Heinrich Himmler : A Life (86 page)

Himmler was aware of the fact that, as with many of his other projects, it would be sensible not to make a big song and dance about his controversial experiments. For example, he expressly rejected the idea of getting Bormann to inform Hitler about their progress. The people involved should ‘work quietly and in some cases not talk so much about the natural methods of agriculture. Nobody [would] bother us if we quietly, decently, and successfully got on with tilling the land.’ The office in charge of the project should be moved out of Berlin and transferred to one of the farms, ideally in the east.
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In fact it came to be based in the Wertingen state farm near Himmler’s Hegewald headquarters in the Ukraine. The person in charge,
Obersturmführer Grund, was given a special new task by Himmler,
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namely, ‘analysing the performance of the biological-dynamic method in the Russian territories’. Himmler’s weakness for unconventional projects had once again acquired gigantic dimensions.
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However, the expansion of the SS’s business operations involved not only enterprises that were mainly based in the concentration camps. In April 1939 the SS established the Sudetenquell GmbH (Sudeten Spring Ltd.) near Marienbad, which a short time later began producing its own drink with the enticing name ‘Green Sour Spring Water’ (
Grüner Sauerbrunn
). This enterprise was rooted in Himmler’s ambition to get the ‘SS men used to quenching their thirst with non-alcoholic drinks instead of their excessive consumption of beer, wine etc.’; good-value mineral water was to be offered as an alternative.
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During the following years the SS, by buying up firms, tried to acquire a monopoly of mineral-water production in order to break the cartel that was assumed to operate in this market. By 1944 75 per cent of German mineral-water production was in the hands of the SS; Himmler’s efforts, initially focused solely on reforming SS members, had acquired their own momentum.
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The same intention was behind the purchase of fruit-juice factories, in which, among other things Himmler’s prized ‘Vitaborn’ (Life Spring) juices were produced. Himmler used to give them as presents, and they represented a particular token of his esteem.
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Another development, however, was to prove more significant for the future of the SS business empire. In November 1939 Himmler succeeded in persuading the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost (Main Trustee Office East), which under Göring’s auspices was administering the property confiscated from Poles and Jews in the annexed eastern territories, to seize all the brickworks in the area under their control for the benefit of his settlement commissariat. The aim was to place their production at the disposal of ethnic German settlers. In January 1941 the Ostdeutsche Baustoffwerke (East German Building Materials Works) was established, which in the course of the year restarted 300 brickworks, most of which were small-scale operations; in addition, there were the works producing building materials in the General Government. In his capacity as Settlement Commissar, Himmler also took over building-materials works in annexed Lower Styria as well as in the district of Bialystok, in other words, the area in eastern Poland that, after its conquest in the summer of 1941, had acquired a special administrative status.
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Thus, most of the SS enterprises served either the needs of the SS itself or, often, Himmler’s political-ideological aims (as can be shown with the manufacture of mineral water, medicinal herbs, and building materials for German settlers), or they sprang from the need to control the employment of KZ prisoners in order to keep them out of the hands of the authorities responsible for labour deployment. As a result, almost all the businesses operated at a loss.

In 1940 this was to change. Since 1939 all SS businesses had been subordinated to Oswald Pohl, the administrative head of the SS, and from spring 1940 onwards he had been managing them with the aid of his new Administration and Business Main Office (Hauptamt Verwaltung und Wirtschaft). In July 1940 Pohl instigated the establishment of Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe GmbH (German Businesses Ltd.), which was intended to unify all SS enterprises.
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To begin with, Pohl was the sole general manager. In July 1942 a second manager was appointed, although Pohl retained complete control.
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During 1940–1, under the management installed by Pohl, SS business policy underwent a significant change. From now on economic factors were taken much more into consideration—the watchwords were the maximizing of profit, business expansion, and the market.
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Himmler’s plans for the SS and police to establish their own judicial system along the lines of the military can be traced back to 1937. However, he was able to achieve his objective only in October 1939. All armed SS units, the full-time members of the HSSPF staffs, as well as all police units who were deployed in the war were subjected to the new judicial system.
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Regulations equivalent to those of the military code were now applied to the SS, including the death penalty and penal servitude, with the SS and police courts responsible for all offences, not only those against the military code.
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The SS disciplinary code—in other words, the possibility of demoting or expelling SS members—remained unaffected by the new jurisdiction.

It was not by chance that the SS and police judicial system was introduced immediately after the war with Poland. It is obvious that Himmler wished to have the responsibility for investigating and, where he felt it appropriate, punishing the assaults and crimes committed by members of the SS and
police during the war.
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Himmler also banned the press from reporting the proceedings of the SS and police courts.
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However, other motives for creating this special judicial system were decisive. In view of the general intensification of repression in the autumn of 1939, the Reichsführer did not want any complaints that offences by members of the SS and police were being treated too laxly. At the same time, having achieved his own judicial system, he considered it very important to ensure that it fully embodied the principles of virtue, decency, and discipline that he had been preaching for years.

During the Second World War he gradually expanded the responsibility of the SS judicial system to include the whole of the police, the General SS (including those serving in the Wehrmacht), all foreigners fighting in SS units and the ‘ethnic alien’ protection forces, as well as auxiliary organizations attached to the police such as the Technical Emergency Unit, the Air Defence Police, and the Fire Service (including the voluntary fire brigades).
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In a number of occupied territories, for example in the Protectorate, the Netherlands, and to the greatest extent in Norway, it became an instrument of occupation policy, since it was applied even to offences committed by inhabitants of these countries.
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With a decree of 4 April 1943 the Wehrmacht handed over the prosecution of civilian offenders in the occupied territories entirely to the SS and police courts if the offence was largely directed against the SS or police.
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When Himmler took over the Reserve Army in July 1944, thereby acquiring responsibility for the POWs of the Wehrmacht, this group too became subject to the SS and police jurisdiction.
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Himmler played a central role in shaping this judicial system.
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He not only provided the Court Main Office, to which the SS and police judiciary was subordinate, with regular instructions, he also appointed an ‘SS Judge on the Staff of the Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police’ in the shape of Horst Bender, to whom he gradually transferred the powers that he himself possessed as ‘Supreme Judge’ (
Gerichtsherr
) of the SS and police.
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Himmler provided himself with the power to suspend sentences,
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and in a number of cases reserved to himself the right to confirm sentences, as, for example, with offences against the ban on sexual relations with the wives of front-line soldiers and prosecutions of adultery,
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as well as all sentences of SS leaders and police officers.
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The right of confirming sentences also extended to offences committed by members of the SS and police against his ban on sexual relations with
‘women from an ethnically alien population’ in the occupied eastern territories. In such cases he generally called for the papers prior to the initiation of a preliminary investigation in order to decide, on the basis of photos and a report on the general racial impression made by the woman, whether such an offence had in fact been committed, as significantly the term ‘alien’ (
andersartig
) was never properly defined.
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SS judges deployed in the east decided at a conference held in May 1943 that Himmler’s ban on sexual relations with indigenous women must be ‘urgently’ amended, since, as one of the judges put it, probably ‘at least 50 per cent of all members of the SS and police’ were breaching this ban. As he had discovered from one unit, the view taken by the force was that ‘relationships and sex were permitted as long as there were no consequences’.
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In June 1942 Himmler had already relaxed the ban on ‘sexual relations with women and girls from a population of an alien race’
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which he had issued in April 1939, for members of the SS and police based in the General Government: ‘I recognize the difficulties facing the men of the SS in the General Government from a sexual point of view. I do not, therefore, object to sex in brothels or with prostitutes subject to medical and police supervision, as neither procreation nor close personal relations are likely to occur as a result.’
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Himmler’s 1939 ban kept causing problems right up until the end of the war, problems in which, typically, Himmler took a personal interest. Thus, in January 1945, for example, he decided ‘that GV [sex] with racially inferior Croatian women [is] merely undesirable’.
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Himmler’s right to confirm sentences was extended by a Führer decree of 1941 laying down that, ‘in the event of there being serious doubts about the correctness of a verdict’, the Reichsführer would have the right on his own initiative to suspend verdicts that had already been reached under due process and to insist on a retrial.
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He wished to be informed of all cases which involved breaches of ‘ideological obedience’ (and for that to be done right at the start of proceedings), as well as of ‘all sentences of SS and police courts’ that involved the death penalty, penal servitude for life, or penal servitude of over ten years.
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Moreover, prosecutors, and eventually SS judges as well, received an enormous number of individual directives from their Reichsführer.
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The measures that Himmler instituted to govern the SS judicial system were thus not only comprehensive but involved an elaborate system of multiple stages of supervision and reveal a positively manic need to exercise control. Everything was designed to enable him to make the final decision.

Himmler gave this caricature of a legal system its ultimate expression when, following the death of the head of the SS Court Main Office, Paul Scharfe, who was not in fact a lawyer, Himmler issued the ‘Basic Directive No. 1 for the SS Judicial System’, which stated quite baldly: ‘I hereby decree that the head of the SS Court shall never be a lawyer.’
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It would, however, be too simple to interpret Himmler’s excessive need to exercise control merely as megalomania finding release in arbitrary actions. For, seen in the light of his pedagogic mentality, with its ideological bent, his control mechanisms were altogether rational: Himmler was endeavouring to create a special SS penal code, designed to put into practice ideas for the ideological indoctrination of his men and the inculcation of SS norms of living. A particular instrument used to achieve this was the juridical trick of judging breaches of internal SS prohibitions as military disobedience, in other words, as a serious offence under the military penal code.
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Himmler, therefore, ensured that the SS and police judicial system punished sexual contacts with ‘alien races’ to an extent far beyond the provisions of the Blood Protection Law of 1935, prosecuted sex with the wives of front-line soldiers with conspicuous harshness, and took extremely tough action against offences linked to alcohol, homosexuality, and property crime, in other words, all those offences which he, as Reichsführer-SS, had already tried to eliminate through educational and disciplinary methods before the introduction of the SS judicial system.

Himmler advocated the uncompromising punishment of members of the SS and police as a matter of principle. The nation should know, he wrote to Daluege in 1942, ‘that a disloyal policeman or police officer will be punished. This will not damage our reputation but will rather strengthen and increase it.’
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Similarly, in 1943 he emphasized to the Gruppenführer that, as ‘Reichsführer-SS, as Chief of the German Police and now as Reich Minister of the Interior, [he did not have] the moral right to prosecute any national comrade and we could not summon up the strength to do it if we did not brutally insist on impeccable conduct in our own ranks’.
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When he considered it necessary he imposed punishment without a formal sentence. Thus, in one case he postponed the sentencing of an SS-Obersturmführer found guilty of the mistreatment of a subordinate involving grievous bodily harm resulting in death, and ordered that the person concerned ‘should be provided with a pistol and given the opportunity of executing judgment on himself’, which he then did.
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Subsequently, as often happened in such cases, he showed consideration by ordering that the
dependants should be looked after as if the person involved had fallen in battle. ‘That is the point of providing the pistol.’
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