Heinrich Himmler : A Life (92 page)

On 21 May Himmler issued an order in which he outlined the main features of the deployment of SS and police units in the future occupied territories, about which agreement had been reached with the Wehrmacht in mid-April: in the east, as in the Reich itself, the Higher SS and Police Leaders (HSSPF) would play a central role. The relevant HSSPF was to be put in charge of ‘SS and police troops and security police for special deployment’ (not only the Einsatzgruppen, who had been the subject of negotiations with the army, but also units that had not been mentioned in the agreement and to which Himmler was giving an even greater degree of independence in this order), so that he could ‘implement tasks I [Himmler] shall give directly to him’. Comprising these units were, on the one hand, troops belonging to the order police, who were to ‘fulfil their tasks according to my directives’, and on the other, units of the Waffen-SS, who were responsible for similar tasks as well as ‘special tasks I shall give them’.
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What Himmler was alluding to obliquely rather than directly was the fact that in the months to come these particular SS and police units were to carry out mass murder on a devastating scale among the civilian population of the occupied Soviet territories, and especially its Jewish members, and in so doing open the floodgates for the annihilation of the European Jews. How did Himmler prepare the members of these units for this? Let us take a closer look at the individual units and what we know about the instructions given to them.

From the spring of 1941 onwards four Einsatzgruppen, in total about 3,000 strong, were set up in the security police’s NCO training school at Pretzsch near Leipzig.
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They were made up of members of the SD, Gestapo, criminal police and order police, Waffen-SS, and ancillary staff,
in part from the SS and police administrative apparatus.
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It is striking that a particular type was dominant in the leadership, namely the ‘specialist’; he had already had an academic education, often in law, a practical training within the police administration, and was a skilled bureaucrat, while at the same time being a man of radical action and conviction and strongly committed to Nazi ideology.
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Of the seventeen members of the leadership cadre of Einsatzgruppe A, all without exception long-standing employees in the SS and police apparatus, there were, for example, eleven lawyers, nine of whom had doctorates; thirteen had joined the NSDAP or one of its affiliated organizations before 1933.
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At first the order police
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went into the war against the Soviet Union with twenty-three battalions (in total 11,640 men and 420 officers), consisting of long-serving career policemen, who made up the bulk of the leadership corps and NCO corps in the remaining units also, as well as of older police reservists
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without any service record and also of younger volunteers.
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All these units were led by more senior police officers, many of whom had gained experience back in the civil war and border conflicts of the post-war period, while a significant number of more junior officers had been trained in the SS officer-training colleges.
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In addition to the security and order police Himmler, by concentrating the SS Death’s Head units into a ‘Commando Staff (
Kommandostab
) RFSS’, equipped himself with a reserve force ready for deployment on his ‘special tasks’.
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As early as 7 April 1941 he had created his own task force, which on 6 May was renamed Commando Staff RFSS.
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On 1 May he formed two motorized SS brigades from SS Death’s Head regiments and simultaneously two SS cavalry regiments in Cracow and Warsaw were merged and later became the SS Cavalry Brigade.
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A number of these Death’s Head units had already carried out numerous acts of violence in Poland.
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In July 1941 Himmler had a total of more than around 19,000 Commando Staff troops at his disposal.
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In this way he enabled himself to intervene directly to combat racial and political enemies in the occupied eastern territories and to set clear priorities in this process.

In the weeks before the Russian campaign, ‘Operation Barbarossa’, these forces were initiated into their tasks. The relevant orders that Hitler had issued to the Wehrmacht in themselves spoke volumes about the coming war. In May he ordered that criminal acts perpetrated by members of the Wehrmacht against the civilian population in the east were as a rule no longer to be prosecuted by the military courts, and thus were to go
unpunished. Crimes committed by enemy civilians were also not to be punished by the military courts, but rather in such cases the perpetrators were to be ‘finished off’, ‘put down’ on the spot; ‘collective violent measures’ against communities were permitted.
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In the ‘Guidelines on the Treatment of Political Commissars’ signed on 6 June by Keitel, the head of the Wehrmacht High Command, it was stated that Soviet commissars, as ‘the initiators of barbaric Asiatic methods of fighting’, were to be ‘finished off’ by the fighting force.
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In the ‘Guidelines on the Conduct of Troops in Russia’ of 19 May, which were disseminated down to company level, ‘Bolshevism’ was characterized as being the ‘mortal enemy of the National Socialist German nation’, and for this reason ‘ruthless and vigorous measures against Bolshevik agitators, partisans, saboteurs, and Jews’ were required, as well as ‘the eradication of all active and passive resistance’.
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Himmler and Heydrich, however, went considerably further than these instructions. The Reichsführer insisted on personally putting the most senior SS leaders in the right frame of mind for the extermination they were going to carry out. To that end he summoned them specially to the Wewelsburg from 11 to 15 June.
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He had invited about a dozen people, among them his close colleagues Wolff and Brandt; his two police chiefs Daluege and Heydrich; the HSSPFs earmarked for the territories to be conquered, namely Prützmann, von dem Bach-Zelewski, and Jeckeln; Pohl, the head of the SS Main Office; and his friend, the writer, President of the Reich Chamber of Literature, and SS-Brigadeführer Hanns Johst. In 1939 and 1940 Johst had accompanied Himmler on journeys to Poland, published a small volume about the first journey,
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and thereafter had requested from Himmler the privilege of accompanying him in future on important assignments so that he could act as Himmler’s semi-official biographer.
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Thus he was promoted to the role of ‘Bard to the SS’,
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and so was indispensable for capturing the atmosphere of these historic days at the Wewelsburg.

At this meeting, Himmler, according to a post-war testimony of von dem Bach-Zelewski, put at 30 million the number of human beings by which the Soviet Union was to be ‘decimated’, in other words, a figure corresponding to the scale of population growth since 1914 in the territories to be conquered.
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This statement characterizes the climate prevailing in the highest echelons of the SS in these days and weeks immediately before the invasion: they had a clear sense of embarking on a campaign of racial annihilation of incalculable proportions.

Heydrich then went on to apprise the leaders of the Einsatzkommandos along the same lines, both at a meeting in the Prince Charles Palace in Berlin, which presumably took place on 17 June, and also in Pretzsch on the Elbe, when the Einsatzkommandos were officially given their marching orders shortly before the outbreak of the war.
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After this Heydrich wrote a summary of his instructions: on the one hand, in a letter of 29 June to the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, in which he alluded only to the ‘efforts at self-cleansing’ that the commandos were supposed to set in motion;
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and on the other, in a communication to the HSSPFs of 2 July, in which he informed them about the ‘most important instructions I have given to the security police and SD Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos’.
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In the 2 July letter he stated clearly: ‘All of these are to be executed’, and there followed a list—‘Comintern officials (and professional communist politicians) [,] the senior, middle-ranking and radically inclined lower-ranking officials of the party, the Central Committee, the regional and district committees [,] people’s commissars [,] Jews in party and state posts [,] other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.).’

The ‘all’ at the beginning and the ‘etc.’ at the end of the list, as well as the fact that in this instruction Heydrich also emphasized that the ‘attempts of anti-communist and also anti-Jewish circles at self-cleansing in the territories to be occupied [ . . . ] were not to be impeded’—on the contrary, they were to be promoted, ‘though invisibly’
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—reveal that the scope of those to be executed was set very wide. The formulation ‘all [ . . . ] Jews in party and state posts’ was similarly only code for the instruction to kill an extremely vaguely defined Jewish elite, consisting first and foremost of men. It was largely left to the commandos’ own initiative to determine the details of who was to be counted as part of this elite.

After the June conference at the Wewelsburg Himmler went to Berlin, where he had numerous meetings. He met, amongst others, Hermann Fegelein, who reported to him that the two SS cavalry regiments were ready for deployment; Jüttner, the head of the SS Leadership Main Office; and Gauleiter Alfred Meyer, Rosenberg’s most important colleague in the setting up of the Ministry for the East. He also visited Hitler several times in the Reich Chancellery.
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At this time of high excitement he was regularly restored to fitness between appointments by his masseur Felix Kersten.
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On 18 June, at around midday, however, he interrupted his Berlin duties and flew to Bavaria in order to spend the following day with his wife and daughter in his home in Gmund. Before the start of the great struggle he
wanted once more, even if only briefly, to relax: private photographs have survived showing the Himmlers on this beautiful summer day in the wonderful mountain scenery around Lake Tegern—picking flowers.

Ill. 23.
The Himmlers on 19 June 1941, two days before the outbreak of the war with the Soviet Union.

By lunchtime on 20 June Himmler was back in the Reich Chancellery and had a meeting in the afternoon with Jeckeln. The next day he met Daluege and had lunch again with Hitler and others. The following morning the attack on the Soviet Union began. Himmler had a considerable fighting force among the invading armies: as well as the Einsatzgruppen, the order-police squads, and the troops of the Command Staff, his three Waffen-SS divisions, the police division (incorporated in 1942 into the Waffen-SS), and the ‘Leibstandarte’ division all took part in the invasion.

On 25 June Himmler took his special train ‘Heinrich’ to Hitler’s headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia. On 30 June he set off through occupied
Lithuanian territory; Heydrich accompanied his Reichsführer on this train journey, first to Grodno and then to Augustowo. In Grodno Himmler and Heydrich found that, although the town had been occupied the week before, not a single member of the security police or the SD was there, which provoked Himmler to reprimand the commando leader and admonish him in future to demonstrate ‘the greatest flexibility in tactical troop deployment’.
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In Augustowo they came across a commando of the Gestapo base at Tilsit that had already made a start on ‘punishment campaigns’ in the wake of the advancing Wehrmacht. Himmler and Heydrich approved of these ‘comprehensively’, as the Tilsit Gestapo reported to the Reich Security Main Office.
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Three days later the Tilsit commando shot over 300 people, mainly Jewish civilians.
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The next day, already back in his headquarters in East Prussia, Himmler met Göring, and on 3 July he had a meeting with the chief of his Command Staff, Kurt Knoblauch, and with Jüttner, head of the Leadership Main Office. Two days later, on Saturday, he inspected the troops of the 1st SS Cavalry Regiment.
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On 8 July he returned to the newly occupied territories, this time accompanied by the chief of the order police, Daluege. The same day he arrived in Bialystok,
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where at a meeting of SS and police officers—at least according to what von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was also present, said after the war—he made statements to the effect that, ‘as a matter of principle any Jew’ was ‘to be regarded as a partisan’.
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The way in which this order was passed down through the levels of the hierarchy in the days that followed can be reconstructed: on 9 July, speaking to members of the police regiment Centre, Daluege issued a call for ‘Bolshevism finally to be eradicated’,
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and on 11 July the commander of the police regiment Centre in Bialystok passed on the order of the HSSPF for special assignments (z.b.V.) attached to the commanding officer of the rear army area Centre, that all Jewish men between the ages of 17 and 45 ‘caught’ looting were to be executed.
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This gave carte blanche for mass murder: in the middle of July two battalions of the regiment were responsible for a massacre that claimed the lives of about 3,000 Jewish men.
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