Heinrich Himmler : A Life (90 page)

As a direct consequence of the ‘unfortunate legionnaires’ putsch’, in April 1941 Ribbentrop wanted to cancel the agreement he had reached with Himmler at the start of the war about police attachés. The agreement had, in particular, granted the SD the right of reporting independently to the RSHA.
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Ribbentrop now demanded from all members of German foreign missions a declaration, on their word of honour, that they were not working for the SD or for military intelligence.
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The closing down of the ‘Office of the Reich Security Main Office in Pressburg’ in July 1941, which had already begun intelligence operations in Slovakia comparable to those in the Reich, must be seen in this context. Evidently the Foreign Ministry feared that, as in Romania, independent initiatives by the SD could jeopardize relations with a Reich ally.
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Ribbentrop’s response put an end to his friendship with Himmler. ‘It seems to be all over between Ribbentrop and Heini,’ Margarete Himmler wrote in her diary on 8 May 1941. ‘Herr v. R is too full of himself.’
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The cooling of personal relations most probably contributed to the slow progress of negotiations between the SS and Foreign Ministry concerning the future position of police attachés at German foreign missions that produced an agreement only after several months; as Heydrich noted, ‘a peace agreement that was so important for the Reichsführer in human terms’.
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In the agreement of August 1941 Himmler and Ribbentrop concurred on the following points: the representatives of the SS and police working abroad should refrain from all diplomatic activities; if, in the course of
their intelligence work, they came across material relevant to foreign policy this should be handed over to the Foreign Ministry. Himmler’s agents would in future be led by police attachés, who were responsible to the heads of mission and would be required to report to them.
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At this time so-called police liaison officers were attached to the German diplomatic missions in Sofia, Shanghai, Rome, Tokyo, Lisbon, Pressburg (Bratislava), Madrid, Paris, Belgrade, and Bucharest. Representatives of the SD’s foreign department were located in Addis Ababa, Sofia, Shanghai, Reval (Tallin), Athens, Teheran, Tokyo, Belgrade, Bucharest, Leningrad, Bern, Pressburg, Ankara, and Budapest.
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Furthermore, the August agreement included the sending of further police attachés to German foreign missions. As a result, at the beginning of 1942 Ribbentrop sent Himmler’s representatives to Helsinki, Stockholm, and Bern. However, he was not prepared to go beyond the agreement that had been reached and therefore declined to accept the appointment of SS leaders to the consulates in Izmir and Trapezunt (Trabzon), Casablanca, and Marseilles.
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After the crisis of 1941 Ribbentrop claimed the right to approve Himmler’s foreign trips. To support his stance he could refer to a circular of August 1941 from Hans-Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery, that established the requirement for all leading figures to secure permission for trips abroad.
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When Himmler wanted to make a flying visit to Belgrade in October 1942 to inspect the ‘Prince Eugene’ division, Ribbentrop instructed that ‘the Reichsführer-SS’s trip to Belgrade should be treated just like any other foreign trip’.
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However, Himmler visited Belgrade even without permission,
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and the Foreign Ministry decided that it was advisable to take no further action.
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When, in spring 1943, Himmler planned a visit to Mussolini, Ribbentrop once again intervened in the preparations for the visit, and it did not in fact take place.
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Ribbentrop also attempted to subject the visits that Himmler received from abroad to a confirmation procedure which, however, the latter always succeeded in smoothly avoiding. Thus, Ribbentrop complained to Himmler in 1944 that ‘the Hungarian Interior Minister Vajna’s trip to Germany should have been submitted to the Führer for approval via the Foreign Ministry’; in future he should please ensure that this happened.
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Himmler replied that in principle this was true, but Vajna was a ‘special case’ which ‘[I] have of course cleared with the Führer’.
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In the spring of 1940 the Nazi government was once more engaged in planning a ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’. Now, after victory in the west, the French colony of Madagascar appeared to be the answer.
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This was by no means an original idea. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century the notion that one could settle European Jews in large numbers in Madagascar had been very popular in anti-Semitic circles in various European countries.
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Himmler provided an important impetus, presenting Hitler, on 25 May 1940, with a memorandum ‘Concerning the Treatment of the Alien Population in the East’ in which he expressed the intention of seeing ‘the term “Jew” [ . . . ] completely eliminated through the massive emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some colony’. However, when discussing the plan to steal children ‘of good racial quality’ from Poland he distanced himself from the ‘physical extermination of a people’; that would be ‘fundamentally un-German and impossible’. Hitler approved the memorandum in principle,
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and during the summer made a number of positive comments about the Madagascar project,
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which was now being developed both by the Foreign Ministry and by the Reich Security Main Office.

Franz Rademacher, the head of the ‘Jewish Affairs’ desk in the Foreign Ministry, presented a plan on 3 July. A few days earlier Heydrich had requested to be allowed to participate in the planned ‘territorial solution’, which would affect the 3.25 million people concerned.
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Rademacher’s motto, ‘all Jews out of Europe’, makes clear how the ‘territorial solution’ had come to be envisaged in the meantime. Rademacher proposed that France should give Germany Madagascar as a mandate ‘for the solution of the Jewish question’: ‘The part of the island that is not required for military purposes will be placed under the administrative control of a German police governor, who will be subordinate to the Reichsführer-SS. Apart from that the Jews will be allowed to govern themselves in this territory.’ This would ensure that the Jews would be ‘hostages in German hands for the future good behaviour of their racial comrades in America’. Thus, the Madagascar project was envisaged as hostage-taking (as indeed had been the case with the plan for a ‘Jewish reservation’ in Poland).

A memo of Rademacher’s dated 2 July (‘Plan for Solving the Jewish Question’) contained more details of this project:

From the German point of view the Madagascar solution represents the creation of a large ghetto. The security police are the only people who have the necessary experience in this area; they have the means of preventing escapes from the island. Moreover, they have the experience to enable them to impose the appropriate punishments that will be necessary in view of the hostile acts committed against Germany by Jews in America.
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During the following weeks the Reich Security Main Office produced its own version of the Madagascar Plan, which was issued as a booklet on 15 August. It referred to the creation of a ‘police state’ in Madagascar for the 4 million Jews under German rule. A time-scale of four years was envisaged for their transportation by ship.
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Furthermore, in August Viktor Brack, the official within the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP responsible for organizing the ‘Euthanasia’ programme, put forward a proposal ‘to use the transport organization that he has developed during wartime for the Führer’s “special assignment” for transporting the Jews later on to Madagascar’, a suggestion that was explicitly approved by Rademacher.
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The fact that Philipp Bouhler, the head of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP, was being considered as governor of a future colony in East Africa
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also demonstrates how sinister the whole Madagascar project was. The idea that over a period of years millions of Jews would be deported to Madagascar, where a large number of them would presumably succumb relatively quickly to the inhospitable conditions—leaving aside the ‘punishments’ to be inflicted by the security police—clearly demonstrates that, in the final analysis, this project envisaged their physical extermination even if, in the event of ‘good behaviour’ by the United States, this might have been subject to revision. Thus, the plans, in which the Reich Security Main Office was heavily involved, were developing step by step in the direction of the ‘extermination’ that Himmler had himself rejected in May.

However fantastic the Madagascar project may sound, the Reich Security Main Office took it seriously. The Madagascar plan provided a substitute for the plans for a ‘Jewish reservation’ that they had not been able to realize in Poland and in which they now included the west European Jews. They most likely assumed that if Madagascar failed to work out then in good time they would find some other territory. What is remarkable about
Rademacher’s August memo, at any rate, is the fact that he now estimated the number of Jews to be sent to Madagascar as 6.5 million, an indication that the Jews from south-east Europe as well as those from the French colonies in North Africa were to be included in the deportation plans.

The Madagascar plan had a direct impact on German Jewish policy in Poland. As Governor-General Frank informed his colleagues a few days later,
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on 8 July Hitler had assured him that in the light of the Madagascar project there would be no further deportations into their territory. On 9 July Himmler announced to the Reich Security Main Office that there would be no more deportations into Frank’s territory, thereby finally closing down the project for a ‘Jewish reservation’ in the General Government.
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Right from the start it had been Frank’s civil administration that had been responsible for the measures directed against the Polish Jews—their registration and public identification through a badge and their exclusion from the economy. Moreover, it had gradually introduced ghettoization.
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In addition, in June 1940 the civil administration took over responsibility for Jewish forced labour from the SS. This was, above all, the result of the high-handed and brutal forced-labour policy pursued by Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district, which had caused serious problems and by the summer of 1940 was considered to have failed. However, the new distribution of responsibilities did not prevent Globocnik from maintaining forced-labour camps in order to pursue his pet project: the creation of the ‘Moat’, a dilettante plan for a defensive line along the border with the Soviet-occupied zone. Globocnik’s unstoppable activity in the field of Jewish forced labour was also primarily responsible for the fact that the Lublin district developed into the centre for slave labour within the General Government. It was here that Jews from other districts tended to be deployed on major projects and housed in special camps under primitive and completely inadequate conditions.
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Between autumn 1940 and January 1941 the German leadership finally gave up the Madagascar plan, after they had been forced to accept that there would not be a separate peace with Britain. Within the context of the planning for ‘Barbarossa’
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(the invasion of the Soviet Union), a new ‘post-Madagascar project was being developed.
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On 22 October, in a speech to party comrades during his stay in Madrid, Himmler had once again stated that ‘all Jews from the Greater German Reich’ would be placed in a ‘closed ghetto’ in the General Government.
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However, in view of Frank’s opposition to deportations into his territory, and against the background of the start of German planning for the war against the Soviet Union, it was obvious that this objective would have to be revised.

A memo of Eichmann’s, dated 4 December, in which he produced figures for a speech by Himmler, provides an indication of how the Reich Security Main Office was envisaging the future ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ at this time.
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Eichmann distinguished between two phases: ‘the initial solution of the Jewish question through emigration’ and the future ‘final solution of the Jewish question’, by which he meant ‘the resettlement of the Jews away from the economic sphere of the German people to a territory which is still to be designated’. According to Eichmann, this project would ‘involve around 5.8 million people’, whereas the Reich Security Main Office had used a figure of 4 million. Thus, in the meantime, the territories of Germany’s allies and satellites in south-east Europe as well as the French colonies in North Africa were now also being included.

In a speech to the Reich leaders and Gauleiters on 10 December 1940, on the subject of ‘Settlement’, Himmler described the ‘emigration’ of the Jews from the General Government as a vital future task in order ‘to make more room for Poles’. Himmler had thereby clarified the link between the settlement of ethnic Germans in the annexed Polish territories, the further expulsion of indigenous Poles to the General Government, and the need to deport the Jews from the General Government in order to make way for this new wave of immigration. The Reichsführer-SS did not, however, say what the destination of this ‘Jewish emigration’ was to be.
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At the end of 1940 and beginning of 1941 Hitler gave Heydrich the task of working out a ‘project for a final solution’ to be implemented after the war, which he presented to the ‘Führer’ in January 1941. Hitler had given his instructions to Heydrich via both Himmler and Göring; thus the Hitler–Göring–Heydrich chain of command in Jewish policy that had existed since 1936 was still intact, alongside that of Hitler–Himmler–Heydrich. We do not have the text of Heydrich’s plan, but the content can be reconstructed from various documents.
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