Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life
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of communism and capitalism. From the end of August onwards the
propaganda machine had been spreading appropriate catchphrases on a
huge scale. In this context the regime also stepped up its persecution of
German Jews. In September they not only had to suffer new types of
discrimination, but in the wake of a decision from Hitler of 18 August
67
they were obliged to wear badges identifying them as Jews and thus,
according to propaganda, be made visible as ‘the enemy within’. In August
the assumption among the Nazi leadership was still that the German Jews
would be deported to the east only a few months later, after the generally
anticipated victory over the Soviet Union.
68
Against this background Himmler could rest assured that any initiative to
radicalize anti-Jewish policy would be favourably received by his ‘Fu
¨
hrer’.
The extension of the mass executions in the Soviet Union was not a case of
Himmler acting independently, but rather an anticipation of what Hitler
had in any case planned for the period after the war: the physical extermi-
nation of the Jews, whatever form that might take. And so Himmler made
no bones about his radicalization of Jewish policy in the east. The reports
from the Einsatzgruppen were being read daily by a large number of people
at the Berlin headquarters, and conveyed a vivid impression of Himmler’s
anti-Jewish extermination policy. They were also shown to Hitler. Accord-
ing to a radio telegram from the Gestapo chief Mu
¨
ller to the Einsatzgrup-
pen: ‘Regular reports on the work of the Einsatzgruppen in the east are to be
sent to the Fu
¨
hrer.’
69
Phase II: Women and children
With Hitler’s instruction of 16 July and the decision in principle it indicated
about the structure of the civil administration, the moment had come for
Himmler, in spite of his clear setback, to deploy the three SS brigades of his
Commando Staff for their actual purpose—for those ‘special tasks I shall
give them’, as he had announced in his order of 21 May.
70
Himmler probably discussed the planned deployment of the SS cavalry
units
71
with von dem Bach-Zelewski as early as 8 July, when he visited
Bialystok. With the orders of 19 and 22 July—in other words, immediately
after Hitler had given him control of ‘providing security in the newly occupied
eastern territories through the police’ and had significantly enhanced the
status of the HSSPFs—Himmler placed the two cavalry regiments, which
530 an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilati on
were to be concentrated into one cavalry brigade at the beginning of
August, under von dem Bach-Zelewski’s command and the 1st Infantry
Brigade under the command of the HSSPF Russia South, Jeckeln.
72
On 21
July Himmler had a meeting with the commanding officer of the rear area
of army South, Karl von Roques, presumably in order to discuss the
activities of Jeckeln’s 1st Infantry Brigade within von Roques’s sphere of
responsibility.
73
Himmler personally planned the first deployment of the SS cavalry,
which was to be in the Pripet marshes. He travelled there via Kaunas and
Riga. On 29 July he flew to Kaunas, looked round the city, and spoke with
Hinrich Lohse, the new Reich Commissar for the Ostland (the Baltic States
and Byelorussia). On 31 July he continued his journey to Riga, where
amongst other things he inspected the central prison and its new inmates.
The following day he met Lohse again and also the HSSPF Hans Adolf
Pru
¨
tzmann.
74
Immediately after Himmler’s visit the latter’s men extended
the mass murders of Jews in Lithuania and Latvia. From 5 August Einsatz-
kommando 3, as the detailed report of its leader, Karl Ja
¨
ger, shows, began
with the help of Lithuanians to shoot men, women, and children indiscrim-
inately.
75
Einsatzkommando 2, stationed in Latvia, also began in August
to shoot women and children; in September 18,000 people had been
murdered.
76
Einsatzkommando ‘Tilsit’ likewise began, at the end of July
or beginning of August, to shoot women and children in considerable
numbers.
77
On the afternoon of 31 July Himmler flew from Riga to Baranowicze,
where he gave the final order for the creation of the Cavalry Brigade led by
Hermann Fegelein from the two regiments. He then discussed with von
dem Bach-Zelewski the SS cavalrymen’s continuing ‘pacification’ cam-
paign.
78
For this deployment Himmler had already issued the brigade
with special ‘Guidelines for Cavalry Units Combing Marshlands’: ‘As,
nationally speaking, the population is hostile, racially and humanly inferior,
or even, as is often the case in marsh areas, composed of criminals who have
settled there, all those who are under suspicion of helping the partisans are
to be shot, women and children are to be deported, livestock and food are
to be confiscated. The villages are to be burnt to the ground.’
79
On his visit to Baranowicze on 31 July Himmler radicalized this order, as
can be inferred from a radio message of 1 August from the 2nd Cavalry
Regiment: ‘Express command of the RFSS. All Jews must be shot. Jewish
women to be herded into the marshes.’
80
The equivalent order delivered by
an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilat ion 531
the commander of the cavalry battalion of the 1st Cavalry Regiment on 1
August was equally brutal : ‘No Jewish male to remain alive, no remnant of
any family in the villages.’
81
If the wording of these orders is a guide, Himmler had obviously
instructed that all Jewish men were to be shot and also that the women
were to be subjected to violence, though not explicitly that the latter should
be murdered. The same pattern is followed repeatedly: the gradual inclusion
of new groups of victims of the shootings was not the response to a single
and absolutely unequivocal order from Himmler, but rather there was a
longer process in which the unit leaders were progressively accustomed to
their own atrocities, indeed positively educated into being mass murderers.
Future developments show also that Himmler’s order was understood
in very different ways. The 1st Cavalry Regiment had been murdering
thousands of Jewish men, women, and children indiscriminately since 3
August in Chomsk, Motol, Telechany, Swieta Wola, Hancewicze, and
other places.
82
On 11 August the cavalry detachment of the regiment
reported 6,504 victims; in fact the number was most probably closer to
11,000.
83
By contrast, the cavalry battalion of the 2nd SS Cavalry Regiment
shot almost exclusively Jewish men: according to information given by the
regiment, between 5 and 11 August a total of 6,526, in fact presumably
around 14,000.
84
Apart from this the regiment reported: ‘Herding woman
and children into the marshes was not as successful as it should have been,
for the marshes were not so deep that people sank into them.’
85
Was that an
attempt deliberately to misinterpret Himmler’s command?
In the weeks to come the Cavalry Brigade continued its ‘cleansing
operation’ almost continuously and murdered thousands of Jews, and
from the beginning of September onwards even the members of the 2nd
Regiment began shooting women and children.
86
In fact, in August the
Cavalry Brigade had most probably already murdered more than 25,000
Jews.
87
This then triggered the spread of the mass murders to the whole
Jewish population in the rear area of the Army Group Centre, in which von
dem Bach-Zelewski as HSSPF had control.
In the meantime Himmler had long since returned from the occupied
eastern territories: on 3 August he had flown to Berlin and on 5 August had
set off for his headquarters in Rastenburg, where a series of meetings took
place in the following days.
88
From Rastenburg Himmler observed above all
the development of the mass murders committed against the Soviet civilian
population in the area of HSSPF Russia South, Jeckeln, whom he had put in
532 an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilati on
command of the 1st SS Infantry Brigade for this purpose. Jeckeln and his
brigade were supposed to play the same central role on the southern section
of the front assumed by von dem Bach-Zelewski with the help of the
Cavalry Brigade further north. The 1st Infantry Brigade began as early as
the end of July also to shoot Jewish women, doing so as part of a ‘cleansing
operation’ that took place between 27 and 30 July in the Zwiahel area.
89
The brigade reported that as a result of this ‘operation’ it had executed 800
people, ‘Jews and Jewesses aged 16 to 60’.
90
After this mass murder brigade
units carried out further ‘operations’, in the course of which they murdered
an estimated 7,000 Jewish men, women, and children.
91
Himmler was not
satisfied. He ordered Jeckeln to his headquarters on 12 August and appeared
‘indignant’ about the latter’s activity, which still left something to be
desired,
92
whereupon Jeckeln increased the number of murders.
93
At the end of August the series of mass murders organized by Jeckeln
reached its peak. In a hitherto unprecedented massacre, 23,600 people,
94
the
vast majority Jews who had been deported across the border by the Hun-
garian authorities in July–August as ‘troublesome foreigners’,
95
were mur-
dered within three days in Kamenets-Podolsk. Massacres followed in
Berdychiv
96
and Shitomir;
97
Jeckeln also played a leading role in the
massacre of the Kiev Jews at Babi Yar, in which 33,771 Jews were report-
edly executed at the end of September.
98
This wave of mass murders gave
the decisive impetus that led to commandos under Jeckeln’s jurisdiction
(Einsatzgruppe C and several police battalions that had in part already
participated in Jeckeln’s ‘operations’) also beginning a blanket extermina-
tion of the Jewish population in the summer.
99
By the beginning of October 1941 Einsatzkommando 6 belonging to
Einsatzgruppe C was the only one that had not yet executed any Jewish
women. That was to change after Himmler paid a visit to the unit on
3 October in Krivoy R og, whereupon members of Einsatzkommando
6 shot the Jewish women there also, the city being reported on 20 October
as being ‘free of Jews’.
100
On 14 October Himmler set off again for Baranowicze, this time with a
large entourage. Flying with him were, amongst others, Wolff, Pru
¨
tzmann,
and also the Reich theatre designer Benno von Arent, who had the rank of
SS-Oberfu
¨
hrer, the ‘Fu
¨
hrer’s cameraman’, Lieutenant Walter Frentz (who
was received into the SS during this journey), and a further SS photo
reporter. The reason why they were there was to become clear in
the days that followed. On arriving in Baranowicze, where von dem
an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilat ion 533
Bach-Zelewski apprised Himmler of the results to date of the ‘cleansing
operation’, the party of notables proceeded the same day to Minsk and took
up residence in the Lenin House.
101
The next morning an execution was on Himmler’s itinerary—‘partisans
and Jews’, as his work diary noted. The mass shooting took place outside
Minsk: squads of eight to ten order or security policemen, members of
Einsatzkommando 8, took turns to shoot the victims, who included
women. There are strong indications that Frentz filmed the execution; an
entry for 19 November in Himmler’s diary reads: ‘Dined on the train.
Newsreel and film of Minsk.’
102
Watching the execution, Himmler seems to have assumed the pose of a
neutral and businesslike observer. A lieutenant of the criminal police in
charge of one of the execution squads gave the following testimony after the
war: ‘After the first salvo Himmler came right up to me and looked
personally into the ditch, remarking that there was still someone alive. He
said to me, “Lieutenant, shoot that one!” ’ The man obeyed. ‘Himmler
stood beside me while I did it [ . . . ] For Himmler and his entourage the
whole thing was simply a spectacle.’
103
Afterwards Himmler made a speech to the members of the firing-squads,
in which he said that although the shootings were a heavy burden for the
marksmen they were nevertheless necessary in ‘the war of ideologies’. On
this occasion, according to the testimony of Otto Bradfisch, the leader of
Einsatzkommando 8, Himmler stated that the Fu
¨
hrer had issued a command
concerning the shooting of all Jews that must be obeyed at all costs.
104
There is nothing to corroborate this statement. If it is indeed accurate then it
took several weeks more for the new order to reach all the murder squads, a
fact that makes it unlikely that Himmler, above and beyond his comment to
Bradfisch at Minsk, was already announcing openly that all Jews were to be
murdered, as was asserted in post-war testimonies.
105
Before lunch at the Lenin House the party visited a prisoner-of-war
camp, and in the afternoon, after a drive through the ghetto, Novinki
hospital, a psychiatric institution north-west of Minsk. Five weeks later a
German police commando murdered 120 patients by gassing them. Every-
thing points to Himmler, still under the immediate impression of the
execution, having given instructions for this murder when he inspected
the institution on 15 August, apparently as part of the search for a less bloody
method of murder.
106
534 an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilati on
The next day, culture, or properly speaking cultural looting, was on
Himmler’s itinerary. On the occasion of a visit to a Minsk museum he
gave Arent the task of sifting the city’s art collections for possible exhibits to
be sent back to Germany. On the morning of 16 August Himmler flew back
to Rastenburg. That evening he met the former administrative head of
Lebensborn, Standartenfu
¨
hrer Guntrum Pflaum, whom he had given au-
thority on 11 July ‘to receive ethnic German children of good and unmixed
blood’ in the Volga German republic. Himmler now extended this task ‘to
the entire occupied territories of the European Soviet Union.’
107
In August
the Main Office of the Reich Commissariat for the Consolidation of the
Ethnic German Nation set up a branch office in Riga which was to take care
of unresolved questions relating to the property of ethnic Germans.
108
In
July Himmler had already had the Sonderkommando R (Russia) set up
under Brigadefu
¨
hrer Horst Hoffmeyer to seek out ethnic Germans still
living in the Soviet Union.
109
Himmler was therefore continuing his efforts to extend his sphere of
influence as Settlement Commissar to the occupied Soviet territories. His
order, discussed above, to Globocnik to pursue an independent settlement
policy in the east, and his attempt to make Lublin the base for it, were
projects that also belong in this context. For Himmler regarded the mass
murders of Jews, to which he devoted so much attention during these
weeks, as an integral part of a much more broadly based policy of ethnic
reordering.
On 17 August Himmler had lunch with Hitler. In the weeks following he
remained almost without a break in his own headquarters in East Prussia,
where he had numerous meetings with Hitler and also had discussions with
Ribbentrop, Lammers, Go
¨
ring, Heydrich, Daluege, and others.
110
By the
beginning of September he had finally got his way over a decisive matter:
Hitler declared that the scope of the responsibilities of the R eich Settlement
Commissar should now include the occupied eastern territories.
111
Yet the
Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS was still not satisfied: on 18 September Heydrich sent a
draft decree to Lammers which provided for more powers to be given to the
SS and police, as well as to Himmler in his capacity as Settlement Commis-
sar both in the General Government and the Protectorate as well as in the
territories controlled by the heads of the civil administration (in other
words, in Lorraine, Alsace, Luxembourg, Carinthia–Carniola, Lower
Styria, the occupied Netherlands, and Norway). The SS and police were
now to be responsible for ‘control of security’ in ‘internal political’ matters,
an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilat ion 535
and no longer only for ‘police’ matters in these occupied territories.
In addition, Himmler wanted authority over the Minister for the East,
Rosenberg. Lammers was to indicate to Himmler several weeks later,
however, that such formal extension of his competency was not possible
for the time being.
112
At a meeting on 4 October 1941 representatives of the Ministry for the
East, led by Gauleiter Meyer, attempted to gain acceptance for the view that
the responsibilities Hitler had just confirmed as being Himmler’s related
only to the ‘implementation’ of settlement policy, while planning fell
properly to the Ministry for the East. Heydrich rejected this interpretation,
however, and instead suggested that the central offices and the institutions
subordinated to them on various levels in the occupied eastern territories
should coordinate their activities better.
113
On the same day that Heydrich sent Lammers his extensive demands,
Himmler himself set about enlarging his role as Settlement Commissar by
issuing instructions on the spot. On 18 September he embarked on further
‘travels in the Ostland’, accompanied by Heydrich, Wolff, and others: he
flew to Riga, went on the following day to Mitau ( Jelgava) and Reval
(Tallinn), then to Dorpat and Pleskau (Pskov), returning to Rastenburg on
21 September. He used this opportunity to issue various instructions
about the deportation of Russians from Estonia, and gave his HSSPF in
Riga, Pru
¨
tzmann, the task of examining whether those children whose
parents had been deported by the Soviets in 1940–1 were ‘capable of
Germanization’.
114
On 24 September Himmler took part in a discussion at the Fu
¨
hrer’s
headquarters at which Hitler appointed Heydrich Deputy Reich Protector
in Prague, and thereby created the precondition for a more radical policy
towards the Jews in the weeks to follow.
115
On 30 September he set off on
yet another tour of inspection, this time to the Ukraine. On 2 October, only
two days after the Babi Yar massacre, he met Jeckeln in Kiev and then spent
three days in Krivoy Rog. There he visited Einsatzkommando 6, which, as
described above, began immediately afterwards also to shoot Jewish
women.
116
At the request of the Wehrmacht, Himmler decided on 4 October—he
was still in Krivoy Rog—that Sonderkommando Lange, which since 1940
had been murdering Jews by means of gassing vehicles, should be brought by
plane to Novgorod in order to kill the patients in three psychiatric hospitals
there, because the accommodation was urgently needed for troops.
117
On the
536 an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilati on
same day Himmler paid a visit to Nicolajev, where Einsatzgruppe D was
based, and apparently also to Cherson, as a note indicates.
118
At the end of September—in other words, a few days before his visit—
Einsatzgruppe D had murdered the inhabitants of the ghetto in Nikolajev,
about 5,000 men, women, and children.
119
Now Himmler addressed the
members of Einsatzgruppe D, calling the shootings a difficult task but a
necessary one.
120
Presumably only a few days later Sonderkommando 11a
executed virtually all the Jewish inhabitants of Cherson.
121
With these mass
murders Einsatzgruppe D finally began murdering all Jewish members of the
civilian population in their territory, and it is evident that Himmler’s visit
brought about this radicalization.
On 5 October he was back again at the Fu
¨
hrer’s headquarters in Rastenburg,
meeting Hitler in the evening and entertaining him with his recent
Ill. 24. Himmler used his visits to the newly conquered territories to enquire into
a whole range of matters. As usual he was interested in anything and everything.
This photo from the year 1941 shows him, together with Karl Wolff, inspecting a
captured Soviet tank.
an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilat ion 537
impressions of the journey: he reported to his ‘Fu
¨
hrer’ that the inhabitants
of Kiev had made an unfavourable impression on him and a good ‘80–90%
of them’ could be ‘dispensed with’.
122
On 7 October, his forty-first birthday, Himmler held court: Daluege,
Heydrich, Wolff, Ju
¨
ttner, Grawitz, Knoblauch, and many others put on a
reception to congratulate him. In the evening he gave a dinner attended by
many of the above and also by Ribbentrop and Lammers.
123
On 13 October
he discussed the ‘Jewish question’ with Globocnik in the latter’s district of
Lublin (we shall return to this), on 14 October he had a lengthy interview
with Heydrich,
124
and on 23 October he visited the slave-labour camp in
Mogilev. It was at this time that plans were made to extend this camp
significantly; only a few days before, on 18 October, the deportation of Jews
from Reich territory had begun, and on 8 November the first of these
transports was due to reach Minsk, which lay about 150 kilometres west of
Mogilev. In mid-November the construction of a large crematorium for the
camp in Mogilev was commissioned, just as at the other destinations of
deported German Jews, in Chelmno and Riga, preparations were made to
build mass extermination complexes (which we shall also return to in more
detail). On the day of Himmler’s visit to the Mogilev camp 279 people were
executed there. Four days previously the ghetto had been liquidated; most
of the inhabitants had been shot.
125
On 24 October Himmler made a
lightning visit from Mogilev to Smolensk and met the senior commander
of the Army Group Centre, von Bock. During their meeting the shootings
of Jews in the army group’s area were discussed, according to the testimony of
von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was also present.
126
On 25 October Himmler returned to his headquarters, where he had a
meeting with Globocnik.
127
That evening Himmler and Heydrich were
with Hitler. Records of Hitler’s monologues give us an indication of
the topics discussed. After recalling his ‘prophecy’ of 30 January 1939, the
dictator stated: ‘This race of criminals has the two million dead of the World
War on its conscience, and now it has hundreds of thousands more. Let
nobody say to me: We can’t send them into the swamps! Who’s worrying
about our people? It’s good if the fear that we are exterminating the Jews
goes before us.’
128
Around three weeks later, on 15 November 1941, Himmler had a
meeting with Rosenberg in Prague to discuss cooperation in ‘police and
settlement matters’; the encounter was made necessary by Rosenberg’s
complaint of 14 October. The upshot of this discussion was an agreement
538 an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilati on
signed by both men on 19 November establishing that the HSSPFs and the
SSPFs should answer ‘personally and directly’ to the Reich and general
commissars. The territorial commissars had ‘authority in specialist matters’
over them.
129
The question of whether the ‘treatment of the Jewish prob-
lem’ was a ‘police matter’ or had to be resolved in ‘the context of overall
policy’ (a clear indication that Himmler’s radical action had strained his
authority as police chief to the point that Rosenberg was justified in
perceiving a threat to his own political leadership in the east) was to be
solved by means of ‘dual accountability’: The person responsible for ‘Jewish
questions’ on the HSSPF’s staff would have the same responsibility in the
Reich commissar’s office.
130
On 16 November, the following day, both
came to report to Hitler that they had reached agreement over the most
important bones of contention. In reality they had done little more than use
set phrases to express a compromise that in the following months Himmler
would increasingly interpret to his own advantage.
131
The truly astounding amount of travelling Himmler did in these weeks
and months reveals that, after being passed over during discussions of
occupation policy, he did everything he could from the end of July to the
end of September/beginning of October to step up the mass executions of
Jews in the Soviet Union (which his murder units had already begun under
the pretext of their duties as ‘security police’), to the point of turning them
into a comprehensive genocide: in all the territories where his Einsatzgrup-
pen were operating the decisive impetus to move to the systematic murder
of the Jewish civilian population came in every case from him personally.
‘I decided’, he was to explain on 6 October 1943 to the SS-Gruppenfu
¨
hrer,
‘in this case also to find a clear solution. I did not see myself as justified in
eradicating the men—by that I mean in killing them or having them
killed—only to let their children grow up to avenge them by killing our
sons and grandsons.’
132
And on 24 May he expressed himself in almost
exactly the same terms in Sonthofen to the Wehrmacht generals: ‘I did not
consider myself justified—as far as Jewish women and children were
concerned—in allowing children to grow up to be the avengers who
would kill our fathers and our grandchildren. I would have seen that as
cowardly. As a result the issue was solved uncompromisingly.’
133
The
formulations Himmler chose in these addresses indicate that he really did
take the decision to murder the women and children on his own initiative—
secure in his confidence that such actions reflected the intentions of the
highest authority, those of Hitler himself.
an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilat ion 539