Heinrich Himmler : A Life (93 page)

On the way back from Bialystok Himmler, now accompanied by Heydrich, once more stopped off in Grodnow. Both were supplied with evidence to satisfy them that the murder commandos had made up for the passivity for which they had been criticized on 30 June. ‘In the first days in Grodnow and Lida initially only 96 Jews were liquidated,’ a report from
Einsatzgruppe B read. ‘I gave the order that operations here were to be considerably stepped up. [ . . . ] The necessary liquidations will be guaranteed under all circumstances.’
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Himmler’s tours of inspection and personal interventions on the spot in the first weeks of the war therefore did much to initiate and intensify the mass murder of Jewish civilians.

As Christian Gerlach has shown, in his indispensable study of German occupation policy in Byelorussia, senior-ranking SS men were demonstrably present at almost all sizeable ‘operations’ (
Aktionen
) in the first weeks of the war against the Soviet Union: if neither Himmler, Heydrich nor Daluege was there, their place was frequently taken where the murders were committed by the responsible officer for the region, von dem Bach-Zelewski, Nebe, or the chief of the police regiment Centre, Max Montua. Himmler’s inspection tours were therefore an integral part of a system of leadership in which the senior leaders ensured that the overall policy was adhered to through checks and constant intervention on the ground.

Almost all the security police and SD Einsatzkommandos, and also a whole series of police battalions, had begun in June to shoot Jewish men of military age en masse, hundreds or thousands at a time. These executions were carried out on a variety of pretexts: ‘reprisals’, punishing ‘looters’, combating ‘partisans’. The diverse units followed a set pattern, even if individual murder operations showed variations: some units set the upper age-limit of the male victims higher than others; in some places the entire male population in a particular age-group was murdered, in other places it was ‘only’ some, and here again to varying extents. The leaders of the units therefore quite clearly had a certain amount of room for manoeuvre. When the order was passed down it had, of course, been clear that initiative and individual judgement were required.

And mass murders committed by the units were not the whole story. In numerous places they succeeded, as Heydrich had ordered, in provoking ‘efforts at self-cleansing’, in other words, pogroms carried out by the local population. In the territories occupied by the Soviets between 1939 and 1941, above all in Lithuania, Latvia, and the western Ukraine, there is evidence for pogroms in a total of at least sixty places, and estimates suggest there were at least 12,000 victims, possibly 24,000.
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On 13 July in Stettin (Szczecin) Himmler inspected 200 members of the Waffen-SS who had been transferred to the Finnish front to reinforce the SS combat group North, which had not only suffered heavy losses in the first days of the war but had been unsuccessful in an attack on and in the ensuing
counter-attack from the Red Army. The unit was showing widespread signs of disintegrating. Himmler admonished the men and then spoke to the twenty-five commanders as a separate group. They were, he explained, engaged in a struggle with a ‘nation of 180 million, a hotch-potch of races and peoples whose very names are unpronounceable and who are physically built in such a way that they can be shot en masse without mercy’, ‘animals’, in other words. ‘This nation has been united by Jews in a religion, a world-view, called Bolshevism [ . . . ].’
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On 16 July, around three weeks after the beginning of the war to which Himmler attached such high hopes, Hitler in his headquarters made the essential decisions concerning the structure of future occupation policy in the east. Present were Göring, Keitel, Rosenberg, and Bormann—not Himmler, and the outcome of that meeting was to be a disappointment to him as well. Hitler ruled
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that at the end of hostilities the administration of the occupied territories should pass to civilian agencies: to Reich commissariats under the newly appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg.
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Rosenberg was, admittedly, instructed to observe the jurisdictions of other central agencies—and that meant in particular Himmler’s responsibilities, which were defined by Hitler as ‘providing security in the newly occupied territories through the police’. To this end Himmler was allowed to appoint Higher SS and Police Leaders and SS and Police Leaders.
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Himmler’s ambitions, however, as we have seen, extended far beyond this. On 10 June he had asked Lammers for control over ‘police
and political
security matters’, and thereby provoked Rosenberg’s objection.
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Two days after the outbreak of the war he had gone further and given Konrad Meyer, his head of planning, three weeks in which to incorporate Soviet territories into the planning already in train for German settlement policy in the east (‘General Plan East’).
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On 11 July Himmler gave the Coordination Centre for Ethnic Germans the responsibility for producing a survey of ‘ethnic Germans’ in the occupied Soviet Union, an activity that was to proceed in close consultation with the Einsatzgruppen.
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On 15 July Meyer’s outline plan was on his desk. The fact that the following day Hitler denied him the central role he craved in the political reorganization of the east was a bitter
personal defeat. At the same time, this day marks the commencement of a decisive change in Himmler’s policy, a change that can be explained by his practice of not allowing setbacks to divert him from doggedly pursuing the goals he had set himself.

First of all, it is striking that he stubbornly persisted in acting as if the responsibilities he had been given as Reich Settlement Commissar in October 1939 for the ‘consolidation of the ethnic German nation’ also applied in the occupied Soviet territories, a claim vigorously contested by both Rosenberg and Göring.
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In concrete terms, Himmler made use of his police jurisdiction to initiate settlement measures in the occupied eastern territories, thus proving once again his ability when necessary to make very effective combined use of the individual parts of his empire.

Three days after his setback he travelled to Lublin, where he gave Globocnik a series of orders that underlined the significance of the Lublin district as the future hub of the ‘ethno-political’ reordering of the east. In the town of Lublin, according to Himmler, a large complex of camps was to be set up, and in the area around Zamosc preparations were to be made for the settlement of ethnic Germans. In addition, he instructed Globocnik to create a network of police and SS posts in the newly occupied territories stretching out from Lublin.
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Himmler’s stubborn attempts to exploit his police responsibilities as the basis for a ‘new ethnic order’ in the east were not, however, restricted to settlement measures. And this brings us to the real change he effected from the middle of July 1941. The task of ‘consolidating the ethnic German nation’ that Hitler had given him in October 1939 included not only the ‘creation through resettlement of new German settlement areas’, but also the ‘elimination of the damaging influence of [ . . . ] alien elements in the population’. In Poland Himmler had attempted to put this latter aspect into practice by beginning mass deportations of Poles and Jews from the annexed territories. Yet this huge resettlement programme, designed to create space for ethnic Germans, had in essence failed: the planned numbers were far from being attained, the expulsions had led to considerable chaos in the General Government, and the majority of ethnic Germans were still stuck in resettlement camps.

The conclusion Himmler drew from these experiences was that ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the east should be tackled right away and not, as originally assumed, after the war. As a first step to ‘neutralize’ the ‘alien elements in the population’ whole regions were now to be made ‘free of Jews’ through mass
executions and the ghettoization of those who could still be exploited as slave labour.

At the back of this was a gigantic programme of expulsion, resettlement, and extermination, to which some 30 million people in the east (this was the extent of the operation planned at the outbreak of the war, according to von dem Bach-Zelewski) were to fall victim. Yet such a programme of annihilation directed at the indigenous population as a whole was a complete pipe-dream in the summer of 1941. It was possible neither simply to shoot 30 million people nor to cut them off from any food supplies and let them starve. From the perspective of the conquerors, however, these reservations did not apply to the Jews, a much smaller population group: it was claimed they could be clearly distinguished ‘racially’ from the rest of the population, and as allegedly strong supporters of the communist regime they were said to be the most dangerous enemy of the Nazi leadership and so must be dealt with first. Himmler had, in any case, set in motion a systematic policy of discrimination and terror against the Jews, who were concentrated overwhelmingly in the towns, as part of his police duties. He needed only to extend and step up these measures to turn ‘providing security through the police’ into a policy of ethnic extermination. The Jews’ homes and possessions were a very welcome source of booty into the bargain, as they provided valuable resources that could be used to make further resettlement measures considerably easier. By ‘neutralizing’ the Jews while the war was still in progress, Himmler calculated, he stood out as the man with the necessary brutality and the requisite means at his disposal to turn the regime’s overblown notions of a new ethnic order for the entire ‘eastern area’ into reality.

In addition, the fact that in August 1941 Himmler began to connect his utopian ideas of a new order in the east with the ‘neutralization’, the systematic murder, of the Soviet Jews was in harmony with the general policy of the Nazi regime towards the Jews in this critical period. For in August 1941 Hitler was attuning the regime to the idea of fighting the war in future under the banner of a ‘war against the Jews’. As relations with the United States, which sooner or later would enter the war, deteriorated, the propaganda machine intensified its anti-Semitic rabble-rousing: now the Germans were no longer fighting only ‘Jewish Bolshevism’—this old Nazi propaganda slogan had been promptly and extensively reactivated at the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union—but also a comprehensive ‘Jewish world conspiracy’, held together, allegedly, by an incipient coalition
of communism and capitalism. From the end of August onwards the propaganda machine had been spreading appropriate catchphrases on a huge scale. In this context the regime also stepped up its persecution of German Jews. In September they not only had to suffer new types of discrimination, but in the wake of a decision from Hitler of 18 August
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they were obliged to wear badges identifying them as Jews and thus, according to propaganda, be made visible as ‘the enemy within’. In August the assumption among the Nazi leadership was still that the German Jews would be deported to the east only a few months later, after the generally anticipated victory over the Soviet Union.
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Against this background Himmler could rest assured that any initiative to radicalize anti-Jewish policy would be favourably received by his ‘Führer’. The extension of the mass executions in the Soviet Union was not a case of Himmler acting independently, but rather an anticipation of what Hitler had in any case planned for the period after the war: the physical extermination of the Jews, whatever form that might take. And so Himmler made no bones about his radicalization of Jewish policy in the east. The reports from the Einsatzgruppen were being read daily by a large number of people at the Berlin headquarters, and conveyed a vivid impression of Himmler’s anti-Jewish extermination policy. They were also shown to Hitler. According to a radio telegram from the Gestapo chief Müller to the Einsatzgruppen: ‘Regular reports on the work of the Einsatzgruppen in the east are to be sent to the Führer.’
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With Hitler’s instruction of 16 July and the decision in principle it indicated about the structure of the civil administration, the moment had come for Himmler, in spite of his clear setback, to deploy the three SS brigades of his Commando Staff for their actual purpose—for those ‘special tasks I shall give them’, as he had announced in his order of 21 May.
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Himmler probably discussed the planned deployment of the SS cavalry units
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with von dem Bach-Zelewski as early as 8 July, when he visited Bialystok. With the orders of 19 and 22 July—in other words, immediately after Hitler had given him control of‘providing security in the newly occupied eastern territories through the police’ and had significantly enhanced the status of the HSSPFs—Himmler placed the two cavalry regiments, which
were to be concentrated into one cavalry brigade at the beginning of August, under von dem Bach-Zelewski’s command and the 1st Infantry Brigade under the command of the HSSPF Russia South, Jeckeln.
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On 21 July Himmler had a meeting with the commanding officer of the rear area of army South, Karl von Roques, presumably in order to discuss the activities of Jeckeln’s 1st Infantry Brigade within von Roques’s sphere of responsibility.
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Himmler personally planned the first deployment of the SS cavalry, which was to be in the Pripet marshes. He travelled there via Kaunas and Riga. On 29 July he flew to Kaunas, looked round the city, and spoke with Hinrich Lohse, the new Reich Commissar for the Ostland (the Baltic States and Byelorussia). On 31 July he continued his journey to Riga, where amongst other things he inspected the central prison and its new inmates. The following day he met Lohse again and also the HSSPF Hans Adolf Prützmann.
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Immediately after Himmler’s visit the latter’s men extended the mass murders of Jews in Lithuania and Latvia. From 5 August Einsatzkommando 3, as the detailed report of its leader, Karl Jäger, shows, began with the help of Lithuanians to shoot men, women, and children indiscriminately.
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Einsatzkommando 2, stationed in Latvia, also began in August to shoot women and children; in September 18,000 people had been murdered.
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Einsatzkommando ‘Tilsit’ likewise began, at the end of July or beginning of August, to shoot women and children in considerable numbers.
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