Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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[ . . . ] requires a second girl, who must be sent as soon as possible for a

well-known family’. But that was not the end of it: ‘Furthermore,

SS-Gruppenfu

hrer Wolff requests a cook and a housemaid for SS-

Sturmbannfu

hrer Sachs in Schweinfurt.’ It is clear from the same letter that

the Cosmic Ice Theory researcher in the Ahnenerbe, Scultetus, also wanted to

be provided with servants. Wilhelm Koppe was able to meet all ﬁve requests.

And the numbers of those who were interested in acquiring servants grew:

in May 1941 Himmler asked Greifelt ‘to supply 12 ethnic German girls for

the SS sanatorium Hohenlychen and three more girls who are to be

employed by members of the Reichsfu

hrer’s family’.

All the measures for settling ethnic Germans described hitherto have

referred to the annexed eastern territories, the enlarged ‘living-space’ of

the Nazi Reich. By contrast, at that time the General Government was

envisaged in the minds of the planners as simply an area in which to dump

people who were ‘inferior’. In summer 1940 Himmler included the General

Government for the ﬁrst time in his plans for Germanization in another

way, and in the form of an experiment strictly limited to the SS. He assigned

to Globocnik the task of establishing what the latter termed a model

‘military settlement’. Himmler decided that this type of settlement should

be given the name ‘SS and police base’ (SS- und Polizeistu

tzpunkt), and on

2 November ordered Globocnik to establish six such bases. In March 1941

the latter had transformed six former rural estates into bases. They were

administered by SS members, and when necessary could be occupied by

police units.

At this point it was not planned to turn them into core areas

for substantial settlement projects.

The Ethnic German List [Volksliste]

and re-Germanization

Apart from racial assessment of ethnic German returnees, ‘racial assessment’

of the indigenous population of the annexed Polish territories also formed

part of the duties of the SS. On 25 May 1940 Himmler gave Hitler a

memorandum with the title ‘A Few Thoughts on the Treatment of the

Ethnically Alien Population in the East’. Himmler’s basic idea was that ‘in

the east we must endeavour to recognize and foster as many individual

groups as possible’, in other words, ‘to divide them up into as many

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segments and splinter groups as possible’. For ‘only by dissolving this ethnic

mishmash of 15 million people in the General Government and 8 million in

the eastern provinces will we be able to carry out the racial screening process

that must form the basis on which we can ﬁsh out the racially valuable

people from this mishmash, bring them to Germany and assimilate them

there’.

Within four or ﬁve years, ‘for example, the term “Kaschubian” will be

unknown because there will no longer be a Kaschubian people’. ‘I hope to

see the term “Jew”, Himmler continued, ‘completely eliminated through

the possibility of a large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some

colony’; and that it will be possible, ‘over a slightly longer period [ . . . ] to

ensure the disappearance of the ethnic categories of Ukrainians, Gorales,

and Lemkes from our territory’. The same should also apply, ‘making

allowances for the larger area involved, to the Poles’.

A key to solving this problem was the ‘question of schools’. The non-

German population in the east should have only elementary schools with

four classes and no schools at a higher level. The elementary schools should

simply teach : ‘Basic counting up to 500 at the most, how to write one’s

name, and that it is God’s commandment to be obedient to the Germans

and to be honest, hardworking, and well-behaved. I consider it unnecessary

to teach reading.’ Parents who wanted to give their children a better

education would have to apply to the Higher SS and Police Leader,

whose decision would be primarily determined by racial considerations:

If we recognize such a child as being of our blood then the parents will be informed

that the child will be placed in a school in Germany and will remain in Germany

indeﬁnitely. However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, if one rejects

the Bolshevik method of physically exterminating a people on the grounds that it is

fundamentally un-German and im possible, then this method is the kinde st and the

best one.

Himmler sketched the future as follows:

After these measures have been systematically implemented over the next decade,

the population of the General Government will inevitably consist of an inferior

remnant, which will include all the people who have been deported to the eastern

provinces as well as from those parts of the German Reich which contain the same

racial and human type (for example, the parts containing the Sorbs and Wends).

This population will be available as a leaderless labouring class [ ...]itwill get more

to eat and have more from life than under Polish rule and, while lacking culture

itself, under the strict, consistent, and fair leadership of the German people will be

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called upon to participate in their eternal cultural achievements and monuments.

Indeed, in view of the amount of hard labour required to produce them, it may

even be indispensable.

Himmler noted that Hitler had endorsed the memorandum in principle,

and had agreed that it should be given to a small group of top functionaries

for them to read as a guideline authorized by him, but that it should not be

handed out generally.

Himmler had already developed two Germanization programmes. Since,

according to the memorandum, the General Government was to be re-

served for ‘inferiors’, these applied only to the annexed territories. In the

ﬁrst place, there was the ‘re-Germanization’ of those Poles who, because of

their ‘positive’ racial characteristics, were to be excluded from the mass of

people who were to be deported to the General Government. Secondly,

there was the tracking down of ‘people of German origin’ in the annexed

Polish territories through the procedure of racial screening, which acquired

the title ‘Ethnic German List’ (Volksliste).

Re-Germanization had the dual function of, ‘on the one hand, utilizing

racially valuable families for the German programme of labour mobilization

and, on the other hand, removing from the Polish nation those Nordic

families from which, experience has shown, the Polish leadership is pre-

dominantly drawn’.

In order to carry out this task, Himmler, in his role as

Settlement Commissar, had already established a special ofﬁce of the Race

and Settlement Main Ofﬁce in the Ło

branch of the Central Ofﬁce for

Resettlement [UWZ] in March 1940.

Since the summer of 1940 a total of around 30,000–35,000 Poles had been

re-Germanized.

This ﬁgure was far below Hitler’s and Himmler’s guide-

lines. They had originally envisaged up to a million Poles ‘capable of being

re-Germanized’, a ﬁgure that matched calculations produced by the

NSDAP’s Ofﬁce for Racial Policy.

In October 1940 Himmler reduced

the target to around 100,000, and justiﬁed this by the need for careful ‘racial

selection’.

In May 1941 he explained his position once again to the Higher

SS and Police Leaders based in Poland:

People can’t be Germanized by the party taking them in hand and politically

indoctrinating them, for the German administration and the German military

have been trying this kind of thing in West Prussia and Posen for over a hundred

years in a different form, with the result that during the period of German rule

people served as Germans and were German citizens and during the period of

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Polish rule they served as Poles and were Poles. This old method has hist orically

been proved to be the wrong one.

Germanization of the eastern provinces can be done only on the basis of racial

theory and that is by screening the population of these provinces. The racially

valuable people, who in terms of their bloodline can be absorbed into our national

body without causing damage (in some cases even with positive results), must be

transferred to the old Reich as individual families. The other group, who on raci al

grounds cannot be absorbed, will remain in the country for as long as we need its

labour for the developmen t of the provinces and will then, in the course of the next

5–10 years, without exception or mercy be got rid of to the General Government,

which is the place for people for whom on racial grounds Germany has no use.

Ill. 19. Between the autumn of 1939 and the spring of 1941 Himmler regarded

settlement policy in Poland as his most important task. He not only pushed these

plans forward to a megalomaniacal extent but involved himself in every detail from

the installation of showe rs in settlement houses to the criteria for raci al examina-

tions. Here he is explaining an exhibit at the exhibition ‘Construction and

Planning in the East’ to the head of the Chancellery of the Fu

hrer of the NSDAP,

Philipp Bouhler, Reich Armamen ts Minister, Fritz Todt, Hitler’s Deputy, Rudolf

Hess, and Heydrich.

anewracialorder 453

In view of the slow results, in the middle of 1940 Himmler ordered the

Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce to look for re-Germanizable families also

among the Polish agricultural workers who had come to the Reich after the

outbreak of war and whom Himmler had been obliged to let in ‘un-

screened’ because of the shortage of time.

The aim was to select several

thousand who would be able to live in Germany over the long term.

As far as the introduction of the Ethnic German List was concerned,

Reich Governor Arthur Greiser had already begun the process in 1939 by

introducing a list in the Warthegau, for which, however, the decisive

criteria were political and cultural, a line that was clearly contrary to the

racial policy of the SS.

On 12 September 1940 Himmler issued his own

guidelines for an ethnic German list in the annexed Polish territories based

on the principle that any ‘attempt at a general Germanization of the eastern

provinces that is not based on racial principles will, in the end, lead to failure

and to the loss of the eastern provinces’.

Once again Himmler envisaged four categories: groups I and II would

include those who were clearly categorized as Germans; these people would

be given German citizenship. Group III was intended for those who, ‘over

the years, had established links with the Poles’ but nevertheless had the

‘racial potential’ to become ‘full members of the German national commu-

nity’. This group would receive German citizenship, but without the

privilege of being a ‘Reich citizen’. However, this had little practical

importance since the status of Reich Citizen, which had been introduced

by the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935, was never precisely deﬁned and in

practice never materialized. Ethnic Germans who had ‘thrown in their lot

with the Poles politically’ belonged to group IV and received German

citizenship only on a provisional basis. Members of groups III and IV

were obliged to move to the Old Reich.

As usual, Himmler had very detailed ideas as to how the process of ‘racial

assessment’ should proceed: ‘1. The most important principle is that the

racial assessment should be disguised as a medical examination [ . . . ] 2. The

rooms used must be such that, at the end of the assessment, the person who

is to be assessed returns to the dressing-room. 3. A shower facility for the

purpose of personal hygiene is an essential precondition for the assessment

procedure.’ Himmler also laid down that assistant assessors should be em-

ployed, that coloured boards should be used, that cheekbones, eyelids, and

body hair should be examined, as well as other details of the physical

examination, and, in addition, required that there should be a ‘proper

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drill’ for the whole procedure in order that the ‘thorough assessment’ of up

to 400 people a day could be managed.

As usual, he made the ﬁnal

decision on any complaints.

The main problem with the Ethnic German List was deciding on who

belonged in groups III and IV, who was German and who was Polish. The

Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce pursued the policy of subjecting these

2 million or so people to individual assessment, a task which in 1942 was to

be handled by eleven ofﬁces of the Ethnic German List in the annexed

Polish territories. It is unclear, however, how many people were actually

assessed.

For Himmler was to come up against considerable opposition to

his plan for individual racial assessments from the Reich Governors in the

Warthegau, Danzig–West Prussia, and Upper Silesia, who preferred a

simpler procedure.

In any case, during the war it proved impossible to

carry out major resettlement programmes on the basis of the Ethnic German

List.

Thus, all three Germanization programmes t hat Himmler had ini tiated

in the autumn of 1939 in his role as Settlement Commissar had come to a

halt in 19 40–1, a nd had more or less failed. The settlement o f ethnic

Germans from the Baltic States in the annexed territories had only

partially succeeded; re-Germanization achieved far poorer results than

originally envisaged. The process of registration for the Ethnic German

List does not appear to have been successfully concluded. The main

obstacle to the realization of these programmes was the fact that the

expulsions to the General Government could not be carried out to the

extent required. The various population movements got in each other’s

way to such a degree that even the ‘evacuation’ of the Jewish population

from the Reich that had originally been envisaged and conﬁdently

announced could not be carried out directly after the defeat of Poland,

as had been planned.

‘Jewish emigration’

Three months after the deportations associated with the Nisko project had

been halted in November 1939 because of the priority being given to the

settlement of ethnic Germans, the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce organized a

further, limited expulsion. On 12 and 13 February 1940 over 1,100 Jews

from the district of Stettin, comprising almost the whole of the city’s Jewish

anewracialorder 455

community, were deported to the Lublin region, and on 12 March around

160 people were deported from Schneidemu

hl to Glovnev near Posen.

On 19 February Himmler justiﬁed these transports to the Gauleiters by

the need to ﬁnd room for the Baltic Germans. According to Himmler, he

was explaining this so that his audience did not have any ‘false hopes’ as to

subsequent deportations from their Gaus.

During the coming year,

however, he intended, ‘provided the war goes on for the whole year’, to

tackle ‘Jewish emigration’ ‘to the extent that the numbers permit’, in other

words, to the extent that the conditions in the General Government

allowed. Evidently this compulsory resettlement was to be distinguished

from the ‘normal emigration from the Old Reich, the Ostmark, and the

Sudetengau’. This would ‘continue [ . . . ] despite the war’. ‘We then still

want to emigrate [sic] 6,000–7,000 Jews per month to Palestine, South

America, and North America.’ However, working along these lines it was

possible to expel at most 80,000 people annually. Thus the deportations into

the General Government had to be restarted in accordance with the fol-

lowing priorities:

First, I must try to get the Jews out of the eastern provinces, Posen and West

Prussia, eastern Upper Silesia, and southern East Prussia, from the four pro vinces.

That’s the ﬁrst thing to do. Then comes the Old Reich and then the Pro tectorate.

Here too I want at some point to get the 150,000 Jews in the Protectorate out. The

Gypsies are another problem. If I can, I want to get them out this year as well.

There are around 30,000 in the Reich as a whole, but they do a lot of racial

damage.

Himmler had good reason to warn against ‘false hopes’, for expansive

deportation plans to the General Government were increasingly coming up

against the opposition of the Governor-General, Hans Frank. At a top-level

meeting on 12 February Frank had opposed the ‘continuation of the

resettlement programme as practised hitherto’ and had received a promise

from Himmler and Go

ring that in future he would be consulted more about

the evacuations.

After a further conversation with Hitler, on 29 February,

Frank reckoned that ‘at least 400,000–600,000 more Jews’ would be arriv-

ing, and on 4 March he informed the district and city chiefs in the Lublin

area that their district continued to be envisaged as ‘a sort of Jewish

reservation’.

Thus, a few days later the German authorities postponed

the planned creation of a ghetto in Warsaw; in view of the fact that the

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General Government was going to act as a dumping ground, there no

longer seemed any point in going ahead with it.

On 24 March Go

ring made all deportations into the General Govern-

ment subject to his and Frank’s express approval.

This meant that de facto

the transports had been halted. The project for a Jewish reservation in

Lublin was permanently abandoned and the preparations for a ghetto in

Warsaw were restarted.

Himmler’s announcement to the Gauleiters had

been far too rash.

Ethnic policy in the former Czechoslovakia

reviewed

In the autumn of 1940 the population of the Protectorate of Bohemia and

Moravia was also subjected to a ‘racial stocktaking’.

The initiative came

from the Higher SS and Police Leader in Prague, Karl Hermann Frank, and

received a positive response from Hitler. The investigation was the respon-

sibility of the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce, which, in October 1940,

was ordered by Himmler ‘as soon as possible to draft a questionnaire for

Czech school doctors’, which superﬁcially was intended to assess school-

children’s health, but in fact was designed ‘to clarify what are for us

important questions’ concerning the ‘racial’ make-up of Czech youth.

Himmler then laid down the criteria for the racial test: ‘exact height, age,

weight, eye colour divided into three categories: 1. blue, blue-green—2.

brown, dark brown—3. black, and ﬁnally the skin colour, which is to be

divided into 1. Blond, dark blond—2. Brown, dark brown and black.’

100

Himmler sent Frank the questionnaire that had been drafted by the

RuSHA in accordance with his guidelines and, in addition, recommended

that ‘proﬁle and full-face photographs’ should be made of every child. In

this way, according to Himmler, for the ﬁrst time they would have ‘in

practice a racial stocktaking of the Czech people’.

101

In order to carry out

this ambitious task, at the beginning of 1941 the R uSHA established a well-

staffed branch ofﬁce in Prague.

102

In the meantime, a member of the RuSHA, Walter Ko

nig-Beyer, had

composed a memorandum on the racial-political conditions of the

Bohemian–Moravian region which concluded that, after a thorough racial

and political assessment of the indigenous population, around 55 per cent

anewracialorder 457

should be resettled to the General Government.

103

However, at this point

Himmler’s assignment as Settlement Commissar did not yet apply to the

Protectorate, so that initially no concrete steps could be taken to implement

such a project. It was only when Heydrich was appointed deputy Reich

Protector in October 1941 that plans for the Germanization of the Protec-

torate received a decisive impetus.

At this point Slovakia also became a target of the SS and its ambitious

population policy. Independent Slovakia, which had been created in March

1939, had a German minority of about 130,000 people. The leadership of

this group, which had Nazi views, sought afﬁliation with the Reich, which,

in view of the areas of ethnic German settlement, would have implied the

annexation of large parts of Slovakia. This was opposed to the ofﬁcial policy

of the Nazi regime, which was much more in favour of a Slovakian state

dependent on Germany than of bringing these ethnic Germans ‘home to

the Reich’.

104

In May 1940 Franz Karmasin, the leader of the ethnic German group,

appealed to the RuSHA to join him on a visit to the ethnic Germans who

were living dispersed in the Beskydy mountains in order to ‘assess and

examine their racial value’. Gu

nther Pancke, the head of the RuSHA,

duly undertook a study trip to the area, informing the Reichsfu

hrer of its

results: ‘The whole of Slovakia is a huge graveyard for ethnic Germans.’ On

the basis of this observation Pancke developed a plan that, far from aiming to

strengthen the ethnic German group, instead envisaged a fusing of the

Slovakian population with ‘the ethnic Germans’. In Pancke’s view, after

the removal of Jews and Gypsies, as well as the ‘exclusion’ of the population

of Hungarian origin, amounting to around 500,000 people, it would be

possible to win back this territory completely for German ethnicity, partic-

ularly if, in addition, some 100,000 ethnic German families were settled

there.

105

In March 1940 the SS not only began clandestinely to examine the

ethnic Germans in Slovakia but at the same time set about forming an elite

from the Slovakian Hlinka guards, which might act as the core of the fusion

policy advocated by Pancke.

The resettlement of the South Tyroleans

Apart from these plans for large-scale settlement and population move-

ments, Himmler was still confronted with the problem of sorting out the

458 anewracialorder

task Hitler had given him prior to his appointment as Reich Commissar for

the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation, namely, the resettlement

of the South Tyroleans.

A few days after the outbreak of the Second World War Himmler

informed his ‘highly valued friend’, the Italian Minister of Police Bocchini,

that he would stick to his original promise to oblige all R eich Germans to

leave South Tyrol within three months (the ﬁrst stage in the resettlement),

‘despite the changed conditions and tension inevitably created by the war’.

Naturally, the South Tyroleans who decided to emigrate ‘should not be

permitted to look down on’ those people who decided to remain in Italy,

‘thereby indicating that they wanted to become Italians both as regards their

outward behaviour and as far as their innermost feelings are concerned’.

106

After further negotiations Himmler interrupted the intensive planning

for the population movements in Poland and, between 11 and 13 October,

met Bocchini in Tremezzo on Lake Como in order to deal with the

problems that had arisen in the meantime. He used the occasion to advocate

a radical shortening and acceleration of the planned operation. Originally

the South Tyroleans with Italian nationality had been given a deadline of

30 June 1940 within which to decide whether they wanted to become

German or remain Italian. This was now reduced to 31 December 1939,

with a corresponding simpliﬁcation of the bureaucratic procedure.

107

On the return journey from Tremezzo Himmler took some fundamental

decisions relating to the resettlement of the South Tyroleans. He noted, in a

piece that was intended for publication, that they should be ‘placed en bloc

in a new settlement area’, for example in the lower reaches of the Netze

(Notec) river or in an area on ‘the northern slopes of the Beskyda’, in other

words, in the mountain range in southern Poland that bordered on Slovakia.

In accordance with an order from Hitler, the resettlement was to be carried

out in a ‘generous manner’. ‘Rural and urban communities will be re-

established under their old names.’ Himmler had already thought of a

name for the settlement, which was not meant cynically: East Tyrol.

108

On 21 October 1939, after further negotiations, the ﬁrst agreement

concerning the resettlement was reached,

109

and ﬁve days later, on

26 October, the emigration guidelines were issued. However, this

prompted a propaganda campaign by the Italians against the resettlement

that was tolerated by the prefect in Bolzano. Moreover, the Italian autho-

rities kept arresting South Tyroleans sympathetic to the Nazis who were

supporting the emigration.

110

On 14 November Himmler intervened, with

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