricted the tasks of the Gestapo through an edict of 31 August 1939. Its engagement in matters involving the religious confessions, Jews, Freemasons, émigrés, reactionaries, and party affairs was substantially restricted, while the majority of those cases involving homosexuality and abortion were transferred to the Kripo.
¹⁷
‘Preventive’ measures using terror directed at ‘asocials’ and criminals were also now largely the responsibility of the criminal police. These instructions were modified during the course of the war.
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The SD, which in the pre-war period had often acted as an auxiliary agency of the Gestapo, now tended to withdraw from an executive role.

A few weeks after the outbreak of war, and with the police reorganization still going on, Himmler was confronted with his first challenge. At 9.20 on the evening of 9 November 1939 a bomb exploded in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, killing eight people and injuring numerous others. The explosion occurred only thirteen minutes after Hitler had left the building, considerably earlier than his programme had envisaged. If he had not altered his plans he would undoubtedly have fallen victim to the explosion, which occurred next to the rostrum and had been detonated with the aid of a timing device. By chance the assassin was arrested on the same evening. Georg Elser, a joiner, who had prepared and carried out the assassination attempt on his own, was caught by German frontier guards while trying
to flee to Switzerland, and, after the attack became known, was brought to Munich.

Himmler and the Gestapo officials investigating the affair initially did not believe Elser’s claim that he had carried out the attack without any outside help. Instead, they believed that it had been an attack by the British Secret Service. Himmler had already officially committed himself to this account of the events, and the propaganda covering it was designed accordingly.
¹⁹
Since, on the very same day, an SD commando had kidnapped two British agents, Captain Sigismund Payne Best and Major Richard Stevens, in the Dutch town of Venlo near the German border, Hitler and Himmler immediately speculated that they had disrupted a secret operation of the British Secret Service aimed at removing the dictator and destabilizing the Nazi regime.
²⁰

As a result, an attempt was made to force Elser to reveal information about the ‘men behind the scenes’. According to a post-war report by two Gestapo officials, Himmler even interrogated Elser personally in order to explore the background; in the process he kicked him brutally several times, abused him, and had him tortured by a Gestapo official in a side room. This is, in fact, the only example in his whole career of Himmler personally using physical force.
²¹
However, during the night of 13–14 November Elser undermined Himmler’s assumptions and deductions by explaining in detail how he had planned and carried out the act on his own.
²²

As a result, Himmler was faced with the threat of being accused of incompetence in relation to the assassination, on the grounds both of having led the investigations in the wrong direction and, as the supreme chief of police in the Reich, of being responsible for the inadequate security arrangements at the Bürgerbräukeller that had enabled Elser painstakingly to assemble his bomb.

On 8 September 1939 the Reich Ministry of Justice issued a brief and terse press release: ‘The Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police has announced that Johann Heinen, of Dessau, was shot on 7.9.1939 for refusing to cooperate in implementing safety measures required for national defence. He also had a criminal record for theft.’ The announcement mentioned two further cases: another person with a previous conviction who was shot for ‘arson and sabotage’ and a Jehovah’s Witness shot for ‘conscientious objection’.

The Reich Justice Minister, Franz Gürtner, was concerned about the legal grounds for these ‘executions without a trial’. It was not until a few
weeks later that he learned that Hitler himself had ordered the three shootings and, in the meantime, had ordered the execution of two bank-robbers, as the courts ‘had not shown themselves equal to the special wartime conditions’. By January 1940 Hitler had instructed Himmler to arrange the immediate execution of a total of eighteen criminals, including a confidence-trickster who had pretended to be a successful U-boat officer, a rapist, a handbag thief who had taken advantage of the blackout, an arsonist, and sex offenders who had abused children. In some cases sentences had already been passed on these offenders, in others no trial had yet taken place.
²³

There was, in fact, no legal basis for these executions; the Gestapo had nevertheless already developed a standard procedure for them. On 3 September Heydrich had informed the Gestapo branches of the ‘Basic Principles for Maintaining Internal Security During the War’, which stated, among other things:

Any attempt to undermine the unity of the German people and its determination to fight must be ruthlessly suppressed. In particular, any person who expresses doubts about the victory of the German nation or questions the justification for the war is to be arrested [ . . . ] The Chief of the Security Police must then be informed without delay and a decision requested on the further treatment of the arrested persons, since the ruthless liquidation of such elements may be ordered at a high level […].
²⁴

Himmler’s organization was thus entitled to execute anyone arousing such a suspicion, even in the case of relatively minor offences. The term used to describe this police licence to kill was ‘special treatment’ (
Sonderbehandlung
). It was carried out in concentration camps, police prisons, or in work reeducation camps, and later on in the war also in public, for example in businesses or in public places.
²⁵
All cases which regional Gestapo offices deemed suitable for ‘special treatment’ had to be referred to Himmler. It is clear that the Reichsführer made the decision himself, which was final, just as he did in doubtful cases involving the approval of marriage, applications for re-Germanization, and the punishment of his men for indulging in banned sexual relations.
²⁶

Within the territory of the Reich itself ‘special treatment’ was directed above all against an ‘opposition’ group that the Nazi policy of conquest had itself created: foreigners living in Germany. By the end of 1939 the party and state agencies were already engaged in intensive discussions about how the
large numbers of Polish POWs and workers who had been brought into the Reich should be treated, and above all how they should be kept separate from the German population. It was clear that people from a subjugated country who were potentially hostile to Nazi Germany posed a threat. Propaganda hostile to the regime, the undermining of work discipline, espionage, but also ordinary criminality could all be anticipated. The assumed ‘racial inferiority’ of the Poles increased the problem in the eyes of the regime, and Himmler made it his task not only to develop the surveillance of foreigners into a new focus for the work of the Gestapo, but to do so in particular in racial terms.

A few days after the outbreak of war Himmler asked Hitler how they should proceed if Polish POWs made friends with, or even had sexual relations with, German women and girls. Hitler replied, as Himmler noted in a minute, ‘every POW who has relations with a German girl or a German woman should be shot’, and the German woman should be publicly denounced by ‘having her hair shorn and being sent to a concentration camp’.
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On 8 January Heydrich informed the Gestapo offices that the POWs concerned would be transferred by the Wehrmacht’s POW department to the Gestapo.
²⁸
(In December, at Himmler’s request, Best had already ordered all Poles who left their place of work without permission to be imprisoned in a concentration camp).
²⁹

On 29 February 1940 Himmler expressed his views on the treatment of Polish agricultural workers, who were being brought into the Reich in ever-increasing numbers, to a group of senior party functionaries. It was impossible to ‘screen’ a million Poles within a few weeks and to allow only ‘racially valuable and decent people’ into the Reich. Instead, the Poles were being ‘brought in en bloc and treated as Poles en bloc’. They would be given a badge, and as a matter of principle ‘they would not be allowed to form relationships with Germans [ . . . ] If a Pole has sex [ . . . ] with a German woman the man will be hanged and it will be done in front of his camp. Then the others won’t do it.’ Moreover, Himmler reassured his audience that they were making sure ‘that there are a sufficient number of Polish women and girls coming over as well so that there can be no question of there being any need’. The German women who had forbidden relations with Poles, Himmler added, would be ‘mercilessly taken to court’ and, if there was insufficient evidence to secure a conviction, ‘sent to a concentration camp’. There was ‘no point’, the Reichsführer concluded, in
‘theorizing’ about this. It would be ‘better if we didn’t have them—we all know that—but we need them’.
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Barely two weeks later, on 8 March 1940, the question of how Polish civilian workers living in the Reich were to be treated was finally and comprehensively dealt with by the so-called ‘Polish decrees’, a collection of ten documents in total.
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In this connection Himmler informed Gestapo offices through a telex from the Reich Security Main Office that they should be responsible for punishing insubordinate behaviour by Poles—habitually negligent work, strikes, leaving the workplace without permission, acts of sabotage, and so on—on their own initiative through consignment to a work re-education camp or a concentration camp, and, in particularly serious cases, through ‘special treatment’—in other words, execution. In the case of sexual intercourse between Polish workers and Germans, the Pole should be shot without waiting for the sentence of a court; the German partner, whether male or female, should be sent to a concentration camp.
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If the case did go to court and there was no guilty verdict, imprisonment in a concentration camp should nevertheless be imposed. In a decree of May 1940, reflecting Hitler’s instruction of September 1939, Himmler added that, ‘if the local women and girls wish publicly to denounce the woman concerned or to cut off her hair before she is transferred to a concentration camp the police should not intervene to prevent it.’
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In July the application of the March decrees was extended to cover POWs who had been released.
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Large numbers of executions of Polish POWs for having sexual relations with German women began after the victory over France in June 1940. However, after July 1941 Himmler ordered the RSHA to examine every single case, in order to establish through ‘a racial assessment’ whether the Polish man concerned was capable of being ‘Germanized’. If this was the case he was sent to a KZ for a relatively short time. If the racial assessment was negative he was executed.
³⁵
The press reported the incidents with the standard formula: ‘hanged [ . . . ] on the orders of the Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police for illicit sexual relations.’
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It would, however, be a mistake to imagine that at the start of the war the Gestapo had begun to pursue all actual or potential ‘enemies’ of the regime with the same degree of harshness. The number of cases brought against left-wingers and critical or opposition members of religious denominations
appears even to have reduced.
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The historian Eric Johnson has shown that, as in the pre-war period, more than 40 per cent of the preliminary investigations were directed against ‘ordinary Germans’,
³⁸
who in wartime too were treated relatively mildly and got away with a warning or a fine.
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By contrast, the surveillance and persecution of the Jews was drastically increased after the outbreak of war. This also had organizational repercussions. Department IV D4, established in the RSHA at the beginning of 1940 under Eichmann, and shortly afterwards renamed IV B4 (Jewish affairs, evacuation affairs), focused on the ‘Jewish question’.
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Among other things, the section controlled the Reich Association of Jews, created in July 1939, to which all the Jewish communities that still existed and all remaining Jewish associations, organizations, foundations, and so on were subordinated.
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During the first months after the outbreak of war the exclusion of Jews from German society was completed.
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Joseph Walk’s collection of anti-Jewish legislation reveals that between the November pogrom of 1938 and the outbreak of war 229, and between 1 September 1939 and the start of the deportations in October 1941 exactly 253 anti-Jewish measures were enacted, often by Himmler or the security police. On 10 September 1939 Himmler issued an unpublished edict imposing a 8 p.m. curfew for Jews.
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On 12 September 1939 the security police limited the Jews to certain shops,
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and on 23 September the Gestapa ordered the ‘immediate’ confiscation of all radios in the possession of Jews throughout the Reich.
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Further measures imposed by other authorities included the removal of telephones,
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discriminatory treatment in relation to air-raid precautions,
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as well as discrimination in the allocation of rationed goods, which was ensured by marking Jews’ ration-books with a J.
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Moreover, the whole of the Jewish population capable of work was obliged to perform compulsory labour,
⁴⁹
and more and more Jews had to vacate their flats and move into specified ‘Jew houses’ (
Judenhäuser
).
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From May 1941 onwards Gestapo offices began to set up special ‘Jew camps’ (
Judenlager
), particularly near large cities.
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