Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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took place in the new Reich Chancellery, in the presence of Hitler and the

entire leadership of the Third Reich; Himmler gave the funeral oration.

Reﬂecting the measures taken in the Protectorate, the Reichsfu

hrer empha-

sized the motif of revenge: ‘We have the sacred duty to atone for his death,

to carry forward his work, and now, even more than before, mercilessly to

annihilate the enemies of our people without showing any weakness.’

With Heydrich, Himmler had lost his most important colleague, the man

who during the 1930s had built up the security police apparatus, who after

the outbreak of war had established the Einsatzgruppen, who in past months

had been largely responsible for organizing the mass murders in the Soviet

Union, and who had prepared and initiated the deportations from various

European countries. Himmler had always been sure of Heydrich’s loyalty,

even if, with Hitler’s assignment to Heydrich of preparations for the ‘ﬁnal

solution’, a second chain of command had been created alongside Himm-

ler’s general responsibility for combating all ‘enemies of the Reich’. These

competing chains of command do not, however, appear to have led to

serious rivalry between Himmler and Heydrich. On the contrary, Himmler

considered that in the ﬁrst instance and above all it was his own power that

had been adversely affected by his colleague’s murder.

Heydrich was buried in the Invaliden cemetery. In the evening Himmler

made another speech to the leaders of the SS-Oberabschnitte and the heads

of the SS-Ofﬁces. Apart from the admonition not to neglect their own

security—‘for we want to kill the enemy, the enemy mustn’t kill us’—

Himmler spoke about the future tasks of the SS: the further ‘amalgamation

with the police’, the ‘bringing in and amalgamation of the Germanic

peoples with us’, as well as ‘settlement and ethnic migration in Europe’.

‘We shall certainly have concluded the ethnic migration of the Jews within a

year,’ he continued, ‘then no one will be migrating any more. For now

things have ﬁnally got to be sorted out.’

From the weird perspective of Himmler and the Nazi leadership the

assassination of Heydrich had to be avenged with a further radicalization of

Jewish persecution; they were in a ‘war against the Jews’, and felt massively

challenged by the assassination and especially by this enemy. The SS

leadership—Himmler took over the RSHA himself—immediately began

to press for the further stepping-up of mass murder that had begun in May.

The planners in the RSHA and on Globocnik’s staff beneﬁted from the fact

that, because of the summer offensive, a transport ban was imposed between

19 June and 7 July. During this period they could revise the existing

570 the murder of the european jews

deportation plans. Under the title ‘Operation Reinhardt’ (in honour of the

dead Heydrich), Globocnik’s responsibility was now extended to cover the

murder of all Jews in the General Government.

After the assassination: Himmler launches the

Europe-wide extermination programme

After the death of Heydrich the deportations from the Reich continued

with undiminished intensity. When the transport ban was imposed in the

east those Jews who had hitherto been exempted from the ‘transports to the

east’ became the focus of the planners: the elderly and inﬁrm, decorated war

veterans and their dependants, as well as other ‘privileged’ groups. Between

June and October 1942 around 45,000 people were deported to There-

sienstadt, which now served as a ‘ghetto for the elderly’.

In view of the transport ban, Himmler had the idea of deporting more

Jews from western Europe ‘for labour deployment’. Following his orders,

on 11 June 1942 the SS Jewish experts in the various countries arranged to

transport ‘15,000 Jews from the Netherlands, 10,000 from Belgium, and

100,000 from France’. They also obeyed Himmler’s instruction that ‘10%of

Jews incapable of work’ could ‘be included’.

According to Himmler’s

order of May 1942, this meant that these people would be subjected to

‘special measures’, in other words, would be murdered in the gas chambers

of Auschwitz immediately on arrival.

On 23 June, when informed that the total planned for France could not

be achieved for organizational reasons, Himmler responded indignantly: the

tempo envisaged hitherto (of three transports of 1 ,000 people each per

week) would have to be ‘signiﬁcantly increased [ . . . ] with the aim of

completely freeing France of Jews as soon as possible’.

This order

must be seen as part of the acceleration of the extermination of the Jews

throughout Europe that had been initiated in May and June. The appoint-

ment of Carl-Albrecht Oberg, hitherto SS and Police Leader in the Polish

district of Radom, as HSSPF in France from 1 June will have convinced

Himmler that the organizational preconditions for such a comprehensive

deportation of the Jews were now in place.

In fact, following Himmler’s

order, the tempo of deportations from France was signiﬁcantly increased.

Whereas in March and June, prior to his intervention, only ﬁve transports

the murder of the european jews 571

had been achieved, between July and November 1942 a total of ﬁfty-three

transports, most of them containing 1,000 people, left France bound for

Auschwitz.

And on 21 July, for the ﬁrst time, ‘Jews incapable of work’,

whom Himmler had insisted be deported, were separated from the other

deportees immediately on arrival and murdered in the gas chambers.

The ﬁrst ‘selection’ had, however, already occurred in Auschwitz some

weeks earlier. From the beginning of July 1942 onwards transports from

Slovakia no longer went to the district of Lublin but to Auschwitz, where

on 4 July ‘those incapable of work’ were for the ﬁrst time murdered

immediately on arrival. There is evidence that by 21 October deportees

from eight transports from Slovakia had been murdered in this way.

After

the lifting of the transport ban most of the transports from the Reich were

sent to Minsk, and in the following months also to R iga, Treblinka, and

Auschwitz. Most of the deportees were now killed immediately after the

trains had arrived.

After the lifting of the transport ban in July deportations from

occupied Poland also began again in large numbers. The aim of making

the General Government ‘free of Jews’ in the near future corresponded to

the Germanization policy that was being simultaneously initiated. On

12 June Himmler had already ordered the ‘Germanization’ of large areas in

the east, including the General Government, to be speeded up and completed

within twenty years. At the beginning of July HSSPF Kru

ger advocated

approving the settlement of Germans in the General Government.

Deportations from the district of Cracow to Belzec began again in the

second week of July, after the period of the transport ban had been used

considerably to enlarge the capacity of the gas chambers.

On 9 July

Himmler discussed with Kru

ger and Globocnik the latter’s proposals of

3 July. Although these have not survived, we know that they were particu-

larly concerned with Jewish policy in the district of Lublin.

On 11, 12, and 18 July Himmler had frequent meetings with Hitler.

Afterwards he pressed for increased transport capacity. Karl Wolff, the head

of his private ofﬁce, telephoned the state secretary in the Reich Transport

Ministry, who assured him that from 22 July there would be ‘every day a

train with 5,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka, as well as a train from

Przemysl (Lublin district) to Belzec twice weekly’.

While we can only

assume that Himmler discussed the details of the mass murder of the Polish

Jews with Hitler, we can be certain that, as far as the occupied Soviet

572 the murder of the european jews

territories were concerned, Himmler had received explicit instructions from

Hitler to make these ‘free of Jews’.

On 17 and 18 July Himmler visited Auschwitz and used the opportunity to

witness a demonstration of how people were murdered in a gas chamber.

On the evening of 17 July, at a social occasion put on by the Gauleiter of

Upper Silesia, contrary to his normal habits he drank several glasses of wine

and gave the appearance of being relaxed and content. His behaviour and

comments led one of those present to assume that the Nazi leadership had

now decided to murder the European Jews—a piece of information that was

passed on to Switzerland and from there was telegraphed to the west via the

representative of the Jewish World Congress, Gerhart Riegner.

Himmler travelled on from Auschwitz to visit Globocnik in Lublin,

where, on the following day, he ordered Kru

ger to ensure that the ‘resettle-

ment of the whole Jewish population of the General Government has been

carried out and completed by 31 December 1942’. After this date Jews would

no longer be permitted to reside in the General Government, apart from in

four large camps.

Three days later the dissolution of the Warsaw ghetto

began, which was to take place in stages. The majority of the inhabitants

were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp, which had just been

built and was located only 50 kilometres from Warsaw.

By 12 September

over 250,000 people had been deported, a rough average of 5,000 per day.

At the same time Himmler’s organization took over the whole system of

Jewish forced labour, in other words, the area of operation that represented

the only barrier to the complete annihilation of the Jewish population. In

the hands of the SS forced labour, in the sense of ‘extermination through

labour’, now became an integral part of the murder programme in the

General Government.

In May and June 1942 it had looked as if Jewish workers would still be

deployed in large numbers in the General Government, that is to say, that

the extermination policy in the General Government was still targeted

primarily at the Jewish population that was ‘incapable of work’. However,

hardly had HSSPF Kru

ger taken over responsibility for all ‘Jewish affairs’ at

the beginning of June when the policy changed radically. His July order to

the effect that only Jews aged between 16 and 32 were permitted to be

employed proved decisive. This restriction, which is reminiscent of Himm-

ler’s directive of May 1942 (which referred to people aged between 16 and

32), represented a death sentence for all those outside this age cohort.

14 August Kru

ger went a step further and ordered the dissolution of all

the murder of the european jews 573

Jewish forced-labour camps. Also, on 5 September, Field-Marshal Keitel

ordered the Wehrmacht to replace all Jewish workers in the General

Government with Poles.

All Jews in the General Government were

now exposed to the strategy that Himmler had been pressing for since the

beginning of 1942, of combining forced labour and mass murder to form a

comprehensive extermination programme.

As this chapter has shown, in the summer of 1942 Himmler’s anti-Jewish

policy had culminated in the inclusion of a whole series of European

countries in the policy of systematic mass murder. However, in the second

half of the year he was to press for the murder-rate in those countries that

had already been included in the Holocaust to be stepped up still further

and, in addition, to extend the deportation programme to more countries.

The following chapters will show that for Himmler the launching of the

Holocaust in Europe was only the ﬁrst step on the path to a much more

comprehensive vision of a new order. For it is clear from an assessment of

his ceaseless activities during these months that the ﬁnal decision to murder

the European Jews was just the ﬁrst of a number of fundamental turning-

points that Himmler was to engineer during the coming months, and which

had the object of securing the central role in the establishment of the Nazi

empire for his SS and an unique historical position for himself.

To this end, the Reichsfu

hrer sought to combine what, at ﬁrst glance,

seem completely different topics to form a political programme, geared to

the racial domination and reordering of Europe. Thus, in the next two

chapters we shall examine more closely two ﬁelds in which Himmler also

took important decisions in the summer of 1942: settlement policy and the

recruitment of non-German citizens for his Waffen-SS. However, in order

to explain the importance of these turning-points in the summer of 1942,it

is necessary ﬁrst to look at the chronology both before and after this period.

Only then will we turn our attention to the second half of 1942.

The events of 1942 strikingly demonstrate that Himmler was a man who

knew how to combine ambitious ideological notions with a sure instinct for

power. And this is apparent in the way he systematically exploited the

functions he had acquired as Reichsfu

hrer-SS. What begins to become

evident in 1942 is a fantasy world displaying the most extreme degree of

brutality, inhumanity, and absolute ruthlessness in power politics, a fantasy

world that has Himmler’s characteristic stamp upon it and which he be-

lieved he could turn into reality in a very short space of time.

574 the murder of the european jews

Settlement Policy and Racial

Selection

recisely at the point when he was setting about drawing the whole of

Europe into the Holocaust, in May and June 1942 Himmler took

decisive steps to standardize the diverse SS settlement plans and extend

them to the whole territory of the future Reich. The systematic murder of

the Jews was only the beginning (as the coincidence of these decisions

makes clear) of his project to subject the whole of Europe to a radical racial

‘reordering’.

Himmler had a mental picture of the European map separated into a

number of zones, distinguished by the ‘racial calibre’ of their inhabitants and

the latter’s future role in a Greater Germanic Reich. By comparison,

national boundaries were of secondary importance for him. In the top

rank according to his estimation were the countries whose inhabitants he

classed as ‘Teutons’ (Germanen): these were places where ‘Germanic’ vo-

lunteers could be recruited into the Waffen-SS and where later potential

settlers for the east could be found. In a Greater Germanic Reich these

countries would stand side-by-side with the German Empire as equal

partners. In practice, however, he could treat only Norway and the Nether-

lands, which were administered by civil commissars, fully as Germanic

territories, and thus he intervened in the internal politics of those countries.

The fascist movements he supported and their leaders, Quisling and Mus-

sert, met with little success, however. In Belgium conditions were more

difﬁcult: only the Flemish could really count as Teutons, whereas by origin

the Walloons could not. Yet a process of mental revision seems to have

occurred in him, for he reacted very positively to attempts by the Walloons

to present themselves to him as ‘romanized Teutons’, and he supported

research projects designed to prove this theory. The fact that the Belgian

territories were subject to military rule was, however, an obstacle for it was

less open to his inﬂuence. He also in fact regarded Denmark as ‘Germanic’,

but in this case the restrained German occupation policy prevented him

from taking any signiﬁcant action. Sweden was undoubtedly ‘Germanic’,

but neutral, and so in the case of this potential ‘brother country’ he also had

to exercise severe restraint. All in all, therefore, his attempts at Germanic

integration remained pipe-dreams; the only degree of success he achieved

was in recruiting volunteers and bringing national police forces into line

with the German pattern (as discussed elsewhere in this volume).

The second zone on Himmler’s map of Europe consisted of those areas

the Reich had already annexed or was going to annex, where the inhabitants

would have to be sorted on the basis of racial criteria: the Protectorate

belonged to this zone, also the occupied Polish and Soviet territories, as well

as Alsace and Lorraine (which were under the authority of German Gau-

leiters as chiefs of the civil administration and thus already half integrated

into the Reich) and the Yugoslav territories annexed in 1941.

The third zone was made up of those eastern and southern European

states allied to the Third Reich in which there were signiﬁcant ethnic

German minorities. Acting on Hitler’s instructions, Himmler assumed the

leadership of these ethnic Germans and represented their ‘interests’ (as he

himself deﬁned them) with regard to the governments of these countries.

The countries in question were Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, and Romania;

Serbia, which was under military rule, was a special case. Even here his main

concern was in the ﬁnal analysis the recruitment of ‘volunteers’ from the

ethnic German population; though he did not state it openly, at bottom he

became more and more convinced that these populations should be dis-

persed and those belonging to them used to further his settlement projects in

eastern Europe.

The remaining European territories that were not to become part of the

racially based empire that was to be created interested him by comparison

far less: thus France was signiﬁcant to him above all because he was

responsible for the security of the occupying forces. Italy was German’s

most important ally, and its autonomy had to be respected at all costs, which

is why he gave complete support to Hitler’s policy of strengthening this

alliance by abandoning the claims of the ethnic Germans to South Tyrol.

Finland was regarded as a loyal ally, to whose population he accorded high

status because of its particular racial ancestry, even if they were not ‘Teu-

tons’.

576 settlement policy and racial selection

The settlement policy that will be discussed in this chapter therefore

related exclusively to the territories designated here as the second zone,

namely, territories that the German Reich had annexed or intended to

annex.

In an earlier chapter we have traced the early stages of Himmler’s racist,

‘selection’-based settlement policy and seen that his efforts were concen-

trated at ﬁrst on Poland and then extended to the Protectorate as well as

Alsace and Lorraine.

After the Balkan war Himmler also included Yugoslav territory in his

endeavours—more precisely, the territories that under the names of Lower

Styria and Upper Carniola had been annexed by the R eich. In his capacity as

Settlement Commissar Himmler subjected the Slovenian population to a

racial ‘selection’ and had almost 40,000 people—members of the intelli-

gentsia and immigrants from other parts of Yugoslavia—relocated to Serbia

and Croatia. In June 1941 he ordered that all racially ‘suitable’ persons from

Lower Styria and southern Carinthia be ‘included in the measures to deploy

persons capable of re-Germanization from the eastern territories and Gen-

eral Government’.

As a ﬁrst step, however, these people were to be taken

to west and central Germany. In November 1941 and January 1942, after a

preliminary selection, a total of more than 33,000 people were transferred to

VoMi camps in the Reich, where in spring 1942 a more thorough racial

examination was conducted. In this process 15,000 people were identiﬁed as

being ‘capable of re-Germanization’, in other words, suitable for settlement

in the east. Most, however, remained in the VoMi camps until the end of

the war.

The German ethnic minority from Gotschee, an area near Lju-

blyana now part of the Italian zone of occupation, was in turn forcibly

resettled in the now-vacant areas of Lower Styria and southern Carinthia.

The outbreak of the war against the Soviet Union compelled Himmler

to revise his entire settlement planning.

Two days after the Germans

launched their attack, on 24 June, he gave his head of planning, Konrad

Meyer, in the Main Ofﬁce of the Settlement Commissariat the task of

adapting the planning to the new circumstances.

Meyer was ready in July

with a ﬁrst version of the revised ‘General Plan East’. It was now envisaged

that the General Government and the territories being annexed to the east

of it would be Germanized, though only two days later this project turned

out already to be outdated, because Hitler, at a meeting about the future of

the east, sketched out more extensive plans for annexation.

settlement policy and racial selection 577

Meanwhile the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce was working on its own

general plan for the east. It was presented in 1941 and assumed that, in

addition to the annexed Polish territories and the General Government, the

Bialystok district, the Baltic States, the western Ukraine, and Byelorussia

would also be settled by Germans. The precondition for this was the

expulsion of 31 million inhabitants of these territories.

On 28 May 1942 the Reich Settlement Commissariat Main Ofﬁce

produced a new version of its General Plan East. The suggestion was now

that so-called ‘settlement marches’ be set up in the Baltic area, the Ukraine,

and the Leningrad region, as well as thirty-six settlement bases, which

would function also as SS and police bases. In the meantime there was no

more talk of extensive relocation of indigenous populations, and instead

discussion focused on ‘decimating’ the urban population above all by means

of starvation and forced labour.

Himmler read the plan, which he considered ‘very good on the whole’,

and charged Meyer with enlarging it into a European ‘Comprehensive

Settlement Plan’ incorporating the older projects for the annexed eastern

territories but also including Alsace and Lorraine, Upper Carniola and

Southern Styria, and Bohemia and Moravia. In addition Himmler ordered

the complete ‘Germanization’ of Estonia and Latvia. The period envisaged

for this settlement process was, he instructed, to be reduced from between

twenty-ﬁve and thirty years to twenty years.

From documents Meyer presented at the end of 1942 it is apparent that

the plans now aimed to ‘transfer’ within thirty years a ‘pool of settlers’,

amounting to more than 10 million people from the Reich, more than a

million from the ‘Germanic’ countries, and 200,000 more from overseas, to

the territories to be settled. A process of ‘complete Germanization’ was

envisaged; further details about the fate of the native, non-German popula-

tion were, in the author’s view, clearly superﬂuous.

Himmler responded by

instructing Meyer to include Lithuania, White Ruthenia (Byelorussia), the

Crimea, and Taurien in the comprehensive plan also.

Work to reﬁne

these plans continued until some time in mid-1943.

The efforts put into a comprehensive settlement plan can therefore be

described as Himmler’s attempt to harmonize settlement planning as a

whole throughout his various ofﬁces.

The period in which he made

these fundamental decisions, in May and June 1942, coincided, as must be

emphasized once again, with the phase in which he was also laying the

578 settlement policy and racial selection

foundations for the whole of Europe to be included in the Holocaust and

even accelerated this process under the impact of Heydrich’s assassination.

In a speech on 16 September 1942 to the SS and police leaders from the

Russia South area Himmler set out how he saw the settlement of the eastern

territories. In the next twenty years the annexed Polish territories, the

General Government, the Baltic States, White Ruthenia, Ingria (the area

around Leningrad), and the Crimea were to be settled by ‘Teutons’. In the

remaining occupied Soviet territories bases would be established on the

main transport routes so that ‘settlement enclaves’ would arise—ﬁrst of all

‘from the Don to the Volga’, but later ‘as far as the Urals’. ‘This Germanic

east reaching to the Urals must’, according to Himmler’s vision, ‘be a

seedbed for Germanic blood, so that in 400–500 years [ . . . ] instead of 120

millions there will be 500–600 million Teutons.’ The indigenous popula-

tion would be sifted according to those of ‘inferior’ race and those ‘of good

race’.

What lay at the heart of the settlement of the east he had summed up

succinctly in the summer of 1942 as the maxim of the ‘ethno-political

monthly’ Deutsche Arbeit (‘German Work’) in the words: ‘Our task does

not consist in Germanizing the east in the traditional sense, that means by

teaching the German language and German laws to the people who live

there, but rather to ensure that only people of actual German and Germanic

blood live there.’

By the end of 1942 Himmler had made considerable progress with his

resettlement strategy: according to the report he sent to Hitler dated 20

January 1943, a total of 629,000 ethnic Germans had been resettled. Of

those, 429,000 had come from territories previously under Soviet rule,

77,000 from Romania, 34,000 from Yugoslavia, and 79,000 from the

South Tyrol. Of these 629,000 ethnic Germans, 445,000 had been ‘settled’,

332,000 of them in the annexed Polish territories, 13,500 in Carniola and

Lower Styria, 6,600 in the Protectorate, 5,000 in Alsace and Lorraine,

17,000 in Lithuania (as part of a special scheme for returning Germans),

and in addition 70,000 (apart from the South Tyroleans) in the ‘Old Reich’,

including annexed Austria. In many cases, however, the settlers ended up

not in neat farmhouses on their own bit of land, as Himmler’s planners had

pictured them, but rather in resettlement camps or in mostly cramped

accommodation in towns.

To create space for these people 365,000 Poles from the annexed Polish

territories had been expelled into the General Government, 17,000 Slove-

nians had been deported to Serbia, and 37,000 as forced labour to Germany.

settlement policy and racial selection 579