Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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racial composition from neighbouring nations. The evident differences in

appearance among those tested were, however, not simply accepted as

variants but rather the attempt was made to relate them back to speciﬁc

‘ideal types’, which in their pure form—the ‘Nordic’ type, the ‘Dinaric’

type, and so on—existed only in the imagination of race theorists. For racial

theory was based on the proposition that the origins of human beings in the

twentieth century could be traced back to prehistoric, pure ‘primal races’

(Urrassen)—an assumption that was essentially a historical myth with no

anthropological foundation.

The arbitrariness of the racial examinations is not only reﬂected in these

results but characterized the process as a whole: the decisive element in the

assessment was, in the end, the ‘overall picture’ presented by the candidate,

the immediate impression gained by the assessor at the examination. Family

context (the preference was for examining the whole family), geographical

origin, religious afﬁliation, nationality, and possible membership of the Nazi

Party were noted and formed part of this ‘overall picture’. Yet even the

purely biological criteria were subject to interpretation. If, for example, the

shape of the head (‘short’) and the amount of body hair (‘abundant’)

indicated negative racial characteristics, the criterion ‘erect bearing’ could

fully compensate for these inadequacies. In the ﬁnal analysis, where there

were so many criteria, it was virtually always possible in assessing a candidate

presenting a ‘mixed’ racial appearance to give weight to one or several as

clear ‘proof ’ of a ‘positive’ (or ‘negative’) overall picture.

A sober appraisal would put Himmler himself in the racially average

band, or to some extent even below it: his face was round rather than

oval, his nose more broad than slim, his normal bearing more ‘sagging’ than

‘erect’, and his chin—and for the racial assessors this was a particularly

negative feature—fell clearly into the ‘receding’ category.

600 settlement policy and racial selection

The ‘Iron Law of Ethnicity’:

Recruitment into the Waffen-SS

uring this summer of 1942 that was proving so promising for Himm-

ler—he had, after all, succeeded in including the whole of Europe in

the systematic mass murder of the Jews, while at the same time advancing

his settlement plans—the Reichsfu

hrer-SS made progress in another area as

well: the expansion of his Waffen-SS. He succeeded in massively extending

its basis of recruitment both inside and outside Germany.

In May 1942 Himmler had managed to persuade Hitler to establish an SS

army corps under Colonel-General of the Waffen-SS Paul Hausser, com-

posed of the ‘Leibstandarte’, ‘Das Reich’, and ‘Death’s Head’ divisions,

which were withdrawn from the front in order to ﬁll the gaps left by their

losses and to re-equip them as Panzer grenadier divisions. By the end of the

year the army corps had been renamed the SS Panzer Corps.

This meant

that Himmler had brought together his most effective divisions under a

uniﬁed command, and right up to the end of the war SS divisions were used

as a ‘ﬁre brigade’, always being deployed where critical situations developed

on any of the fronts. In this way, through deployments involving very heavy

losses, the Waffen-SS was able to build up its reputation as a superior elite

force.

Finally, in August 1942, Himmler succeeded in persuading Wilhelm

Keitel, the chief of the Wehrmacht High Command, to triple the quota

of recruits for the Waffen-SS from the 1924 age cohort. This measure

provided the SS with new divisions. In September 1942 Hitler ordered

that the SS Cavalry Brigade should be expanded to form the SS Cavalry

Division ‘Florian Geyer’.

In December he ordered the creation of two new

German SS divisions from which, in 1943, a new SS army corps was to

emerge.

However, as has already been described, in 1940 the Waffen-SS had

already begun to try to recruit outside Germany, in the so-called Germanic

countries and among ethnic German minorities in south-eastern Europe.

The Reich’s intervention in the Balkans and the attack on the Soviet Union,

which in propaganda terms was fought as a crusade of civilized Europe

against ‘Bolshevism’, changed the context in which recruitment took place.

It was now necessary to spread the net widely in the search for allies in the

war against Bolshevism. As Himmler regarded the recruitment measures

among ethnic German minorities in south-east Europe and in the occupied

countries in northern and western Europe as anticipating the future Greater

Germanic Reich and the new order which this new power would impose

on Europe after the end of the war, the recruitment policy of the Waffen-SS

forms part of the same project as Himmler’s other racial and foreign-policy

ambitions. It is clear from the numerous relevant entries in his ofﬁce diary

just how seriously he took issues involving the recruitment, establishment,

and equipment of the Waffen-SS. These matters also ﬁgured prominently in

his ‘leader’s lectures’.

National legions

Apart from the two sources of recruitment already referred to that the

Waffen-SS had utilized outside Germany—ethnic Germans and ‘Germanic

volunteers’—in 1941 Himmler focused on another small group: volunteers

from occupied or allied countries who were to be organized in national

‘legions’. Hitler agreed to this project on 29 July 1941.

Following negotiations with the Wehrmacht, it was agreed that the

Waffen-SS would recruit legions from Norwegians, the Dutch, Swedes,

Danes, and Flemings and retain the Finnish volunteer battalion that had

already been set up at the start of 1941, while the Wehrmacht would form

Croatian, Spanish, and French units. Although the majority of the Waffen-

SS legionnaires came from ‘Germanic’ countries, they were carefully differ-

entiated from the true ‘Germanic’ volunteers from these countries. They

were not considered members of the SS, and so were not subject to the SS’s

racial criteria for selection or to the Marriage Order; they were foreign

legionnaires in the service of Germany. These legions were intended to

signify, in an explicitly nationalist manner, the participation of the countries

602 the ‘iron law of ethnicity’

concerned in the common ‘crusade’ against Bolshevism, while the idea of

the ‘Germanic’ volunteers implied an integrative purpose.

There were, however, considerable teething troubles involved in setting

up the legions; the Swedish one did not even get going.

In Denmark,

where recruitment was in the hands of the Danish Nazis, the SS began to

establish a so-called Free Corps ‘Denmark’ in July 1941, and by the end of

the month was able to send 600 volunteers to Germany for training.

In July

1941 Dutchmen and Flemings were withdrawn from the Standarte ‘North-

West’ established in April to form the core units for the ‘Flanders’ and ‘The

Netherlands’ legions

, and at the end of July the SS Leadership Ofﬁce

ordered the creation of the ‘Norway’ legion.

However, by the time the

men had ﬁnished their training at the end of 1941 none of the legions had

achieved regimental strength

—by then they had been able to recruit a total

of only 5,816 men.

In the directives that Himmler issued for the new force he emphasized

that the legionnaires were not members of the SS; thus, they did not wear

SS runes on their uniform, but instead badges symbolizing their ‘member-

ship of their nation’. They had to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler, and

received the same wages and family support as all other members of the

Waffen-SS.

The ﬁrst military engagement of the Flemish and Netherlands legions,

which occurred in January 1942 and was designed to block a Soviet

counter-attack in the Leningrad area, proved extremely costly. The Nor-

wegian legion also took part in military operations in the Leningrad area in

February 1942; the Danish legion had been ﬁghting on the eastern

front since 1941 as part of the ‘Death’s Head’ division.

The military

engagement of the Finnish legion was considerably delayed. In January

1942 Aaltonen, the chief of the Finnish state police, told a colleague of

Berger’s in no uncertain terms that the volunteers were so discontented,

above all with the arrogance of the German ofﬁcers and their rough

treatment, that ‘Finnish volunteers [ . . . ] going into action for the ﬁrst

time would shoot their German SS ofﬁcers’.

It was only after a number

of serious abuses had been dealt with that the Finnish authorities permitted

the battalion to leave for the front. From January 1942 onwards it fought for

several months as part of the ‘Viking’ division.

The complaints made by the Finns—discriminatory treatment, failure to

keep the promises with which they had been recruited, failure to take

account of the military experience and ranks that they had acquired in

the ‘iron law of ethnicity’ 603

their own army—were also made by the members of other nations. Berger

warned Himmler in February 1942 that ‘the recruitment of volunteers from

the Germanic and ethnic German areas is becoming more and more difﬁcult

and will cease altogether if fundamental changes are not made’.

In response, on 6 March 1942 Himmler transferred to Berger responsi-

bility for the ‘recruitment of the Waffen-SS legions, police units, and guard

battalions’, the ‘military supervision of all the Germanic volunteers’, and the

‘establishment, leadership, and training of the Germanic SS in the individual

countries’,

and introduced a series of concrete measures to meet the

legionnaires’ complaints. The men whose period of enlistment had come

to an end were in fact discharged; foreigners were also now allowed to be

trained as ofﬁcers at the SS ofﬁcer-training college at Bad To

lz; and from

now on German personnel who were transferred to the legions had to go

through an orientation course. Himmler also reserved the right to appoint

ofﬁcers to the foreign units of the Waffen-SS himself.

Since little changed as far as the poor treatment of foreigners was

concerned, and the war soon began to take a turn for the worse, during

1942 the number of volunteers decreased. The legions’ losses could no

longer be covered, so that they could no longer be deployed in their existing

form.

As a result, the legions had a poor reputation with the leadership of

the regime. In April 1942, during one of his table talks, Hitler was already

expressing scepticism about ‘all the foreign legions on the eastern front’: as

the legionnaire was not ‘inspired by ethnic membership of the Germanic

Reich he must consider himself a traitor to his nation’.

In view of the lack of new recruits, at the end of 1942 the decision was

taken to reorganize the legions; as part of this reorganization the term

‘legionnaire’ was replaced by ‘SS volunteer’. German members of the SS

and ‘Germanic volunteers’ were now deployed to reinforce the Danish,

Dutch, and Norwegian legions, and the legions were transformed into the

‘Denmark’, ‘Netherlands’, and ‘Norway’ regiments. This provided the basis

for the future SS Volunteer Panzer Grenadier division ‘Nordland’ (‘North-

land’).

The complicated name clearly indicates the difference between it

and the proper Waffen-SS divisions, which were composed only of Reich

Germans and ‘Teutons’.

A year later the ‘Netherlands’ regiment was removed from the ‘Nord-

land’ division. The new autonomous brigade ﬁnally became the 23rd SS

Volunteer Panzer Grenadier ‘Netherlands’ Division. A new Flemish legion

was established with the name ‘Langemarck’ and later transformed into the

604 the ‘iron law of ethnicity’

27th SS Volunteer Grenadier Division. The Wehrmacht transferred its

French and Wallonian volunteer units to the SS, which deployed each of

them as a division within the Waffen-SS, even though their numbers were

below those normally required for a Waffen-SS division.

The Finnish government, however, recalled its battalion in May 1943

following the wrangles referred to above.

Himmler issued an emotional

order of the day to the departing Finns: ‘During these recent most difﬁcult

and testing times we have been linked by a fraternal bond, which can never

be broken by any outward separation.’

Germanic volunteers

The recruitment of ‘Germanic’ volunteers was much more successful.

Although, like the German SS members, these volunteers had to undergo

racial screening

and submit to the obligations of the Engagement and

Marriage Order,

according to a (possibly too generous) estimate, during

the Second World War the Waffen-SS was able to recruit over 100,000 men

from northern and western Europe. However, about half of these joined

during the last year of the war, in other words, in circumstances under

which the ‘volunteers’ had few alternatives. According to this calculation

there were 50,000 Dutch, 40,000 Belgians (with equal numbers from

Flanders and Wallonia), and 6,000 each from Denmark and Norway, as

well as a further 1,200 volunteers from other countries, above all Switzer-

land, Sweden, and Luxembourg, and about 1,000 Finns.

On 12 August 1942 Hitler declared that the Reichsfu

hrer-SS was respon-

sible for ‘dealing with all the ethnic German groups in Denmark, Norway,

Belgium, and the Netherlands [ . . . ] on behalf of the NSDAP, its forma-

tions, and afﬁliated organizations’.

Six months later he extended this

monopoly of responsibility to the civilian administrations in the occupied

territories, so that they were now obliged to consult Himmler if they wished

to contact the ‘ethnic German’ elements in the various countries

concerned.

As a result, Himmler had not only strengthened his position

vis-a

-vis the recruitment of ‘Germanic’ volunteers in north-west Europe,

but above all had had his ‘Greater Germanic’ policy conﬁrmed. Ever since

the occupation of these countries in 1940 he had been endeavouring to

establish relations with indigenous fascist movements so that they could help

him not only to recruit for his Waffen-SS but also provide the political basis

the ‘iron law of ethnicity’ 605

for a future amalgamation with the Reich as part of the ‘Greater Germanic’

concept. However, by the time Hitler sanctioned this policy in August 1942

it had already basically failed.

In Denmark the SS had initially worked with the Danish Nazis, and

in particular used their organization to recruit volunteers. However,

through this cooperation the Danmarks Nationalsocialistiske Arbejderparti

(DNSAP) had discredited itself in the eyes of the majority of its fellow

countrymen. When elections were due in 1943 the DNSAP was to gain

representation in parliament only through massive electoral support from

the German minority. As a result the SS had to seek a new partner. In 1943 it

broke with the DNSAP, and instead the SS established a quasi-militia, the

Schalburg Corps, named after the leader of the ‘Denmark’ Free Corps,

Christian Frederik von Schalburg, who had been killed in Russia. Fritz

Clausen, the head of the DNSAP and formerly Himmler’s most important

partner in Denmark, volunteered for front-line duty and eventually, fol-

lowing his increasing abuse of alcohol, was conﬁned to a mental hospital by

Himmler.

In Norway Himmler had relied on Vidkun Quisling and his party,

Nasjonal Samling. Quisling, however, who had been appointed Prime

Minister by the occupation authorities in February 1942, was completely

isolated among his own population. His attempts to extract commitments

concerning the future of his country from the German leadership were

stalled.

In the Netherlands Himmler’s attempts to recruit volunteers met with

resistance from Anton Mussert, the very man whom the occupation autho-

rities regarded as their main ally in the country. The ‘Leider’ of the fascist

Nationaal-Socialistische movement, the only party that had been permitted

to exist in the Netherlands since the summer of 1941, was pursuing his own

policy. He hoped to achieve a ‘Greater Netherlands’ through amalgamation

with Germanic Flanders. Right from the start he regarded SS attempts at

recruitment as an affront to Dutch sovereignty. Although Himmler suc-

ceeded in neutralizing Mussert’s resistance to Waffen-SS recruitment and in

forcing through the establishment of a ‘Germanic’ General SS in the

Netherlands, in doing so he had aroused Mussert’s mistrust. He feared

that the ‘Greater German Reich’ propagated by Himmler would simply

result in the annexation of the Netherlands. Although Himmler was often

provoked by Mussert,

he could not avoid supporting him in public for the

simple reason that there was no alternative.

The person who was originally

606 the ‘iron law of ethnicity’

his closest ally, Rost van Tonningen, leader of the radical wing of the Dutch

Nazis, had been rejected as a volunteer by the SS-Standarte ‘Westland’

because he could not prove his Aryan identity and thus was not a feasible

candidate for such a function.

Rost van Tonningen had been born in

Indonesia, a fact that was used by his opponents to cast doubt on his racial

‘purity’. Instead, in April 1941 he took over as head of the Dutch national

bank and became state secretary in the Finance Ministry. From then on he

focused his attention on currency matters.

Himmler’s interest in Belgium was initially concentrated on Flanders,

which after the war he intended to incorporate into the Reich as ‘Reich Gau

Flanders’. The head of the SS Main Ofﬁce, Gottlob Berger, who regarded

himself as an expert on Flanders and devoted a considerable amount of effort

to the Germanization of this area, initially attempted to inﬁltrate the fascist

Vlaamisch Nationaal Verbond (VNV) and persuade it to adopt a Greater

Germanic policy, an attempt which, however, failed. It supported a policy

of seeking a Greater Flanders through the incorporation of the Netherlands.

In 1941 Berger, therefore, turned to the Deutssch-Vlamisch Arbeitsge-

meinschaft (DeVlag) (German-Flemish Working Group) in order, with

Himmler’s full support, to build it up as a counterweight to the VNV.

The result was that the Flemish forces who were prepared to collaborate

were now working against each other.

Himmler’s attempts to create a basis for his ‘Greater Germanic’ fantasies

through cooperation with fascist mass movements in north European

countries had led nowhere. The fact that he utilized these organizations

for the attempt to recruit for the Waffen-SS damaged their reputation in the

eyes of the indigenous population, which saw them not as the avant-garde

of a better political future but as collaborators and traitors. And from the

point of view of the fascist movements those volunteers recruited by the SS

now left a gap as political activists in the countries concerned.

Given this limited progress, and at the same time the Waffen-SS’s urgent

need for recruits, Himmler began to consider whether the concept of

‘Germanic volunteers’ could not be extended. For example, in the

French-speaking Wallonian part of Belgium, which Nazi racial experts

generally regarded as ‘Roman’, there was the fascist Rexist movement

under the leadership of Le

on Degrelle. Since the beginning of 1943 he

had been deputy commander of the SS Storm Brigade ‘Wallonia’, a unit of

Belgian volunteers that had been transferred by the Wehrmacht to the

Waffen-SS. Himmler supported Degrelle, if only for the simple reason

the ‘iron law of ethnicity’ 607

that he was able to recruit more volunteers for the SS in Wallonia than was

possible in the ‘Germanic’ Flemish part of Belgium.

Moreover, Himmler

approved of the way in which Degrelle was prepared to adapt his original

policy of a ‘Greater Belgium’ to the SS’s vague ‘Germanic’ ideas. For

Degrelle utilized the transfer of his men to the Waffen-SS to proclaim, in

a major speech, that the Walloons were members of the ‘Germanic race’.

Hitler was delighted (and evidently surprised) by this move, and noted in

January 1943 that it was ‘extremely interesting that the Walloons were now

suddenly deciding to be Teutons’.

Himmler, at any rate, was thinking along the same lines. In 1943 he

initiated racial-biological investigations in Wallonia which, according to a

report by Professor Frank Petri, appeared to conﬁrm that ‘the whole of the

north and west of France reaching right into the Paris basin contains a very

signiﬁcant proportion of Germanic-north German bloodlines’. Petri, who

was a medievalist and leading ‘researcher of the west’, held the rank of senior

councillor for military administration and acted as the expert for ‘ethnic

German and ethnic Flemish affairs’ on the staff of the military administra-

tion. He provided Himmler with the intellectual backing for his attempt to

claim that Wallonia should belong to the future Greater Germanic R eich.

Himmler’s Flanders expert, Gottlob Berger, could already see a ‘Reich Gau

Wallonia’, in other words, another Germanic province, beginning to

emerge.

In July 1944 Himmler explained his views on the Wallonia question to

Hitler in the following terms:

We must take care in our dealings with the movement for Wallonian renewal. Its

leader, Le

on Degrelle, is an extremely clever but very adaptable politician, who has

at last persuaded the Rexist movement to take on board the idea of a Greater

Germanic R eich but who is capable of suddenly reverting to the notion of a Greater

Burgundian Reich of the Walloons. Degrelle’s idea that the Walloons are roma-

nized Teutons is a view that we could very well adopt ourselves.

However, given the way the war was developing such plans soon proved

irrelevant: a few weeks later Himmler’s romanized Teutons were already

outside his control.

At the same time, on occasion Himmler contemplated assimilating young

Slovaks through service in the SS. In October 1941 he adopted a project

which Nageler, his adviser with the Hlinka Guard, had been pursuing for

some time.

During a meeting with the Slovak President Tiso, and his

608 the ‘iron law of ethnicity’

Interior Minister Mach, Himmler proposed recruiting volunteers for the

Waffen-SS from the Hlinka Guard. According to Himmler, Mach re-

sponded ‘enthusiastically’. This was the same visit during which he pro-

posed to his Slovak guests that ‘their’ Jews should be deported to the

General Government, a further example of how seamlessly the ‘positive’

and ‘negative’ sides of Himmler’s racial policy meshed together: integration

on the one hand, exclusion and mass murder on the other. After the

meeting Himmler immediately issued detailed instructions for the recruit-

ment of Slovaks. They should be ‘subject racially to the strictest Germanic

criteria’. One should ‘never be able to distinguish a Slovak volunteer in the

Waffen-SS from a German or a Germanic volunteer when in uniform’.

The idea was that, through such a process of racial selection, an elite could

be created in Slovakia that could be merged with the majority population of

a future Greater Germanic Reich.

On 1 September 1942 Himmler appointed Nageler his special represen-

tative for the recruitment of volunteers in Slovakia. In fact, from January

1943 onwards, with the support of the Slovak government, several thousand

men were to be ‘recruited’ for the Waffen-SS, sometimes under consider-

able pressure, although these came mostly from among the German minor-

ity. Himmler’s idea of ‘Germanizing’ a Slovak elite through service in the SS

was dropped.

Ethnic Germans

Under the changed circumstances of the war Himmler now beneﬁted from

the fact that in 1936–7 he had acquired the primary responsibility for ethnic

German policy and during the following years, with the help of VoMi, had

managed to bring the individual ethnic German communities increasingly

under his control. As early as April 1941 the Waffen-SS began recruiting

among the German minorities in western Banat (which, as part of Serbia,

was under German military administration); in the new state of Croatia,

which was dependent on Germany; as well as in Blatschka, which had been

transferred from Yugoslavia to Hungary.

This was rapidly extended to

other countries: Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia where Himmler’s recrui-

ters were already active. Since Himmler regarded the German ethnic groups

in the ﬁrst instance not as citizens of their respective countries but as

Germans, who were living in those countries purely as a result of historical

the ‘iron law of ethnicity’ 609