Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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In addition, 100,000 people from Alsace, Lorraine, and Luxembourg had

been deported to unoccupied France, Germany, or to the occupied eastern

territories. Himmler’s assumption was that he could also resettle a further

400,000 ethnic Germans, consisting of 143,000 South Tyroleans and

250,000 from the occupied eastern territories.

After this general survey we shall look in greater detail in the following

sections at the most important resettlement projects. These also include

Himmler’s vigorous efforts to identify ‘good blood’ among the non-

German population in the occupied territories and to make a start at least in

conducting a racial selection among the foreign slave labourers in the Reich.

The Protectorate

In the Protectorate Heydrich had been pressing on with plans for Germani-

zation from the autumn of 1941 onwards. A start was actually made in

compiling the ‘racial inventory’ of the population that the Race and Settle-

ment Main Ofﬁce had been preparing since the previous autumn. It was

disguised as an X-ray screening connected with the introduction of the

German identity card in the Protectorate. The head of the RuSHA, Bruno

Kurt Schultz, took on responsibility for the academic supervision of the

operation as a whole, and to this end was appointed to a chair in racial

biology specially created for him at Prague University. It is impossible to

establish now how many people were examined in detail; certainly the racial

examiners were occupied with ‘establishing the racial composition’ of the

Protectorate until late 1942 .

Even the Prague Land Ofﬁce was reactivated on Heydrich’s orders as an

instrument of racial policy: the director up to that point, Theodor Gross, a

dietitian, was replaced by a member of the SD, as had happened before in

1939;

Heydrich, signiﬁcantly, reproached Gross with not having imple-

mented the policy of expropriation consistently enough. Now the Land

Ofﬁce applied itself with renewed zeal to the preliminary steps towards

requisitioning large tracts of land for German settlers.

By means of racial testing and settlement planning the intention was to

have all the necessary documentation ready so that Germanization could

begin immediately after the war. In November 1941 Heydrich received the

cover for his back that he needed for these preparations: on Himmler’s

urging, Hitler included the Protectorate in the former’s responsibilities as

580 settlement policy and racial selection

Settlement Commissar and Himmler immediately entrusted Heydrich with

carrying out these tasks.

After Heydrich’s death Himmler accelerated what was already in prog-

ress. In the conﬁdential address he delivered at Heydrich’s memorial service

in Berlin he announced that Bohemia and Moravia also should have an

‘entirely German’ population within twenty years. A few days later he

directed that Bohemia and Moravia, as well as Alsace, Lorraine, Upper

Carniola, and Southern Styria were to be integrated into the general

settlement plan. The corresponding detailed work carried out by the

Reich Settlement Commissariat Main Ofﬁce anticipated that about 50 per

cent of the Czech population would be ‘Germanized’ and the other half

expelled. In addition to the 236,000 Germans already living in the Protec-

torate, the intention was to bring 1.4 million German settlers into the

country.

What was to happen to the Czechs who were destined to be ‘expelled’?

Heydrich had already made a clear statement on the matter: in February

1942, two weeks after the Wannsee conference, he had declared in a speech

to representatives of the administration of the German occupation that in

the process of the envisaged deportation of 11 million European Jews to

‘open up further the Arctic region’ the Czechs could be used ‘as supervisors

and foremen, etc. as a positive indication of their pro-German orientation’.

The ‘ﬁnal solution to the Jewish question’, which at this point was still

conﬁned to the deportation of the Jews to the eastern territories, was

therefore, as this comment makes clear, embedded in the gigantomania of

the SS’s population-policy plans.

But it all remained a fantasy: no concrete measures to resettle the Czechs

were taken during the war. In the General Government, in the Soviet

Union, and in France, on the other hand, Himmler did set settlement

pilot projects in train in order to lend weight to his claim after the war to

a leading role in the reordering of ‘living-space’. The key decisions for all

these projects were taken, surprisingly, within a relatively short space of

time, in July and August 1942.

The General Government

At the end of 1939 Hitler and Himmler had already declared the General

Government to be territory to which ‘inferior’ beings from the new eastern

settlement policy and racial selection 581

provinces incorporated into the Reich, but also some from the Old Reich,

were to be ‘consigned’, and by the end of 1942 365,000 Poles had in fact

been deported to this territory, as has already been mentioned, while from

the end of 1940 to the spring of 1941 the SS resettled around 30,000 ethnic

Germans and ‘alien nationals of good race’ in the opposite direction, from

the General Government to the Warthegau and the Old Reich: the General

Government as dumping ground could simply not be a suitable home for

people of German descent.

Thus Himmler’s fundamental decision, dating

from the summer of 1941, in future to ‘Germanize’ the General Govern-

ment also marks a radical change of direction.

Signiﬁcantly, the SSPF for the Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik, who was

simultaneously organizing the mass murder of Jews, became the central

ﬁgure in the settlement policy of the General Government. During his visit

in July 1941 to Lublin Himmler not only made Globocnik his ‘appointee in

charge of setting up the SS and police bases in the new eastern region’, but

also empowered him to extend the district operation ‘Search for German

Blood’ to the whole of the General Government and to establish a ‘large-

scale settlement area’ near Zamosc,

so that from there the whole Lublin

district could be Germanized.

In the autumn of 1941 Globocnik, who for months had maintained his

own planning ofﬁce to look after his special responsibilities for ‘population

policy’,

introduced a series of measures and prepared his men for what was

to come. ‘Enemy nations’ must ‘move slowly towards their own destruc-

tion’, and ‘in this territory a bulwark’ must ‘be created against the Slav

nations through the settlement of German farmers and farmers of German

descent’,

he proclaimed in November 1941 at a leaders’ conference in

Lublin.

The same month several thousand people were forcibly expelled from

various villages in the Lublin district by SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger,

which was notorious for its brutality, so that the ethnic Germans of the

district could be concentrated there.

Simultaneously, a specialist adviser

from the RuSHA speciﬁcally attached to Globocnik began a ‘general re-

view’ of the Polish population and their property.

In addition, from the

autumn onwards Globocnik had been extending the system of SS and

police bases, on which he had been working since 1940. Each base was to

comprise several estates as well as the administrative ofﬁces of various

branches of the SS and police, and thereby fulﬁl a dual function: as a centre

582 settlement policy and racial selection

for the combating of partisans and as an outpost for Germanization thanks to

exemplary agricultural production and training on the farms.

In March 1942, in parallel with the equivalent measures in the annexed

eastern territories, the procedure of the Ethnic German List (Volksliste; see

Chapter 16 above) was applied also to those of German descent in the

General Government.

At roughly the same time ﬁve new commissions of

the Central Ofﬁce for Immigration began, in the wake of the ‘search for

German blood,’ to register ethnic Germans throughout the General Gov-

ernment and also to investigate the ‘proportion of German blood’ in those

people who between 1939 and 1941 had been expelled on account of their

‘inferiority’ from the annexed eastern territories into the General Govern-

ment. The operation went on until the autumn of 1943.

From 18 to 20 July Himmler was again staying in the Lublin district in

order to ﬁnd out about the progress of the Germanization process there.

Immediately beforehand he had convinced himself in Auschwitz that the

mass murder of the European Jews was in operation. In Lublin he now

made further decisions concerning the Germanization of the district, in

particular with regard to the settling of ethnic Germans in the Lublin and

Zamosc areas. On 19 July, along with Kru

ger and Globocnik, he made a

through inspection of the area identiﬁed for it and spent an afternoon with

the ethnic German settlers. He showed particular interest in the process of

racial examination: at his request, individual families from a variety of

categories were presented to the Reichsfu

hrer.

Himmler also used the

opportunity to be brought up to date by Kru

ger and Globocnik about the

progress of ‘Aktion Reinhardt’, the murder of the Jews in the General

Government. The order, mentioned above, to Kru

ger to ensure that the

‘resettlement of the whole Jewish population of the General Government is

accomplished by 31 December 1942’ dates from this day.

The Zamosc settlement project got under way in November 1942,

Himmler having given detailed instructions for it. At this point the Jewish

inhabitants in the area had already been murdered; now 50,000 Poles were

to be expelled in order to make room for around 2,500 families of settlers, in

total about 10,000 people. The Poles, who were driven from their homes

with violence by Globocnik’s men, were channelled into a camp in which

employees from a branch ofﬁce of the Central Ofﬁce for Resettlement

sorted them into the familiar four ‘racial groups’: those assigned to the

ﬁrst two groups, a small minority, were deported to the Reich to be ‘re-

Germanized’, but the vast majority were deployed in the Reich or on the

settlement policy and racial selection 583

spot as forced labour. In this way the native Polish farmers were made to

work for the German settlers. Anyone classiﬁed as ‘inferior’ was sent to

Auschwitz; those unﬁt for work were consigned to so-called pension

villages (Rentendo

rfer), in other words, death colonies. Progress as a whole

was, however, slow. By the end of 1943 the racial examiners had dealt with

only a third of the 50,000 people they were to cover. This changed when a

series of ‘anti-partisan’ operations was initiated in the war zone: treatment

of the Polish population became more brutal, the examination procedure

was radically simpliﬁed and accelerated, and within a few weeks the target of

50,000 deportees had almost been achieved.

The Soviet Union

Although the order that Himmler gave to Globocnik on 17 July 1941 to

construct a network of SS and police bases in the newly occupied territories

led to the creation of an extensive administration (the Ofﬁce of the Repre-

sentative Responsible for Setting up the SS and Police Bases in the New

Eastern Region), because of a lack of resources there were no practical

results. Globocnik therefore conﬁned himself again to establishing bases in

the General Government.

Himmler’s attempt to use his police powers to

introduce settlement measures in the occupied eastern territories thus had

failed, but it had also become superﬂuous. He had, after all, managed to

convince Hitler in September 1941 that the occupied Soviet territories

should be placed under his control in his capacity as Settlement Commissar.

Apart from that, Himmler had found yet another foothold in ethnic

policy by which to secure his position in the Soviet Union: the ‘protection’

of ethnic Germans. He had already used the same method in Poland and

Yugoslavia. The Sonderkommando R (Russia) he had set up in July 1941

under Brigadefu

hrer Horst Hoffmeyer established an armed defence unit in

the ethnic German territories, opened German schools, and appointed

liaison ofﬁcers. The investigations pursued by the Sonderkommando into

‘Black Sea Germans’ indicate that at the end of 1941 there was still an

assumption in the SS that these people, like the ethnic German ‘settlers’

from the Soviet Union before them, were to be brought ‘home to the

Reich’. In 1942, however, a change began in settlement policy: now ethnic

Germans were to be gathered into settlement centres and act as pioneers

within the project of Germanization.

As in the General Government, in

584 settlement policy and racial selection

the autumn of 1942 three race and settlement leaders were installed as part of

the HSSPF group in the conquered Soviet territories. Their task was to

ensure the preservation of ‘valuable blood’ and to help in the preparations

for future settlement. They concentrated, for example, on gaining control

of the collective farms.

In August 1942 Himmler called his leading staff in the area of ethnic

policy to a meeting in his headquarters in the Ukraine. Meyer, Greifelt,

Lorenz, Berger, Pru

tzmann, HSSPF for Russia South, and Stuckart, state

secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, were present.

In the

Ukraine, 45,000 ethnic Germans in ‘around 486 villages’ had at ﬁrst been

looked after by the VoMi, but were now, as was generally acknowledged,

being neglected since the transfer of responsibility to the civil administra-

tion. Here, ‘life as a vo

lkisch community [ . . . ] was now dead’. In order to

change this unsatisfactory situation Himmler announced that he was going

to involve the HSSPF in looking after the German minority by setting up

‘ethnic German control centres’. In addition, he instructed that these people

should be ‘settled together’; in the ﬁrst instance 10,000 were to be based in

and around Shitomir.

‘In accordance with the Fu

hrer’s order,’ Himmler continued, in his

initiation of his audience into Hitler’s plans for the occupied eastern terri-

tories, ‘in the next twenty years parts of the Ukraine will be populated

entirely by Germans.’ Settlements in any of the territories were to be

established ﬁrst and foremost on the main trafﬁc routes—at intersections

there should be towns of 15,000 to 20,000 inhabitants surrounded by ‘a rural

population which is entirely German’. Settlements in the other territories

were to be established as follows: ﬁrst of all the Reich Commissariat Ostland,

‘in view of the Estonians’ capacity for Germanization’, while on the other

hand ‘it is imperative that the Latgalians be expelled’ from Latvia and ‘there

is no possibility of Germanizing the Lithuanians, as they are intellectually

slow and have an extraordinary amount of Slavic blood’; secondly, so-

called Ingria, the territory around Leningrad; thirdly, White Ruthenia,

which would be comparatively easy, as the local population had ‘no intelli-

gentsia or political ambition’; and ﬁnally, fourthly, the Crimea.

Only the projects relating to the Ukraine (including the Crimea) were

set in motion. But as a preliminary the number of ethnic Germans living

there had to be established. Reich commissar Lohse, whom Himmler put

in charge of ‘Germanization’ on 9 September, therefore gave instructions

for the Ethnic German List to be introduced in September 1942.

The

settlement policy and racial selection 585

population in question was split into three groups: ﬁrst Germans, secondly

Germans in mixed marriages and their families (insofar as they professed

themselves to be German and their families made a ‘good impression’),

thirdly people of German descent and their families who no longer felt

themselves to be German, and in addition orphaned children of German

blood. Those who, although they felt they were German culturally, were

judged to be ‘racially alien’ and were not married to a German were not

entered in the Ethnic German List. Thus Himmler’s racist policy had

triumphed completely in this territory: being German was a matter of

‘blood’ and not of attitude.

In November 1942, after a stay in the Crimea, Himmler gave the SSPF

Crimea, SS-Sturmbannfu

hrer Heinze, the task of preparing for the settle-

ment of the peninsula (including the neighbouring territory of Taurien

between the Dnieper estuary and the Azov Sea). Thereupon Heinze set

up an ethnic German control centre, the so-called Crimean Commando,

which derived from Commando R and comprised around 10,000 ethnic

Germans, and made preparations for the territory to be settled later.

The

plan temporarily ﬂoated to settle the South Tyroleans in the Crimea had had

to be shelved in 1942. Instead, in 1943 the Crimean Commando hit on the

idea of moving the Palestine Germans there who had been interned by the

British. But in the meantime the Wehrmacht was in retreat, and when, from

autumn 1943, the Crimea was being abandoned the settlers were also

evacuated, for the time being to the Warthegau.

The second settlement project was in fact realized: the settling of a total of

30,000 ethnic Germans (for a time the assumption was there would be

43,000) in the General Commissariat of Shitomir, in three areas around

Himmler’s headquarters in Hegewald.

Between the middle of October

and the middle of November 1942 a specially created Sonderkommando of

the Reich Settlement Commissariat, the Henschel unit, expelled a total of

almost 15,000 Ukrainians from the settlement areas of Hegewald and Fo

sterstadt and moved 10,000 ethnic German settlers there. Himmler showed

great interest in this: on 20 October he made a ‘journey to the ethnic

German villages’ from his headquarters, accompanied by a group of SS

leaders, among them his writer friend Hanns Johst, the ‘SS bard’, and

Himmler’s former employer from Fridolﬁng, Alois Rehl, who in the mean-

time had become an Obersturmfu

hrer and was visiting for a few days. Both

Johst and Rehrl also accompanied Himmler to the Crimea to inspect ethnic

German settlements.

586 settlement policy and racial selection

In 1943, however, German resettlement policy in the General Commis-

sariat of Shitomir had to go on the defensive: the special Henschel unit’s

main task was now to withdraw ethnic Germans from territories threatened

by partisans and from dispersed settlements. The plan was in fact to accom-

modate them in two further settlement areas around Shitomir, but even that

turned out to be impossible, one reason being that any further large-scale

expulsion of Ukrainians seemed inopportune in view of the tense overall

situation. Thus, in the end 30,000 ethnic Germans were squashed into the

settlements at Hegewald and Fo

rsterstadt and a few thousand were taken to

the third settlement area of Kalinowka. The ‘settlement’ programme was a

failure: apart from small garden plots, it had not been possible as a rule to

give the settlers any land of their own. Instead they were put to work on

large farms; many were living in camps. At the end of 1943 the settlements

were abandoned and the ethnic Germans were brought in ‘treks’ by horse

and cart to the Warthegau.

Ill. 27. During his visit to the Crimea at the end of October 1942 Himmler, who

had studied agriculture, found the time to inspect the local cotton plantation.

settlement policy and racial selection 587

France

In the summer of 1942 Alsace and Lorraine also claimed more of Himmler’s

attention. In this case the Reich’s resettlement supremo was concerned

above all to ‘remove’ those who were considered undesirable on racial

grounds in a future greater Germanic Reich. The Gauleiters Robert Wagner

and Josef Bu

rckel, who were established as heads of the civil administration

in Alsace and Lorraine, simply wished to consign these people to the

occupied eastern territories—regardless of the fact that Himmler had intro-

duced pilot schemes here that were based on careful racial ‘selection’. In his

view only truly ‘Germanic elements’ could be considered for settlement,

and not those ‘inferior beings’ whom Bu

rckel and Wagner wanted to get rid

of. It was, however, to be no easy job for Himmler to get his way in the face

of opposition from these Reich governors.

In 1940 he had come off second-best against Bu

rckel in Lorraine when

the latter, as already described, had more than 80,000 people deported to

France and, in spite of great difﬁculties, settled Reich Germans and ethnic

Germans. In the autumn of 1941, however, the situation changed. For in

September Bu

rckel (who was the ofﬁcial representative of the Reich Com-

missar for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation in Lorraine)

appointed HSSPF Theodor Berkelmann as his representative for settlement

matters in Lorraine, and thereby effectively handed his responsibility for

ethnic issues back to Himmler. In doing so he was acknowledging that his

settlement policy—he had had recourse, above all, to people from his home

Gau of Saar-Palatinate—had largely been a failure.

Berkelmann now set about organizing a comprehensive racial examina-

tion of the Lorraine population on the same lines as the Ethnic German List:

in October 1941 the racial ‘suitability test’ was introduced.

His aim of

implementing a carefully prepared settlement policy on a racial basis was,

however, in conﬂict with Bu

rckel’s plan to resettle 40,000 Lorrainers in the

Ukraine—a request Hitler himself granted Bu

rckel in August 1942.

Grei-

felt, the head of the Main Staff Ofﬁce in the Settlement Commissariat, was

extremely vexed by ‘the need to carry out such an immediate mass evacua-

tion’ as a result of Bu

rckel’s initiative, for it necessarily jeopardized ethnic

policy in Lorraine and in the Ukraine. But Himmler’s response was:

588 settlement policy and racial selection

‘Nothing can be done about these things. The Fu

hrer has made his deci-

sion.’

Himmler agreed with Bu

rckel that Lorrainers who were ‘racially worth-

less and asocial’ should emigrate to France, as should the female relatives of

Lorrainers living in France, if they ‘are past childbearing age or are racially

worthless’. The same applied to male relatives if they were no longer ﬁt for

military service. The opportunity generously granted to Lorrainers who

were not opting for German nationality of going to France did, however,

have a catch, as is clear from the agreement: ‘Those Lorrainers opting for

emigration to France will be noted down at the receiving ofﬁces until this

Saturday. They will then be immediately transferred to concentration camps

as communist elements.’

The plan to resettle 40,000 Lorrainers in the Ukraine, like many a grand

‘population project’, never came to fruition, as a result of wartime devel-

opments, with the result that Himmler’s men did get their way: in February

1943 10,000 Lorrainers, handpicked on the basis of racial tests, were re-

settled, mostly in the Old Reich. In May 8,000 of them were still in VoMi

camps.

In Alsace Robert Wagner, the Gauleiter, had by the end of 1940 deported

about 100,000 people to unoccupied France. In the second half of 1941

Himmler gradually brought his inﬂuence to bear on resettlement policy.

The precondition for this was the setting up of a Land Ofﬁce in Stras-

bourg.

On 19 March Wagner informed Himmler that he had recently

received Hitler’s permission for a ‘ﬁnal cleansing’ in Alsace. The timing, he

said, was still open, but it was to involve ‘the removal of anybody unusable

or racially inferior’; Hitler would determine, ‘according to the political

situation’, whether ‘such elements’ should be ‘consigned to France or settled

in distant parts of the east’.

Three months later Himmler returned to this matter in a letter to

Wagner. In principle he was, of course, in agreement with Wagner that

Alsace must ‘be cleansed of unreliable elements of any kind’. Under no

circumstances, however, could these be ‘consigned to the east’, as the east

was being kept in view ‘by us as an area for Germanic settlement by good

racial elements’ and so was not a ‘penal colony’. Wagner might also consider

that if ‘some elements’ were deported to France there was a danger of, ‘by

this means putting people of German blood at the disposal of the French and

thus promoting the rebuilding of the French nation’.

settlement policy and racial selection 589