Назад
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.
34
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’.
35
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’,
36
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.
37
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.
38
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’.
39
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.
40
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,
41
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’.
42
Himmler’s henchmen also set about systematically murdering Polish
patients in mental hospitals, at least 7,700 people in total.
43
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.
44
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.
45
At the beginning of 1940 this facility was replaced by gas vans.
46
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.
47
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.
48
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.
49
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.
50
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
193940, 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
193940 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.
51
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’.
52
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.
53
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.
54
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.
55
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,
56
murders were continuing to be carried out by the Selbstschutz.
57
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.
58
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.
59
In February 1940 the military commander in the southern section of the
frontier, General Wilhelm Ulex, used the word ‘bestiality’ to describe the
atrocities.
60
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.
61
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.
62
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-
fu
¨
hrer-SS as Reich Commissar for the Settlement of the East’.
63
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.
64
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.
65
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.’
66
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’.
67
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’.
68
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.
69
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.’
70
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.
71
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’.
72
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
16
A New Racial Order
A
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’.
1
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
2
), 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.
3
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.
4
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.
5
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.
6
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.
7
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.
8
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.
9
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.
10
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.
11
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