Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life
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At the beginning of August 1939 Himmler received ‘a number of South
Tyrolean men’, representatives of the minority, ‘in order to explain to them
quite frankly the Fu
¨
hrer’s intentions and the purpose of the whole resettle-
ment programme’, and to request them, ‘despite the great sadness they must
feel at the loss of their homeland, to obey the order to leave and to show the
utmost discipline in carrying it out’.
170
Despite a few problems, in fact the German–Italian negotiations over the
implementation of the resettlement programme, initiated by the Berlin
meeting of June 1939, reached a conclusion acceptable to both sides in
October 1939.
171
Those people with German citizenship living in South
Tyrol were expected to resettle within three months. The South Tyroleans
of Italian nationality who opted for Germany would leave by the end of
1942. Those who did not would remain in their homeland and become
Italians; in other words, speak Italian and adopt Italian culture.
172
The so-
called option procedure by which the South Tyroleans had to opt for
Germany or Italy was, as envisaged, basically completed by the end of
1939. This did not, however, resolve the issue of where the South Tyroleans
were to settle; indeed, it was to preoccupy Himmler for years.
In the spring of 1939 Himmler’s attention was initially focused on the
Protectorate. On 18 April 1939 an ‘Einsatzgruppe Land Office’, composed
of representatives of the State Police Office, the SD, and the RuSHA, had
taken over the department in the Czech Ministry of Agriculture responsible
for keeping the records of landholdings, the so-called ‘Land Office’. It had
been established after the end of the First World War in connection with
the programme of land reform in the Republic of Czechoslovakia.
173
On 17 May Curt von Gottberg, head of the Settlement Office in the
RuSHA, was appointed head of the Land Office by the Reich Protector. By
the time of his dismissal in December 1939 he had confiscated a total of
256,000 hectares of land for the SS and its settlement associations, and had
secured for the Land Office, through transfer to an intermediate foundation,
a total of 145,000 hectares of state forest. Property was expropriated from
Jews, as well as from the Catholic Church and the state.
174
The aim was to
settle Germans and expel ‘non-Germanized’ Czechs to the Reich, where
they would be used as labour. Responding to a query from Himmler, in July
1939, only two months after his appointment, Curt von Gottberg could
announce that they were ready to settle 12,000 South Tyroleans.
175
420 war preparations and expansion
In his role as Reich Minister of Agriculture and Reich Peasant Leader,
Darre
´
was primarily interested in ‘peasant policy’, and he now protested in
vain at the appointment of a representative of the SS as head of the Land
Office and at the resultant gearing of future settlement in the Protectorate to
the requirements of population policy. The working-group, which Rei-
schle, the head of Darre
´
’s staff office, had already set up in 1938 to prepare for
the settlement of Bohemia and Moravia, had long been aware of the fact that
control over the Land Office would be the decisive administrative prerequi-
site for the transfer of agricultural property in the Protectorate, and had,
therefore, also sought to secure it.
176
However, the SS had beaten Darre
´
’s
people to it, for they had the impression that Darre
´
and his agrarian experts
considered the settlement issue too much in terms of ‘food policy’.
177
During the following months Darre
´
, supported by the Reich Protector’s
office, kept complaining about Gottberg’s policy and, as Pancke reported to
Himmler, trying to ‘torpedo’ it.
178
A particular problem was the fact that
the acting headship of the Land Office lacked clear administrative authority,
as ‘hitherto its legal position [has been based] exclusively on the policing
role assigned to the Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS’.
179
Gottberg aimed at ‘promoting’ his Czech Land Office to be ‘the Reich
Protector’s supreme settlement authority’.
180
By trying to take over the
DAG (German Settlement Society), founded by Darre
´
, through an associa-
tion of which he was the chairman, Gottberg sharpened the conflict with
Darre
´
, who in response tried to have it transferred to the state.
181
Darre
´
may
well not have been entirely innocent in Gottberg’s involvement in a
dubious financial affair in connection with the purchase of the DAG. As a
result, the latter was first relieved of his post as head of the Settlement Office
in November 1939 and then, in December, also of the headship of the Land
Office.
182
The views on settlement policy of Gottberg’s successor, Theodor
Gross, who came from the Reich Protector’s office, were much closer to
those of the Ministry of Agriculture than to those of the SS.
183
Thus Himmler’s move to take over settlement policy failed initially,
above all as a result of the opposition of Darre
´
. After the latter had been
kicked out, Himmler had envisaged a comprehensive settlement policy
based on effective cooperation between the individual parts of his organiza-
tion. His contacts and responsibilities as Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS and Chief of the
German Police had appeared to make him predestined to become commis-
sar for the resettlement of the South Tyroleans, and his control of the police
in the Protectorate, which was not constrained by any legal restrictions,
wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 421
enabled him to take over the Land Office. Nevertheless, his attempt had
failed. Himmler appears to have learnt one thing above all from this
experience: if he was to achieve his goal of completely controlling settle-
ment policy, he would have to deploy his police powers far more brutally
than he had done in Prague.
The role that Himmler’s SS played in the annexation of Austria and the
Sudetenland and in the occupation of the Czech parts of Czechoslovakia,
his involvement in the resettlement of the South Tyroleans for the purpose
of strengthening the German–Italian alliance, as well as the extensive
confiscation of land by the SS in the Protectorate—all of these develop-
ments show that, during 1938–9, Himmler was placing the SS more and
more at the service of a policy of expansion, preparation for war, and the
permanent occupation of conquered territory.
When, in March 1939, the Polish government, strengthened by an Anglo-
French guarantee, declined to accede to Germany’s demands for the integra-
tion of Danzig into the Reich and for concessions over the Polish Corridor,
Hitler decided to resolve the issue by going to war with Poland. The following
months saw careful preparations for the military conflict: through various
forms of provocation of Poland, through the strengthening of the alliance
with Italy, and finally through the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which sealed the fate of
the Polish state, Hitler believed that he could exclude the possibility of the
western powers entering the war in the event of renewed German aggression,
despite the fact that they had indicated they would do so. At any rate, he did
not imagine that the military action against Poland would immediately lead to
the major European war that he had envisaged since 1937, and which, since
the beginning of 1939, Himmler had reckoned would occur at any moment.
Himmler was prepared for war: he controlled armed units with 40,000 men;
the police was ready to deploy a substantial number of its personnel for military
purposes and to fill the gaps with reservists; his concentration camps had a large
capacity for containing actual and potential opponents of the regime.
Five days before the start of the war mobilization was in full swing, and
affected a wide range of people. Among others, Professor Werner Jansen,
author of the Teutonic novels that Himmler liked so much and a member of
the SS since 1935, reported to his Reichsfu
¨
hrer for duty. A physician and
professor at Berlin University, he requested Himmler, ‘with warm greet-
ings, to let me participate in the great struggle as your historian’.
184
Himm-
ler responded positively, assigning Jansen to the staff of the division which
422 war preparations and expansion
had been formed in the meantime from the Death’s Head units, where in
fact he remained during the next few months.
185
For Himmler, things had
come full circle: the man who had been a major inspiration for the devel-
opment of his Teutonic fantasy became his chronicler at the very moment
when the SS set out to realize this fantasy. Jansen, however, did not succeed
in writing this epic. He died in December 1943 following a long illness, two
days after Himmler had appointed him SS-Standartenfu
¨
hrer.
186
wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 423
15
War and Settlement in Poland
T
he start of the Second World War represented an extraordinary
opportunity for Himmler. During the previous years, under the slogan
‘State Protection Corps’, he had endeavoured to integrate his various
functions to make them as coherent and unified as possible. In this way,
under the pretext of pursuing a policy of general prevention, an ever-
expanding and oppressive police apparatus had been created, which was
intended to be merged with the SS ‘order’, supplemented, in particular, by
armed units, by responsibilities in the field of ethnic population policy,
and—from 1938 onwards—by various settlement and resettlement activ-
ities. Now he could begin expanding and reorganizing his various power
centres, and directing the various individual parts of his empire to undertake
complementary tasks, thereby producing synergies.
The military engagement of the various armed SS units at last offered him
the opportunity of realizing his long-held idea of a large, unified, and
autonomous military force, the Waffen-SS. Its ‘blood sacrifice’ in war
must increase the aura of the SS as an elite organization and underpin its
role as the ‘State Protection Corps’. Moreover, in the context of the war he
could move against all ‘enemies of the state’, at home but also in the
territories to be conquered, with the utmost brutality and in this way
expand his power base. Above all, the war offered the option of greatly
expanding the SS’s settlement policy in conquered territory, thereby
providing the foundations for that ‘ring’ of 80,000–100,000 peasants that
he had envisaged as protecting the frontiers of the R
eich. With the outbreak
of war this vision, that he had originally envisaged as a task for future
generations, appeared to Himmler to be increasingly relevant to his own
‘settlement’ activities: the future of the Greater Germanic Reich lay in the
present, and to a large extent in his own hands.
In July 1939, at the ceremony which took place annually in Quedlinburg
to commemorate the German emperor, Henry I (the Fowler), Himmler
had the idea of commissioning the Ahnenerbe to investigate ‘how quickly
major achievements have been carried out in German history’. He was
particularly interested in discovering whether his idol, Henry, could be used
as a measure of comparison for the political achievements of Adolf Hitler.
Nine days after the outbreak of war he had the first results of the Ahnenerbe
investigation, which, however, did not begin to provide an answer to his
question.
1
However, Himmler, who when in doubt invariably preferred his
own ideas to those of the experts, did not allow this to prevent him from
viewing the war as the fulfilment of a historic mission.
The SS at war
The Gestapo and SD were substantially involved in the preparations for
war.
2
A Central Office II P (Poland) had already been set up in the SD Main
Office in May 1939, in order to handle centrally the affairs of ‘ethnic
Germans in Poland’ and to create a register of those persons against whom
they would want to proceed in the event of war. From July 1939 onwards
the Gestapo and SD took concrete measures for the event of war by once
more forming Einsatzgruppen.
3
The SD was assigned the important role of staging a number of frontier
violations directly before the planned attack, which would be blamed on the
Poles and used to justify the outbreak of war.
4
Heydrich directed the highly
secret operation himself, and Himmler made a short visit in the middle of
August to inspect the sections of the frontier that had been selected.
5
After
careful preparation, on 31 August, the night before the invasion, SD
commandos attacked the Gleiwitz radio station, a customs post, and a
forestry house on the German–Polish border, in order to fake Polish
provocations. Statements in German and Polish were broadcast by the
Gleiwitz station. They left behind a number of KZ prisoners who had
been dressed in Polish uniforms and then killed. This was to provide the
justification for the German ‘retaliation’.
6
Another, much smaller commando, composed of members of the Death’s
Head units, played a key role in the early hours of the war. The SS men had
been smuggled into the Free City of Danzig in order to strengthen the
‘home guard’ (Heimwehr), a force composed of Danzig SS members which,
war and settlement in poland 425
after secret preparations, the Nazi-controlled Danzig Senate had officially
established on 18 August 1939 as the ‘SS-Danzig Home Guard’. On the
morning of 1 September 1939 the Home Guard participated among other
things in the attack by German troops on the Westerplatte, the Polish
fortress in Danzig. It also had the task of capturing the post-office. Howev-
er, armed post-office officials, who were Polish army reservists, had barri-
caded themselves in the building, which was not finally taken until the
evening.
7
Himmler, who liked to see himself as a soldier, could at last now ‘go to
the front’. But he did this in a rather comfortable manner, appropriate to his
high rank. At the beginning of September he left Berlin with his mobile
headquarters in the special train ‘Heinrich’ (which he had to share with
Ribbentrop and the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans-Heinrich
Lammers). During the next few weeks he tried to keep as close to Hitler’s
headquarters as possible, which at this point was also in a train, and which
changed its location several times in the course of the war.
8
Publicly, and particularly vis-a
`
-vis the Wehrmacht, Himmler had always
justified the establishment of armed SS units in terms of the SS’s role in
maintaining internal security. In fact, however, since 1934 he had been
systematically constructing a military force, training a large number of potent-
ial officers in the officer-training colleges and militarizing the Death’s Head
concentration camp guard units.
9
Now, in the war against Poland, he could
at last strengthen the various armed units, create more of them, and thereby
establish a unified SS military force. His aim was to create an autonomous
SS army corps, as he had already explained to the Gruppenfu
¨
hrer in Novem-
ber 1938. This would, he said, underpin the ‘moral’ position of the SS as an
organ of repression:
If I may describe the overall task of the SS as being, together with the police [ . . . ]
to guarantee Germany’s internal se curity, then this task can be perf ormed only if a
section of the SS, of this leadership corps, serves and sheds blood at the front. If we
did not make a blood sacrifice and if we did not fight at the front we would have
lost the moral right to shoot those at home who avoid serving and are cowards.
That is the role of the Verfu
¨
gungstruppe [military SS], which has the most glorious
duty of being able to serve at the front.
10
In August 1939 Hitler had ordered the integration of the units of the
Verfu
¨
gungstruppe (VT) into the field army, as had been envisaged in the
426 war and settlement in poland
event of mobilization. The ‘Leibstandarte’, the regiments ‘Germania’ and
‘Deutschland’, as well as other units, were distributed among various armies
and participated in the war against Poland.
11
With the end of hostilities
came the next step: the VT division , which had long been planned, was
created out of the units of the Verfu
¨
gungstruppe; it was later to be called
‘Das Reich’.
12
Right at the beginning of the war Himmler made Theodor
Eicke commander of the Death’s Head Standarten. The KZ guards now
went into action as military formations; their role in the concentration
camps was taken over by the so-called police reinforcements. Three Death’s
Head Standarten operated in the rear areas of the 10th and 8th Armies and
carried out ‘cleansing and security measures’, in reality using the most
vicious methods to terrorize the civilian population, and murdering count-
less people. Eicke carried out the operations using Hitler’s special train as
his base.
13
As early as September 1939 Himmler received permission from Hitler to
form the Death’s Head Standarten into a division. When the three Stan-
darten left Poland in October for Dachau, where the division was formed,
they were replaced by new Death’s Head units that had been established
since 1938.
14
In the same month Himmler ordered the creation of a police
division from members of the order police and Wehrmacht units.
15
Thus, shortly after the outbreak of war Himmler controlled an SS armed
force comprising three divisions as well as the ‘Leibstandarte’. In the course
of 1940 the force acquired the collective name Waffen-SS.
16
The name
signified the existence of a force independent of the Werhrmacht, and
suggests that the various SS units were regarded as being of equal value to it.
‘Shoot them on the spot’
The war against Poland was fought by the Nazi leadership to some extent as
a war of racial extermination. Here too Himmler played a central role from
the start.
17
On 22 August Hitler had spelled out unmistakably to the generals how
he wanted this war to be fought, as is clear from a record of his speech in
note form taken at the time: ‘The destruction of Poland has priority. The
aim is to eliminate active forces, not to reach a definite line [ . . . ] Close your
hearts to pity. Act brutally. 80 mill. people must obtain what is their right.
war and settlement in poland 427
Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is always right. The
greatest harshness.’
18
On 3 September Himmler gave an order that ‘armed Polish insurgents,
who are caught in the act’, were to be ‘shot on the spot’. In the event of
insurgents emerging, senior officials in the local administration should be
taken hostage. His permission should be sought if large numbers of insur-
gents were captured or if it was intended to shoot hostages. Four days later
Himmler issued an order by telephone that the shootings should be carried
out by the police and not the army.
19
On 7 September Heydrich announced, at a meeting of departmental
heads, that ‘the leading elements in Polish society should as far as possible
be rendered harmless’,
20
and on 14 October he demanded in front of the
same group that the ‘liquidation of leading Poles’ that was already under
way should be concluded by 1 November.
21
In accordance with these
instructions, special police and SS units, as well as Wehrmacht units,
murdered tens of thousands of Polish citizens during the hostilities and in
the first months of the occupation. The pretext for this was provided by
claims of Polish atrocities, according to which more than 50,000 people
were alleged to have lost their lives. In fact the total number of all ethnic
Germans who died in various ways during the war amounted to between
4,500 and 5,000, among them about a hundred victims of the ‘Bromberg
Bloody Sunday’, which was portrayed by Nazi propaganda as a Polish
atrocity with thousands of deaths.
22
The planned mass murder of particular groups of Poles, which was
disguised as ‘retaliation’, was to a significant extent controlled and carried
out by the Einsatzgruppen of the security police, which had once again been
established as in the previous annexations. There were seven Einsatzgrup-
pen in all, comprising around 2,700 men, of which five were assigned to the
high commands of the five armies deployed in Poland.
23
Officially they
were supposed to combat all those ‘elements hostile to the Reich and anti-
German in enemy territory behind the front line’, as was stated in the
agreement reached with the Army High Command in July. However, a
minute by Heydrich from July 1940 indicates that they had received further
instructions that ‘were extremely radical (for example, an order to liquidate
numerous members of the Polish elites running into thousands)’. In practice
this meant legitimizing the murder of members of the intelligentsia, the
clergy, the aristocracy, and the Jewish community.
24
The Reich Security
Main Office had been preparing relevant search lists since May 1939.
25
428 war and settlement in poland
It is not clear who issued the instructions referred to by Heydrich, or
when they were issued. Leading members of the Einsatzgruppen stated after
the war that a meeting had already taken place in August, at which Himmler
and Heydrich had made it clear that it was to be left up to their own
initiative how they eliminated the Polish intelligentsia,
26
a procedure that
was to be typical of the way in which orders were issued within the SS
throughout the war.
The Einsatzgruppen received support above all from the Volksdeutscher
Selbstschutz (Ethnic German Self-Defence Force). Himmler had given
orders for the creation of this force shortly after the start of the war.
27
The
matter was taken in hand by Gottlob Berger, the head of the SS Recruit-
ment Office responsible for recruiting members of the armed SS. The
Selbstschutz recruited the greater part of the German minority who were
‘fit for action’ (amounting to a total of 100,000 men within a few weeks) was
heavily dependent on the SS for its organization, and in September was
integrated into the order police.
28
During the actual hostilities the Einsatzgruppen and the Selbstschutz, but
also the order police, the Waffen-SS, and elements of the Wehrmacht, shot
thousands of Polish civilians,
29
among them hundreds of Polish Jews, who
in a number of cases were locked in their synagogues and burned alive.
30
These murders represented the culmination of the unrestrained violence to
which the Jews had been subjected since the start of the war.
31
After
September 1939 the Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht drove tens of
thousands of Jews by force over the demarcation line into the Soviet-
occupied zone.
32
On occasion Himmler intervened directly in the actions of the Einsatz-
gruppen. Thus, on 3 September, responding to the news of alleged dis-
turbances in the industrial district of eastern Upper Silesia, he ordered
SS-Obergruppenfu
¨
hrer Udo von Woyrsch to establish an Einsatzgruppe z.
b.V. (‘for special assignments’) and made him responsible for ‘radically
crushing the Polish uprising that is flaring up [ . . . ] with all available
means’.
33
After it had become clear that there was no significant uprising
in the ‘area of operations’, Himmler extended von Woyrsch’s mission. He
appointed him ‘Special Police Commander’ in the area of the 14th Army
and ordered him to ‘disarm and crush the Polish bandits. Executions.’
Himmler was offering von Woyrsch, whom he had had to dismiss as leader
of Oberabschnitt East for being involved in unauthorized murders asso-
ciated with 30 June 1934, a chance to ‘prove himself ’ by taking radical
war and settlement in poland 429