Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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Himmler this experience was sufﬁcient reason to keep such occult interests

even more ﬁrmly ‘under wraps’.

On 18 May he returned to Berlin, where he had a meeting with, among

others, Victor Brack from the Fu

hrer’s Chancellery, one of those mainly

responsible for the ‘Euthanasia’ programme. Some weeks earlier Brack had

sent him a report about the possible mass sterilization of Jews, which they

very likely discussed.

A few days after this meeting Professor Carl Clau-

berg, whose advice Himmler usually sought concerning gynaecological

matters, suggested a further process for carrying out mass sterilization.

Presumably these plans were connected with the projected deportations of

European Jews to the Soviet territories that were to be conquered: any

possibility of the deportees procreating was to be excluded.

On 21 May Himmler issued an order in which he outlined the main

features of the deployment of SS and police units in the future occupied

territories, about which agreement had been reached with the Wehrmacht

in mid-April: in the east, as in the Reich itself, the Higher SS and Police

Leaders (HSSPF) would play a central role. The relevant HSSPF was to be

put in charge of ‘SS and police troops and security police for special

deployment’ (not only the Einsatzgruppen, who had been the subject of

negotiations with the army, but also units that had not been mentioned in

the agreement and to which Himmler was giving an even greater degree of

independence in this order), so that he could ‘implement tasks I [Himmler]

shall give directly to him’. Comprising these units were, on the one hand,

troops belonging to the order police, who were to ‘fulﬁl their tasks accord-

ing to my directives’, and on the other, units of the Waffen-SS, who were

responsible for similar tasks as well as ‘special tasks I shall give them’.

What Himmler was alluding to obliquely rather than directly was the fact

that in the months to come these particular SS and police units were to carry

out mass murder on a devastating scale among the civilian population of the

occupied Soviet territories, and especially its Jewish members, and in so

doing open the ﬂoodgates for the annihilation of the European Jews. How

did Himmler prepare the members of these units for this? Let us take a closer

look at the individual units and what we know about the instructions given

to them.

From the spring of 1941 onwards four Einsatzgruppen, in total about

3,000 strong, were set up in the security police’s NCO training school at

Pretzsch near Leipzig.

They were made up of members of the SD,

Gestapo, criminal police and order police, Waffen-SS, and ancillary staff,

520 an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilati on

in part from the SS and police administrative apparatus.

It is striking that a

particular type was dominant in the leadership, namely the ‘specialist’; he

had already had an academic education, often in law, a practical training

within the police administration, and was a skilled bureaucrat, while at the

same time being a man of radical action and conviction and strongly

committed to Nazi ideology.

Of the seventeen members of the leadership

cadre of Einsatzgruppe A, all without exception long-standing employees in

the SS and police apparatus, there were, for example, eleven lawyers, nine

of whom had doctorates; thirteen had joined the NSDAP or one of its

afﬁliated organizations before 1933.

At ﬁrst the order police

went into the war against the Soviet Union

with twenty-three battalions (in total 11,640 men and 420 ofﬁcers), con-

sisting of long-serving career policemen, who made up the bulk of the

leadership corps and NCO corps in the remaining units also, as well as of

older police reservists

without any service record and also of younger

volunteers.

All these units were led by more senior police ofﬁcers, many

of whom had gained experience back in the civil war and border conﬂicts of

the post-war period, while a signiﬁcant number of more junior ofﬁcers had

been trained in the SS ofﬁcer-training colleges.

In addition to the security and order police Himmler, by concentrating

the SS Death’s Head units into a ‘Commando Staff (Kommandostab) RFSS’,

equipped himself with a reserve force ready for deployment on his ‘special

tasks’.

As early as 7 April 1941 he had created his own task force, which on

6 May was renamed Commando Staff RFSS.

On 1 May he formed two

motorized SS brigades from SS Death’s Head regiments and simultaneously

two SS cavalry regiments in Cracow and Warsaw were merged and later

became the SS Cavalry Brigade.

A number of these Death’s Head units

had already carried out numerous acts of violence in Poland.

In July 1941

Himmler had a total of more than around 19,000 Commando Staff troops at

his disposal.

In this way he enabled himself to intervene directly to combat

racial and political enemies in the occupied eastern territories and to set clear

priorities in this process.

In the weeks before the Russian campaign, ‘Operation Barbarossa’, these

forces were initiated into their tasks. The relevant orders that Hitler had

issued to the Wehrmacht in themselves spoke volumes about the coming

war. In May he ordered that criminal acts perpetrated by members of the

Wehrmacht against the civilian population in the east were as a rule no

longer to be prosecuted by the military courts, and thus were to go

an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilat ion 521

unpunished. Crimes committed by enemy civilians were also not to be

punished by the military courts, but rather in such cases the perpetrators

were to be ‘ﬁnished off’, ‘put down’ on the spot; ‘collective violent

measures’ against communities were permitted.

In the ‘Guidelines on

the Treatment of Political Commissars’ signed on 6 June by Keitel, the

head of the Wehrmacht High Command, it was stated that Soviet commis-

sars, as ‘the initiators of barbaric Asiatic methods of ﬁghting’, were to be

‘ﬁnished off’ by the ﬁghting force.

In the ‘Guidelines on the Conduct of

Troops in Russia’ of 19 May, which were disseminated down to company

level, ‘Bolshevism’ was characterized as being the ‘mortal enemy of the

National Socialist German nation’, and for this reason ‘ruthless and vigorous

measures against Bolshevik agitators, partisans, saboteurs, and Jews’ were

required, as well as ‘the eradication of all active and passive resistance’.

Himmler and Heydrich, however, went considerably further than these

instructions. The Reichsfu

hrer insisted on personally putting the most

senior SS leaders in the right frame of mind for the extermination they

were going to carry out. To that end he summoned them specially to the

Wewelsburg from 11 to 15 June.

He had invited about a dozen people,

among them his close colleagues Wolff and Brandt; his two police chiefs

Daluege and Heydrich; the HSSPFs earmarked for the territories to be

conquered, namely Pru

tzmann, von dem Bach-Zelewski, and Jeckeln;

Pohl, the head of the SS Main Ofﬁce; and his friend, the writer, President

of the Reich Chamber of Literature, and SS-Brigadefu

hrer Hanns Johst. In

1939 and 1940 Johst had accompanied Himmler on journeys to Poland,

published a small volume about the ﬁrst journey,

and thereafter had

requested from Himmler the privilege of accompanying him in future on

important assignments so that he could act as Himmler’s semi-ofﬁcial

biographer.

Thus he was promoted to the role of ‘Bard to the SS’,

and

so was indispensable for capturing the atmosphere of these historic days at

the Wewelsburg.

At this meeting, Himmler, according to a post-war testimony of von dem

Bach-Zelewski, put at 30 million the number of human beings by which the

Soviet Union was to be ‘decimated’, in other words, a ﬁgure corresponding

to the scale of population growth since 1914 in the territories to be con-

quered.

This statement characterizes the climate prevailing in the highest

echelons of the SS in these days and weeks immediately before the invasion:

they had a clear sense of embarking on a campaign of racial annihilation of

incalculable proportions.

522 an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilati on

Heydrich then went on to apprise the leaders of the Einsatzkommandos

along the same lines, both at a meeting in the Prince Charles Palace in

Berlin, which presumably took place on 17 June, and also in Pretzsch on the

Elbe, when the Einsatzkommandos were ofﬁcially given their marching

orders shortly before the outbreak of the war.

After this Heydrich wrote a

summary of his instructions: on the one hand, in a letter of 29 June to the

leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, in which he alluded only to the ‘efforts at self-

cleansing’ that the commandos were supposed to set in motion;

and on

the other, in a communication to the HSSPFs of 2 July, in which he

informed them about the ‘most important instructions I have given to the

security police and SD Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos’.

In the 2 July letter he stated clearly: ‘All of these are to be executed’, and

there followed a list—‘Comintern ofﬁcials (and professional communist

politicians) [,] the senior, middle-ranking and radically inclined lower-

ranking ofﬁcials of the party, the Central Committee, the regional and district

committees [,] people’s commissars [,] Jews in party and state posts [,] other

radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.).’

The ‘all’ at the beginning and the ‘etc.’ at the end of the list, as well as the

fact that in this instruction Heydrich also emphasized that the ‘attempts of

anti-communist and also anti-Jewish circles at self-cleansing in the terri-

tories to be occupied [ . . . ] were not to be impeded’—on the contrary, they

were to be promoted, ‘though invisibly’

—reveal that the scope of those to

be executed was set very wide. The formulation ‘all [ . . . ] Jews in party and

state posts’ was similarly only code for the instruction to kill an extremely

vaguely deﬁned Jewish elite, consisting ﬁrst and foremost of men. It was

largely left to the commandos’ own initiative to determine the details of

who was to be counted as part of this elite.

After the June conference at the Wewelsburg Himmler went to Berlin,

where he had numerous meetings. He met, amongst others, Hermann

Fegelein, who reported to him that the two SS cavalry regiments were

ready for deployment; Ju

ttner, the head of the SS Leadership Main Ofﬁce;

and Gauleiter Alfred Meyer, Rosenberg’s most important colleague in the

setting up of the Ministry for the East. He also visited Hitler several times in

the Reich Chancellery.

At this time of high excitement he was regularly

restored to ﬁtness between appointments by his masseur Felix Kersten.

On 18 June, at around midday, however, he interrupted his Berlin duties

and ﬂew to Bavaria in order to spend the following day with his wife and

daughter in his home in Gmund. Before the start of the great struggle he

an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilat ion 523

wanted once more, even if only brieﬂy, to relax: private photographs have

survived showing the Himmlers on this beautiful summer day in the

wonderful mountain scenery around Lake Tegern—picking ﬂowers.

By lunchtime on 20 June Himmler was back in the Reich Chancellery

and had a meeting in the afternoon with Jeckeln. The next day he met

Daluege and had lunch again with Hitler and others. The following morn-

ing the attack on the Soviet Union began. Himmler had a considerable

ﬁghting force among the invading armies: as well as the Einsatzgruppen,

the order-police squads, and the troops of the Command Staff, his three

Waffen-SS divisions, the police division (incorporated in 1942 into the

Waffen-SS), and the ‘Leibstandarte’ division all took part in the invasion.

Phase 1: Executions of Jewish men

On 25 June Himmler took his special train ‘Heinrich’ to Hitler’s headquar-

ters near Rastenburg in East Prussia. On 30 June he set off through occupied

Ill. 23. The Himmlers on 19 June 1941, two days before the outbreak of the

war with the Soviet Union.

524 an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilati on

Lithuanian territory; Heydrich accompanied his R eichsfu

hrer on this train

journey, ﬁrst to Grodno and then to Augustowo. In Grodno Himmler and

Heydrich found that, although the town had been occupied the week

before, not a single member of the security police or the SD was there,

which provoked Himmler to reprimand the commando leader and admon-

ish him in future to demonstrate ‘the greatest ﬂexibility in tactical troop

deployment’.

In Augustowo they came across a commando of the Gestapo base at Tilsit

that had already made a start on ‘punishment campaigns’ in the wake of the

advancing Wehrmacht. Himmler and Heydrich approved of these ‘com-

prehensively’, as the Tilsit Gestapo reported to the Reich Security Main

Ofﬁce.

Three days later the Tilsit commando shot over 300 people,

mainly Jewish civilians.

The next day, already back in his headquarters

in East Prussia, Himmler met Go

ring, and on 3 July he had a meeting with

the chief of his Command Staff, Kurt Knoblauch, and with Ju

ttner, head of

the Leadership Main Ofﬁce. Two days later, on Saturday, he inspected the

troops of the 1st SS Cavalry Regiment.

On 8 July he returned to the newly occupied territories, this time

accompanied by the chief of the order police, Daluege. The same day he

arrived in Bialystok,

where at a meeting of SS and police ofﬁcers—at least

according to what von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was also present, said after

the war—he made statements to the effect that, ‘as a matter of principle any

Jew’ was ‘to be regarded as a partisan’.

The way in which this order was

passed down through the levels of the hierarchy in the days that followed

can be reconstructed: on 9 July, speaking to members of the police regiment

Centre, Daluege issued a call for ‘Bolshevism ﬁnally to be eradicated’,

and

on 11 July the commander of the police regiment Centre in Bialystok passed

on the order of the HSSPF for special assignments (z.b.V.) attached to the

commanding ofﬁcer of the rear army area Centre, that all Jewish men

between the ages of 17 and 45 ‘caught’ looting were to be executed.

This gave carte blanche for mass murder: in the middle of July two

battalions of the regiment were responsible for a massacre that claimed the

lives of about 3,000 Jewish men.

On the way back from Bialystok Himmler, now accompanied by

Heydrich, once more stopped off in Grodnow. Both were supplied with

evidence to satisfy them that the murder commandos had made up for the

passivity for which they had been criticized on 30 June. ‘In the ﬁrst days in

Grodnow and Lida initially only 96 Jews were liquidated,’ a report from

an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilat ion 525

Einsatzgruppe B read. ‘I gave the order that operations here were to be

considerably stepped up. [ . . . ] The necessary liquidations will be guaran-

teed under all circumstances.’

Himmler’s tours of inspection and personal

interventions on the spot in the ﬁrst weeks of the war therefore did much to

initiate and intensify the mass murder of Jewish civilians.

As Christian Gerlach has shown, in his indispensable study of German

occupation policy in Byelorussia, senior-ranking SS men were demonstra-

bly present at almost all sizeable ‘operations’ (Aktionen ) in the ﬁrst weeks of

the war against the Soviet Union: if neither Himmler, Heydrich nor

Daluege was there, their place was frequently taken where the murders

were committed by the responsible ofﬁcer for the region, von dem Bach-

Zelewski, Nebe, or the chief of the police regiment Centre, Max Montua.

Himmler’s inspection tours were therefore an integral part of a system of

leadership in which the senior leaders ensured that the overall policy was

adhered to through checks and constant intervention on the ground.

Almost all the security police and SD Einsatzkommandos, and also a

whole series of police battalions, had begun in June to shoot Jewish men of

military age en masse, hundreds or thousands at a time. These executions

were carried out on a variety of pretexts: ‘reprisals’, punishing ‘looters’,

combating ‘partisans’. The diverse units followed a set pattern, even if

individual murder operations showed variations: some units set the upper

age-limit of the male victims higher than others; in some places the entire

male population in a particular age-group was murdered, in other places it

was ‘only’ some, and here again to varying extents. The leaders of the units

therefore quite clearly had a certain amount of room for manoeuvre. When

the order was passed down it had, of course, been clear that initiative and

individual judgement were required.

And mass murders committed by the units were not the whole story. In

numerous places they succeeded, as Heydrich had ordered, in provoking

‘efforts at self-cleansing’, in other words, pogroms carried out by the local

population. In the territories occupied by the Soviets between 1939 and

1941, above all in Lithuania, Latvia, and the western Ukraine, there is

evidence for pogroms in a total of at least sixty places, and estimates suggest

there were at least 12,000 victims, possibly 24,000.

On 13 July in Stettin (Szczecin) Himmler inspected 200 members of the

Waffen-SS who had been transferred to the Finnish front to reinforce the SS

combat group North, which had not only suffered heavy losses in the ﬁrst

days of the war but had been unsuccessful in an attack on and in the ensuing

526 an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilati on

counter-attack from the Red Army. The unit was showing widespread signs

of disintegrating. Himmler admonished the men and then spoke to the

twenty-ﬁve commanders as a separate group. They were, he explained,

engaged in a struggle with a ‘nation of 180 million, a hotch-potch of races

and peoples whose very names are unpronounceable and who are physically

built in such a way that they can be shot en masse without mercy’, ‘animals’,

in other words. ‘This nation has been united by Jews in a religion, a world-

view, called Bolshevism [ . . . ].’

‘Police and political security matters’?

On 16 July, around three weeks after the beginning of the war to which

Himmler attached such high hopes, Hitler in his headquarters made the

essential decisions concerning the structure of future occupation policy in

the east. Present were Go

ring, Keitel, Rosenberg, and Bormann—not

Himmler, and the outcome of that meeting was to be a disappointment to

him as well. Hitler ruled

that at the end of hostilities the administration of

the occupied territories should pass to civilian agencies: to Reich commis-

sariats under the newly appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern

Territories, Alfred Rosenberg.

Rosenberg was, admittedly, instructed to

observe the jurisdictions of other central agencies—and that meant in

particular Himmler’s responsibilities, which were deﬁned by Hitler as

‘providing security in the newly occupied territories through the police’.

To this end Himmler was allowed to appoint Higher SS and Police Leaders

and SS and Police Leaders.

Himmler’s ambitions, however, as we have seen, extended far beyond

this. On 10 June he had asked Lammers for control over ‘police and political

security matters’, and thereby provoked Rosenberg’s objection.

Two days

after the outbreak of the war he had gone further and given Konrad Meyer,

his head of planning, three weeks in which to incorporate Soviet territories

into the planning already in train for German settlement policy in the east

(‘General Plan East’).

On 11 July Himmler gave the Coordination Centre

for Ethnic Germans the responsibility for producing a survey of ‘ethnic

Germans’ in the occupied Soviet Union, an activity that was to proceed in

close consultation with the Einsatzgruppen.

On 15 July Meyer’s outline

plan was on his desk. The fact that the following day Hitler denied him the

central role he craved in the political reorganization of the east was a bitter

an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilat ion 527

personal defeat. At the same time, this day marks the commencement of a

decisive change in Himmler’s policy, a change that can be explained by his

practice of not allowing setbacks to divert him from doggedly pursuing the

goals he had set himself.

First of all, it is striking that he stubbornly persisted in acting as if

the responsibilities he had been given as Reich Settlement Commissar in

October 1939 for the ‘consolidation of the ethnic German nation’ also

applied in the occupied Soviet territories, a claim vigorously contested by

both Rosenberg and Go

ring.

In concrete terms, Himmler made use of his

police jurisdiction to initiate settlement measures in the occupied eastern

territories, thus proving once again his ability when necessary to make very

effective combined use of the individual parts of his empire.

Three days after his setback he travelled to Lublin, where he gave

Globocnik a series of orders that underlined the signiﬁcance of the Lublin

district as the future hub of the ‘ethno-political’ reordering of the east. In

the town of Lublin, according to Himmler, a large complex of camps was to

be set up, and in the area around Zamosc preparations were to be made for

the settlement of ethnic Germans. In addition, he instructed Globocnik to

create a network of police and SS posts in the newly occupied territories

stretching out from Lublin.

Himmler’s stubborn attempts to exploit his police responsibilities as the

basis for a ‘new ethnic order’ in the east were not, however, restricted to

settlement measures. And this brings us to the real change he effected from

the middle of July 1941. The task of ‘consolidating the ethnic German

nation’ that Hitler had given him in October 1939 included not only the

‘creation through resettlement of new German settlement areas’, but also

the ‘elimination of the damaging inﬂuence of [ . . . ] alien elements in the

population’. In Poland Himmler had attempted to put this latter aspect

into practice by beginning mass deportations of Poles and Jews from the

annexed territories. Yet this huge resettlement programme, designed to

create space for ethnic Germans, had in essence failed: the planned numbers

were far from being attained, the expulsions had led to considerable chaos

in the General Government, and the majority of ethnic Germans were still

stuck in resettlement camps.

The conclusion Himmler drew from these experiences was that ‘ethnic

cleansing’ in the east should be tackled right away and not, as originally

assumed, after the war. As a ﬁrst step to ‘neutralize’ the ‘alien elements in the

population’ whole regions were now to be made ‘free of Jews’ through mass

528 an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilati on

executions and the ghettoization of those who could still be exploited as

slave labour.

At the back of this was a gigantic programme of expulsion, resettlement,

and extermination, to which some 30 million people in the east (this was the

extent of the operation planned at the outbreak of the war, according to von

dem Bach-Zelewski) were to fall victim. Yet such a programme of annihi-

lation directed at the indigenous population as a whole was a complete pipe-

dream in the summer of 1941. It was possible neither simply to shoot 30

million people nor to cut them off from any food supplies and let them

starve. From the perspective of the conquerors, however, these reservations

did not apply to the Jews, a much smaller population group: it was claimed

they could be clearly distinguished ‘racially’ from the rest of the population,

and as allegedly strong supporters of the communist regime they were said

to be the most dangerous enemy of the Nazi leadership and so must be dealt

with ﬁrst. Himmler had, in any case, set in motion a systematic policy of

discrimination and terror against the Jews, who were concentrated over-

whelmingly in the towns, as part of his police duties. He needed only to

extend and step up these measures to turn ‘providing security through the

police’ into a policy of ethnic extermination. The Jews’ homes and posses-

sions were a very welcome source of booty into the bargain, as they

provided valuable resources that could be used to make further resettlement

measures considerably easier. By ‘neutralizing’ the Jews while the war was

still in progress, Himmler calculated, he stood out as the man with the

necessary brutality and the requisite means at his disposal to turn the

regime’s overblown notions of a new ethnic order for the entire ‘eastern

area’ into reality.

In addition, the fact that in August 1941 Himmler began to connect his

utopian ideas of a new order in the east with the ‘neutralization’, the

systematic murder, of the Soviet Jews was in harmony with the general

policy of the Nazi regime towards the Jews in this critical period. For in

August 1941 Hitler was attuning the regime to the idea of ﬁghting the war

in future under the banner of a ‘war against the Jews’. As relations with the

United States, which sooner or later would enter the war, deteriorated,

the propaganda machine intensiﬁed its anti-Semitic rabble-rousing: now

the Germans were no longer ﬁghting only ‘Jewish Bolshevism’—this old

Nazi propaganda slogan had been promptly and extensively reactivated at

the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union—but also a comprehensive

‘Jewish world conspiracy’, held together, allegedly, by an incipient coalition

an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilat ion 529