Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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His strategy of using a campaign of bloody ethnic cleansing to extend

what at ﬁrst were responsibilities solely for police matters into the task of

enforcing a comprehensive ‘ethnic policy’ in the newly occupied territories

was in the end successful. This method was not new: in the Protectorate and

in occupied Poland he had already made use of the brute force of the

security police to advance his ambitions in the ﬁeld of ‘settlement policy’.

Himmler’s technique of meshing his very diverse spheres of responsibility in

the most varied policy areas had proved effective yet again, though with

fateful consequences.

540 an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilati on

From Mass Murder to the

‘Final Solution’

rom the autumn of 1941onwards the Nazi regime began gradually to

extend the mass murder of the Jews to the whole of Europe. The so-

called territorial plans for ‘solving the Jewish question’ had already envisaged

deporting the European Jews to Madagascar, an area which lacked adequate

facilities for survival, and so to destroy them there. From the beginning of

1941 the leadership was determined to achieve this aim within the territory

of the Soviet Union that was scheduled for conquest, in other words, in the

area where, since summer 1941, Himmler’s commandos had been engaged

in a campaign of mass murder of the local Jewish population. It was

inevitable that the Jews who were being deported to ‘the east’ from autumn

1941 onwards would be caught up in this murderous policy, and this

evidently created a situation in which the objectives as far as the ‘ﬁnal

solution’ was concerned became even more radical. Now it was no longer

simply a question of letting the Jews who had been deported die out over

the medium or long term, but rather of ‘eliminating’ them completely

through mass murder and doing so during the course of the war.

The widespread view that this process resulted from a single order from

Hitler does not do justice to its complexity. There was in fact a consensus

within the leadership of the regime, and also among numerous senior

functionaries in the occupied territories, that the ‘Jewish question’ should

be ‘solved’ in a murderous fashion. But the realization of this aim occurred

through the interplay of guidelines from above and initiatives from below

that was characteristic of the regime.

Three elements can be determined that were essential for setting in

motion the process of systematic mass murder: the preparation and actual

commencement of deportations ‘to the east’; the expansion of the murder

campaigns beyond the occupied Soviet territory to embrace particular

regions of east and south-east Europe; and ﬁnally the planning and con-

struction of sites for mass extermination in occupied Poland. During the

ﬁrst months of 1942, out of these elements Himmler and Heydrich fash-

ioned step by step a programme that envisaged the extermination of the

majority of European Jews before the end of the year.

Himmler played a

key role in this process: continually referring back to Hitler, he issued orders

in the latter’s name, made suggestions, encouraged initiatives.

In August 1941 Hitler was still insisting that they could start deporting Jews

to the occupied eastern territories only after Germany had defeated the Soviet

Union.

However, from the beginning of September he was evidently

considering revising this decision. He left the soundings to Himmler. On

2 September, following lunch with Hitler, the Reichsfu

hrer-SS discussed the

topic ‘Jewish question—deportations from the Reich’ with Friedrich-Wilhelm

Kru

ger, the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) in the General Govern-

ment. However, when he became aware that the General Government

could not be used for that purpose, on 4 September he approached Wilhelm

Koppe, HSSPF in the Warthegau. Koppe wrote to him on 10 September

suggesting they could put ‘60,000 Jews in the Litzmannstadt [Ło

] ghetto’.

Other people were also raising the issue. On 14 September the Minister

for the East, Alfred Rosenberg, proposed to Hitler that they should imme-

diately begin the deportation of the central European Jews that had long

been planned, because the previous day the Soviet government had begun

to deport the Volga Germans.

Two days later Otto Abetz, the German

ambassador in Paris, passed on a proposal from his ‘Jewish expert’ that the

Jews from the whole of Europe should be deported to the eastern territories.

Himmler responded positively: Jewish prisoners in camps could be deported

to the east as long as transport was available.

On the same day he discussed

the topic ‘Jewish question. Settlement of the east’ with Ulrich Greifelt, the

head of his Staff Main Ofﬁce for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German

Nation, as well as with Konrad Meyer, his chief planning ofﬁcer for the

eastern settlement programme. Moreover, on this same day Abetz met

Hitler, who expressed his opinion in the most brutal manner on how his

future eastern empire should be organized.

On 17 September Hitler discussed Rosenberg’s proposal with Ribben-

trop, and on the eighteenth Himmler informed Arthur Greiser, the Reich

Governor of the Wartheland, of Hitler’s express wish that

542 from mass murder to the ‘ﬁnal solution’

as soon as possible the Old Reich and the Protectorate should be cleared and freed

of Jews from west to east. I am therefore anxious, as a ﬁrst step, to transport the Jews

from the Old Reich and the Protectorate to the eastern territories that the Reich

acquired two years ago and to do it if possible this year in order to be able to get rid

of them further east next spring. For the winter I intend to put around 60,000 Jews

from the Old Reich and the Protectorate in the Litzmannstadt ghetto, which I

gather has room to spare.

The reasons for Hitler’s decision not to make the deportation of the Jews

living in the areas Germany controlled dependent on the ending of the war

were complex. The fate of the Volga Germans was only a pretext. In August

1941, as has already been mentioned, Hitler decided in future to ﬁght the

war under the slogan of ‘a war against the Jews’. In view of the fact that

it was looking increasingly likely that America would enter the war, he

believed he had found a formula that would explain the impending coalition

between communism and capitalism: the ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ covered

both opponents. As a result, from his point of view the European Jews were

to be seen as members of the enemy camp, and their deportation was the

logical consequence. On 21 September Wilhelm Koeppen

, the Ministry of

the East’s liaison ofﬁcial in Hitler’s headquarters, noted that ‘in the event of

America’s entry into the war’ Hitler was considering ‘retaliatory measures

against the German Jews because of the way the Volga Germans had been

treated’. That the deportations were intended to be understood as a threat

to the United States is underlined by the fact that they took place in full

view of the public, were commented on in the presence of foreign corre-

spondents in Germany,

and received considerable attention in the interna-

tional press.

Since Hitler was completely convinced of the existence of a

Jewish world conspiracy, he relied on awareness of the deportations inﬂu-

encing American foreign policy in his favour.

There was also a domestic-policy motive for the deportations. By being

carried out in public and placed in context by propaganda, they could be

used to denounce and punish the Jews as ‘the people who were pulling the

strings behind the air raids’,

while the household goods of the deportees

could be donated to the non-Jewish victims of air raids and to other people

who were in need who could also be assigned ‘Jewish housing’.

The

calculation behind it was that the numerous beneﬁciaries of the deportations

would thereby make themselves complicit in the Jewish policy. However,

there are various indications that the deportation of the central European

from mass murder to the ‘ﬁnal solution’ 543

Jews was intended right from the beginning to be the ﬁrst step on the way to

a programme involving the deportation of all European Jews.

The background to this was provided by the reaction of the occupiers to

the growing resistance in the territory under their control. The German

attack on the Soviet Union resulted in the mobilization of resistance to the

hated occupation throughout German-occupied Europe. In particular, the

communist underground movement gradually overcame the paralysis that

had been caused by the Hitler–Stalin pact of August 1939. In the summer

and even more in the autumn of 1941 the Germans experienced an increas-

ing number of acts of sabotage and assassinations. As a result they increased

their repressive measures.

Thus, the military commander in Serbia had already begun shooting

hostages in large numbers in July as a ‘reprisal’ for acts of resistance.

France such executions took place for the ﬁrst time on 6 September,

and then, on Hitler’s instructions, increasingly in October; in Belgium on

the 15 and 26 September; and in Norway, after strikes in Oslo, also in the

middle of September.

In Norway Reich Commissar Terboven imposed a civil state of emer-

gency on the district of greater Oslo on 10 September 1941. On the same

day he asked Himmler whether SS and police jurisdiction could not be

extended to the whole of the Norwegian population, in order to prevent

‘German justice in the form represented by the Ministry of Justice from

taking root here’. Himmler agreed by return of post and, only ﬁve days

later, transferred judicial responsibility for the Norwegian population to

HSSPF Friedrich Rediess. By 17 September, when the new arrangement

came into effect, Terboven had achieved his goal.

After the attack on the Soviet Union the commander of the security

police and SD in the Netherlands, Wilhelm Harster, ordered mass arrests of

communists.

On 16 September the OKW issued an order that in general

the execution of ﬁfty to 100 communists was to be considered ‘appropriate’

in reprisal for the assassination of one German soldier.

Heydrich, who had become deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia

and Moravia at the end of September, imposed a civil state of emergency

immediately following his appointment and introduced courts martial; 404

men and women were shot during the period of the state of emergency.

The resistance movement in Greece carried out a number of assassina-

tions at the end of August and in September.

In response, at a meeting

with Hitler at the beginning of November, Himmler proposed punishing

544 from mass murder to the ‘ﬁnal solution’

the large Jewish community in Saloniki and deporting it.

In his presenta-

tion Himmler made the following points: ﬁrst, he spoke generally about

‘moving people of alien race ( Jews)’, mentioned the cities of Riga, Reval

(Talinn), and Minsk as ‘main centres’, and ﬁnally referred to Saloniki, where

he saw a particular ‘threat because of the links between Jews and Levan-

tines’. His presentation clearly shows that at this point he already conceived

the deportations in terms of a Europe-wide project. Hitler approved

Himmler’s presentation and assigned him the task of removing the ‘Jewish

element’ from Saloniki. In fact, the deportations of the Jews from Saloniki

did not take place until 1943.

Himmler was not alone in wanting to focus reprisals on the Jews. Since

the autumn of 1941 the military occupation authorities in Serbia and France

had been taking the initiative to concentrate their reprisals on the Jewish

minority. In October 1941 the Wehrmacht in Serbia began systematically

shooting Jewish men, whom they had targeted for internment since August,

as ‘a reprisal’ for assassinations. By the beginning of November 8,000 Jews

had already fallen victim to these murders; their dependants were interned

during the winter and murdered in gas trucks the following spring.

The military authorities in France had been arresting thousands of mainly

foreign Jews since spring 1941.InDecember1941 they no longer responded

to assassinations with the shooting of hostages but began to threaten to deport

a number of communists and Jews ‘to the east’. At ﬁrst, however, the threat

could not be implemented because of the transport situation. The ﬁrst trans-

port of a thousand hostages to Auschwitz left France only in March 1942.

From the point of view of the Nazi leadership, the intensiﬁcation and

expansion of repressive measures against the Jews was only logical. As they

worked on the assumption that communism and the Jews were substantially

identical, they imagined that it was the Jewish minorities who were mainly

behind the resistance activity even outside eastern Europe. Thus, the fact

that the Nazi leadership was so determined to initiate the deportation of the

Jews in the late summer of 1941 was no doubt due in part to the spectre of a

Jewish–communist resistance movement.

To start with, however, it proved extremely difﬁcult to carry out the

deportations. At the beginning of October the plan to place 60,000 Jews

in the Ło

ghetto met with strong opposition, not only from Georg

Thomas, the head of the Wehrmacht Armaments’ Ofﬁce,

but also from

the district governor, Friedrich Uebelhoer, putting him in bad odour with

from mass murder to the ‘ﬁnal solution’ 545

Himmler as a result.

According to Uebelhoer, the Ło

ghetto was not a

‘decimation ghetto’ into which one could pack more and more people, but

a ‘work ghetto’.

The Reich Governor’s ofﬁce eventually worked out a

deal with Eichmann reducing the original ﬁgure of 60,000 to 25,000 Jews

and Gypsies. Himmler had evidently offered Greiser a deal: ‘in return’ he

could murder no fewer than 100,000 indigenous Jews.

At the beginning

of October the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce also gave orders that the Riga

and Minsk ghettos would have to take 50,000 people between them.

On 6 October Hitler announced to his luncheon guests that all Jews had

to be ‘removed’ from the Protectorate and the Jews from Vienna and Berlin

should ‘disappear’ simultaneously with the ‘Protectorate Jews’.

Four days

later, on 10 October, Heydrich announced the deportation of the ﬁrst 5,000

Jews from Prague.

They could be ‘put in [ . . . ] the camps with the

communist prisoners’ in the eastern territories.

On the same occasion

Heydrich stated that Hitler wanted ‘the Jews to be removed from German

territory, if possible by the end of the year’.

From the spring of 1941 the government of the General Government was

also aiming to have ‘their’ Jews deported in the course of the year to the

Soviet territory that was going to be conquered. However, in mid-October

Rosenberg made it clear to Frank that for the time being there was no

chance of that happening. As a result the government of the General

Government began to contemplate ‘solving’ the ‘Jewish question’ in its

own territory.

That same month Governor-General Frank held a series of

meetings in the capitals of the various districts, at which Jewish policy was

discussed in distinctly radical terms. It was decided that in future the death

penalty would be imposed on people who left ghettos. This inaugurated a

manhunt directed at all Jews who were outside the ghettos.

On 1 August 1941 Galicia was incorporated into the General Govern-

ment. During the weeks prior to its being absorbed the so-called Einsatz-

kommando z.b.V (‘for special assignments’) had launched a campaign of

terror in the district, targeted in particular at Jewish men, especially those in

prominent positions. After the incorporation of Galicia into the General

Government this commando, which in the meantime had been designated

as the headquarters of the commander of the security police in Galicia, did

not let up in its campaign of terror.

From the beginning of October the

security police in Galicia applied their murderous policy to all Jews without

distinction, as the other Einsatzkommandos were doing at the same time in

the Soviet districts. Terrible massacres were taking place week after week.

546 from mass murder to the ‘ﬁnal solution’

Thus the practice of systematic mass murder had already reached the

General Government at the same time as Rosenberg was giving his negative

response to Frank.

In the same period concrete preparations were being made for the

systematic murder of Jews in the district of Lublin bordering on Galicia,

in other words, the district that in 1939 had been envisaged as forming the

‘Jewish reservation’ (and in spring 1942 was actually to serve as the reception

area for the Jews deported from the Reich). A central role was played by the

local SS and police leader Odilo Globocnik, to whom three months earlier

Himmler had assigned vital tasks in the future ethnic reorganization of the

east. On 13 October Globocnik met his Reichsfu

hrer

in order to discuss a

proposal made two weeks before to restrict the ‘inﬂuence of the Jews’, who

must be ‘targeted’ for the sake of political security’.

It can deﬁnitely be

assumed that Globocnik proposed the construction of a primitive extermi-

nation camp and that Himmler gave him permission.

This meeting marked a turning-point. Two or three weeks later, at the

beginning of November—in the meantime the ‘Jewish question’ had been

discussed at several government meetings in the General Government—

work began on the construction of Belzec extermination camp.

The fact

that its capacity was initially restricted and that no further extermination

camps were built in the General Government before spring 1942 indicates

that in autumn 1941 Globocnik had not yet received the order to prepare for

the extermination of all the Jews in the General Government. His commis-

sion concerned the district of Lublin and possibly also that of Galicia.

On 20 October 1941, a week after his conversation with Globocnik,

Himmler, together with Ribbentrop, met a high-level Slovakian delegation

at the Fu

hrer’s headquarters consisting of the President, Josef Tiso, Prime

Minister and Foreign Minister Vojtech Tuka, as well as Interior Minister

Alexander Mach. Himmler used the occasion to offer the Slovakian leader-

ship the possibility of deporting ‘their’ Jews to a specially designated terri-

tory in the General Government. His proposal received a unanimously

positive response.

There are indications that, as a result of this meeting,

the construction of a second extermination camp was initiated in the district

of Lublin–Sobibor.

It was probably during his visit to Minsk in mid-August or shortly

thereafter that Himmler issued his instructions to ﬁnd a method of killing

that exposed his men to less stress than the massacres.

A few days after

Himmler had witnessed a mass shooting there, von dem Bach-Zelewski

from mass murder to the ‘ﬁnal solution’ 547

tried—probably in vain—to get Herbert Lange, the chief of the SS Son-

derkommando that for some time had been murdering patients in the

Warthegau in gas vans, to give a demonstration in Minsk.

Arthur Nebe,

the commander of Einsatzgruppe B, who was probably present during

Himmler’s visit, also initiated experiments. Following attempts to kill

mental patients through the use of explosives,

patients from asylums

in Mogilev and Novinki near Minsk (which Himmler had visited on

15 August) were killed in hermetically sealed rooms through car-exhaust

fumes introduced from outside.

Finally, the decision was made in favour

of using gas vans. Before the end of the year all four Einsatzgruppen were

using this method.

From November 1941 onwards gas vans were also deployed in the

Warthegau, where from mid-October to 9 November

20,000 Jews ar-

rived from the Reich as well as 5,000 Gypsies from the Burgenland, in a total

of twenty-ﬁve transports. The gas vans were used for murdering indigenous

Jews as had been agreed, ‘in return’ for the deportations. There is evidence

for the use of gas vans in Chelmno from 8 December, where in the

meantime a base for gas vans had been established.

This was the ﬁrst

extermination camp to begin its fearful work, and from January 1942

inhabitants of the Ło

ghetto were being killed in Chelmno.

Alongside the development of gas vans, in the autumn of 1941 gas

chambers were being installed in occupied eastern Europe. On 25 October

Erhard Weitzel, the desk ofﬁcer for racial questions in the Ministry of the

Eastern Territories, informed Reich Commissar Hinrich Lohse of the con-

struction of such a gas chamber: Oberdienstleiter Brack of the Chancellery

of the Fu

hrer of the NSDAP, the organizer of the ‘Euthanasia’ programme,

would soon be coming to Riga in order to make the necessary prepara-

tions.

However, the announcement was premature: the murders in Riga

were carried out in gas vans, not gas chambers.

In the General Government, as we have seen, the construction of Belzec

extermination camp had begun at the start of November and a second

extermination camp (Sobibor) may have been prepared at the end of

1941.

Brack played a role here. He met Himmler on 14 December and

agreed to send his specialists to the General Government to help establish

and run the extermination camps. By the summer of 1942 Brack had

assigned a total of ninety-two specialists in murder.

Gas was also the murder method that came to be used in Auschwitz

concentration camp, which had been considerably enlarged since the start of

548 from mass murder to the ‘ﬁnal solution’

the war with the Soviet Union. Experiments were carried out with the

poison gas Zyklon B, which was already used in the camp for the purposes

of disinfection.

The ﬁrst of these occurred at the beginning of September,

when 600 Soviet POWs and 250 sick prisoners were killed with Zyklon B

in a cellar of Block 11. Later, in the middle of September, 900 Soviet POWs

were murdered in the same way in the morgue of the crematorium.

the end of the year it can be assumed that a number of small groups of

prisoners—in all likelihood exhausted Jewish forced labourers from Upper

Silesia—had fallen victim to the Zyklon B experiments in Auschwitz.

In November 1941 the SS ordered the construction of a large crematori-

um in Mogilev (around 150 kilometres east of Minsk), which suggests that a

large extermination camp was going to be located there. During the early

months of 1942, however, the SS decided to expand their extermination

facilities in Poland instead. The ovens that were originally planned for

Mogilev were sent to Auschwitz in 1942.

This evidence can be summarized as follows: while experiments with

Zyklon B were going on in Auschwitz, in the autumn of 1941 the SS began

building installations for murdering people with gas near those ghettos that

were the destinations for the initial wave of deportations from the Reich—

in Riga, near Ło

(Chelmno), in Belzec, probably also in Mogilev, in other

words, in the Minsk area. In those regions that were of central importance

for the future transfers of population being planned within the context of

the racial ‘New Order’, at the very least the indigenous Jewish population

that was ‘incapable of work’ was to be exterminated. In addition, it was still

the intention to deport the remaining Jews to the occupied Soviet territory,

a ‘ﬁnal solution’ plan which was also based on the physical extermination of

the European Jews.

The deportations to Minsk began on 8 November. The day before, on

7 November, the German security police had murdered around 12,000

inhabitants of the Minsk ghetto with the help of indigenous auxiliaries.

Eight transports with around 8,000 people arrived in Minsk before the

deportations were interrupted at the end of November as a result of the

poor transport situation. In view of the approaching winter Himmler had

to abandon his original intention of deporting the central European Jews

‘to the east’

before the end of the year; the plans now ran into the

coming spring.

When the deportations to Riga began on 19 November the construction

of the KZ that was intended for the German Jews had not even begun.

from mass murder to the ‘ﬁnal solution’ 549