Heinrich Himmler : A Life (91 page)

The draft envisaged the deportation of all Jews from Europe. The destination of the transports was to be the General Government, but that would serve only as an intermediate stopping place.
¹²¹
The (top-secret) final destination of the deportations was to be the Soviet territories that were to be occupied. When Heydrich went to see Göring in March 1941 in order to
discuss the matter and his responsibilities, Göring pointed out the need for a clarification of Rosenberg’s position. This was because he had been designated as the future Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories.
¹²²

It is not absolutely clear, however, what those involved actually meant at this point by a ‘final solution’ within the Soviet Union that was going to be occupied, and presumably it was not yet clear to them either. At the beginning of 1941 Himmler, at any rate, temporarily considered the idea of a mass sterilization of Jews. He asked Viktor Brack to work out a plan for it. However, after he received the plan in March 1941 he appears not to have pursued this idea any further.
¹²³
It seems that Himmler and the other decision-makers preferred to postpone dealing with the issue of what was to happen to those who had been deported until after the anticipated victory over the Soviet Union.

The Nazi leadership had been preparing for a renewed extension of the war since the beginning of 1941: late in July 1940 Hitler had decided to invade the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941. Again this war was planned as a Blitzkrieg, in other words, the expectation was that the Soviet Union would collapse like a house of cards under the blows delivered by the Wehrmacht and would by autumn be completely defeated. What was new about this war, however, was that from the start it was conceived as an ideological and racist war of annihilation. The Soviet Union was not simply to be defeated; the intention was to eliminate its ruling class, decimate the nations living on its territory by the violent destruction of millions of people, and to exploit the survivors as slave labour for the construction of the new German ‘living-space’ (
Lebensraum
).
¹

Himmler assumed that he would play a key role in the conquest, control, and reshaping of this gigantic territory. He planned to deploy four divisions and a series of further fighting units, mostly at the most forward part of the front: his police organization would employ his methods of terror to dominate the conquered territory, and he himself as Settlement Commissar would organize the necessary expulsions and resettlements of the indigenous population, in order to make way for ‘Germanic’ settlers. The vision of a forcible seizure of land to colonize in the east that he had outlined as the SS’s future task suddenly seemed to come within reach. On 10 June 1941 he put to the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, his suggestion that he, Himmler, should be given responsibility for maintaining control in all occupied eastern European territories in police ‘and political’ security matters, so that, as Settlement Commissar, he could ‘see to the pacification and stabilization of the political situation’.
²
This claim to power
put him in direct competition with Alfred Rosenberg, whom Hitler had already appointed on 20 April to be ‘responsible for the central coordination of questions concerning eastern Europe’, though with the qualification that Himmler would in future ‘occupy a special position’ alongside him in the east. The negotiations that Himmler then conducted with Rosenberg about their future responsibilities in the east turned out to be tough: ‘To work with Rosenberg, let alone under him, is definitely the most difficult thing there is in the NSDAP’, as Himmler wrote to Bormann.
³

Now 40 years old, Himmler hoped that his new tasks would boost his career, which in the previous few years had stagnated, and result in his being admitted to the innermost circle of Nazi leaders. After the great political successes of 1933 and 1936, since 1938 he had had to accept several painful defeats: his misdirected investigations into von Fritsch had seriously threatened the relationship between Hitler and the Wehrmacht, had played a significant role in provoking a state crisis, and brought down Hitler’s displeasure on him. He had found himself increasingly forced to keep his various ‘Germanic’ and occult activities ‘under wraps’, as he was in no doubt that Hitler regarded these ventures with suspicion. His radical proposals regarding the role of the church could not be put into practice. The atrocities carried out by the SS in Poland and his order to procreate had provoked massive criticism from the Wehrmacht, with the result that he had to give way publicly and accept being marginalized during the police ‘processing’ of the conquered north and west European states. In Romania his SD had supported the Iron Guard’s failed putsch and as a result had destabilized German–Romanian relations; for that reason Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister, curtailed Himmler’s foreign-policy ambitions wherever possible. Even Himmler’s various resettlement programmes had ground to a halt. And although Waffen-SS units had been deployed in the very vanguard of Blitzkrieg operations from the autumn of 1939 onwards, since the end of 1939 he had been able to establish only one additional division, ‘Viking’; the concentration of these units into an independent SS army corps that he had planned as early as 1938 had not come about. Instead, his units had always been distributed over the whole of the front, with the result that he was unable to establish a link between their military effectiveness and strategically decisive operations.

Now that there was a prospect of conquering vast territories in the east Himmler hoped to be able to turn the situation again to his advantage.

As a result of the predominantly negative experiences Himmler had had in cooperating with the Wehrmacht during the military campaigns of 1940, he attempted early on to reach agreement with the military about the deployment of security police and SD in the attack on Russia.

Heydrich had been negotiating with the army Quartermaster-General on this question since February 1941.
⁴
On 13 March Keitel, chief of the Wehrmacht High Command, issued guidelines stating that ‘special responsibilities in the zone of army operations’ would be given to the Reichsführer-SS ‘at the Führer’s request [ . . . ] in preparation for the political administration’. These special responsibilities, as the guidelines ominously put it, ‘result from the impending final struggle between two opposing political systems’.
⁵
What was meant by these special responsibilities was made abundantly clear by Hitler to his generals during March, in a number of statements. He stated unequivocally that the coming war was a ‘battle between two ideologies’
⁶
that could be won only if the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia’
⁷
were annihilated.

Keitel’s guidelines of 13 March also indicated, however, that in fulfilling their ‘special responsibilities’ the units of the Reichsführer-SS would no longer be subordinate to the Wehrmacht, as they had been in the war against Poland, but were rather to act independently. By this means the leadership of the Wehrmacht believed it could distance itself from the renewed and extended mass murders which, if Poland had been anything to go by, were in the offing.

Against the background of these provisions Heydrich, in close consultation with Himmler,
⁸
agreed a draft arrangement with the Quartermaster-General at the end of March.
⁹
In the ‘Regulations for the Deployment of the Security Police and the SD in Conjunction with the Army’ we read that ‘the carrying out of particular tasks by the security police outside the scope of the army units’ made it ‘necessary to deploy special security police (SD) units in the field of operations’. Their duties were, however, only vaguely defined: where they were near the army front line they were to ‘secure’ documentation and people; in the rear area they had responsibility, amongst other things, for ‘identifying and combating activities hostile to the state and the Reich’. The special units (
Sonderkommandos
) had to execute their duties
‘on their own responsibility’, but were to be subordinate to the armies or to the commanders of the rear areas ‘with regard to marches, provisions, and quartering’.
¹⁰
What was actually meant by the formulation ‘on their own responsibility’ was that the anticipated mass liquidation of communist officials in the area of army operations was to be carried out by the Sonderkommandos, but that they could rely on the army’s logistical support in carrying this out.

The negotiations had just been concluded when unforeseen events occurred: on 27 March the Yugoslav government, which was friendly towards Germany, was toppled in a military putsch, and the Nazi regime had to reckon with the country entering the war on the side of the British. Hasty preparations were therefore made to attack Yugoslavia and also Greece (which at the time was already at war with Italy). On 6 April the Nazi attack began; Yugoslavia capitulated on 17 April and mainland Greece was occupied by the end of the month.
¹¹

An extremely simple solution was found to the question of what role Himmler’s security police and SD were supposed to play in this improvised war: Heydrich’s draft agreement with the Quartermaster-General provided the basis for action, though with a small but very significant change. When the people whom Himmler’s henchmen were to ‘secure’ were listed, not only ‘émigrés, saboteurs, and terrorists’ were included but specifically ‘communists and Jews’ also. This revealed that the war in the Balkans was to be waged as an ideological war, just as was planned for the war against the Soviet Union. In accordance with the agreement two security police and SD Einsatzgruppen took part in the fighting, one in Yugoslavia and one in Greece—from the perspective of the SS leadership a significant improvement over the affront they had been forced to endure the previous year when France, Belgium, and the Netherlands were occupied.
¹²

One day before Yugoslavia’s surrender, on 16 April, Himmler, who had set up his headquarters during hostilities in Bruck an der Mur, had a meeting in a hotel in Graz with Heydrich, Wolff, Daluege, the chief of his Leadership Main Office Hans Jüttner, and the army Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner. On the basis of the draft of 26 March, they came to a final agreement about the ‘Regulations for the Deployment of the Security Police and the SD in Conjunction with the Army’ for the imminent war against the Soviet Union. Although ‘communists and Jews’ were not expressly mentioned in the final version, the events that led up to the
agreement demonstrate that the participants were in no doubt as to who was meant as the prime target of the ‘war of two ideologies’.
¹³

At the beginning of May Himmler interrupted his war preparations and made a flying visit to Greece, which had recently been occupied, just as he had taken a look at the newly conquered western territories the previous year. On 6 May he flew to Athens, arriving the following day after a stopover in Budapest. There he visited the Peloponnese and Corinth, and finally German troops in Larissa. From Athens he flew on to Belgrade, where he inspected an ethnic German village.
¹⁴

Back in Germany on 11 May, he was confronted with an alarming situation: the previous day Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy, had flown on his own initiative to Scotland in a Messerschmitt and parachuted down in order put a peace proposal to the British government.
¹⁵
Leaving Gmund, where he had wanted to relax for a few days, Himmler had a meeting on 11 May in Munich with Göring to discuss the situation then travelled with him to Obersalzberg, where talks continued into the night. Himmler’s Gestapo was to take responsibility in the days that followed for arresting and interrogating important close friends of Hess. Two days later there was a hurried meeting of Reich and Gau leaders on the Obersalzberg, which Himmler most probably also attended.
¹⁶

Hitler dealt relatively quickly with the crisis occasioned by Hess. The Führer’s former Deputy was declared insane, and was succeeded in the role (but without the title) by Martin Bormann, who had up to that time been the Deputy’s deputy. Bormann, who was now head of the Party Chancellery, was friendly with Himmler. They both belonged to the radical wing of the party and this expressed itself, for example, in the strong anticlericalism that was fundamental to both of them. Bormann’s appointment therefore increased Himmler’s chances of finding Hitler disposed to listen to his ideas, and in fact Himmler’s position grew more secure in the course of the ensuing months.

One result of Hess’s flight was a Gestapo campaign in June against astrologers, clairvoyants, dowsers, spiritualists, and representatives of other occult teachings, which Hess in part espoused; this was a means of providing evidence to show the outside world that Hess had quite simply been the victim of mumbo-jumbo. The campaign was not without its dangers for Himmler, as it threatened circles he felt connected to, for example the adherents of anthroposophical agriculture or of the Cosmic Ice Theory. For
Himmler this experience was sufficient reason to keep such occult interests even more firmly ‘under wraps’.
¹⁷

On 18 May he returned to Berlin, where he had a meeting with, among others, Victor Brack from the Führer’s Chancellery, one of those mainly responsible for the ‘Euthanasia’ programme. Some weeks earlier Brack had sent him a report about the possible mass sterilization of Jews, which they very likely discussed.
¹⁸
A few days after this meeting Professor Carl Clauberg, whose advice Himmler usually sought concerning gynaecological matters, suggested a further process for carrying out mass sterilization. Presumably these plans were connected with the projected deportations of European Jews to the Soviet territories that were to be conquered: any possibility of the deportees procreating was to be excluded.