Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life
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midnight that soon ‘action would be taken against the Jews, in particular
against synagogues’; no one should interfere. Looting and major acts of
violence should, however, be prevented. And, more important: the con-
centration camps should prepare to receive 20,000–30,000 prisoners.
124
At midnight Himmler joined Hitler for the oath-taking ceremony for SS
candidates on Odeonsplatz and then returned to his hotel, the Vierjahres-
zeiten, where he met Heydrich. Put in the picture by Himmler, Heydrich
then sent a telex to the offices of the security police and SD in which he
announced that ‘demonstrations against the Jews are to be expected
throughout the Reich’, which the police should not hinder. Instead, the
police should restrict themselves to preventing the burning of synagogues
where there was a threat to neighbouring buildings, as well as to stopping
looting and attacks on non-Jewish businesses.
125
Mu
¨
ller’s order and Heydrich’s telex, sent about one-and-a-half hours
later, show that the police reacted relatively late to these events and were
evidently surprised by the extent of the violence. Throughout the Reich
Nazi activists—members of the SA and SS, members of the party and other
Nazi organizations—had begun to destroy synagogues, Jewish institutions,
and businesses; to smash the furniture in Jewish houses; to drag Jews from
their homes by force, to humiliate, mistreat, and in many cases to murder
them. The official death-toll was later put at ninety-one, which is probably
too low. There were numerous suicides, and of the 25,000–30,000 Jewish
men who were arrested during the night and taken to concentration camps
many did not survive their imprisonment or died later as a result.
126
During the following weeks further steps in so-called ‘Jewish policy’
were discussed at a number of conferences attended by high-ranking offi-
cials.
127
At the meeting held on 12 November 1938 Heydrich raised the
question of Jewish emigration, and among other things mentioned
the experience of the SD with the ‘Jewish Emigration Office’ in Vienna.
He proposed the establishment of a similar agency to cover the whole of the
Reich. Go
¨
ring accepted the idea. Furthermore, Heydrich proposed an
‘emigration programme for the Jews in the rest of the Reich’, covering a
time-span of ‘at least 8–10 years’.
128
The fact that his proposal for an
organized expulsion of the Jews met with general approval at this meeting
was the decisive precondition for Heydrich’s future leadership role in Jewish
policy. The idea of a programme for the comprehensive expulsion of the
Jews developed by the ‘Jewish department’ of the SD during the previous
410 war preparations and expansion
years, which had thoroughly assessed its domestic, diplomatic, and econom-
ic implications, now became the official policy of the regime.
On 24 January 1939 Go
¨
ring ordered the establishment of a ‘Central
Office for Jewish Emigration’ along the lines of the emigration agency
created by Eichmann in Vienna, and put Heydrich in charge of it. In parallel
with this, Go
¨
ring began the amalgamation of all the various Jewish organi-
zations and associations to form an integrated compulsory organization in
the shape of the Reich Association of the Jews in Germany (Reichsverei-
unigung der Juden in Deutschland), under the supervision of the Reich
Interior Ministry.
129
It replaced the Representative Council of the Jews in
Germany (Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland) created in 1933.On
4 July 1939, under the 10th Decree for the Implementation of the Reich
Citizenship Law, all Jews living in Germany and all Jewish organizations
were obliged to become members of this body.
130
The pogrom was followed by a wave of anti-Semitic legislation. Jews
were largely excluded from further economic activity, their businesses were
compulsorily ‘aryanized’, their insurance claims arising out of the damage
caused by the pogrom were nullified. Instead, they were obliged to pay an
‘atonement contribution’ amounting to 1 billion Reich marks.
131
Himmler too issued a number of decrees during these weeks. Thus, on 10
November he banned Jews from possessing firearms, a measure which the
Reich Minister of the Interior confirmed the following day by issuing an
official decree to that effect.
132
On 2 December, on the basis of a general
police decree issued the day before,
133
he ordered a curfew for all Jews to
coincide with the ‘National Solidarity Day’. Since Jews ‘had no part to play
in the solidarity of the German people’, they were not permitted to leave
their place of residence between the hours of 12.00 and 8 p.m.
134
On 3
December 1938 Himmler signed a decree which banned Jews from posses-
sing motor vehicles, with immediate effect. Their driving licences and
permits were declared invalid and had to be handed in.
135
This continuing and increasingly threatening harassment had its effect.
The negotiations with the International Committee for Political Refugees,
which Schacht began on Hitler’s instructions at the end of 1938 in order to
realize Heydrich’s proposal for a large-scale ‘emigration programme’, in the
end collapsed.
136
However, the panic produced by the November pogrom
and the loosening of the restrictions on immigration in several countries led
to increasing numbers of Jews leaving Germany.
137
wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 411
The occupation of Prague
At the beginning of April 1939 Himmler’s daughter Gudrun received a
letter from Karl Wolff, her father’s adjutant: ‘Dear Pu
¨
ppi,’ he began, ‘I’m
writing this letter in order to give you and, in particular your children and
grandchildren, a valuable document.’ According to Wolff, on 15 March he
had personally witnessed the Fu
¨
hrer’s entry into the old imperial castle of
Prague, the Hradschin. He described it as follows: ‘The Fu
¨
hrer went into a
barely furnished room, turned to your father, and embraced him, delighted
that it had been granted to him to win Bohemia and Moravia for Germany.
The Fu
¨
hrer then said: “Himmler, isn’t it wonderful that we are standing
here, here we are and we shall never leave”. Later on the Fu
¨
hrer once again
said to your father: “I don’t want to praise myself, but I really have to say: it
was very elegantly done”.’ ‘I hope, dear Pu
¨
ppi,’ Wolff concluded his letter,
‘that I will have made you very happy with my story.’
138
There was a good reason why Hitler turned to Himmler in his euphoria,
for the SS and police had in fact played a leading role in the largely smooth
occupation of the Czech part of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, just as
they had in the invasion of Austria and the Sudetenland. In addition to two
regiments of order police,
139
Himmler had assigned two Einsatzgruppen of
security police to the occupying force, who immediately began seizing
documents and—as part of ‘Operation Iron Bars’—arrested large numbers
of communists and German e
´
migre
´
s—by the beginning of May around
6,000 people. It took until 1 September before the status of the security
police in the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’ had been legally
defined. In the meantime the security police could impose an arbitrary
regime unrestrained by legal limits.
In fact legalization changed little, because effectively it simply legalized
the arbitrary regime already established by Himmler and Heydrich. The
decree laid down that not only the Czech authorities but also the German
administration were obliged to follow the orders of the Gestapo, and that
‘the Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS, in agreement with the Reich Protector, [. . .] can
[implement] [. . .] the administrative measures necessary for the maintenance
of law and order outside the normal limits’. The Reich Protector, the
former Foreign Minister von Neurath, was, however, de facto excluded
from security matters, because the Deputy Reich Protector, Karl Hermann
412 war preparations and expansion
Frank, who had been appointed Higher SS and Police Leader, was subordi-
nate to Himmler as far as his practical responsibilities were concerned.
Moreover, the security police were authorized to give instructions to the
regional authorities in the Protectorate on ‘matters concerning the state
police’, and it was Himmler who appointed the commander of the security
police. In fact, the first appointee to this post, Otto Rasch, was replaced after
only a few weeks by Stahlecker. The order police operated with the same
degree of autonomy.
140
The revival of settlement policy
Up until 1938 Himmler showed very little interest in the settlement
activities of his Race and Settlement Main Office. It is true that, on 3
September 1935, he issued an order to the effect that the Race and Settle-
ment Main Office (RuSHA) was responsible for all matters concerning the
settlement of SS members. This applied to the choice of settlers for both the
project ‘Re-establishment of the German Peasantry’ and the ‘homestead
settlement’ programme, in other words urban settlement,
141
and in 1938
the head of the Race and Settlement Main Office had extended this order to
the police.
142
In fact, however, the SS’s settlement activities were initially
on a modest scale. Thus, in 1938, for example, only fifty-five peasants had
been settled on a total area of less than 5,000 hectares as part of the ‘New
Peasant Settlement’ programme, while 102 SS houses were planned in the
SS-Oberabschnitt West as part of the homestead programme.
143
This minimal amount of activity, and the limited personal interest shown
by the Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS in the settlement issue, can be attributed to the fact
that, by appointing Reich Minister of Agriculture Darre
´
as head of the Race
and Settlement Main Office at the beginning of the 1930s, Himmler had
intended to ensure that he would be made responsible for ‘eastern settle-
ment’. Although at the time it looked as though this would become
important only in the distant future, his aim was to ensure that, through
the alliance with Darre
´
, the SS would have a strong position in a key sphere
of the Nazi fantasy empire.
Although Darre
´
had emphasized, in a speech in January 1936, that the
future of German peasant settlement lay in eastern Europe up to the
Urals,
144
his RuSHA had not made any significant preparations for this
future project. In 1937, however, Hermann Reischle, the head of the staff
wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 413
office of the Reich Food Estate, for which Darre
´
was also responsible, had
given instructions to start secretly planning the settlement of Czechoslova-
kia. Reischle insisted that he was not prepared to put up with the ‘absurd
situation’ that in Nazi Germany ‘nobody was thinking [how] in practice’
the central demand of Nazism for ‘new space’ could be realized. The strict
secrecy of these drafts prevented Reischle, who was also head of the Race
Office of the Race and Settlement Main Office, from involving the SS in
these plans. Indeed, it may well be the case that, in his function as head of
the Race Office, he wished as far as possible to prevent the SS from
developing their own settlement plans and so providing unwelcome com-
petition.
145
SS settlement activity only really got going in 1938, utilizing settlement
land in the annexed Sudeten territory and in Austria. In June 1938 the
German Settlement Society (Deutsche Ansiedlungsgesellschaft = DAG),
which was controlled by the RuSHA,
146
was given the task of buying
land in Austria for a Wehrmacht training area and resettling the residents
in ‘aryanized’ property. This was followed by three more such contracts for
military training areas. In all it involved a total of 35,000 hectares.
147
The
fact that DAG ran ‘a precise, punctual and smooth operation’ led to it being
given further, similar tasks.
148
The RuSHA was even more heavily involved in the Sudetenland. In
October Gu
¨
nter Pancke, who had replaced Darre
´
as head of the RuSHA in
the late summer of 1938, wrote to his boss Himmler that ‘the opportunity
provided by the Sudetenland’ should be exploited for far-reaching changes
in the ‘whole settlement field’. The Sudetenland should be intensively
utilized as a test-bed for settlement in order to secure SS responsibility for
settlement issues for the whole of the Reich or, as Pancke put it, so that, ‘by
being able to refer to real achievements, the SS can work towards gaining
the post of Reich Settlement Commissar in the old Reich as well’. Thus, his
appointment as Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of the German
Ethnic Nation (Reichskommissar fu
¨
r die Festigung deutschen Volkstums), which
represented the decisive step in increasing Himmler’s responsibility for
settlement, was already being prepared the previous year. In July 1939,
with specific reference to an order from the Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS, the Race
and Settlement Main Office requested from the SD ‘documents, statistics,
as well as maps dealing with the agricultural and geopolitical conditions in
Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Romania’. The fact that, at
the same time, a request was made for documents concerning the ‘work of
414 war preparations and expansion
Catholic Action in the above countries’ indicates who was envisaged as
providing the land for future settlement.
149
The real change in SS settlement policy, however, came in spring 1939,
when Hitler gave Himmler the task of organizing the resettlement of the
German minority in South Tyrol. It was only then that settlement policy
acquired the dimensions of a full-scale ‘ethnic population policy’, and it was
only then that Himmler not only came to focus on it but saw it as a chance
to shift the emphasis in the expansion of the SS empire from the concept of
the ‘state protection corps’ to ‘Lebensraum policy’.
Such a reorientation of policy would have been impossible with Darre
´
.
The SS’s settlement policy needed to acquire a more racial and military
emphasis than Darre
´
’s peasant form of settlement policy. In the SS the future
settlers were seen in the first instance as ‘military peasants’ (Wehrbauern).
150
Thus, Himmler considered the removal of Darre
´
, whom he had long
regarded as a political partner and personal friend, as unavoidable
Himmler parts company with Darre´
Darre
´
’s personal records show that by 1937 at the latest he had come to
mistrust Himmler. On 17 April 1937, on the occasion of a visit to Himmler,
Darre
´
had noted that the R eichsfu
¨
hrer-SS had behaved in a ‘very warm and
friendly way’ towards him, but ‘had been remarkably pessimistic about the
damage to my public position and my relationship with the Fu
¨
hrer’.
Himmler was referring to Darre
´
’s unfortunate appearance at the Reich
Peasant Rally in 1936, which had seriously damaged his prestige within
the Nazi leadership. In the view of leading Nazis, Darre
´
’s long-winded
speech, which focused on ideology, had failed to articulate agricultural
policy. The whole event had served only to document the Reich Peasant
Leader’s political isolation.
151
Now, wrote Darre
´
, on this visit he had
‘refrained from commenting’ and ‘simply calmly listened to what he had
to say, since my friendship with Himmler means a lot to me’.
152
On 8 December 1937 he had a ‘serious talk’ about the SS with his state
secretary, Herbert Backe:
I don’t believe for a moment that the RFSS could have anything against me, but his
entourage or some of them must have a very strong influence over him so that he’s
beginning to do things and he’s not aware of their repercussio ns [. . .] What should
wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 415
one do? Wait! [. . .] I can’t give up my post as head of the Race and Settlement Main
Office [. . .] dangerous gaps in the flank of the Nazi struggle in support of the
peasantry [. . .] Is the SS developing into a feudal praetorian guard? [ . . . ] People are
pulling the wool over Himmler’s eyes with the slogan ‘good blood’ that has to be
saved and yet behind the scenes all the key positions are being filled by
SS donors.
153
Two weeks later Darre
´
noted: ‘Conversation with Backe: plan to turn the
SS into a samurai order and at the same time to amalgamate it with the
police (Plan RFSS). That won’t do. Cui bono?’ And, at the beginning of
1938: ‘Very worried about the way the SS is going [ . . . ] Wolff is creating an
alternative regime with opponents of the SS.’ Two weeks later he noted:
‘Worried about the future of the SS. Would it be better for me to give up
the Race and Settlement Main Office since the SS is developing into a
capitalist praetorian guard under a Jesuitical high command?’
154
In February 1938 he did in fact offer his resignation as head of the Race
and Settlement Main Office. Himmler had strongly criticized Joachim
Caesar, the head of the indoctrination department in the Race and Settle-
ment Main Office, accusing him of excessive ‘intellectualism’, and evidently
wanted to dismiss him over Darre
´
’s head. According to Darre
´
, he was the
third head of the indoctrination department whom Himmler had rejected,
and therefore the Reichsfu
¨
hrer was obviously dissatisfied with the way in
which ‘my [Darre
´
’s] ideas of blood and soil, of breeding and race are being
imparted to and anchored in the SS’. His dismissal as head of the Race and
Settlement Main Office was therefore unavoidable.
155
Although this resig-
nation statement was phrased in such a way that it gave Himmler the
opportunity of rejecting it, in fact he accepted Darre
´
’s resignation without
further discussion.
156
A draft of this letter has survived that is even more
direct. ‘I owe it to the Fu
¨
hrer’, Darre
´
had written, ‘to vacate my office, since
it no longer provides the guarantee that my place in history will be clear.’ In
the last sentence he had also described his decision as ‘irrevocable’, whereas
in the letter that was actually sent he wrote that he ‘could not see an
alternative course of action’.
157
Darre
´
’s resignation was announced to the public as resulting from the
burdens imposed by his other duties. According to a note of Darre
´
’s, ‘at the
moment nothing could be worse’ than having ‘this solution exploited by
somebody to drive a wedge between the SS and the peasantry’.
158
After
Himmler had secured Hitler’s approval for Darre
´
’s dismissal he initially sent
him on leave, because, as he wrote to him, he had been ‘unable to issue final
416 war preparations and expansion
instructions and make a new appointment’ as a result of his preoccupation
with other urgent political matters.
159
At that time he had on his desk a
proposal from Pohl to abolish the Race and Settlement Main Office, in
order to be rid of its ‘chronic financial difficulties [ . . . ] once and for all’.
160
In the end Himmler could not bring himself to do this, but, as Pohl had
proposed, transferred the indoctrination office, hitherto subordinate to the
RuSHA, to the SS Main Office, thereby considerably restricting Darre
´
’s
former sphere of operations.
A successor to Darre
´
, namely Pancke, was not appointed until 11 Sep-
tember 1938, after Darre
´
had pressed for his dismissal to be made official on
the grounds that the existing hiatus was creating problems. Two of his
closest colleagues, the chief of staff of the RuSHA, Georg Ebrecht, and the
head of the Race Office, Reichsle, left with him.
161
However, Darre
´
asked
Himmler to appoint him as a ‘close personal adviser without any particular
function’, since, during the next few years, Himmler would not be able to
realize the ‘concept of the SS as an order’ that both of them were trying to
achieve because the task of ‘state protection’ would have priority. Thus,
Darre
´
continued to hope that he would be able to realize his far-reaching
ideological dreams over the medium term with the aid of Himmler and the
SS. Significantly, Himmler did not respond to his request.
162
This rejection may well have confirmed Darre
´
in the opinion that he
noted down when he was informed by Himmler’s adjutant of the Reich-
sfu
¨
hrer’s acceptance of his resignation as head of the Race and Settlement
Main Office: ‘Himmler has never understood the fundamental importance
of my ideas.’ At the time he added that he wanted ‘to try to retain his
friendship’.
163
And indeed, Darre
´
and Himmler were subsequently anxious
publicly to demonstrate that their personal relationship remained intact.
164
Nevertheless, they continued to drift apart, and by 1939–40 Darre
´
’s initial
mistrust had turned into enmity.
South Tyrol and the Protectorate
Now, without Darre
´
, SS settlement policy could be geared to the concept
of living-space. The prelude to this was Himmler’s assignment to resettle
the ethnic Germans from South Tyrol.
165
Immediately after the occupation
of Prague, either at the end of March or the beginning of April, Hitler gave
Himmler and the Gauleiter and Governor of Tyrol, Franz Hofer, oral
wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 417
instructions to prepare to deprive 30,000 ethnic Germans living in South
Tyrol of their German citizenship.
166
The background to this was the
attempt to defuse German–Italian relations through a clear demarcation of
their respective spheres of interest. For the invasion of Prague represented a
clear breach of the Munich Agreement, for which Mussolini had been
largely responsible, and contradicted the statement made by the Germans
to the Italian government that German expansion would stop at the German
‘ethnic frontier’. Hitler now aimed to allay the suspicion of his most
important potential ally through a generous policy regarding South Tyrol.
Hitler’s demonstrative step in the South Tyrol question was the essential
precondition for the Pact of Steel of 22 May 1939, which was intended to
consolidate the German–Italian alliance.
It was understandable that Hofer, the Gauleiter of Tyrol, should have
been assigned this task, but why was Himmler brought in? There were
several reasons. First, he could point to the experience gained by the Race
and Settlement Main Office through the resettlement programmes involved
in the establishment of military training areas in Austria and the Sudeten-
land. But much more important were his police responsibilities, which
promised to ensure that the ‘de-settlement’ of the South Tyroleans would
take place in an orderly manner, and that any objections from those affected
would be immediately suppressed. In addition, there was his excellent
relationship with the most senior officials of the Italian police, as well as,
above all, the role that he had taken on in the past as the coordinator and
most senior authority in the field of ethnic policy.
Right from the start, Himmler interpreted the task of resettling 30,000
South Tyroleans as the first stage in the complete clearing of South Tyrol of
German-speakers.
167
On 30 May 1939 he stated in a memorandum that,
‘the Fu
¨
hrer’s fixing of the border between German and Italy’ was to be
‘permanent’. It was thereby ‘clearly and irrevocably established that South
Tyrol has been abandoned as ethnic German territory and is of no more
interest to us’. This did not, however, mean that ‘Germany has given up the
200,000 South Tyroleans who want to be German’. The problem could be
solved only in the context of ‘what may be a historically uniquely generous
process’: Germany would ‘create somewhere in the territory under its
control, for example in the east, a space for 200,000 people’, a specially
designated area from which all the existing population would be removed.
Such an area could, for example, be established in North Moravia, which
would also have the advantage that ‘Moravia would acquire an additional
418 war preparations and expansion
200,000 national elements [sic], who are of good racial stock and very self-
consciously and militantly German’.
That, however, was the ‘strategic final goal’. Until then they should aim
for a ‘solution in stages’, for example through resettlement from the South
Tyrol to the German Reich, above all to North Tyrol. They had already
requested the Coordination Centre for Ethnic Germans to produce a
‘central registry’ of all these immigrants, in order to be able later on to
have the possibility of transferring the South Tyrolean immigrants to the
designated settlement area. The resettlement programme would have to be
closely coordinated with the Italian agencies, preferably in cooperation with
their responsible police authorities.
168
On 23 June a meeting between German and Italian officials, chaired by
Himmler, took place in Berlin; the Italian delegation was led by the
ambassador, Bernardo Attolico. Himmler noted that the meeting had re-
sulted in an agreement to begin the ‘return’ of those people who were
citizens of the German Reich (that included numerous Austrians who had
changed their citizenship as a result of the Anschluss). A central ‘Office for
Emigration and Returnees’ was to be established in Bozen (Bolzano), with
four branch offices in other parts of South Tyrol, in order to organize this
population-transfer of several thousand people within the space of a few
weeks, but also to prepare the other South Tyroleans for their future
emigration. After the conclusion of this first operation ‘those Tyroleans
who were not bound to the soil’ were to move to Reich territory and, in
particular, to North Tyrol; the peasant population would follow later.
Moreover, according to Himmler, the Italians had agreed to help ensure
that the real-estate of the South Tyroleans was not sold off at knock-down
prices. The Italian state would therefore introduce a special commission into
the sales process. Himmler, on the other hand, had made a commitment to
the Italians to stop the small amount of motor traffic on the frontier between
North and South Tyrol, in order to avoid damaging ‘popular morale’. He
also had requested the Italians to ask the Vatican, with which ‘I have only
inadequate contacts’, for support so that the Catholic clergy in both parts of
Tyrol could ‘prevent the whipping up of chauvinistic nationalism and the
demand for Anschluss with Germany’. According to Wolff ’s minutes,
Himmler was ‘irritated’ by Attolico’s question as to where the Germans
intended settling the Italians: ‘What’s it got to do with the Italians where we
resettle the South Tyroleans?’
169
wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 419