Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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action in Poland. What was required was murderous initiative, and in fact

Einsatzgruppe z.b.V. was to carry out numerous pogroms against Jews in its

path through Poland.

On 11 September, prompted by Hitler, Himmler

gave Einsatzgruppe IV the order ‘to arrest 500 hostages to be drawn mainly

from the Polish intelligentsia in Bromberg and additionally from commu-

nists and, in the event of the slightest sign of insurrection or attempts at

resistance, to act ruthlessly by shooting the hostages’.

After the end of the German–Polish war this terror was systematized.

From the end of October onwards the Einsatzgruppen and the Selbstschutz,

directed by the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce, carried out the so-called

‘Intelligentsia Operation’,

which was in fact a campaign of murder direct-

ed above all at teachers, university graduates, former ofﬁcers and ofﬁcials,

clergy, landowners, leading members of Polish nationalist organizations,

and above all Jews.

As mentioned already, during the ﬁrst four months of the German

occupation tens of thousands of people were murdered in this way. The

new Reich Gau of Danzig–West Prussia was a particular focus of the

operation.

Here, in addition to members of the Polish elites and Jews,

asylum patients, ‘asocials’, prostitutes, women who allegedly had sexual

diseases, as well as Gypsies were shot; here it became clear to what extent

subordinate bodies, acting on their own initiative, could carry out a ‘cleans-

ing’ of the conquered territories on the basis of ‘racial hygiene’.

From mid-September onwards the leader of the Selbstschutz in Danzig–

West Prussia who was responsible for these murders was Ludolf von

Alvensleben, previously Himmler’s adjutant.

The ‘reward’ that Himmler

thought up for this mass murder represented not only an expression of his

gratitude to and recognition of von Alvensleben, but also had a pedagogic

purpose. On 20 March 1940 Himmler informed Heydrich that he had

assigned to von Alvensleben, of whose precarious ﬁnancial position

he had been well aware since the 1930s,

two estates in the territory that

had been annexed which until 1918 had belonged to his family. However,

this was only a provisional measure and by no means represented a transfer

of property; he did not intend to give von Alvensleben preferential treat-

ment. Rumours to that effect that had been circulating among ethnic Ger-

mans in the Gau, and had presumably prompted Heydrich to contact

Himmler, were without foundation. Rather, he, Himmler, had agreed to

Alvensleben’s taking over the running of the estates ‘in order to provide SS-

Oberfu

hrer von Alvensleben, who, as leader of the Selbstschutz had played

430 war and settlement in poland

a signiﬁcant part in the executions but of whom it was said by some ethnic

Germans that he was not really bothered and would soon be leaving, with

the opportunity to return as a citizen and inhabitant and thereby to be a

good and courageous example to the ethnic Germans’.

Himmler’s henchmen also set about systematically murdering Polish

patients in mental hospitals, at least 7,700 people in total.

This action has

clear parallels with the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme in the Reich.

There the Chancellery of the Fu

hrer of the NSDAP, operating under the

code title T4, was responsible; in Poland it was the SS. Those who took part

in the shooting of patients between the end of September and December

1939 in the new Reich Gau of Danzig–West Prussia included members of

the ‘Wachsturmbann Eimann’, a unit composed of SS men from Danzig,

the Ethnic German Self Defence force, as well as members of Einsatzkom-

mandos. In November patients from the Owinska (Teskau) asylum in the

new Reich Gau of Wartheland were murdered.

From the end of

November onwards patients from two asylums were deported to Posen,

where the Gestapo had a base in Fort VII, part of a nineteenth-century

fortress. Here a new murder technique was applied, whose effects Himmler

was able to observe for himself when he paid a visit on 12 December 1939.

The victims were poisoned with carbon monoxide gas in a hermetically

sealed room—the ﬁrst mass murder carried out by the Nazis with poison

gas.

At the beginning of 1940 this facility was replaced by gas vans.

Mental patients, however, were shot by Himmler’s commandos in the

Reich as well, in neighbouring Pomerania. In September–October 1939

Gauleiter Franz Schwede had evidently offered to place the Stralsund sana-

torium at Himmler’s disposal. In November and December 1939 between

1,200 and 1,400 psychiatric patients were ‘transferred’ from the Pomeranian

asylums to West Prussia and executed there by the Wachsturmbann Eimann.

At the beginning of 1940 patients began to be deported to the Kosten asylum

in the Warthegau, which had just been ‘cleared’, where they were murdered

in gas vans.

The asylums in the annexed territories in Poland and in Gau

Pomerania, which had been ‘cleared’ in such a murderous manner, were

then occupied by SS units, used as accommodation by the Wehrmacht or as

prisons, as well as for accommodating ethnic German being resettled from

the Baltic States who were in need of care.

The murder of mental patients in the occupied territories continued until

the middle of 1941. The Sonderkommando Lange, named after its com-

mander, criminal commissar and SS-Untersturmfu

hrer Herbert Lange,

war and settlement in poland 431

which was responsible, killed thousands of people with the aid of gas vans,

above all in May and June 1940 as well as in June and July 1941.

In the

autumn of 1941 Lange’s commando began to murder the Jewish population

of the Warthegau. At the end of 1941 it established a gas-van base in

Chelmno in order to carry out these murders on a larger scale.

In the

process Lange’s unit became an important organizational link between the

systematic murder of the handicapped and of the Jews. In the winter of

1939–40, however, Himmler and his henchmen were not yet contemplat-

ing the mass killing of Jews with poison gas. At this point the ‘ﬁnal solution’

they were seeking involved ghettoization and expulsion, and, although in

1939–40 the SS had already killed thousands of Jews in Poland, there was no

question yet of the systematic murder of the Jewish population in special

extermination camps.

Ill. 18. During the war with Poland Himmler kept in close proximity to Hitler

to demonstrate clearly the key role that his SS was playing in this Nazi ideological

war of annihilation. The photo shows Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant Nikolaus von

Below (standing on the left), and his army adjutant Gerhard Engel (standing next

to him), to the left of Hitler Martin Bormann, and to the right of Hitler his

Wehrmacht adjutant, Rudolph Schmundt.

432 war and settlement in poland

During the war with Poland members of the Wehrmacht had not only

taken part in the murder of civilians in the occupied territories, but—much

more seriously—at the beginning of the war the Wehrmacht leadership

had agreed to a ‘division of labour’ with the SS and police. When, on

12 September 1939, Admiral Canaris, the head of military intelligence,

spoke to the chief of the Wehrmacht High Command, General Keitel,

about the plans for wide-ranging executions in Poland, the latter referred

him to a decision of Hitler’s. The Fu

hrer had made it clear that ‘if the

Wehrmacht didn’t want to have anything to do with it, it must accept that

the SS and the Gestapo would act alongside it’.

On 21 September the

Commander-in-Chief of the army, von Brauchitsch, informed army com-

manders that Hitler had assigned the Einsatzgruppen in Poland certain ‘tasks

of an ethnic-political nature’ that lay outside the army’s area of responsibili-

ty.

The Wehrmacht had thereby made a signiﬁcant contribution towards

creating the preconditions for the war in Poland to acquire the features of an

ideologically driven extermination campaign. However, it left the vast

majority of the mass murders to Himmler’s henchmen.

It was only after the end of this war that the military, but also the civil,

administration opposed the uncontrolled behaviour of the Einsatzgruppen

and the Selbstschutz.

There had been repeated confrontations between

their leaders and Wehrmacht ofﬁcers. In the middle of November the

army commander in the newly created military district of Danzig, Lieuten-

ant-General Fedor von Bock, complained to the Gauleiter and Reich Gov-

ernor Albert Forster that, despite a promise made to him in the middle of

October,

murders were continuing to be carried out by the Selbstschutz.

Although on 8 October Himmler had ordered the dissolution of the

Selbstschutz by the end of the month, in some occupied districts this process

lasted until the spring of 1940.

The commander of the military district in

the Warthegau, General Walter Petzel, also contacted the Commander-in-

Chief of the Reserve Army and informed him of the arbitrary shootings,

looting, and acts of violence being carried out by the SS special formations.

In February 1940 the military commander in the southern section of the

frontier, General Wilhelm Ulex, used the word ‘bestiality’ to describe the

atrocities.

In November 1939 and January 1940 the military commander in

the east of Poland, Johannes Blaskowitz, complained to the Commander-in-

Chief of the army about the murders of Jewish and non-Jewish Poles.

war and settlement in poland 433

The behaviour of the SS in Poland caused so much concern among the

ofﬁcer corps that, as we shall see, at the beginning of 1940 Himmler felt

compelled to respond to the issue of SS terror.

Reich Commissar for the Consolidation

of the Ethnic German Nation

Himmler instructed the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce (RuSHA) to send

three special Einsatzkommandos to western Poland, the so-called RuS-

Advisers, small groups of eight or nine SS members, who worked in close

cooperation with the Einsatzgruppen of the security police.

In September

1939 they advanced with the German troops and began registering all Polish

and Jewish agricultural land as well as conﬁscating farms that appeared

valuable. The names of the owners were passed on to the security police,

‘so that the owners of the farms can be arrested’. Thus, already during the

war the SS was making practical preparations for the policy of Germaniza-

tion and, as the head of one of the adviser commandos put it, in order ‘to

secure the necessary land for the impending appointment of the Reichs-

hrer-SS as Reich Commissar for the Settlement of the East’.

This

evidently happened in a great hurry in order to pre-empt any measures by

the Reich Ministry of Agriculture, which considered itself responsible for

settlement policy and was regarded with suspicion by the RuSHA.

As has

already been shown, the Ministry under Darre

had succeeded in frustrating

the ambitions of the SS’s settlement experts in the Protectorate and was

preparing, at the latest from August 1939 onwards, to take over settlement

matters in occupied Poland.

At the beginning of October 1939 the Reich Ministry of Agriculture

discovered that, in pursuit of their settlement activities in the conquered

territories, the SS were referring to a ‘Fu

hrer edict’. During the following

days this edict acquired concrete form, despite the bitter opposition of Darre

and his great disappointment, which he was to express in letters to Lammers

and Himmler. But Darre

was engaged in a fruitless struggle. For, on

7 October, on Himmler’s thirty-ninth birthday Hitler made Himmler

‘very happy’, as Margarete noted in her diary: ‘The Fu

hrer has made him

Settlement Commissar for the whole of Germany. The crowning acknowl-

edgment of his work. He works day and night.’

With the Decree for the

434 war and settlement in poland

Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation, Hitler gave Himmler respon-

sibility for the two tasks of ‘admitting into its territory and arranging the

settlement within the Reich of [ . . . ] those Germans who were hitherto

obliged to live abroad’, as well as ‘arranging the settlement of the ethnic

groups [within the area under Germany’s control] so as to improve the lines

of demarcation between them’. In practice this involved ‘repatriating’ Reich

and ethnic Germans, ‘eliminating the harmful inﬂuence of those alien

sections of the population which constitute a threat to the Reich and the

German national community’ (for which purpose, it stated below, Himmler

could ‘assign speciﬁc areas of settlement to the population groups in ques-

tion’), as well as ‘forming new German settlements through the resettlement

of populations’. In order to carry out these tasks the Reichsfu

hrer-SS was to

make use of ‘the existing authorities and institutions’.

However, Himmler, who in future called himself ‘Reich Commissar for

the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation’, was successfully thwarted

by Lammers in his attempts to turn the Reich Commissariat into a ‘supreme

Reich authority’.

A few days before Hitler was supposed to assign

Himmler the new task, Lammers had received a concerned letter from

Darre

who, ‘in the interests of our great settlement project’, expressed

‘the urgent wish’ that ‘this task, to which I am particularly committed,

should not be restricted by any special commissions assigned to some other

agency’. After all, ‘everybody in Germany’ knows ‘that the precondition

for the organization of this task being located in the SS was my seven years

of devoted work as head of the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce. Without

my work the SS would not be remotely in a position to raise the whole

issue.’ Darre

explicitly opposed Himmler’s idea of ‘military peasants’. He

argued that the historical examples of Austria and Russia showed that this

model was suitable only for weakly defended borders or territories that lay

outside one’s own borders that needed to be protected. But the new border

with Russia would be defended by the Wehrmacht.

On 5 October Himmler received a letter from Darre

, in which he was

still addressed as ‘Dear Heini!’ Darre

’s exclusion from the eastern settlement

programme was, he wrote, ‘one of the greatest disappointments of my life’.

Furthermore, he complained that Himmler had failed ‘to inform me of what

had already been going on for two weeks in relation to the re-creation of

the German peasantry in Poland’. ‘In order to have it documented’, Darre

concluded with the following statement: ‘This past summer I have been

carefully observing the goings on in this matter and those involving von

war and settlement in poland 435

Gottberg, as well as the most recent events concerning the re-creation of the

German peasantry in Poland. I have been aware of them and I have made a

careful note of them.’

Darre

met Lammers and Himmler on 7 October, and from their conver-

sation concluded that Himmler had agreed that he, Darre

, should perform

the ‘executive functions’ in the settlement programme.

When, a few

weeks later, it became clear that Himmler had no intention of letting

Darre

participate in settlement policy in Poland, the latter turned to Go

ring,

complaining he was bitter about the fact that, ‘on the question of settlement

the Reichsfu

hrer is throwing me on the scrapheap like a squeezed lemon

after he has sucked out from my brain and my talents what seemed useful to

him and his SS’.

But this intervention by the Agriculture Minister could

not alter the fact that, shortly after the beginning of the war, Himmler had

succeeded in taking substantial control of settlement policy in the newly

conquered territories and outmanoeuvering Darre

in the process.

436 war and settlement in poland

A New Racial Order

s Reichsfu

hrer-SS, Chief of the German Police, and Settlement Com-

missar Himmler now had all the instruments in his hands necessary for

subjecting the conquered territories to a radical ‘ethnic reordering’. To

begin with he started to construct an organizational setup in the conquered

territories along the same lines as the one in the Reich.

In October 1939 Friedrich Wilhelm Kru

ger was appointed Higher SS

and Police Leader (HSSPF) East and thereby as Himmler’s representative in

the General Government.* There was a change to the usual organizational

arrangements, in that Himmler sought to improve the coordination of his

various responsibilities by appointing SS and Police Leaders in the four

districts of the General Government. Himmler saw them as ‘advisers of the

government district chiefs’, who would be obliged to follow the latter’s

instructions ‘as long as they are not countermanded by orders from the

HSSPF or his representatives’.

Kru

ger, who was ‘directly’ subordinate to

the Governor-General, Hans Frank (which, according to his and Himmler’s

interpretation, meant that he was not subject to any bureaucratic control by

Frank’s ofﬁce

), soon acquired a special position for his ofﬁce within the

administration of the General Government. In September 1941, as his

relationship with the Governor-General reached a critical point, Himmler

reserved the right to subject instructions which Governor-General Frank

gave to Kru

ger on police matters to prior examination before they were

implemented. Frank naturally rejected this.

In November 1939 Himmler appointed Bruno Streckenbach command-

er of the security police in the General Government. The former inspector

of the security police in Hamburg had commanded an Einsatzgruppe during

* Translators’ note: German-occupied Poland excluding the territories annexed to Germany.

the war with Poland. Streckenbach, to whom the commanders of the

security police in the four districts of the General Government were sub-

ordinated, commanded about 2,000 members of the Gestapo and Kripo.

Alongside them there was an equivalent organization of the order police.

As far as the Polish territories annexed to Germany were concerned, SS-

Gruppenfu

hrer Wilhelm Koppe was appointed HSSPF for the new

Warthegau, and SS-Gruppenfu

hrer Richard Hildebrandt HSSPF for the

new Gau of Danzig–West Prussia, while the territories annexed to Upper

Silesia and East Prussia were assigned to Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski,

based in Breslau, and Wilhelm Rediess, based in Ko

nigsberg, respectively.

The Higher SS and Police Leaders were to play a key role in population

policy in the east. Himmler not only made them responsible for transporting

the people who were to be ‘outsettled’ and of settling the ethnic Germans,

but above all placed the whole executive responsibility for population

policy in their hands. In East Prussia, Silesia, and the Warthegau he

appointed them ‘permanent representatives’ of the Reich Governors

whom he had appointed as his ‘representatives’ in the sphere of population

policy. In Gau Danzig–West Prussia and in the General Government the

HSSPF were even to act as Himmler’s representatives in his role of ‘con-

solidating the ethnic German nation’, as he did not have sufﬁcient trust in

either Reich Governor Forster or Governor-General Frank.

The reality of

these, in some cases, complicated arrangements was that, as in the Reich,

Himmler had created in Poland a network of responsibilities, lying outside

the orbit of the civil administration, which he essentially controlled.

From the beginning his police apparatus in Poland pursued a policy of

brutal suppression. Blissfully ignorant of the country—it was, for example

forbidden to learn Polish—a negative selection of police ofﬁcials set about

crushing any Polish insubordination through a policy of exceptionally

tough punishments, mass arrests, and summary executions. In the spring

of 1940 this strategy reached its initial unhappy high point when the security

police killed around 3,500 members of the Polish intelligentsia and political

functionaries, as well as around 3,000 people who were described as crim-

inals.

Against this background any attempt to penetrate the Polish under-

ground, let alone try to play off the various factions of the Polish

underground movement against each other, was hardly possible.

Within

a very short time the Germans had succeeded in alienating the very people

who, in view of their anti-Russian and anti-Soviet attitudes, might have

been won over in the summer of 1941.

438 anewracialorder

In February 1940, with the aid of a ‘Decree for the Combating of Acts of

Violence in the Annexed Eastern Territories’, Himmler undertook a ﬁrst

attempt at introducing a massive increase in penalties for the Polish and Jewish

populations and in certain cases the ‘immediate passing and carrying out’ of

sentences through police courts martial. In other words, the arbitrary violence

of the previous months was to be retrospectively legitimated. Although this

initiative was opposed by Lammers and Go

ring, the Reich Ministry of Justice

adopted the increases in penalties proposed by Himmler in one of its decrees.

In response Himmler agreed to put an end to the police courts.

However, his restraint did not last long. Since Himmler did not wish to

dispense with a judicial responsibility for the police in the annexed eastern

territories, in December 1941, with signiﬁcant support from Bormann, he

compelled the Reich Justice Ministry to issue a penal code for Poles in the

annexed territories. This was a special penal code for Poles and Jews, which,

although implemented by the judiciary, was so draconian that it applied the

death penalty even for minor cases of insubordination. The Reich Minister

of Justice could not prevent Himmler from using the negotiations preceding

this decree to reintroduce SS and police courts martial, albeit restricted to

certain situations.

The start of Jewish persecution in Poland

Given this background, it is hardly surprising that, right from the start, and

based on Himmler’s wide-ranging powers, the new gentlemen of the black

order aimed to target the approximately 1.7 million Jews who had come

under German rule as a result of the war. Himmler and the SS leadership

had already developed far-reaching plans for what to do with them.

Heydrich reported to the meeting of departmental heads of the security

police on 14 September that Himmler was currently putting to Hitler

proposals for dealing with the ‘Jewish problem in Poland’, which, because

of their major diplomatic implications, could be decided only by the Fu

hrer

himself.

A week later, on 21 September, Heydrich informed the de-

partmental heads that Hitler had approved Himmler’s plans for ‘deporting

the Jews into the foreign Gau’, for ‘driving them over the line of demarca-

tion’.* It is clear from a telex to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen

* Translators’ note: The line of demarcation with the Soviet-occupied zone.

anewracialorder 439