Heinrich Himmler : A Life (85 page)

The SD reported that, in the first quarter of 1940, 10,312 Jews had emigrated from Germany.
⁵²
On 24 April 1940 the Reich Security Main Office instructed Gestapo offices that they must ‘continue to press ahead with Jewish emigration from the Reich, and to an even greater extent during the war’.
⁵³

During the war the criminal police (Kripo) had to cede a large part of its personnel to agencies in the occupied territories as well as to Einsatzkommandos, the Gestapo, and to the Wehrmacht’s Secret Field Police. The gaps were inadequately filled by the reactivation of pensioned officers as well as through the appointment of outsiders.
⁵⁴

At the same time, the Kripo acquired numerous new responsibilities. It was expected to impose greater control and discipline on young people, who were subject to a variety of bans to prevent them from going astray;
⁵⁵
it also had to pursue the so-called war-economy offences, in other words, breaches of the numerous rationing regulations such as slaughtering animals without a permit, participating in the black market, or distributing forged ration books.
⁵⁶
During the later war years it also had to exercise control over the millions of foreigners living in Germany, as well as deal with some of the consequences of Allied bombing.

The criminal police responded to these new demands above all in two ways: on the one hand, they no longer pursued so-called petty offences, which among other things resulted in the statistics for certain offences such as fraud showing a decline.
⁵⁷
On the other hand, they gradually extended the ‘preventive combating of crime’ until it became a policy of systematic mass murder as the conditions in concentration camps were made considerably harsher.

To begin with, the Kripo imposed preventive police detention on more and more sections of the population. After the outbreak of war all those ‘unworthy of military service’ (that is to say, those who were excluded from military service because of significant previous convictions), women who were suspected of working as prostitutes, as well as so-called criminal psychopaths were consigned to concentration camps.
⁵⁸
On 18 October Himmler ordered that ‘work-shy’ people with previous convictions who were arrested during police raids should no longer be reported to labour exchanges but immediately transferred to concentration camps.
⁵⁹
During the first weeks following the outbreak of war Himmler also had numerous members of the socialist labour movement sent to concentration camps, as well as 2,000 people of Polish origin.
⁶⁰
Moreover, the Kripo rearrested those Jews who had been taken into protective custody in November 1938
and had then been released in return for their promise to emigrate, but who had remained in the country.
⁶¹
Furthermore, the Reich Criminal Police Office ordered that all people who, on account of ‘mental instability’, were suspected of spreading discontent among the population should be taken into preventive police custody.
⁶²
In addition, the persecution of clergy was increased. Numerous new legal regulations which were issued immediately after the outbreak of war, for example, the ban on listening to foreign broadcasts, the Decree against National Pests, or the War Economy Decree, provided the justification for imposing preventive custody.
⁶³

As far as crime-prevention was concerned, between the summer of 1940 and the autumn of 1941—that is, during the phase of Blitzkrieg victories—the Kripo appears to have already been preparing for the post-war period. The preventive measures were now extended to the annexed territories (the Protectorate, western Poland, Alsace and Lorraine) and within the Reich were increasingly geared to the priorities of population policy. Homosexuals, sex offenders, and people who cohabited in order to avoid the regulations of the Marriage Health Law all suffered ever-increasing persecution.
⁶⁴
Above all, as previously indicated, conditions for those imprisoned in concentration camps became much harsher.

Himmler was determined to respond to the increase in the number of prisoners during the war by expanding the KZ system and to prevent any camps being established outside the system he had created. During the winter of 1939–40 he had to intervene with several Higher SS and Police Leaders on these grounds. In December 1939 he reprimanded Richard Hildebrandt, the HSSPF responsible for the new Gau of Danzig–West Prussia, for establishing his own camp in Stutthof. Hildebrandt was intending to retain the Wachsturmbann Eimann, a formation created from the Danzig SS, after the end of the war as an autonomous unit, among other things to act as guards for ‘his KZ’. Himmler complained that by setting up such an autonomous force Hildebrandt was helping to bring about ‘the end of the SS as a unified organization’. He told him, in no
uncertain terms: ‘concentration camps can be established only with my permission.’
⁶⁵

Himmler had a copy of this letter sent to the leaders of the Oberabschnitte, though he did not mention Hildebrandt by name. Furthermore, he instructed the acting Inspector of Concentration Camps, August Heissmeyer, to find out whether there were any other HSSPF camps in the Reich. The camps were then inspected by the Concentration Camps Inspectorate (IKL), and none of them was considered worth retaining. Even Stutthof remained a detention camp with purely regional responsibilities. The Wachsturmbann Eimann was disbanded.
⁶⁶

When Himmler learnt in January 1940 that the HSSPF in Breslau, von dem Bach-Zelewski, was intending to establish a regional detention camp in a former artillery barracks near the town of Auschwitz, ‘along the lines of a state concentration camp’,
⁶⁷
he seized the property, using his powers as Settlement Commissar. In fact, in February 1940
⁶⁸
Richard Glücks, who had taken over the IKL from Eicke in November 1939, proposed establishing a concentration camp there under its auspices. Himmler agreed and, at the beginning of May 1940, Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Höss, hitherto Schutzhaftlagerführer in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was appointed its commandant. Initially the majority of prisoners incarcerated there were Polish civilians.
⁶⁹

At the beginning of 1941 the IG Farben chemicals concern expressed an interest in constructing a large plant for the manufacture of Buna (synthetic rubber) in Auschwitz. Its favourable geographical location and the prospect of prisoners providing cheap labour were positive factors influencing the decision.
⁷⁰
Himmler devoted a great deal of attention to the IG Farben project, and gave his personal assurance that there would be a sufficient number of prisoners to carry out the building work. He first visited the KZ on 1 March 1941 and took decisions concerning both the design of the camp and cooperation with IG Farben.
⁷¹
The construction of the camp accelerated plans for the ‘Germanization’ of the town; Jews and Poles were expelled. Himmler wanted Auschwitz to become a German ‘model town’, a model for the settlement of the east.
⁷²

Around January 1940 Himmler transformed the previous branch camp of Neuengamme near Hamburg into an autonomous concentration camp. The number of prisoners was doubled and plans were made for the large-scale production of clinker-brick.
⁷³
Gross-Rosen in Lower Silesia, which initially had been established as a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen and was
intended for the quarrying of granite, was raised to the status of an autonomous concentration camp in May 1941. Himmler and Glücks had already visited the camp in the autumn of 1940.
⁷⁴
Natzweiler in Alsace also became an autonomous concentration camp in May 1941. In August 1940, like Neuengamme, it too had been established as a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen. This camp was also primarily designed for the quarrying of stone.
⁷⁵

Thus, by spring 1941 four new concentration camps had been established in addition to the six existing ones: Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Gross-Rosen, and Natzweiler. Moreover, KZ Niedernhagen (the camp was intended for prisoners working on the Wewelsburg), as well as KZ Hinzert (a former police camp for disciplining workers on the Western Wall fortifications project), were subordinated to the IKL.
⁷⁶

Ill. 21.
Himmler and his entourage during a visit to KZ Mauthausen. Himmler had already announced to Wehrmacht officers in 1937 that, in the event of war, the SS saw it as its task to secure ‘Germany at home’ as a fourth ‘theatre of war’ alongside those on the land, water, and in the air. And after the outbreak of the Second World War Himmler did indeed focus on this task with extreme brutality. He reserved decisions in cases of ‘special treatment’, in other words the summary murder of people who were opponents of the regime or guilty of serious offences, to himself.

After the outbreak of war conditions in all the concentration camps were made more harsh: food supplies were reduced and mistreatment increased;
the barracks were seriously overcrowded. As a result, after the outbreak of war the death-rate increased sharply.
⁷⁷
Soon, however, German inmates came to represent only a minority among the numerous prisoners whom the Gestapo had arrested in the occupied territories, particularly in the east.
⁷⁸
The number of KZ prisoners quadrupled from around 21,000 in August 1939 to around 70,000 in spring 1942.
⁷⁹

In January 1941 Heydrich ordered a ‘division of the concentration camps into distinct levels reflecting the personality of the prisoners and the degree of threat they pose to the state’. Accordingly, the prisoners were divided into three categories, for each of which particular concentration camps were responsible: ‘the less incriminated prisoners in protective custody who are definitely capable of rehabilitation’ were sent to Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Auschwitz; those more seriously incriminated but nevertheless capable of being rehabilitated were assigned to ‘Level II’, namely Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Neuengamme, as well as to Auschwitz II, which was still to be built; the ‘seriously incriminated’ prisoners who were ‘unlikely to be capable of rehabilitation’ were to be sent to Mauthausen, which at this stage was the only KZ in ‘Level III’. And it was, in fact, there that the most dreadful conditions and the highest death-rate were to be found.
⁸⁰

As we have seen, the exploitation of prisoners’ labour played a major role in the establishment of the four new concentration camps, as indeed had been the case with the Mauthausen and Flossenbürg camps established in 1938. It was to be utilized both for the SS’s own building-materials business as well as—as in the case of Auschwitz—for building projects. Thus, in addition to the German Earth and Stone Works (Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke), founded in 1938 and responsible for stone-quarrying by KZ prisoners, a further 199 holding companies were established for KZ businesses.

The Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke GmbH (German Equipment Works Ltd.), founded in May 1939, gradually took over the workshops in the camps in order, in the first instance, to provide equipment for armed units of the SS and for concentration camps. In 1940–1 the number of objects produced was reduced; the main focus was now on furniture for the KZ and SS forces, but also for ethnic Germans who were being resettled. At the end of 1941 the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke had plants in Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Lublin, and Lemberg (Lvov), and a total of 4,800 workers, overwhelmingly KZ prisoners and Jewish forced labourers.
⁸¹
Similarly, the Gesellschaft für Textil und Lederverwertung
(Textiles and Leather Processing Company) acted as an umbrella company for all the plants providing the SS with clothing with the aid of KZ workshops.
⁸²

With the establishment in January 1939 of the German Research Institute for Food and Nutrition (Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Ernährung und Verpflegung = DVA), which initially focused above all on research into and the planting of medicinal herbs, Himmler had succeeded in realizing a project particularly close to his heart. The institute was primarily dependent on the extensive herb gardens in KZ Dachau, but during the following years in addition bought a total of sixteen experimental farms. In October 1940 Himmler directed the research institute to focus on experiments that had been suggested by people working on the ground or which had not yet been carried out by academic scientists or had even been rejected by them. It was particularly important to develop careful processing methods; their effectiveness should be assessed in collaboration with the SS physicians.
⁸³

Himmler utilized the SS farms in particular in order to carry out experiments involving biological-dynamic methods of cultivation.
*
Although this agrarian theory inspired by anthroposophy, like all other ‘secret knowledge’, had been officially banned after Hess’s flight to Scotland—the Führer’s Deputy was portrayed as being a victim of such circles—Himmler pressed on with these experiments, although the term now used was ‘natural methods of agriculture’ (
naturgemäße Landbauweise
). Himmler gave detailed instructions
⁸⁴
for the experiments which demonstrated his hostility to artificial fertilizers. After all, as he pointed out to his administrative chief Pohl, having worked as a laboratory assistant in the Schleissheim fertilizer factory he knew what he was talking about.
⁸⁵