Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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As Himmler saw it, dealing with ‘undesirable elements’ was therefore

essentially a racial problem: among the Reich’s political enemies there could

be valuable ‘Germanic blood’ that in France and in the occupied eastern

territories might cause damage in the long term. Wagner adopted Himm-

ler’s standpoint on this and proposed a solution that promised not only to

free his territory from ‘undesirables’ but also to avoid the loss they feared of

‘valuable blood’: ‘racially valuable’ persons were to be ‘resettled’ in the Old

Reich, while the ‘racially inferior’ were to be ‘resettled’ in France.

This principle was accepted on 7 August 1942 by the representatives of

various SS ofﬁces responsible for ethnic policy who met in Berlin in order,

on the basis of Wagner’s detailed proposals, to issue ‘Guidelines for the

Treatment of Resettled Alsatians’. Wagner had drawn up a list of those

‘inferior people’ whom he intended to get rid of by means of a ‘second

resettlement operation’ (the ﬁrst had taken place in October 1940 ):

‘Negroes and coloured people of mixed race, Gypsies and their descendants,

Jews from half-Jews upwards, those in Jewish mixed marriages’, and in

addition, ‘those of alien races and their descendants’, the ‘patois popula-

tion’,

‘asocials’, and ‘the incurably mentally ill’.

Two days later, on 9 August, in the Fuhrer’s headquarters Himmler met

ﬁrst of all Hitler, then Wagner and Bu

rckel, Gustav Simon, head of the civil

administration in Luxembourg, the state secretary in the Reich Ministry of

the Interior, Stuckart, as well as Ribbentrop and Keitel, to discuss the

principles of ethnic policy in the west.

rckel reported later that on

this occasion Hitler had made the decision in principle that ‘asocials’,

‘criminals’, ‘all inferior elements’, and ‘anyone who does not belong to us

by blood’ should be sent to France, while ‘anyone who belongs by blood to

the German nation and must not be handed over to France [ . . . ]—is to be

resettled in the Reich without regard to political or other attitudes, insofar as

these elements in the population cannot be sustained in Alsace’.

Though

warning that at the time there was no scope for larger-scale operations,

Hitler had allowed the possibility of smaller ones (in ‘individual and

special cases’).

By persuading Wagner, Himmler had therefore succeeded in making

Hitler revise his original position that ‘inferior people’ should simply be sent

off ‘to the east’. Now a racial examination was to be the ﬁrst stage and the

deportations diverted to France. This was by no means merely a question of

geography, but rather Himmler had managed to pin his ‘Fu

hrer’ down to

Himmler’s own principles: the crucial factor in ofﬁcial membership of the

590 settlement policy and racial selection

German nation was not now political loyalty, language, or cultural tradition

but race (scrutinized on an individual basis by SS experts). A German-

speaking inhabitant of Alsace who felt himself to be ‘German’ and was

loyal to the Third Reich could be deported to France as being ‘of inferior

race’, while an opponent of German policy who deﬁned himself as French

and spoke French could, if the racial examination was positive, be moved to

the Reich on the grounds that he was ‘capable of being re-Germanized’.

It was precisely this group that stubbornly resisted the imposition of

‘Germanness’ who attracted the particular attention of the racial examiners,

for the latter detected behind this obstinacy the possibility of the inﬂuence

of Nordic blood.

With regard to France, Himmler pursued many far-reaching plans. On 12

April 1942 he came out with the view, during a meal with Hitler, that ‘once

a year there should be a trawl through the Germanic population of France

for good blood. There should be an attempt to move the children of this

section of the population while very young to German boarding schools and

direct them away from their accidental French nationality towards their

Germanic blood and to the fact that they belong to the great German

nation.’

A start had been made some considerable time before on establishing the

number of ethnic Germans and those of German descent in France.

‘advisory centre for returning ethnic Germans’ established at the headquar-

ters of the military command in Paris in 1940 had already registered 74,000

ethnic Germans in France by May 1941.

In June 1941 Heydrich therefore

created a branch ofﬁce of the EWZ (Central Ofﬁce for Immigration, based

in Ło

) in Paris that was not only to register the ethnic Germans but also to

examine their racial characteristics. Lambert von Malsen-Ponickau, who

was at the same time head of the EWZ in Ło

, was put in charge of the

ofﬁce, for which Himmler laid down special guidelines. By the end of 1944

almost 20,000 people in France had been registered and settled in Alsace,

Lorraine, the Old Reich, and in the annexed Polish territories.

These

results fell far short of the SS’s expectations: ‘The racial proﬁle of the

returning ethnic Germans processed in February can only be described as

moderate’, we read for example in 1942 in the summary produced by the

branch ofﬁce in Paris in its report for that month.

In northern France, on the other hand, the racial examiners encountered

a sizeable group of around 15,000 people, originally from Poland, who had

lived for a considerable time in Germany, mostly in the Ruhr, and had

settlement policy and racial selection 591

emigrated to France after the First World War, where they called them-

selves ethnic Germans. In 1943 they were the object of a ‘special emigration

operation’, and 5,000 of them were registered in the Ethnic German List. In

March 1943 Himmler consented to their being given German nationality.

The decisive factor in this decision was not, however, that these people

regarded themselves as Germans, but that, even though their ancestors

originated from Poland, they had proved by their stubborn attitude as

migrants that they represented a racial selection and therefore had ‘German-

ic’ roots.

Marriage ban and ‘Germanization’ in the Reich

Himmler’s Germanization policy in no way stopped at his plans for reset-

tlement. As a result of the war against the Soviet Union he rather became

increasingly convinced that in the ‘inferior’ population of the Soviet Union

there must nevertheless still be genetic remnants of extinct Germanic

peoples, which by, as it were, a back-cross with living ‘Germanic’ people

could again be made fruitful. The immense number of people needed for

the new order envisaged for the east led to a certain generosity in deﬁning

what was to be understood by ‘Germanic’.

Himmler, therefore, from time to time contemplated including all the

eastern workers brought into the Reich in the process of re-Germaniza-

tion.

The fact that forced labourers from the east could not be examined as

part of their whole family—something that, as Himmler repeatedly stressed,

was crucial for the ‘overall impression’—did, however, run counter to this.

The process of re-Germanization for eastern workers was therefore applied

only in particular individual cases, and in September 1944 halted altogether.

It was above all those Soviet agricultural workers earmarked for ‘individual

deployment’ on German farms who, as part of a ‘rough-and-ready selection

process’, were tested for their ‘capacity for re-Germanization’. Underlying

this was concern about the biological ‘threat’ to the female rural population.

By contrast, racial testing of female domestic staff from eastern Europe

developed differently. In October 1941 Himmler had already ordered that

girls from Poland, the Ukraine, and the former Baltic States who, after

careful racial examination, were judged to be ‘capable of re-Germanization’

should be brought to the Reich as housemaids,

in order to relieve German

592 settlement policy and racial selection

housewives of work and thus promote in them a greater desire to have

children. If these girls, as Himmler expressed his thoughts in July 1941,

have, depending on their age, worked impeccably for 3–5 years as housemaids,

cooks, or nannies in a family with three or more children or where there is one

child and the mother is expecting a second, they will be given German nationality

and also be entitled to marry a German. Further more, such girls should be given the

prospect of their family also being judged by the girls’ behaviour and attitude and

then later having the opportunity of coming to Germany and being Germanized.

Yet only 3–5 per cent of these eastern European girls, for whom members of

the elite eagerly placed orders at the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce,

satisﬁed the racial criteria.

As their ‘capacity for re-Germanization’ had

been overestimated, in 1942 another method was tried: the search for

suitable workers was extended to the occupied Soviet territories, particular-

ly to the Ukraine and Byelorussia, and the racial criteria were relaxed. Now

the aim was not primarily to identify those capable of being re-Germanized

but to conduct a ‘preliminary selection’, in other words, to exclude partic-

ularly ‘primitive’ people. Girls belonging to Racial Group III did still seem

to be acceptable, though not for subsequent citizenship. As many as 50,000

girls may have been brought to the Reich with this proviso.

The supposed

biological risks associated with these girls being employed in German

households were therefore considered much less serious than those to

which lonely farmers’ wives saw themselves exposed by Soviet agricultural

workers.

Even though sexual intercourse between Germans and ‘ethnic aliens’ had

been ruled as strictly forbidden, Himmler did not apply without exception

the rigorous punishment originally envisaged for such cases. Instead, he

instructed that a differentiated procedure be adopted, based on the ﬁndings

of the ‘racial’ examination of the ‘ethnic alien’ involved and designed to

ensure that no ‘valuable blood’ was lost. From 1941 onwards he no longer

had slave workers caught in ‘cases of sexual intercourse’ summarily exe-

cuted, but rather ﬁrst subjected to a racial examination; if this had a positive

outcome they were sent to a concentration camp.

German women who

had become pregnant by civilian workers or prisoners of war were also

subjected to a racial test, on the outcome of which depended whether the

Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce would require the pregnancy to be

terminated.

settlement policy and racial selection 593

From December 1942 onwards pregnant workers from the east were also

required to undergo a racial examination. If a child ‘of good race’ could be

expected the mother was allowed to carry the child to term but not to keep

it. Rather, it was handed over after birth to a German foster-family. If the

child was ‘racially undesirable’ considerable pressure was often put on the

mother to agree to a termination, and sometimes even force was used. If

such ‘undesirable’ children were nevertheless born they were put in ‘care

facilities for foreign children’, where most died of systematic neglect—

without doubt several tens of thousands of infants in all.

The dangers to ‘racial policy’ created by mass deportations from eastern

Europe to Germany and the numerous provisions for individual cases that

were made either to contain these risks or to ﬁlter out ‘good blood’ seem to

have prompted Himmler to introduce a radical reversal of racial policy in

the spring of 1942. In March that year he decreed, in his capacity as

Settlement Commissar, that the term ‘related’ (artverwandt), which up to

that point had been used consistently in Nazi racial terminology to refer to

the non-German European nations, was to be replaced by a set of new

prescribed terms. The term ‘related’, it was claimed, was based on the

‘presupposition [ . . . ] that the racial structure of all European nations is so

closely related to that of the German nation that if interbreeding occurs

there is no danger that the German nation’s blood will be racially contami-

nated’. This, it was claimed, is not at all the case, however: even in the

European context, ‘racial intermingling’ was a threat, particularly in the case

of contact with ‘Slavdom’.

The corresponding directive states that at a meeting in the Party Chan-

cellery of the party branch ofﬁces involved it had therefore been decided,

‘with immediate effect’ (until a comprehensive law protecting German

blood was passed after the end of the war), to divide the term ‘related’

into, ﬁrst, ‘German blood and blood of related (= Germanic) races’

(to which members of ‘non-Germanic’ nations who were ‘capable of

re-Germanization’ also belonged, in other words those who exhibited

‘Nordic-Faelish (nordische-fa

lische) racial elements’), and secondly, ‘related

blood but not from related races’, by which was meant all non-Germanic

European nations (Slavs, Latins, Celts, Balts).

The introduction of this terminology heralded Himmler’s policy of

permitting Germans in future to have sexual relations only with other

Germans or ‘Teutons’. Although at ﬁrst intercourse was banned only with

Slavs, the directive made a basic distinction undoubtedly intended to

594 settlement policy and racial selection

prepare the way for a future ban on sexual relations between Germans and

those of Latin, Baltic, or Celtic origin.

Seizure of children

The SS not only took children ‘of good race’ from female slave workers sent

to Germany, but also forcibly removed tens of thousands of them from the

occupied and annexed territories. The historian Isabel Heinemann, who has

done pioneering work on the activity of the Race and Settlement Main

Ofﬁce, concludes that as a result at least 50,000 children in eastern and

south-eastern Europe were forcibly removed from their families.

In 1942 the staff headquarters of the Reich Settlement Commissar took

the initiative in this matter, calling on the responsible authorities in the

Warthegau to search for children of German extraction in Polish orpha-

nages and then to check all children placed in foster-families.

The children

were ﬁrst sent for observation to a central children’s home and then handed

over to the Lebensborn organization, which placed the older ones in

‘German boarding schools’ and offered the younger ones to SS families

for adoption. The remaining annexed Polish territories, the General Gov-

ernment, and the occupied Soviet territories were gradually also drawn into

this initiative.

As early as 18 June 1941 Himmler had spoken to Arthur Greiser, the

Reich Governor in the Warthegau, about this matter: ‘I consider it right that

young children of particularly good race from Polish families should be

collected together and brought up by us in smallish special cre

ches and

children’s homes. The removal of the children should be justiﬁed on the

grounds of health risks. Children who fail to do well must be returned to

their parents.’

Rudolf Creutz, the chief of staff at staff headquarters,

expressed reservations about this proposal, however, insofar as it applied

to ‘Polish children of good race whose parents were still alive’; ‘serious

problems’ could arise from such an operation.

It does, in fact, seem that

Himmler’s idea of forcibly separating children from intact families was not

systematically implemented, but it certainly did occur in a number of cases,

though the number cannot be precisely quantiﬁed.

As far as the Soviet Union was concerned, as early as July 1941 Himmler

had charged Guntram Pﬂaum, the administrative head of the Lebensborn,

with taking care of ethnic German children ‘of good race’. Pﬂaum set up a

settlement policy and racial selection 595

children’s home in Bobruisk for children ‘of good race’, who were offered

for adoption in Germany.

These were by no means all from ethnic

German backgrounds, but also included ‘racially valuable’ children from

Byelorussian families, and the home was not conﬁned to orphans. In the

Ukraine children ‘without parents’ were also gathered in camps and sub-

jected to ‘racial selection’.

During a journey through the Reichskommis-

sariat Ostland in autumn 1941 Himmler had in addition given instructions

to gather information on the children of people deported by the Soviets,

establish whether they were ‘capable of Germanization’, and if so to move

them to the R eich.

On Himmler’s orders, ‘those of German origin’ in the General Govern-

ment who were unwilling to be entered in the Ethnic German List were

punished by being put in concentration camps and having their children

removed.

In addition, at least 4,500 Polish children from the Zamosc

district, whose parents had been ‘resettled’—in other words, turned into

slave labour or sent to Majdanek—were transported to the Reich.

Himmler regarded the whole matter as extremely simple. ‘It is our task’,

he emphasized to the SS and Police Leaders from Russia-South on 16

September 1942, ‘to remove everybody of good race from here.’

And

on 4 October 1943, at the conference of Gruppenfu

hrer at Posen (Poznan

he spoke openly in favour of the forcible removal of children: ‘Whatever we

ﬁnd in the way of good blood from our race we will take, if necessary by

stealing children and raising them ourselves.’

This also applied to the children of resistance ﬁghters and partisans who

had been killed or imprisoned (or those suspected of such activities).

The

best-known case is the barbaric action taken at Lidice. As part of the

‘retribution’ for the assassination of Heydrich eighty-eight children,

whose fathers were shot and whose mothers were put in a concentration

camp, were ﬁrst taken to a camp belonging to the Central Ofﬁce for

Resettlement in Ło

, where seven were identiﬁed as being ‘capable of

Germanization’ and the remaining eighty-one deported to the Chelmno

extermination camp and murdered.

Shortly after, on 25 June 1942, Himmler issued ‘Guidelines for Action

Against Partisans and Other Bandits in Upper Carniola and Lower Styria’.

They clearly stated that, ‘in principle men in any culpable family, in many

cases even those of the entire clan, are to be executed, the women from

these families are to be arrested and sent to a concentration camp, the

children to be removed from their homeland and collected together in

596 settlement policy and racial selection

Ill. 28. On his Minsk trip in August 1942 Himmler is shown demonstrating to

his two companions, Josef Kiermaler, the head of his personal security service

(ﬁrst from left), and Karl Wolff (second from left), the racial examination of a local

boy. The photo was taken by the ‘Fu

hrer’s photographer’, Walter Frenz, who

was accompanying the group.

the part of the Gau belonging to the Old Reich. I shall expect additional

reports on the number and racial value of these children.’

On 6 January

1943 he ordered that in ‘operations against the bandits’ men and women

suspected of such activity were in future to be deported to the camps in

Lublin and Auschwitz and their children to an ‘internment camp for

children and adolescents’. The ‘racial and political inspection’ that was to

take place there can be interpreted as an indication that those racially

‘valuable’ children who did not understand their situation and so were not

potential avengers of their parents were also considered for ‘Germaniza-

tion’.

A further group of ‘Germanic children’ that Himmler refused to relin-

quish were those children fathered by German soldiers in the occupied

countries.

He was particularly concerned about ‘Germanic’ countries.

Assessors from the Race and Settlement Ofﬁce took on responsibility for

the racial examination of children born in the Netherlands and Norway, and

from 1942–3 the Lebensborn organization was involved in their care. In

Norway alone Lebensborn maintained six maternity homes, in which an

estimated 6,000 such children of the occupation were born.

Even the children of German soldiers and Russian women became an

object of Himmler’s desire, above all because it was assumed that there was a

colossal number of such births; even if the mothers were in principle

considered to be ‘racially inferior ethnic aliens’, there was a chance that

the superior racial genetic make-up of the father would produce passable

results.

Hitler had brought his attention to the problem, the Reichsfu

hrer-

SS explained in his address to the SS and Police Leaders from Russia-South

in September 1942, ‘that in Russia probably a good 1 to 1½ million children

had been fathered by German soldiers’. He conceded that it was possibly

slightly fewer, ‘but it will certainly be several hundred thousands or almost a

million’. These children were, he said, ‘an unheard-of boost, both in

quantity and in racial quality, to the Russian nation, which at this point

has lost a great deal of blood’. For that reason Hitler had let him know ‘that

we, the SS, must ﬁrst of all establish where all these children are, so that they

can be inspected. The children who are of good race and healthy will be

taken away from their mothers and taken to Germany, or if the mothers are

of good race and healthy we shall take them too.’

The ‘children of poor race’, on the other hand, were to be left behind.

‘My view is that even that is damaging to us. For even a child produced by a

German father and a Russian mother of poor race gives something positive

598 settlement policy and racial selection

to the Russians; for we cannot tell what may suddenly emerge from his

blood in the third, fourth, ﬁfth, sixth, and even later generations, if it

combines again with similar blood.’ According to another record of the

speech, he already had a solution to hand for this problem: He spoke of the

‘eradication’ of the undesirable progeny.

Hitler and Himmler may, however, have greatly overestimated the

virility of German soldiers stationed in the east. Realistic estimates suggest

that no more than 10,000–11,000 children were fathered by German sol-

diers with local women.

In this case too the Race and Settlement Main

Ofﬁce played its part in conducting racial examinations; the children were

handed over to the National Socialist Welfare organization (NSV). In all the

German occupied territories probably more than 10,000 children of Ger-

man soldiers were taken into NSV institutions.

Racial examination: methodical arbitrariness

As the previous sections of this chapter have shown, in 1941–2 Himmler

began to deﬁne racial criteria in a highly ﬂexible manner. And it emerged

that the ﬂexibility he prescribed was highly compatible with the examina-

tion process. For the vast majority of people examined by the racial assessors

were diagnosed as being a ‘mixture’ of European ‘principal races’ as deﬁned

by racial theory: the subjects were therefore people showing ‘traces of

blood’ of a variety of races—‘Nordic’, ‘Faelish’, ‘Mediterranean’ (westisch),

‘Dinaric’, ‘Alpine’ (ostisch), or ‘East Baltic’. The racial criteria were met

either if the ‘Nordic’ element could be clearly recognized or if the other

components were ‘well balanced’ (in other words, even if there were no

‘Nordic’ elements at all). An applicant was given a clear negative appraisal if,

in the view of the assessor, ‘Slavic’, Negroid’, ‘oriental’ (‘Jewish’), or other

‘alien’ inﬂuences were demonstrable (or were ‘presumed’), or if the traces of

European elements ‘resulted in an ‘unbalanced’ appearance—in other

words, one in which the features were too ‘Dinaric’, ‘Alpine’ or ‘East

Baltic’.

This overview by itself reveals the arbitrariness of the whole procedure

and the absurdity of the so-called racial doctrine underlying it. If the

overwhelming majority of those tested were classed as ‘of mixed race’

(Mischling), then the German population could neither be deﬁned unequiv-

ocally on the basis of ‘racial’ criteria nor could it be clearly distinguished in

settlement policy and racial selection 599