Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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accident, his methods could easily be transferred from one ethnic group to

the next, as will become clear in what follows. He had little interest in the

fact that his recruitment of people who, in terms of international law, were

foreigners would have serious repercussions for bilateral relations; conﬂicts

with the Foreign Ministry were thus inevitable.

While stationed in Yugoslavia in April 1941 the ‘Das Reich’ division

received the order to go ahead and recruit ethnic German volunteers into its

ranks. The divisional commander, Paul Hausser, began systematically to

carry out medical examinations in ethnic German villages of the Banat and

to train the recruits. Ethnic German soldiers of the Yugoslav army who had

been captured by the Germans were released if they agreed to join the

Waffen-SS. As a result, in one way or another around 1,000 men became

members of the Waffen-SS during the spring of 1941.

From April 1941 on an SS recruitment agency was operating among

ethnic Germans in Croatia.

However, this provoked protests from the

Foreign Ministry, which wanted to follow a different path. On 16 Septem-

ber 1941 the German envoy, Siegfried Kasche, made an agreement with the

War Minister, Slavko Kvaternik, about the recruitment of ethnic Germans.

According to this, 10 per cent of ethnic German recruits were to be reserved

for the Wehrmacht (Berger, however, claimed them for the Waffen-SS),

but the bulk of the ethnic Germans were to serve in special ethnic German

units of the Croatian army.

Himmler, however, was unimpressed by this. In the late summer of 1941

he established a ‘German Force’ along the lines of the General SS as a

security militia as well as a task formation for combating partisans, both of

which were formally attached to the Croatian militia, the Ustasha.

In November 1941, responding to a request from Hess issued in Febru-

ary, Himmler established an Ofﬁce for Ethnic Questions within the

NSDAP, which was to ‘deal with all ethnic issues involving the NSDAP’

with representatives from all four of the main ofﬁces that in the meantime

had acquired responsibilities for ethnic issues: VoMi, the RuSHA, the

RSHA, and the Staff Main Ofﬁce of the RKF.

The precise deﬁnition of

his party responsibilities for ‘settlement issues’, which involved difﬁcult

questions of competence, particularly in relation to the Soviet Union,

proved problematic, and Himmler was unable to realize his aim of now

being able to act as ‘the representative of the NSDAP for the consolidation

of the ethnic German nation’.

Nevertheless, by establishing the ofﬁce he

was clearly expressing his claim to be the main point of contact within the

610 the ‘iron law of ethnicity’

NSDAP for all ethnic German matters. In March 1942 the ofﬁce was even

raised to the status of a Main Ofﬁce for Ethnic Questions within the

NSDAP’s headquarters.

Hardly had the ofﬁce been created when, in November 1941, Himmler

met the leaders of the ethnic German groups in Croatia, Slovakia, and

Serbia. On this occasion Sepp Janko, who represented the Germans in

Banat in Serbia, offered to establish an ethnic German home guard in

regimental strength for the purpose of relieving the Wehrmacht units

based in Banat. In view of the relevant experience he had gained there,

Branimir Altgayer, the leader of the Germans in Croatia, was to provide

assistance with the training.

A few weeks later Hitler approved this plan.

Moreover, in January 1942 Himmler appointed August von Meyszner as the

ﬁrst HSSPF in Serbia.

Meyszner not only acquired command over all the

police in Serbia,

but was also given the task of recruiting ethnic Germans

for the Waffen-SS.

In February Himmler ordered von Meyszner to call

upon the German ethnic group in Banat to join a self-defence force attached

to the Waffen-SS.

However, de facto the recruitment of volunteers

turned into compulsory recruitment by agencies of the ethnic group.

Those members of the German minority of military age were also recruited

for a new division of the Waffen-SS, which ﬁnally received the name

‘Prince Eugene’.

In this way, by April 1942 some 10,000–15,000 men

had been recruited from the Banat, who did not in fact have to meet the SS’s

‘racial’ criteria. They counted as ‘SS volunteers’, not as ‘SS members’.

addition, also at the beginning of February 1942, the ‘Banat Staff Guard’ was

set up, an ethnic German auxiliary police force, which was formally subor-

dinate to the Serbian Interior Ministry but in fact answered to the German

commander of the order police in Belgrade.

Thus, within a very short period Himmler had managed to mobilize large

sections of the German minority in south-east Europe for his military

ambitions. That may have been responsible for the fact that, from spring

1942, he ﬂoated the idea that in principle ethnic Germans were subject to

military conscription just like the Germans in the Reich. However, Berger

vetoed that idea in June. He warned that the introduction of military

conscription was ‘not possible’ under international law, but in any case it

was ‘not at all necessary’, for ‘those who do not volunteer will simply have

their houses smashed up’.

As a result, in July Himmler modiﬁed his

position accordingly: he now declared that the ethnic German groups

throughout south-east Europe must be clear that, although they might

the ‘iron law of ethnicity’ 611

not be subject to it in legal terms, they were subject to military conscription

by the ‘iron law of their ethnicity’, and indeed ‘from the age of 17 to 50’.

From September 1942 onwards all ethnic German males aged between 17

and 60 in Banat who were not already on active military service were in fact

required to perform service in the ‘German Force’, a militia similar to the

SS, which, like the one in Croatia, performed security duties. Himmler’s

order to establish the German Force corresponded to an order (to which we

shall return) that he had issued the previous month for the mobilization of

the Germans in the General Government and occupied Polish territories.

All these instructions were designed to achieve a single goal: the total

mobilization of all ethnic Germans under the command of the SS.

On 17 October 1942 Himmler visited the ‘Prince Eugene’ division in

Kraljevo on his way back from a visit to Italy. On the following day ethnic

Germans in the Balkans celebrated the birthday of the person whose name

their division bore.

Recruitment for the division was carried out through-

out the Balkans. In the autumn of 1941 the Waffen-SS had already recruited

so many ethnic German men in Croatia that the quota of 10 per cent settled

on in the agreement of 16 September 1941 was soon exceeded. However—

and this point was emphasized by Martin Luther, head of the German

department in the Foreign Ministry—this recruitment was jeopardizing

the existence of the ethnic German task formation, which had been created

to combat the continually increasing partisan movement. Thus, in October

1941 the SS Main Ofﬁce agreed to cease recruitment.

However, when it

became apparent that the ethnic Germans who, according to the agreement

of 16 September, were supposed to serve with special units of the Croatian

army were in fact receiving their training from Wehrmacht units, Himmler

made a strong complaint to the Wehrmacht and ﬁnally succeeded in

ensuring that in future the recruitment and training of ethnic Germans

throughout south-east Europe would be in the hands of the SS.

In June 1942 Himmler permitted recruitment to begin again. All 17–30-

year-old ethnic Germans from Croatia were to be inspected for admission to

the ‘Eugene’ division. In consequence, around 20,000 members of the

ethnic German minority who lived in the Bosnian territories which be-

longed to Croatia, and which had been made insecure as a result of the

activities of Yugoslav partisans, had to be resettled because they had been

rendered virtually defenceless as a result of the recruitment of their young

men. Moreover, putting an end to such ‘scattered settlements’ and their

replacement by ‘concentrated settlement’ in closed areas reﬂected the policy

612 the ‘iron law of ethnicity’

that Himmler was simultaneously pursuing in Poland and the Soviet Union

in his role as Settlement Commissar. The Foreign Ministry temporarily

stopped or slowed down the recruitment,

but then gave way after massive

pressure from Berger.

Voluntary recruitment was in reality a farce, as is clear from the principle

enunciated by Himmler in July that ethnic Germans were subject to the

‘iron law of ethnicity’. In fact, all members of the relevant age cohorts

were inspected by commissions organized by Obersturmfu

hrer Nageler,

and the organizations of the ethnic group concerned also applied pressure.

By the end of November 28,000 men had been inspected and over 6,500

conscripted.

In December 1941 Hitler ordered the transfer of the ‘Eugene’

division to Croatia in order to ﬁll it with the new recruits. During the ﬁrst

months of 1943 the ethnic German troops of the Croatian Wehrmacht and

the task formations were integrated into the division.

Meanwhile, in

December 1942, however, new complications had arisen: the Croatian

government wanted to withdraw Croatian citizenship from those ethnic

Germans who had joined the SS. But the Germans ﬁnally managed to

persuade it to agree to postpone dealing with the matter until the end of

the war.

In September 1942, while recruitment was going on, the Reich and

Croatian governments made an agreement that, as Himmler had planned,

more than 18,000 ethnic Germans were to be resettled. The majority of

them ended up in a camp near Ło

; the others were housed in camps

scattered throughout the Reich.

Himmler, however, wanted more: the

removal of all Germans living in Croatia. His proposal can be explained

partly in terms of his irritation at the difﬁculties that had arisen in relation to

recruitment in Croatia. But he justiﬁed his proposal with the argument that

this would be a way of demonstrating to their Italian allies (with whom they

shared the occupation of Croatia) that the Reich was not pursuing any long-

term interests of its own in the country. Himmler’s real motive, however,

was probably his overarching Lebensraum project. For in the meantime

Himmler had abandoned the idea of using the German minority to exercise

inﬂuence in Croatia and instead planned to move them to settlement areas

in eastern Europe for which there were not yet nearly enough potential

settlers. At this point he also proposed the ‘resettlement’ of the ethnic

Germans living in Transnistria, which indicates that his plans for ethnic

Germans covered the whole of south-east Europe.

the ‘iron law of ethnicity’ 613

Since the autumn of 1941 Nageler’s men had been at work in Blatschka,

which had previously been Serbian but which had been annexed by Hun-

gary, with their operations disguised as a racial-biological research project.

By October 1941 they had recruited 2,000 Germans for the Waffen-SS. By

the summer of 1941 hundreds of young men from the old Hungarian

territory had already been sent to the Reich for ‘sports training’.

On 18 November Himmler announced to Franz Basch, the leader of the

ethnic German group in Hungary, that the Waffen-SS was now aiming to

recruit to a far greater extent than before from the Hungarian German men

who were living in the core part of Hungary.

He showed little concern for

the political and legal problems created by such a course of action, given that

it involved people who had lived there a long time and had Hungarian

citizenship. For him these people were merely pawns in his scheme to create

a Greater Germanic R eich. The statement that he made in December to the

effect that it would be possible to secure around 60,000 ethnic German

volunteers from Hungary, R omania, and Slovakia

is further proof that he

regarded the very different conditions prevailing in these various countries

as of secondary signiﬁcance.

The Hungarian government agreed to the recruitment of 20,000 ethnic

Germans. The recruitment programme lasted from 24 February to 3 April

1942, and was once again led by Nageler. A total of 25,000 men reported for

inspection, 18,000 of whom were graded as ﬁt for combat.

In June 1942,

under pressure from Himmler, Ribbentrop arranged another recruitment

programme with the Hungarian government for 1943.

(An agreement

similar to that with Hungary was intended to be made with Romania in

1943.)

However, from an ‘ethnic-political’ point of view the Hungarian

programme had a ﬂaw: the Hungarians had insisted that, on joining the

Waffen-SS, the ethnic Germans would lose their Hungarian citizenship.

This meant that the potential of the German minority for exercising

inﬂuence was much reduced. Himmler was not only prepared to accept

this, he even appears to have been willing to go a step further. Basch

reported after the war that Himmler had conﬁded to him that he was

planning to resettle the Hungarian Germans in the Warthegau.

Thus, what originally began as the recruitment of volunteers for self-

defence units had led to the de facto military conscription of the ethnic

Germans; in the course of this development the SS had not only acquired

complete control of the national groups concerned but had even been

able to recruit members of their leadership. However, the recruitment

614 the ‘iron law of ethnicity’

programmes normally had the effect of weakening the national group

concerned to the extent that the abandonment of the country in which

they had lived for centuries came under discussion and in some cases was

actually carried out.

This approach was opposed by the Foreign Ministry. Martin Luther, the

head of its German department, had already objected to the resettlement of

the German minority in Croatia, complaining in September 1942 that this

step would ‘immediately weaken the sense of ethnic solidarity’ of the other

2.5–3 million ethnic Germans in the south east.

Luther, who had joined

the Foreign Ministry in a sideways move from the party and was one of the

main ﬁgures responsible for the naziﬁcation of the ministry, was neverthe-

less sceptical about SS policy. At the beginning of 1943 Helmut Triska, who

was responsible for ethnic policy in the Foreign Ministry, and like Luther

had originally come from the party and therefore was basically in favour of

the ‘revolutionary’ drive of Nazi ethnic policy, strongly criticized Himm-

ler’s approach in a paper with the title ‘On Radical Measures Taken by the

Reich Leadership of the SS Concerning the Policy Towards Ethnic German

Groups Abroad’.

In particular Triska complained that, in recruiting 20,000 ethnic Germans

from Hungary, Himmler had accepted the loss of their Hungarian citizen-

ship and as a result the group had suffered the permanent loss of its most

active members. In Croatia too ‘the physical threat to the German settle-

ments was considerably increased. The German settlements in Bosnia had to

be removed and resettled during the war.’ In Serbia, ‘the conscription that

was originally going to be carried out by the leaders of the national groups

[ . . . ] was carried out directly by the division itself and this was done

rigorously, ignoring any political considerations’. As far as Romania was

concerned, despite ‘all assurances to the contrary by the Reich leadership of

the SS, [ . . . ] numerous ethnic Germans from Romania were illegally

conscripted into the ranks of the Waffen-SS, which led to resistance from

the R omanian government’ and made ‘Reich policy appear suspect’.

In conclusion, according to Triska, the fact was that

the Reich leadership of the SS [ ...] has pursued policies towards ethnic German

groups which have made it virtually impossible to plan future w ork involving these

ethnic groups. [ . . . ] The measures taken have created such political confusion, not

only among the foreign governments but also among the agencies of the Reich

leadership of the SS, that nobody has any idea whether the ethnic groups in the

the ‘iron law of ethnicity’ 615

various countries concerned are to be prepared for future resettlement, consolida-

tion, or political and economic expansion.

The Reich leadership had ‘either taken, initiated, or advocated measures

that have promoted expansion, measures that have consolidated the status

quo, and measures that have involved removal, in other words resettle-

ment’. ‘These measures reveal no clear political line.’

There could hardly be a more apposite description of the chaos that

Himmler’s policies had created among the ethnic German minorities in

south-east Europe (but not only there).

For the ruthless policy of recruit-

ment had drained the ethnic German minorities, threatening their very

existence, while the Reichsfu

hrer’s plans for a new ethnic order remained

too nebulous to offer these people an alternative life in another area.

616 the ‘iron law of ethnicity’

A Europe-wide Reign of Terror

n the second half of 1942 a whole series of developments coincided

within Himmler’s empire. As has been shown in the two previous

chapters, settlement policy and the increased recruitment of citizens of

other countries for the SS were being vigorously pursued, as was the

deportation and murder of the European Jews. However, for various

reasons a number of obstacles were emerging. In this chapter we shall see

how these measures of Himmler’s corresponded with those in other spheres

in which he was active during the decisive summer months of 1942.

Himmler was successful in securing the responsibility for ‘combating parti-

sans’, in order above all to be in a position to drive forward the annihilation

of the Jews in eastern Europe. Combating resistance in the occupied

territories generally went hand in hand with an increase in Jewish persecu-

tion. He was also to make a serious attempt to establish an SS armaments

concern. When that failed he turned to hiring out KZ prisoners as forced

labour to industry. In order to increase their number, among other things he

had the ‘asocials’ transferred from prison to concentration camp. By taking

over the responsibility for punishing slave labourers from eastern Europe he

was able to consign them to concentration camps for the slightest offence

and thereby to increase his reservoir of labour. These measures, which were

motivated partly by racial, partly by security, and partly by economic

priorities, were also driven by the Reichsfu

hrer-SS’s concern to hold to-

gether and combine the various parts of his empire as it expanded in all

directions, in order not only to increase his power but above all to be able to

realize the political objectives of his grand project to establish a new order

on the European continent under the leadership of the SS.

On 28 July, only a few days after the ﬁnal launching of the European

Holocaust, Himmler embarked on a journey to Finland.

Despite a

programme packed with meetings, he was intending to make time for a bit

of relaxation. After a stopover in Reval he landed in Helsinki on the morning

of 9 July, where he was ofﬁcially welcomed by the President, Risto Ryti, and

in the evening attended a dinner given by the Prime Minister, Johan

Wilhelm Rangell. On the following day he was given a tour of the city and

in the afternoon ﬂew to Mikelli, the headquarters of the Finnish Command-

er-in-Chief, Marshall Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim, whom he met in the

evening. During the following days he had meetings with Colonel-General

Eduard Dietl in Rovaniemi and with the commander of the SS Division

‘North’, Matthias Kleinheisterkamp, in Kananeinen, and inspected Waffen-

SS units. On 2 August Himmler travelled for two days of relaxation on the

island of Petays, which had been recommended to him by his masseur, Felix

Kersten, for the ‘magnetic healing’ properties of its sunbathing. On 2 August

he met Prime Minister Rangell on Petays and, according to the latter’s post-

war testimony, raised the question of Finland’s attitude to its indigenous

Jews. Rangell claims to have evaded the issue by remarking that that there

was no ‘Jewish question’ in Finland, which had around 2,000 assimilated

Jews.

In fact the small Jewish minority was not affected by the Jewish policy

of its mighty German ally. After a bit of sightseeing in Helsinki on 5 August

Himmler ﬂew back to his headquarters the following day.

In parallel with Himmler’s initiative in Finland, during July and August

1942 the RSHA tried to get other allies to hand over their Jews. When

viewed together, these various actions clearly indicate that the RSHA was

now determined to try to deport Jews from as many European states as

possible in the course of 1942.

In July the police attache

at the embassy in Zagreb was instructed to

initiate ‘the resettlement’ of the Croatian Jews to ‘Germany’s eastern terri-

tories’. The Ustasha regime had already created the preconditions for this:

from the spring of 1941 onwards it had introduced anti-Semitic legislation

modelled on Germany’s and interned more than half of the 30,000 Jews

living in Croatia in camps, in which the majority were murdered or died as a

result of the appalling conditions.

In August the Germans organized four

deportation trains to Auschwitz, where nearly 5,000 Jews were murdered.

Since the summer of 1941 Romania had been actively involved in the

German policy of exterminating the Jews in the newly conquered eastern

territories. In the territories of Bessarabia and the Bukovina, which had just

been reconquered from the Soviet Union, the Romanians murdered around

50,000 Jews; the Jewish inhabitants of this area who survived, around

150,000 people, were deported to the territory occupied by Romania

618 a europe-wide reign of terror

between the Dniester and the Bug rivers. At least 65,000 of these people

died of hunger and in epidemics or were shot.

In July 1942 the Reich demanded control over the Jews in the core

Romanian territory. The adviser on ‘Jewish questions’ at the German

embassy in Bucharest, SS-Hauptsturmfu

hrer Gustav Richter, made an agree-

ment with the Romanian government that the around 320,000 Jews affected,

who since 1938 had been subjected to increasingly tough anti-Semitic

legislation, should be deported from 10 September 1942 onwards. The

German ambassador in Bucharest, Manfred von Killinger, informed the

Foreign Ministry that the destination of the transports was to be the district

of Lublin, where ‘those capable of working would be deployed in labour

columns while the remainder would be subjected to special treatment’.

In Hungary the situation was different. Although anti-Semitic legislation

had been passed, in the view of the Germans it was not sufﬁciently effective,

as it hardly went beyond the Nuremberg laws.

When, in July 1942, the

Hungarian military attache

in Berlin submitted his government’s proposal

that all Jews living in Hungary ‘illegally’ should be resettled to Transnistria,

Himmler decided to postpone the deportation of Jewish refugees requested

by Hungary until the Hungarians had agreed to include their indigenous

Jews in the proposed measures.

As far as Bulgaria was concerned, in the summer of 1942 the RSHA

considered that its Jewish legislation was also inadequate to initiate deporta-

tion.

Moreover, they were making no progress in the case of Greece either.

Attempts by the RSHA and the Foreign Ministry during the second half of

1942 to persuade their Italian allies to adopt a tougher anti-Semitic policy in

their two occupation zones in Greece—namely, to introduce the marking

of Jews with a badge—came to nothing.

During July and August the RSHA also increased the tempo of deporta-

tions in the occupied western territories. Following Himmler’s order of

June to deport all French Jews, ten initial transports with a total of around

10,000 people were sent to Auschwitz between 19 July and 7 August. Those

being deported, stateless Jews who had often lost their citizenship only as a

result of German Jewish policy, were arrested in a major raid that took place

in Paris on 16 and 17 July.

As had been agreed with the Vichy government

in July, from August onwards they also began deporting Jews from the

unoccupied zone. Moreover, between 14 and 26 August over 2,000 Jewish

children were sent to Auschwitz in six transports, despite the fact that most

a europe-wide reign of terror 619