Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
Himmler had a notice signed by Wolff placed in Das Schwarze Korps, which
described Rahn as ‘a decent SS man’—in other words, an exoneration.
171
Himmler also ensured that Rahn’s Lucifer’s Courtiers, which he had given to
Hitler in 1937 as a present in a special edition, was distributed to the SS as a
gift (and like other works of Rahn) was even republished towards the end of
the war.
172
This was despite opposition from Rosenberg’s office, which
made objections based on ‘the personality of the deceased author’.
173
Order police
Up until now we have dealt fairly extensively with the activities of the
security police under Himmler’s leadership. How did the much larger
section of the police, the order police (Ordnungpolizei), develop during
these years?
In June 1936 Himmler had already instructed Kurt Daluege, the chief of
the Order Police Main Office, concerning the duties of his office. These
involved, above all, responsibility for the Schutzpolizei (the uniformed
police in the cities), the Gendarmerie (the equivalent formation in the
rural districts), the traffic police, the local police (Gemeindepolizei), as well
as various administrative matters involving the police such as in the sphere of
trading standards and health supervision.
174
On 1 September 1936 Himmler assigned Inspectors of the Order Police
to the provincial governors in the Prussian provinces and to those Reich
Governors whose headquarters were located where the commanders of the
military districts were based; in general they performed supervisory func-
tions. However, from 1937 onwards they were assigned to the new Higher
SS and Police Leaders. In this role, as part of the process of Reich centrali-
zation, they contributed towards removing the police authorities, which
had hitherto been subordinate to the state governments, from the responsi-
bility of the regional administrations altogether.
175
In 1935, as part of the rearmament programme, the so-called Landespo-
lizei* was integrated into the Wehrmacht, with the result that the uni-
formed police lost approximately half its strength and was reduced from
104,000 to fewer than 49,000 officers. By 1938 the uniformed police—
Schutzpolizei, Gendarmerie, and local police—had once more reached a
* Translators’ note: The Landespolizei was a paramilitary police force housed in barracks.
240 the state protection corps
total of 100,000 officers. Priority was given to former soldiers who had been
discharged from the Wehrmacht after between two and five years’ ser-
vice.
176
Thus half the personnel with whom the uniformed police entered
the war consisted of recent recruits, the majority of whom had military
experience. This force was supplemented by approximately the same num-
ber of superficially trained police reservists.
While during the second half of the 1930s the order police was heavily
involved in training its own recruits, at the same time it was assigned
numerous new functions in the Nazi police state, including the control of
prices, dealing with passports and identity cards—which were now much
more strictly controlled—and recording details for the national register, in
which the police wished to include all Germans. In addition, there was the
need to provide security for the numerous large-scale events, parades,
marches, and state receptions as well as cordoning-off manoeuvres and,
last but not least, the supervision of defence matters. Large contingents of
the order police were also involved in the annexations of Austria, the
Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia. Thousands of police remained in the
occupied territories.
177
In October 1936 Himmler integrated the Emergency Technical Assis-
tance organization, which in the event of war, catastrophes, internal unrest,
and the like was designed to ensure the continued functioning of essential
services, into the police, and in June 1937 subordinated it to the Order
Police Main Office.
178
The voluntary fire brigades, which contained
around 1.5 million men, and the professional fire service in the big cities
were combined to form a fire protection service and subordinated to a
newly created Inspector of Fire Services attached to the Chief of the Order
Police.
179
These were all measures intended to create a new central task for
the police, namely, the guaranteeing of protection against air raids and the
removal of bomb damage in the event of war.
Expansion of the concentration camps (KZs)
Between the summer of 1936 and the summer of 1937 Himmler dissolved
the small protective custody camps—Esterwegen, Sachsenburg, Columbia
House, Lichtenburg, and Sulza. Of the old camps only Dachau remained.
Instead, the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps developed a new type of
the state protection corps 241
camp, of which the first to be built was Sachsenhausen near Berlin, the
successor to the Esterwegen and Columbia House camps.
180
The design of the camps was based on the principle of placing separate
functional centres—the actual camp itself, the offices of the commandant,
the guards’ barracks, the residential building of the members of the com-
mandant’s staff—within a closed complex of buildings. In the words of
Himmler, who inspected the camp at the end of 1936,
181
it was ‘a complete-
ly new, modern, and contemporary concentration camp that was capable of
being extended’, which secured ‘the Reich against enemies of the state in
peacetime as well in the event of mobilization’.
182
In the summer of 1937 the Concentration Camp Inspectorate established
a second camp, Buchenwald, outside Weimar, after Himmler himself had
personally inspected the site on the Ettersberg hill.
183
In addition, Dachau
was considerably extended on Himmler’s orders.
184
In May 1938 the
Flossenbu
¨
rg concentration camp was established in eastern Bavaria,
185
and
in August 1938, after the Anschluss with Austria, Mauthausen was opened
near Linz.
186
In the same month the Concentration Camp Inspectorate
established its new headquarters in Oranienburg in the immediate vicinity
of Sachsenhausen. In December 1938 work began on the Neuengamme
camp near Hamburg, a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen that initially had the aim
of reopening a brick factory that had been closed.
187
In May 1939 a female
concentration camp was added at Ravensbru
¨
ck.
188
The expansion of the concentration camp system was clearly a prepara-
tory measure for the outbreak of war. Already at the beginning of 1937
Himmler announced that ‘in the event of war’ one ‘would have to lock up a
considerable number of unreliable characters’.
189
In the light of this, the
camp system was designed for 30,000 to 50,000 prisoners. The number of
prisoners had already been slowly increasing from the end of 1936 on-
wards—at the turn of the year 1934–5 it had sunk to 3,000—and by the start
of the war had reached 21,000. However, as a result of the mass arrests after
the pogrom of November 1938 the number of prisoners had briefly
amounted to over 50,000.
190
As before, the decision over the confinement and release of prisoners was
a matter for the Gestapo. Eicke’s office was responsible for conditions in the
camps. Basically, within the camps there was a strict division between the
guards and the commandant’s office, which consisted of the adjutant’s
office, the political department, the protective custody leader, and the
camp doctor, as well as the administration.
191
Certain subordinate functions
242 the state protection corps
were delegated to—often criminal—prisoners, who in return received
certain privileges. In this way the SS included a section of the prisoners as
tools of their terror system. The prisoners received a prisoner’s number,
which had to be visible on their uniform. In the winter of 1938–9 it was
decided to mark the prisoners with a uniform badge. Prisoners had to wear
cloth triangles on their clothing, the colour of which indicated to which
category they belonged: political prisoners, criminals, Jews, homosexuals,
and so on.
According to Himmler, the inmates represented a real collection of
oddities. ‘None of them has been put there unjustly,’ he declared to a
group of Wehrmacht officers in January 1937. ‘They are the dregs of
criminality, of people who have taken the wrong path. There could be no
better demonstration of the laws of heredity and race [ . . . ] There are people
there with hydrocephalus, people who squint, people with deformities,
half-Jews, a mass of racially inferior material.’
192
On 8 November 1937 he
told the SS-Gruppenfu
¨
hrer that ‘we shall have to keep people with several
previous convictions in the camps for many years, at least until they have got
used to living an ordered life, and that doesn’t mean becoming what we
would consider to be decent people, but rather having had their will
broken’. ‘The ‘Bolshevik leaders’ could also not expect to be freed.
193
But what was to be done with all these prisoners? In 1938 Himmler
geared the KZ system towards pursuing new goals and fulfilling new tasks.
He began increasingly to deploy the prisoners for work projects, with plants
being established in the KZs. The new intake of prisoners in the KZs were
now predominantly people who were labelled as being work-shy or asocial.
In other words, the phase associated with the ‘economization’ of the KZs
had begun.
The first notion of deploying KZ prisoners for labour tasks can be traced
back to the turn of the year 1936–7.
194
The motive was not primarily
economic; what was decisive was rather the fact that the growing labour
shortage in the Reich inevitably made people consider the idea of utilizing
KZ prisoners for labour projects (as had already happened with judicial
prisoners). Had the SS not made any efforts in this direction the KZ
prisoners would eventually have been taken over by the Labour Ministry.
195
The large-scale employment of prisoners was prompted by cooperation
with Albert Speer, who in January 1937 had been assigned by Hitler the job
of rebuilding Berlin. Speer, however, was in danger of failing in this task
because labour and building materials were in short supply as a result of the
the state protection corps 243
rearmament boom. In this situation Himmler offered Speer his assistance:
KZ prisoners could provide the granite and bricks for Berlin’s major build-
ings. Speer could finance the construction of brickworks and granite
quarries from his budget. An agreement was signed on 1 July 1938,in
other words, immediately after 10,000 people had been put in the camps
as a result of the action ‘Work-shy Reich’. Himmler’s line of confining
‘asocials’ on the basis of ‘general prevention on racial grounds’ now seemed
to have an economic pay-off as well.
196
The upshot of the cooperation between Himmler and Speer was the
creation, in April 1938, of a company, the German Earth and Stone
Quarries Ltd. (Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH). The company set
about establishing three brickworks and two granite quarries in close prox-
imity to concentration camps. The decisions concerning the location of the
new Flossenbu
¨
rg KZ and the extension to Dachau were determined largely
by the fact that there were quarries in the immediate vicinity. The granite
quarries would even prove profitable; this was not the case with the brick-
works, which suffered from poor management.
197
As was the case from the first days of Dachau concentration camp on, the
prisoners in all the camps suffered under a cruel and arbitrary system. They
were subjected to every conceivable form of chicanery, torture, and mis-
treatment. Punishment exercises; hours of standing for roll-calls, often in
bad or icy weather; forced labour in work details, for example under marshy
conditions until they were exhausted: all these were commonplace. Draco-
nian punishments such as floggings on a punishment-block or solitary
confinement in tiny cells with minimum food for weeks on end were
imposed arbitrarily, and interrogations were carried out with the most brutal
methods of torture. Moreover, the guards frequently murdered prisoners,
such murders being either disguised as suicide or simply filed under the terse
formula ‘shot while trying to escape’. Being forced to live in an extremely
confined space, inadequate and poor-quality food, and excessive hours
of work of the most physically demanding kind also formed part of camp
life.
198
Himmler made a vigorous defence of the terror regime in the concentra-
tion camps, for example in an argument with the Justice Minister, Franz
Gu
¨
rtner, in the spring of 1938. In March 1938 Gu
¨
rtner spoke to Himmler
about the large number of prisoners who had been shot while ‘trying to
escape’ from the concentration camps. Two months later he received a
letter from Himmler.
199
To begin with, Himmler explained that after his
244 the state protection corps
conversation with Gu
¨
rtner he had instructed Eicke ‘to remind the Death’s
Head units once more that they should shoot only in the case of extreme
emergencies’, but in the meantime had come deeply to regret having taken
this step. For, as he put it to the Justice Minister, he had been ‘very shocked’
by the result of his intervention. Only two days before, he himself had had
to view the corpse of ‘a fine 24-year-old SS man whose skull had been
bashed in by two criminals with a shovel’. He was ‘seriously upset by the
idea that, as a result of excessive lenience, [ . . . ] now one of my decent men
had lost his life’. As a result, he had reinstated the old instruction ‘that,
strictly in accordance with service regulations, after someone has been called
upon three times [to halt] or in the event of a physical attack the [guards]
should shoot without warning’. Moreover, he had mentioned the case to
Hitler and had received his approval to hang one of the escaped prisoners,
who had been caught in the meantime, in front of the assembled inmates.
He informed Gu
¨
rtner of this a fortnight later, and ordered the execution to
be carried out.
200
Himmler repeatedly used the opportunity to deal with the issue of
conditions in the concentration camps in public, for example in his speech
to Wehrmacht officers in January 1937:
The camps are surrounded with barbed w ire, with an electrified fence. If anybody
enters a banned zone or goes where he is not supposed to, he will be shot. If
anybody makes even the slightest attempt to flee from his workplace, for example
while working on a moor or on building a road, he will be shot. If anybody is
impertinent or rebellious, and that sometimes happens, or at least is attempted, he
will either be put in solitary confinement, in a dark cellar with bread and water or—
please don’t be shocked, I have applied the old Prussian penitentiary regulations of
1914–1918—he will in the worst cases receive twenty-five strokes. Claims by the
foreign press that acts of cruelty, of sadism, occur are completely inconceivable.
201
In a speech broadcast to mark German Police Day in January 1939 he
said, among other things:
Imprisonment in a concentration camp is certainly, like any loss of personal
freedom, a form of punishment and a strict measure. Tough new values, hard
work, a regular life, exceptional residential and personal cleanliness, impeccable
food, strict but just treatment, the requirement to relearn how to work and thereby
to learn artisanal skills are all part of the educational process. The sign above these
camps states: there is a way to freedom. Its milestones are: obedience, hard work,
honesty, order, cleanliness, sobriety, truthfulness, self-sacrifice, and love of the
fatherland.
202
the state protection corps 245
This ‘doctrine’ of the Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS’ was prominently displayed in large
letters above the assembly-ground of Sachsenhausen.
203
Himmler made regular inspections of the camps: ‘Every year I visit the
camps myself,’ he explained in January 1937, ‘and arrive unannounced to
have a look around.’
204
Walter Janka, who was imprisoned in KZ Sachsen-
burg for his communist activities, described in his memoirs such an inspec-
tion by Himmler in February 1935. However, this visit was not
unannounced. Over three days and nights, ‘everything had been swept,
cleaned, and put in order’. Those prisoners who were going to be in the
front row were given new prison uniforms. ‘With a gesture that could have
meant anything, Himmler, escorted by the commandant, strode up and
down the ranks of the SS. Now and then he stopped and exchanged a few
words. In front of the prisoners he increased his step and no words were
exchanged with them. Himmler did not waste a single glance on the
assembled prisoners.’
According to Janka’s report, the Reichsfu
¨
hrer later made a tour of the
camp and in the process visited the bookbinder’s workshop, in which Janka
worked together with a number of other communist prisoners, and asked
them some very awkward questions. For example, Himmler asked Janka
whether he held the SS responsible for the death of his brother, who had
allegedly hanged himself in a KZ in April 1933. Janka preferred not to
answer.
205
As confirmed by other prisoners, during such visits Himmler appears to
have liked to present himself in the pose of the victor. On 30 September
1942, during a visit to Sachsenhausen KZ, for example, he encountered
Herbert Blank, a ‘special prisoner of the Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS’. Blank had been a
leading member of the Combat Group of Revolutionary National Socialists,
in other words, the group which, under the leadership of Otto Strasser, had
split off from the Nazis in 1930. Blank recorded in an article published in
1948 that Himmler had advised him to ‘get used to the idea’ ‘that I can never
release you as long as you live’.
206
On a visit to Dachau in June 1938
Himmler insisted on being introduced to the ‘prominent’ Austrian prisoners
individually.
207
Himmler also liked giving guided tours of the camps. For example, in
1936 he took the members of the Friends of the Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS (a spon-
sors’ organization) as well as the Reich leadership of the NSDAP and its
Gauleiters round Dachau; in spring 1938 he took a large group of journalists
round Sachsenhausen, and in the summer of 1938 Reich Interior Minister
246 the state protection corps
Frick and high-ranking civil servants. In the following January he was
present when Eicke and Pohl showed police chiefs round Sachsenhausen,
and in the summer he arranged a further visit of the same camp for his circle
of Friends; at the end of 1940 he was there to greet a delegation of ethnic
German politicians from Alsace.
208
The expansion of the armed units
With his appointment as Chief of the German Police Himmler’s ambitions
appeared to be entirely concentrated on internal security. This is the impres-
sion he tried to create with the Wehrmacht, in order not to arouse any
suspicions in their minds concerning the further development of the SS’s
armed units.
209
On 1 October 1936 Himmler had established the Inspectorate
of the Verfu
¨
gungstruppe, which was subordinated to the SS Main Office, and
appointed the commander of the leadership school in Brunswick, Paul
Hausser, to head it.
210
Moreover, in the same year he combined existing
units to create two new regiments in addition to the Leibstandarte, the SS-
Standarten ‘Deutschland’ and ‘Germania’. And then, following the so-called
Anschluss with Austria, he established the Vienna Standarte, ‘Der Fu
¨
hrer’.
211
Furthermore, the expansion of the concentration camps led to the guard units
of the KZs, the Death’s Head units, being increasingly drawn into the
militarization process. From 1937 onwards they were combined to form
three Standarten and, after the Anschluss with Austria, were joined by an
additional one.
212
On 17 August 1938 Hitler issued an edict, which Himmler had seen
and made alterations to in draft, regulating the basis on which the armed
SS units were to operate and their relationship with the Wehrmacht.
213
Hitler determined that the armed units and the Death’s Head units were
neither part of the Wehrmacht nor of the police, but a ‘standing armed
force’. The Death’s Head units were designed ‘to solve special tasks of a
police nature’, while the armed units were to be at Hitler’s ‘exclusive
disposal’. This description of the tasks of the armed units was much vaguer
than the one given in 1934. At that time it had been established that the
armed SS units were primarily to have domestic political functions, and that
the Wehrmacht could call on them in time of war. As late as January 1937
Himmler had emphasized to Wehrmacht officers that he would assign
elements of the police to the army in the event of a war, while the Death’s
the state protection corps 247
Head units would form an ‘intervention force’ distributed throughout the
Reich.
214
However, in the same speech he had also stated that in a future
war, in addition to the three fronts on land, sea, and in the air, there would
be a fourth ‘battlefield’: ‘the German homeland.’
215
Thus, in his view, in a
future war it would be completely impossible to draw a sharp line separating
domestic political security functions from military activity, and it was this
view of the comprehensive nature of a future war that formed the basis for
his vision of the special position of a state protection corps in the Third
Reich.
Himmler used another occasion, an address to SS-Gruppenfu
¨
hrer on
8 November 1938, to explain that, in his view, there was absolutely no
contradiction between the internal security tasks of the SS and their en-
gagement on the front line:
If I describe the overall task of the SS as being, together with the police [ ...] to
guarantee Germany’s internal security then this task can be carried out only if a
section of the SS, this leadership corps, is prepared to stand and die at the front. If
we didn’t make any sacrifices and didn’t fight at the front then we should have lost
the moral authority to shoot down people at home who are trying to avoid their
commitments and behaving as cowards. That is the function of the armed units,
that is their glorious task—to be permitted to go the front.
Furthermore, Himmler announced his intention to have a whole army
corps instead of the single division which he had been allocated. Evidently
he was aiming to thwart the Wehrmacht’s intention of using the armed SS as
auxiliaries in a future war, distributed among the various fronts, and instead
to lead his men into battle as a closed formation.
216
Between January 1935 and December 1938 Himmler built up the armed
units from a figure of barely 5,000 to over 14,000 men, and the Death’s
Head units from barely 2,000 to over 9,000.
217
He did this with some degree
of finesse. When, during the mobilization for the occupation of the Sude-
tenland in autumn 1938, the SS armed units as well as some Death’s Head
formations were integrated into the army, Himmler recruited up to around
5,000 men into the SS as ‘police reinforcements’. He retained 2,000 of these
reservists in the Death’s Head units and in 1939 recruited further reser-
vists.
218
The military character of the armed SS units was made very clear in a
Fu
¨
hrer edict of 18 May 1939. In it Hitler ordered that the existing units
should be formed into a division, but also made it clear that this marked ‘the
248 the state protection corps
end of the expansion of the Verfu
¨
gungstruppe’. The edict also established a
limit to the size of armed SS formations of 20,000 for the Verfu
¨
gungstruppe,
14,000 for the Death’s Head units, and 25,000 for the police reinforce-
ments.
219
By the outbreak of war Himmler had brought the actual strength
of the Verfu
¨
gungstruppe up to around 18,000 men and that of the Death’s
Head units, including the police reinforcements, to over 22,000, which
therefore remained slightly below the limit.
220
Himmler clarified how he envisaged the deployment of the armed SS
formations in the event of a war or civil war at a Gruppenfu
¨
hrer meeting in
Munich on 8 November 1938:
I have told the commander of the Standarte ‘Deutschland’ that I consider it right,
and this also applies to the coming war, that SS men should never be taken prisoner.
Before that can happen they should take their own lives. We shall also not take any
prisoners. Future wars won’t be skirmishes but rather life-and-death struggles
between nations [ ...]However kind and decent we may want to be as individuals,
we will be pitiless if it is a matter of preserving our nation from death. Then it
doesn’t matter if 1,000 inhabitants of a town have to be finished off. I will do it and I
would expect you to carry it out as well.
221
The amalgamation of SS and police
Himmler pursued his goal of amalgamating the SS and police to form a ‘state
protection corps’ with great determination. We have already dealt with his
ideological premises and the role he envisaged for it. The Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS
and Chief of the German Police rapidly got to grips with the personnel and
organizational issues involved. In 1937 Himmler created the post of Higher
SS and Police Leader (HSSPF). The incumbents of the new post, which had
been created specifically with reference to the mobilization for war, oper-
ated in future as his personal representatives in the regions, and were entitled
to issue directives to the various branches of the SS and police within a
military district in his name.
222
According to Himmler, this represented an
important step towards ‘uniting the SS and police to form a corps for the
Fu
¨
hrer’s protection’.
223
On 12 March 1938 the Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS made the first appointment:
Obergruppenfu
¨
hrer Friedrich Karl Freiherr von Eberstein, the commander
of Oberabschnitt South and head of the police department in the Bavarian
Interior Ministry, was appointed HSSPF in the Military Districts VII and
the state protection corps 249