Heinrich Himmler : A Life (95 page)

Ill. 24.
Himmler used his visits to the newly conquered territories to enquire into a whole range of matters. As usual he was interested in anything and everything. This photo from the year 1941 shows him, together with Karl Wolff, inspecting a captured Soviet tank.

At the end of September—in other words, a few days before his visit—Einsatzgruppe D had murdered the inhabitants of the ghetto in Nikolajev, about 5,000 men, women, and children.
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Now Himmler addressed the members of Einsatzgruppe D, calling the shootings a difficult task but a necessary one.
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Presumably only a few days later Sonderkommando 11a executed virtually all the Jewish inhabitants of Cherson.
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With these mass murders Einsatzgruppe D finally began murdering all Jewish members of the civilian population in their territory, and it is evident that Himmler’s visit brought about this radicalization.

On 5 October he was back again at the Führer’s headquarters in Rastenburg, meeting Hitler in the evening and entertaining him with his recent
impressions of the journey: he reported to his ‘Führer’ that the inhabitants of Kiev had made an unfavourable impression on him and a good ‘80–90% of them’ could be ‘dispensed with’.
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On 7 October, his forty-first birthday, Himmler held court: Daluege, Heydrich, Wolff, Jüttner, Grawitz, Knoblauch, and many others put on a reception to congratulate him. In the evening he gave a dinner attended by many of the above and also by Ribbentrop and Lammers.
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On 13 October he discussed the ‘Jewish question’ with Globocnik in the latter’s district of Lublin (we shall return to this), on 14 October he had a lengthy interview with Heydrich,
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and on 23 October he visited the slave-labour camp in Mogilev. It was at this time that plans were made to extend this camp significantly; only a few days before, on 18 October, the deportation of Jews from Reich territory had begun, and on 8 November the first of these transports was due to reach Minsk, which lay about 150 kilometres west of Mogilev. In mid-November the construction of a large crematorium for the camp in Mogilev was commissioned, just as at the other destinations of deported German Jews, in Chelmno and Riga, preparations were made to build mass extermination complexes (which we shall also return to in more detail). On the day of Himmler’s visit to the Mogilev camp 279 people were executed there. Four days previously the ghetto had been liquidated; most of the inhabitants had been shot.
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On 24 October Himmler made a lightning visit from Mogilev to Smolensk and met the senior commander of the Army Group Centre, von Bock. During their meeting the shootings of Jews in the army group’s area were discussed, according to the testimony of von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was also present.
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On 25 October Himmler returned to his headquarters, where he had a meeting with Globocnik.
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That evening Himmler and Heydrich were with Hitler. Records of Hitler’s monologues give us an indication of the topics discussed. After recalling his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939, the dictator stated: ‘This race of criminals has the two million dead of the World War on its conscience, and now it has hundreds of thousands more. Let nobody say to me: We can’t send them into the swamps! Who’s worrying about our people? It’s good if the fear that we are exterminating the Jews goes before us.’
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Around three weeks later, on 15 November 1941, Himmler had a meeting with Rosenberg in Prague to discuss cooperation in ‘police and settlement matters’; the encounter was made necessary by Rosenberg’s complaint of 14 October. The upshot of this discussion was an agreement
signed by both men on 19 November establishing that the HSSPFs and the SSPFs should answer ‘personally and directly’ to the Reich and general commissars. The territorial commissars had ‘authority in specialist matters’ over them.
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The question of whether the ‘treatment of the Jewish problem’ was a ‘police matter’ or had to be resolved in ‘the context of overall policy’ (a clear indication that Himmler’s radical action had strained his authority as police chief to the point that Rosenberg was justified in perceiving a threat to his own political leadership in the east) was to be solved by means of ‘dual accountability’: The person responsible for ‘Jewish questions’ on the HSSPF’s staff would have the same responsibility in the Reich commissar’s office.
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On 16 November, the following day, both came to report to Hitler that they had reached agreement over the most important bones of contention. In reality they had done little more than use set phrases to express a compromise that in the following months Himmler would increasingly interpret to his own advantage.
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The truly astounding amount of travelling Himmler did in these weeks and months reveals that, after being passed over during discussions of occupation policy, he did everything he could from the end of July to the end of September/beginning of October to step up the mass executions of Jews in the Soviet Union (which his murder units had already begun under the pretext of their duties as ‘security police’), to the point of turning them into a comprehensive genocide: in all the territories where his Einsatzgruppen were operating the decisive impetus to move to the systematic murder of the Jewish civilian population came in every case from him personally. ‘I decided’, he was to explain on 6 October 1943 to the SS-Gruppenführer, ‘in this case also to find a clear solution. I did not see myself as justified in eradicating the men—by that I mean in killing them or having them killed—only to let their children grow up to avenge them by killing our sons and grandsons.’
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And on 24 May he expressed himself in almost exactly the same terms in Sonthofen to the Wehrmacht generals: ‘I did not consider myself justified—as far as Jewish women and children were concerned—in allowing children to grow up to be the avengers who would kill our fathers and our grandchildren. I would have seen that as cowardly. As a result the issue was solved uncompromisingly.’
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The formulations Himmler chose in these addresses indicate that he really did take the decision to murder the women and children on his own initiative—secure in his confidence that such actions reflected the intentions of the highest authority, those of Hitler himself.

His strategy of using a campaign of bloody ethnic cleansing to extend what at first were responsibilities solely for police matters into the task of enforcing a comprehensive ‘ethnic policy’ in the newly occupied territories was in the end successful. This method was not new: in the Protectorate and in occupied Poland he had already made use of the brute force of the security police to advance his ambitions in the field of ‘settlement policy’. Himmler’s technique of meshing his very diverse spheres of responsibility in the most varied policy areas had proved effective yet again, though with fateful consequences.

From the autumn of 1941 onwards the Nazi regime began gradually to extend the mass murder of the Jews to the whole of Europe. The so-called territorial plans for ‘solving the Jewish question’ had already envisaged deporting the European Jews to Madagascar, an area which lacked adequate facilities for survival, and so to destroy them there. From the beginning of 1941 the leadership was determined to achieve this aim within the territory of the Soviet Union that was scheduled for conquest, in other words, in the area where, since summer 1941, Himmler’s commandos had been engaged in a campaign of mass murder of the local Jewish population. It was inevitable that the Jews who were being deported to ‘the east’ from autumn 1941 onwards would be caught up in this murderous policy, and this evidently created a situation in which the objectives as far as the ‘final solution’ was concerned became even more radical. Now it was no longer simply a question of letting the Jews who had been deported die out over the medium or long term, but rather of ‘eliminating’ them completely through mass murder and doing so during the course of the war.

The widespread view that this process resulted from a single order from Hitler does not do justice to its complexity. There was in fact a consensus within the leadership of the regime, and also among numerous senior functionaries in the occupied territories, that the ‘Jewish question’ should be ‘solved’ in a murderous fashion. But the realization of this aim occurred through the interplay of guidelines from above and initiatives from below that was characteristic of the regime.

Three elements can be determined that were essential for setting in motion the process of systematic mass murder: the preparation and actual commencement of deportations ‘to the east’; the expansion of the murder
campaigns beyond the occupied Soviet territory to embrace particular regions of east and south-east Europe; and finally the planning and construction of sites for mass extermination in occupied Poland. During the first months of 1942, out of these elements Himmler and Heydrich fashioned step by step a programme that envisaged the extermination of the majority of European Jews before the end of the year.
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Himmler played a key role in this process: continually referring back to Hitler, he issued orders in the latter’s name, made suggestions, encouraged initiatives.

In August 1941 Hitler was still insisting that they could start deporting Jews to the occupied eastern territories only after Germany had defeated the Soviet Union.
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However, from the beginning of September he was evidently considering revising this decision. He left the soundings to Himmler. On 2 September, following lunch with Hitler, the Reichsführer-SS discussed the topic ‘Jewish question—deportations from the Reich’ with Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) in the General Government. However, when he became aware that the General Government could not be used for that purpose, on 4 September he approached Wilhelm Koppe, HSSPF in the Warthegau. Koppe wrote to him on 10 September suggesting they could put ‘60,000 Jews in the Litzmannstadt [Ł
ó
ódź] ghetto’.
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Other people were also raising the issue. On 14 September the Minister for the East, Alfred Rosenberg, proposed to Hitler that they should immediately begin the deportation of the central European Jews that had long been planned, because the previous day the Soviet government had begun to deport the Volga Germans.
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Two days later Otto Abetz, the German ambassador in Paris, passed on a proposal from his ‘Jewish expert’ that the Jews from the whole of Europe should be deported to the eastern territories. Himmler responded positively: Jewish prisoners in camps could be deported to the east as long as transport was available.
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On the same day he discussed the topic ‘Jewish question. Settlement of the east’ with Ulrich Greifelt, the head of his Staff Main Office for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation, as well as with Konrad Meyer, his chief planning officer for the eastern settlement programme. Moreover, on this same day Abetz met Hitler, who expressed his opinion in the most brutal manner on how his future eastern empire should be organized.
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On 17 September Hitler discussed Rosenberg’s proposal with Ribbentrop, and on the eighteenth Himmler informed Arthur Greiser, the Reich Governor of the Wartheland, of Hitler’s express wish that

as soon as possible the Old Reich and the Protectorate should be cleared and freed of Jews from west to east. I am therefore anxious, as a first step, to transport the Jews from the Old Reich and the Protectorate to the eastern territories that the Reich acquired two years ago and to do it if possible this year in order to be able to get rid of them further east next spring. For the winter I intend to put around 60,000 Jews from the Old Reich and the Protectorate in the Litzmannstadt ghetto, which I gather has room to spare.
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The reasons for Hitler’s decision not to make the deportation of the Jews living in the areas Germany controlled dependent on the ending of the war were complex. The fate of the Volga Germans was only a pretext. In August 1941, as has already been mentioned, Hitler decided in future to fight the war under the slogan of ‘a war against the Jews’. In view of the fact that it was looking increasingly likely that America would enter the war, he believed he had found a formula that would explain the impending coalition between communism and capitalism: the ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ covered both opponents. As a result, from his point of view the European Jews were to be seen as members of the enemy camp, and their deportation was the logical consequence. On 21 September Wilhelm Koeppen
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, the Ministry of the East’s liaison official in Hitler’s headquarters, noted that ‘in the event of America’s entry into the war’ Hitler was considering ‘retaliatory measures against the German Jews because of the way the Volga Germans had been treated’. That the deportations were intended to be understood as a threat to the United States is underlined by the fact that they took place in full view of the public, were commented on in the presence of foreign correspondents in Germany,
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and received considerable attention in the international press.
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Since Hitler was completely convinced of the existence of a Jewish world conspiracy, he relied on awareness of the deportations influencing American foreign policy in his favour.