Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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uncertain terms: ‘concentration camps can be established only with my

permission.’

Himmler had a copy of this letter sent to the leaders of the Oberabsch-

nitte, though he did not mention Hildebrandt by name. Furthermore,

he instructed the acting Inspector of Concentration Camps, August

Heissmeyer, to ﬁnd out whether there were any other HSSPF camps in

the Reich. The camps were then inspected by the Concentration Camps

Inspectorate (IKL), and none of them was considered worth retaining. Even

Stutthof remained a detention camp with purely regional responsibilities.

The Wachsturmbann Eimann was disbanded.

When Himmler learnt in January 1940 that the HSSPF in Breslau, von

dem Bach-Zelewski, was intending to establish a regional detention camp in

a former artillery barracks near the town of Auschwitz, ‘along the lines of a

state concentration camp’,

he seized the property, using his powers as

Settlement Commissar. In fact, in February 1940

Richard Glu

cks, who

had taken over the IKL from Eicke in November 1939, proposed establish-

ing a concentration camp there under its auspices. Himmler agreed and, at

the beginning of May 1940, Hauptsturmfu

hrer Rudolf Ho

ss, hitherto

Schutzhaftlagerfu

hrer in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was appointed

its commandant. Initially the majority of prisoners incarcerated there were

Polish civilians.

At the beginning of 1941 the IG Farben chemicals concern expressed an

interest in constructing a large plant for the manufacture of Buna (synthetic

rubber) in Auschwitz. Its favourable geographical location and the prospect

of prisoners providing cheap labour were positive factors inﬂuencing the

decision.

Himmler devoted a great deal of attention to the IG Farben

project, and gave his personal assurance that there would be a sufﬁcient

number of prisoners to carry out the building work. He ﬁrst visited the KZ

on 1 March 1941 and took decisions concerning both the design of the

camp and cooperation with IG Farben.

The construction of the camp

accelerated plans for the ‘Germanization’ of the town; Jews and Poles were

expelled. Himmler wanted Auschwitz to become a German ‘model town’,

a model for the settlement of the east.

Around January 1940 Himmler transformed the previous branch camp of

Neuengamme near Hamburg into an autonomous concentration camp.

The number of prisoners was doubled and plans were made for the large-

scale production of clinker-brick.

Gross-Rosen in Lower Silesia, which

initially had been established as a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen and was

480 repression in the reich

intended for the quarrying of granite, was raised to the status of an autono-

mous concentration camp in May 1941. Himmler and Glu

cks had already

visited the camp in the autumn of 1940.

Natzweiler in Alsace also became

an autonomous concentration camp in May 1941. In August 1940, like

Neuengamme, it too had been established as a satellite camp of Sachsen-

hausen. This camp was also primarily designed for the quarrying of stone.

Thus, by spring 1941 four new concentration camps had been established

in addition to the six existing ones: Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Gross-Rosen,

and Natzweiler. Moreover, KZ Niedernhagen (the camp was intended for

prisoners working on the Wewelsburg), as well as KZ Hinzert (a former

police camp for disciplining workers on the Western Wall fortiﬁcations

project), were subordinated to the IKL.

After the outbreak of war conditions in all the concentration camps were

made more harsh: food supplies were reduced and mistreatment increased;

Ill. 21. Himmler and his entourage during a visit to KZ Mauthausen. Himmler

had already announced to Wehrmacht ofﬁcers in 1937 that, in the event of war, the

SS saw it as its task to secure ‘Germany at home’ as a fourth ‘theatre of war’

alongside those on the land, water, and in the air. And after the outbreak of the

Second World War Himmler did indeed focus on this task with extreme brutality.

He reserved decisions in cases of ‘specia l treatment’, in other words the summary

murder of people who were opponents of the regime or guilty of serious offences,

to himself.

repression in the reich 481

the barracks were seriously overcrowded. As a result, after the outbreak of

war the death-rate increased sharply.

Soon, however, German inmates

came to represent only a minority among the numerous prisoners whom the

Gestapo had arrested in the occupied territories, particularly in the east.

The number of KZ prisoners quadrupled from around 21,000 in August

1939 to around 70, 000 in spring 1942.

In January 1941 Heydrich ordered a ‘division of the concentration camps

into distinct levels reﬂecting the personality of the prisoners and the degree

of threat they pose to the state’. Accordingly, the prisoners were divided

into three categories, for each of which particular concentration camps were

responsible: ‘the less incriminated prisoners in protective custody who are

deﬁnitely capable of rehabilitation’ were sent to Dachau, Sachsenhausen,

and Auschwitz; those more seriously incriminated but nevertheless capable

of being rehabilitated were assigned to ‘Level II’, namely Buchenwald,

Flossenbu

rg, Neuengamme, as well as to Auschwitz II, which was still to

be built; the ‘seriously incriminated’ prisoners who were ‘unlikely to be

capable of rehabilitation’ were to be sent to Mauthausen, which at this stage

was the only KZ in ‘Level III’. And it was, in fact, there that the most

dreadful conditions and the highest death-rate were to be found.

As we have seen, the exploitation of prisoners’ labour played a major role

in the establishment of the four new concentration camps, as indeed had

been the case with the Mauthausen and Flossenbu

rg camps established in

1938. It was to be utilized both for the SS’s own building-materials business

as well as—as in the case of Auschwitz—for building projects. Thus, in

addition to the German Earth and Stone Works (Deutsche Erd- und

Steinwerke), founded in 1938 and responsible for stone-quarrying by

KZ prisoners, a further 199 holding companies were established for KZ

businesses.

The Deutsche Ausru

stungswerke GmbH (German Equipment Works

Ltd.), founded in May 1939, gradually took over the workshops in the

camps in order, in the ﬁrst instance, to provide equipment for armed units of

the SS and for concentration camps. In 1940–1 the number of objects

produced was reduced; the main focus was now on furniture for the KZ

and SS forces, but also for ethnic Germans who were being resettled. At the

end of 1941 the Deutsche Ausru

stungswerke had plants in Dachau, Sach-

senhausen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Lublin, and Lemberg (Lvov), and a

total of 4,800 workers, overwhelmingly KZ prisoners and Jewish forced

labourers.

Similarly, the Gesellschaft fu

r Textil und Lederverwertung

482 repression in the reich

(Textiles and Leather Processing Company) acted as an umbrella company

for all the plants providing the SS with clothing with the aid of KZ

workshops.

With the establishment in January 1939 of the German Research Institute

for Food and Nutrition (Deutsche Versuchsanstalt fu

r Erna

hrung und

Verpﬂegung = DVA), which initially focused above all on research into

and the planting of medicinal herbs, Himmler had succeeded in realizing a

project particularly close to his heart. The institute was primarily dependent

on the extensive herb gardens in KZ Dachau, but during the following years

in addition bought a total of sixteen experimental farms. In October 1940

Himmler directed the research institute to focus on experiments that had

been suggested by people working on the ground or which had not yet

been carried out by academic scientists or had even been rejected by them.

It was particularly important to develop careful processing methods; their

effectiveness should be assessed in collaboration with the SS physicians.

Himmler utilized the SS farms in particular in order to carry out experi-

ments involving biological-dynamic methods of cultivation.* Although

this agrarian theory inspired by anthroposophy, like all other ‘secret

knowledge’, had been ofﬁcially banned after Hess’s ﬂight to Scotland—

the Fu

hrer’s Deputy was portrayed as being a victim of such circles—

Himmler pressed on with these experiments, although the term now used

was ‘natural methods of agriculture’ (naturgema

ße Landbauweise). Himmler

gave detailed instructions

for the experiments which demonstrated his

hostility to artiﬁcial fertilizers. After all, as he pointed out to his administra-

tive chief Pohl, having worked as a laboratory assistant in the Schleissheim

fertilizer factory he knew what he was talking about.

Himmler was aware of the fact that, as with many of his other projects, it

would be sensible not to make a big song and dance about his controversial

experiments. For example, he expressly rejected the idea of getting

Bormann to inform Hitler about their progress. The people involved should

‘work quietly and in some cases not talk so much about the natural methods

of agriculture. Nobody [would] bother us if we quietly, decently, and

successfully got on with tilling the land.’ The ofﬁce in charge of the project

should be moved out of Berlin and transferred to one of the farms, ideally in

the east.

In fact it came to be based in the Wertingen state farm near

Himmler’s Hegewald headquarters in the Ukraine. The person in charge,

* Translators’ note: This refers to a method of cultivation advocated by Rudolf Steiner.

repression in the reich 483

Obersturmfu

hrer Grund, was given a special new task by Himmler,

namely, ‘analysing the performance of the biological-dynamic method in

the Russian territories’. Himmler’s weakness for unconventional projects

had once again acquired gigantic dimensions.

However, the expansion of the SS’s business operations involved not

only enterprises that were mainly based in the concentration camps. In April

1939 the SS established the Sudetenquell GmbH (Sudeten Spring Ltd.) near

Marienbad, which a short time later began producing its own drink with the

enticing name ‘Green Sour Spring Water’ (Gru

ner Sauerbrunn). This enter-

prise was rooted in Himmler’s ambition to get the ‘SS men used to

quenching their thirst with non-alcoholic drinks instead of their

excessive consumption of beer, wine etc.’; good-value mineral water was

to be offered as an alternative.

During the following years the SS, by buying up ﬁrms, tried to acquire a

monopoly of mineral-water production in order to break the cartel that was

assumed to operate in this market. By 1944 75 per cent of German mineral-

water production was in the hands of the SS; Himmler’s efforts, initially

focused solely on reforming SS members, had acquired their own

momentum.

The same intention was behind the purchase of fruit-juice

factories, in which, among other things Himmler’s prized ‘Vitaborn’ (Life

Spring) juices were produced. Himmler used to give them as presents, and

they represented a particular token of his esteem.

Another development, however, was to prove more signiﬁcant for the

future of the SS business empire. In November 1939 Himmler succeeded in

persuading the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost (Main Trustee Ofﬁce East), which

under Go

ring’s auspices was administering the property conﬁscated from

Poles and Jews in the annexed eastern territories, to seize all the brickworks

in the area under their control for the beneﬁt of his settlement commissariat.

The aim was to place their production at the disposal of ethnic German

settlers. In January 1941 the Ostdeutsche Baustoffwerke (East German

Building Materials Works) was established, which in the course of the

year restarted 300 brickworks, most of which were small-scale operations;

in addition, there were the works producing building materials in the

General Government. In his capacity as Settlement Commissar, Himmler

also took over building-materials works in annexed Lower Styria as well as

in the district of Bialystok, in other words, the area in eastern Poland that,

after its conquest in the summer of 1941, had acquired a special administra-

tive status.

484 repression in the reich

Thus, most of the SS enterprises served either the needs of the SS itself or,

often, Himmler’s political-ideological aims (as can be shown with the

manufacture of mineral water, medicinal herbs, and building materials for

German settlers), or they sprang from the need to control the employment

of KZ prisoners in order to keep them out of the hands of the authorities

responsible for labour deployment. As a result, almost all the businesses

operated at a loss.

In 1940 this was to change. Since 1939 all SS businesses had been

subordinated to Oswald Pohl, the administrative head of the SS, and from

spring 1940 onwards he had been managing them with the aid of his new

Administration and Business Main Ofﬁce (Hauptamt Verwaltung und

Wirtschaft). In July 1940 Pohl instigated the establishment of Deutsche

Wirtschaftsbetriebe GmbH (German Businesses Ltd.), which was intended

to unify all SS enterprises.

To begin with, Pohl was the sole general

manager. In July 1942 a second manager was appointed, although Pohl

retained complete control.

During 1940–1, under the management

installed by Pohl, SS business policy underwent a signiﬁcant change. From

now on economic factors were taken much more into consideration—the

watchwords were the maximizing of proﬁt, business expansion, and the

market.

The SS and police acquire their own judicial system

Himmler’s plans for the SS and police to establish their own judicial system

along the lines of the military can be traced back to 1937. However, he was

able to achieve his objective only in October 1939. All armed SS units, the

full-time members of the HSSPF staffs, as well as all police units who were

deployed in the war were subjected to the new judicial system.

Regula-

tions equivalent to those of the military code were now applied to the SS,

including the death penalty and penal servitude, with the SS and police

courts responsible for all offences, not only those against the military code.

The SS disciplinary code—in other words, the possibility of demoting or

expelling SS members—remained unaffected by the new jurisdiction.

It was not by chance that the SS and police judicial system was introduced

immediately after the war with Poland. It is obvious that Himmler wished

to have the responsibility for investigating and, where he felt it appropriate,

punishing the assaults and crimes committed by members of the SS and

repression in the reich 485

police during the war.

Himmler also banned the press from reporting the

proceedings of the SS and police courts.

However, other motives for

creating this special judicial system were decisive. In view of the general

intensiﬁcation of repression in the autumn of 1939, the Reichsfu

hrer did not

want any complaints that offences by members of the SS and police were

being treated too laxly. At the same time, having achieved his own judicial

system, he considered it very important to ensure that it fully embodied the

principles of virtue, decency, and discipline that he had been preaching for

years.

During the Second World War he gradually expanded the responsibility

of the SS judicial system to include the whole of the police, the General SS

(including those serving in the Wehrmacht), all foreigners ﬁghting in SS

units and the ‘ethnic alien’ protection forces, as well as auxiliary organiza-

tions attached to the police such as the Technical Emergency Unit, the

Air Defence Police, and the Fire Service (including the voluntary ﬁre

brigades).

100

In a number of occupied territories, for example in the

Protectorate, the Netherlands, and to the greatest extent in Norway, it

became an instrument of occupation policy, since it was applied even to

offences committed by inhabitants of these countries.

101

With a decree of 4 April 1943 the Wehrmacht handed over the prosecu-

tion of civilian offenders in the occupied territories entirely to the SS and

police courts if the offence was largely directed against the SS or police.

102

When Himmler took over the Reserve Army in July 1944, thereby acquir-

ing responsibility for the POWs of the Wehrmacht, this group too became

subject to the SS and police jurisdiction.

103

Himmler played a central role in shaping this judicial system.

104

He not

only provided the Court Main Ofﬁce, to which the SS and police judiciary

was subordinate, with regular instructions, he also appointed an ‘SS Judge

on the Staff of the Reichsfu

hrer-SS and Chief of the German Police’ in the

shape of Horst Bender, to whom he gradually transferred the powers that he

himself possessed as ‘Supreme Judge’ (Gerichtsherr) of the SS and police.

105

Himmler provided himself with the power to suspend sentences,

106

and

in a number of cases reserved to himself the right to conﬁrm sentences, as,

for example, with offences against the ban on sexual relations with the

wives of front-line soldiers and prosecutions of adultery,

107

as well as all

sentences of SS leaders and police ofﬁcers.

108

The right of conﬁrming sentences also extended to offences committed

by members of the SS and police against his ban on sexual relations with

486 repression in the reich

‘women from an ethnically alien population’ in the occupied eastern

territories. In such cases he generally called for the papers prior to the

initiation of a preliminary investigation in order to decide, on the basis of

photos and a report on the general racial impression made by the woman,

whether such an offence had in fact been committed, as signiﬁcantly the

term ‘alien’ (andersartig) was never properly deﬁned.

109

SS judges deployed

in the east decided at a conference held in May 1943 that Himmler’s ban on

sexual relations with indigenous women must be ‘urgently’ amended, since,

as one of the judges put it, probably ‘at least 50 per cent of all members of the

SS and police’ were breaching this ban. As he had discovered from one unit,

the view taken by the force was that ‘relationships and sex were permitted as

long as there were no consequences’.

110

In June 1942 Himmler had already relaxed the ban on ‘sexual relations

with women and girls from a population of an alien race’

111

which he had

issued in April 1939, for members of the SS and police based in the General

Government: ‘I recognize the difﬁculties facing the men of the SS in the

General Government from a sexual point of view. I do not, therefore,

object to sex in brothels or with prostitutes subject to medical and police

supervision, as neither procreation nor close personal relations are likely to

occur as a result.’

112

Himmler’s 1939 ban kept causing problems right up

until the end of the war, problems in which, typically, Himmler took a

personal interest. Thus, in January 1945, for example, he decided ‘that GV

[sex] with racially inferior Croatian women [is] merely undesirable’.

113

Himmler’s right to conﬁrm sentences was extended by a Fu

hrer decree of

1941 laying down that, ‘in the event of there being serious doubts about the

correctness of a verdict’, the Reichsfu

hrer would have the right on his own

initiative to suspend verdicts that had already been reached under due

process and to insist on a retrial.

114

He wished to be informed of all cases

which involved breaches of ‘ideological obedience’ (and for that to be done

right at the start of proceedings), as well as of ‘all sentences of SS and police

courts’ that involved the death penalty, penal servitude for life, or penal

servitude of over ten years.

115

Moreover, prosecutors, and eventually SS

judges as well, received an enormous number of individual directives from

their Reichsfu

hrer.

116

The measures that Himmler instituted to govern the SS judicial system

were thus not only comprehensive but involved an elaborate system of

multiple stages of supervision and reveal a positively manic need to exercise

control. Everything was designed to enable him to make the ﬁnal decision.

repression in the reich 487

Himmler gave this caricature of a legal system its ultimate expression

when, following the death of the head of the SS Court Main Ofﬁce, Paul

Scharfe, who was not in fact a lawyer, Himmler issued the ‘Basic Directive

No. 1 for the SS Judicial System’, which stated quite baldly: ‘I hereby decree

that the head of the SS Court shall never be a lawyer.’

117

It would, however,

be too simple to interpret Himmler’s excessive need to exercise control

merely as megalomania ﬁnding release in arbitrary actions. For, seen in the

light of his pedagogic mentality, with its ideological bent, his control

mechanisms were altogether rational: Himmler was endeavouring to create

a special SS penal code, designed to put into practice ideas for the ideologi-

cal indoctrination of his men and the inculcation of SS norms of living.

A particular instrument used to achieve this was the juridical trick of

judging breaches of internal SS prohibitions as military disobedience,

in other words, as a serious offence under the military penal code.

118

Himmler, therefore, ensured that the SS and police judicial system

punished sexual contacts with ‘alien races’ to an extent far beyond the

provisions of the Blood Protection Law of 1935, prosecuted sex with the

wives of front-line soldiers with conspicuous harshness, and took extremely

tough action against offences linked to alcohol, homosexuality, and prop-

erty crime, in other words, all those offences which he, as Reichsfu

hrer-SS,

had already tried to eliminate through educational and disciplinary methods

before the introduction of the SS judicial system.

Himmler advocated the uncompromising punishment of members of

the SS and police as a matter of principle. The nation should know, he

wrote to Daluege in 1942, ‘that a disloyal policeman or police ofﬁcer will be

punished. This will not damage our reputation but will rather strengthen

and increase it.’

119

Similarly, in 1943 he emphasized to the Gruppenfu

hrer

that, as ‘Reichsfu

hrer-SS, as Chief of the German Police and now as Reich

Minister of the Interior, [he did not have] the moral right to prosecute any

national comrade and we could not summon up the strength to do it if we

did not brutally insist on impeccable conduct in our own ranks’.

120

When he considered it necessary he imposed punishment without a

formal sentence. Thus, in one case he postponed the sentencing of an

SS-Obersturmfu

hrer found guilty of the mistreatment of a subordinate

involving grievous bodily harm resulting in death, and ordered that the

person concerned ‘should be provided with a pistol and given the opportu-

nity of executing judgment on himself’, which he then did.

121

Subsequently,

as often happened in such cases, he showed consideration by ordering that the

488 repression in the reich

dependants should be looked after as if the person involved had fallen in

battle. ‘That is the point of providing the pistol.’

122

Himmler also kept issuing penal guidelines. For example, in January

1945, when members of the 256 Volksgrenadierdivision (a Wehrmacht

unit set up and led by the SS) had participated in looting, he ordered that,

in the case of looting in Reich territory, ‘as a deterrent a death sentence

should be imposed in a suitable case and should be carried out in the

presence of members of the units of the division concerned’.

123

And after

a lecture by the SS Judge on the Staff of the Reichsfu

hrer-SS concerning

the ‘prosecution of those who have shot Jews without authorization’,

Himmler decided that the decisive point was the ‘motives’ of those involved

in such incidents: ‘In the case of political motives there should be no

prosecution unless required for the maintenance of public order [ . . . ] In

the case of selﬁsh, sadistic, or sexual motives they should be prosecuted

and, where appropriate, for murder or manslaughter.’

124

Thus, even in the

face of unparalleled mass murder Himmler did not want to abandon the

right to claim that his SS murdered ‘decently’.

repression in the reich 489