Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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of them were French citizens. Both the French Prime Minister, Pierre

Laval, and the R SHA had given their express approval for this action.

The deportations from the Netherlands began in the middle of July:

around 38,000 people had been sent to Auschwitz by the end of the

year.

From 4 August 1942 trains from Belgium travelled in the same

direction.

By the end of 1942 almost 17,000 people, all of them foreign

or stateless Jews, had fallen victim to these measures.

Meanwhile, at the end of July HSSPF Fritz Katzmann had once again begun

the mass murder of Jews in the General Government, in accordance with

Himmler’s order to make the territory ‘free of Jews’ by the end of the year.

In the major ‘August action’, which took place between 10 and 25 August,

he had more than 40,000 Jews arrested in the district capital of Lemberg

(Lviv) alone, around half of the city’s population of Jews, and then deported

in goods trains to Belzec, where they were murdered.

This mass murder was in full swing on 17 August when Himmler arrived

in Lemberg for a meeting that was attended by, among others, Governor

Otto Wa

chter, Katzmann, and Globocnik. On this day alone Katzmann had

had 3,051 people arrested, who were then deported to Belzec.

On the

following day Himmler, as usual, wanted to see for himself; to begin with he

inspected various SS ofﬁces and then a number of camps for Jewish forced

labour working on the Transit R oad IV. In the evening he ﬂew back to

Berlin.

Three days later he once again met Globocnik, this time in Lublin,

and travelled with him to the area round Zamosc to see what progress had

been made towards its ‘Germanization’.

Between 31 August and 3 September Himmler had to deal with a

completely different issue: air-raid damage. He undertook a journey lasting

several days to cities in north and west Germany which had been hit

particularly badly by the increasing Allied air raids, gained a clear picture

of the extent of the damage, and then issued instructions for its clearing-up.

In the process he demonstrated once again how ﬂexible he was in linking his

various responsibilities. Teams of KZ prisoners, who had originally been

intended for building-projects in the east, were now utilized for the clear-

ance of air-raid damage in the west and KZ workshops were used to provide

door- and window-frames.

A few weeks later Himmler had to face the fact that his plan to make the

whole of the General Government ‘free of Jews’ by the end of the year

could not be achieved. At the armaments conference held between 20 and

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23 September 1942 Hitler agreed with the proposal of the head of labour

mobilization, Fritz Sauckel, that in view of the dramatic shortage of labour

Jewish skilled workers in the General Government should continue to be

employed.

Himmler, who evidently discussed the consequences of this

decision with Hitler on 22 September,

reacted quickly. Since his attempt

from the beginning of the year to integrate forced labour into the extermi-

nation programme had resulted in his now having to slow down mass

murder in favour of slave labour, he would now have to increase the

number of KZ prisoners who could be forced to work. He would do this

through mass arrests of non-Jews (which will be discussed below), as well as

by conﬁning ghetto inhabitants in concentration or forced labour camps.

On 9 October 1942 he ordered that ‘so-called armaments workers’ in textile

and other plants in Warsaw and Lublin should be gathered together in

concentration camps. Those Jews who were employed in ‘real armaments

plants’ should be removed in stages so that there would be only ‘a few big

Jewish concentration camp plants’ left, preferably in the east of the General

Government. ‘However, even there, according to the Fu

hrer, the Jews

should disappear one day.’

Police regulations issued in October and

November 1942 conﬁned ‘Jewish residential districts’ to restricted areas.

For all those Polish Jews who were not engaged in armaments production

these regulations represented certain death. At the end of 1942 , according to

ofﬁcial German data, only 298,000 of the 2.3 million Jews who had been

originally living in the General Government were still alive.

Himmler also intervened directly in the extermination process in the

Soviet Union, to which the basic instructions for the systematic murder of

European Jews issued in May and June 1942 had particularly applied. In

doing so he made use of the fact that in July 1942 Hitler had given him

responsibility for ‘combating bandits’.

In May 1942 the Einsatzgruppen had resumed their murderous activity

systematically and on a large scale in the General Commissariat of White

Ruthenia. At the end of July Commissar-General Wilhelm Kube reported

that ‘during the past 10 weeks around 55,000 Jews [have] been liquidated’.

In the Reich Commissariat Ukraine, where a new wave of murders had also

begun in May, the scale of murder was stepped up in July, a development

exactly matching that in the General Government, where Himmler had

ordered the annihilation of the Jewish population by the end of the year,

and which was also directly linked to the responsibility for ‘combating

bandits’. This involved, as we shall see, not simply the elimination of actual

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partisans but all ‘suspect elements’, and by deﬁnition these included the

Jewish population. A letter from Himmler to Berger dated 28 July 1942

provides documentary evidence that this responsibility was the equivalent of

an order from Hitler for the systematic murder of the Soviet population in

the occupied Soviet territories: with a hint of self-pity, he declared: ‘The

occupied eastern territories will become free of Jews. The Fu

hrer has placed

the implementation of this very burdensome order on my shoulders. No-

body can relieve me of this responsibility.’

At the end of August 1942 there was a further escalation in the Ukraine:

the aim was now the complete annihilation of the Jewish population. It is

worth remembering in this context the settlement plans Himmler was

pursuing at the same time for the Ukraine, where he had based his head-

quarters throughout the summer months. These involved ‘the settlement

together’ of 10,000 ethnic Germans in and around Shitomir and the idea

that parts of the Ukraine would be completely ‘German’ within a period of

only twenty years. Against this background it is not surprising that the

occupying authorities concentrated on systematically murdering, district

by district, all the Jews living there, in particular in the General Commissar-

iats of Volhynia-Podolia and Shitomir, centres of Jewish life in the Uk-

raine.

It is true that the settlement of ethnic Germans occurred directly at

the expense of the Ukrainians (and not of the Jews). However, the indirect

link between the future of the ethnic Germans and the ‘Jewish question’

within the context of a ‘new ethnic order’ is obvious.

The SD ofﬁce in Pinsk began to dissolve the city ghetto at the end of

October. This was prompted by a written order from Himmler of 27

October 1942:

According to my information, the ghetto in Pinsk can be regarded as the head-

quarters for all the bandit activity in the Pripet marshes. I therefore recommend

that, despite any economic concerns you may have, you immediately dissolve and

liquidate the ghetto in Pinsk. If possible 1,000 male workers are to be secured and

transferred to the Wehrmacht for the construction of the wood en huts. The work

of these 1,000 workers must, howeve r, be carried out only in a closed camp under

the strictest guard. If this guard cannot be provided then these 1,000 workers should

also be annihilated.

The instruction was immediately carried out. Between 29 October and

1 November at least 16,200 people were murdered, in a massacre lasting

four days.

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At the end of 1942 there were only a few thousand Jewish skilled workers

still left in the Ukraine.

The HSSPF for South Russia, Hans Pru

tzmann,

reported to Himmler on 26 December 1942 that in the course of ‘combat-

ing the bandits’ in the area for which he was responsible, which included the

Ukraine and Bialystok, between 1 September and 1 December 1942 a total

of 363,211 Jews had been ‘executed’. On 29 December Himmler passed on

the report to Hitler, who took note of it.

From September onwards, however, there were increasing signs that the

deportations, which since the summer of 1942 had come to involve the

whole of Europe, would by no means proceed smoothly. The problems

were not conﬁned to the General Government. In a number of places there

were even intentional delays and resistance.

At the armaments conference from 20 to 22 September 1942 referred to

above Hitler had spoken of the ‘importance of removing the Jews from the

Ill. 29. This is how Himmler liked to see himself: constantly on the move in order

to take decisions on the spot, drive things forward, and personally intervene to

sort things out. The photo comes from a collection of private photos that Himmler

sent his daughter Gudrun, in order to keep in touch with her.

a europe-wide reign of terror 623

armaments plants’.

A few days later he emphasized to Goebbels his deter-

mination, ‘under all circumstances to get the Jews out of Berlin’; Jewish

workers were to be replaced by foreigners.

At that point, however, it was

simply not possible. It was only the increased recruitment of foreigners and

POWs for armaments production from the beginning of 1943 onwards, and

the general toughening of domestic policy after Stalingrad, that provided the

preconditions for a new wave of deportations from the Reich. Nevertheless,

Himmler did all he possibly could to realize Hitler’s aim of making the Reich

‘free of Jews’. In September he made an agreement with the Reich Minister

of Justice, Otto Georg Thierack, that he would take over all ‘asocial ele-

ments’ who were in prison, including all Jews, Gypsies, R ussians, and Poles,

for ‘extermination through labour’.

On 29 September he inspected Sach-

senhausen concentration camp, and on the same day instructed Glu

cks, the

Inspector of Concentration Camps, ‘to make all concentration camps based

in the Reich free of Jews and [ . . . ] to transfer all Jews to Auschwitz

concentration camp and the POW camp in Lublin’, an instruction which,

on 5 October, the RSHA passed on to the relevant ofﬁces and which was

substantially carried out during the following months.

In France, after the transports in July and August the deportation

programme came to a halt. As a large number of children were held in the

camps, the attempt to continue the deportations aroused public opposition

from the Catholic Church and the population was vehemently hostile. Thus,

at the beginning of September the Vichy government informed the Germans

that further arrests and deportations could no longer be carried out in the

unoccupied zone.

Thus, in view of the threat to the domestic reputation of Prime Minister

Laval, in September HSSPF Carl Oberg persuaded Himmler, as a kind of

gesture of good-will towards the French, not to deport any more French

citizens from the occupied zone for the time being.

This was a remarkable

change of policy, given the fact that as recently as June the Reichsfu

hrer had

demanded the complete deportation of all Jews from France by the end of

the year. Now the occupation authorities increasingly concentrated on

arresting foreign Jews in the occupied zone, who were deported to the

east during November in four more transports. After that there was a stop to

the deportations; by then 42, 000 people had been deported from France.

In Norway a wave of arrests began on the 25 October after the RSHA had

been pushing for the deportation of the small Jewish minority. In Novem-

ber the ﬁrst of a total of 770 Jews were deported—930 had ﬂed to Sweden.

624 a europe-wide reign of terror

The Foreign Ministry and the RSHA also had little success with their

allies in the autumn of 1942. Despite several initiatives it became clear that,

apart from Croatia, all the allies who during 1942 had been included in the

German deportation plans had by the autumn frustrated their intentions. In

Slovakia the deportations had come to a complete halt by October 1942;

Romania was evidently stalling the procedure that had been agreed in July.

In January 1943 Himmler ﬁnally realized that there was no point in pushing

the Romanian government to deliver up its Jews; he therefore suggested

that the ‘Jewish adviser’ at the German embassy in Bucharest should be

withdrawn.

Bulgaria

and Hungary

also showed a lack of commitment

in October 1942.

At the end of November Himmler had still believed that the deportations

from Hungary could soon be set in train. For this purpose he offered

Ribbentrop the services of an experienced expert, for example Dieter

Wisliceny, to act as the ‘desk ofﬁcer for Jewish questions’ at the German

embassy in Budapest. As a ‘ﬁrst instalment’ 100,000 Jews could be deported

from the territories annexed from Slovakia and Romania.

However, in

December he had to accept that the Hungarians had no interest in deporting

their indigenous Jews.

In October 1942 under-state secretary Luther’s attempts, made via the

German missions in Rome and Zagreb, to clarify the Italians’ attitude

towards the deportation of Croatian Jews from their occupation zone met

with no more success.

Even Himmler could not make a difference. At a

meeting with Mussolini during a visit to Italy in October 1942 the two men

discussed the ‘Jewish question’. On this occasion Himmler gave Mussolini

an insight, partly realistic and partly glossed over, into its violent ‘solution’.

However, before he could get round to discussing Italian Jewish policy,

Mussolini ended the interview with a ‘friendly enquiry about the programme

for my stay in Rome and my next travel programme’.

By this time the Jews

living in Croatia had already been interned by the Italian occupation autho-

rities. This had removed them from German clutches.

The combating of partisans and repression

in the occupied territories

In view of the increasing threat posed by Soviet partisans, in July 1942 Hitler

decided that in future the police should be responsible in the ﬁrst instance

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for combating them.

This decision was made at precisely the moment

when Himmler was involving the whole of Europe in the extermination

programme, and it underlines once more the close link between the

Holocaust and ‘combating partisans’. The maxim that Jews were ‘to be

exterminated as partisans’ had been in force ever since the invasion of the

Soviet Union; as already mentioned, Hitler had speciﬁcally conﬁrmed it to

Himmler on 18 December 1941 and, by transferring to him this responsi-

bility, provided him with further room for manoeuvre vis-a

-vis the

programme of mass murder.

However, that was not the only point. Himmler had already proved how

brutally he could act against ‘bandits’ even when the murder of Jews was

not the main priority. On 25 June 1942 he had ordered that ‘bandit activity’

in Upper Carniola and Lower Styria—in other words in the territory

annexed from Yugoslavia—should be ‘totally’ crushed in a ‘four-week-

long campaign’ under the direction of the HSSPF for the Alpine region,

Erwin Ro

sener. ‘Every last German man in this territory but also from

outside this area from the old Gaus of Ka

rnten and Styria, who is capable

of bearing arms and aged between 17 and 55, is to be mobilized for this

campaign [ . . . ] The campaign is to be purposeful, tough, and ruthless.’

Himmler spelled out what this involved in detailed ‘guidelines’.

The campaign must neutralize all elements of the population who have willingly

supported the partisans by providing manpower, food supplies, weaponry, and

shelter. The men of a guilty family, in many cases even the clan, are to be executed

as a matter of principle; the women of these families are to be arrested and sent to a

concentration camp and the children are to be removed from their home and to be

collected together in the Old Reich part of the Gau. I shall expect separate reports

about the number and racial quality of these children. The possessions of the guilty

families are to be conﬁscated.

‘The campaign’, according to Himmler, ‘will require from the leaders and

men the utmost in the performance of their duty and in discretion as well as

in physical performance and exertion in the difﬁcult mountain terrain I

expect leaders and men of the SS and police to fulﬁl the expectations that

have been placed in them.’

In fact the coming months saw a large number

of executions, arrests, and compulsory adoptions in this occupied territory.

On 28 July 1942 Himmler made an ofﬁcial announcement that the

‘Reichsfu

hrer-SS and Chief of the German Police’ had now, ‘in agreement

with the OKW’, become ‘the supreme agency for combating the so-called

626 a europe-wide reign of terror

partisans’. ‘I am personally assuming [command of this] struggle against

bandits, francs-tireurs, and criminals.’

A few days later he ordered that the

term ‘partisan’ should not be used in future, and that instead the term to be

used should be ‘bandits’ (Banden).

On 18 October Hitler conﬁrmed

Himmler’s general responsibility for ‘combating bandits’, and stated speciﬁ-

cally that Himmler should be ‘solely responsible’ in the Reich Commissar-

iats, whereas in the districts under military administration the Wehrmacht

should be in charge.

Already on 9 July the Reichsfu

hrer-SS had summoned high-ranking SS

functionaries to Berlin to a meeting about the future combating of partisan

activity. As usual Himmler was not slow to put forward proposals: for

example, the population of the occupied Soviet territories should be forced

to cut down trees and bushes on either side of the roads and railways to a

depth of 400 to 500 metres in order to deprive the partisans of cover. For a

variety of reasons the Reich Ministry for the Eastern Territories failed to

implement this.

He had more success with another suggestion. On 17 August Himmler,

with the Fu

hrer’s approval, imposed on those Germans living in the General

Government and occupied Soviet territories who were not serving in the

Wehrmacht, police, or SS the ‘duty of honour’ ‘to increase the combat

strength of the SS/police by placing themselves at its disposal in their free

time, and particularly during emergencies’, by serving in ‘alarm units’.

Himmler admitted that this would mean that in future they would lose

their weekends because of having to carry out exercises, but he was

convinced that those affected ‘would be happy, even if they were not liable

for military service,

to be able to serve the Fatherland in some capacity by

bearing arms’.

It is clear that this provided the local SS and police agencies

with a powerful weapon for putting pressure on members of the civilian

administration or employees of German ﬁrms; the total mobilization of all

Germans in the occupied east strengthened the power of the SS and police.

On 7 August Himmler issued detailed orders for two major campaigns

against partisans in the General Commissariat of White Ruthenia and the

district of Bialystok.

The operations ‘Marsh Fever’ and ‘Wisent’ took

place during August–September and September–October 1942. However

‘Marsh Fever’, which was commanded by the HSSPF for Russia-North,

Jeckeln, proved to be something of a failure as far as combating partisans was

concerned. In order to make the result appear more impressive, in addition

to 389 ‘bandits’ who had allegedly been shot in combat and 1,274 bandits

a europe-wide reign of terror 627

who had been ‘found guilty’, Jeckeln had more than 8,000 Jews shot out of

hand, among them almost the whole population of the Baranowicze ghetto.

Although this mass murder ﬁtted in with Himmler’s aim of pushing on with

the murder of Jews under the cover of ‘combating bandits’, at the same

time he wanted to see more dead ‘bandits’. As a result, the responsibility for

‘combating bandits’ in White Ruthenia was transferred to the HSSPF for

Russia-Centre, von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was considered more effec-

tive.

Ernst von dem Bach-Zelewski was to become Himmler’s most important

commander in the ﬁeld of ‘combating bandits’. However, at this point, as

HSSPF for Russia-Centre, the dynamic Bach was responsible only for

territory under military administration. But, according to the Fu

hrer direc-

tive of 18 August, the Wehrmacht was responsible for ‘combating bandits’

in this area. Bach, therefore, requested Himmler to appoint him ‘Inspector

for the Combating of Bandits in the Whole of the Eastern Territories’.

On 22 September Himmler discussed this proposal with Hitler in the

context of a conversation lasting several hours which, apart from the threat

from partisans, covered the settlement of ethnic Germans in the eastern

territories and ‘Jewish emigration’,

a further indication of the extent to

which these three topics were linked in Himmler’s conception of the

reordering of living-space in the east. Hitler agreed, and on 24 October

Himmler appointed his HSSPF Russia-Centre not only as ‘The Reichs-

hrer-SS’s Plenipotentiary for Combating Bandits’ but also signed a total of

ﬁve edicts regulating this new ofﬁce.

Above all, Himmler subordinated to him the General Commissariat

White Ruthenia, which was under civilian administration, for the duration

of the planned ‘paciﬁcation campaign’. This was followed in November by

the appointment of Curt von Gottberg as the new SS and Police Leader in

White Ruthenia. Thus, Gottberg, who had been in the political wilderness

since 1939 as a result of the Prague ‘Land Ofﬁce affair’,

was being given

the chance to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of his Reichsfu

hrer by particu-

larly ruthless action. By transferring the Sonderkommando Dirlewanger,

which was largely composed of criminals,

to Byelorussia Himmler was

placing at von dem Bach-Zelewski’s and Gottberg’s disposal a particularly

brutal force for carrying out the planned ‘paciﬁcation campaign’.

Thus

Himmler had appointed a handpicked trio for ‘combating bandits’ in this

area: three former losers who wanted to earn the respect of their superior.

Between November 1942 and the beginning of May 1943 alone the SS,

628 a europe-wide reign of terror

police, and Wehrmacht killed over 40,000 people in White Ruthenia in the

course of eighteen major campaigns.

On 30 October 1942 Himmler ordered that during all the campaigns

against partisans in the occupied Soviet territories ‘every member of the

population who can be spared and is capable of work should be taken

prisoner and sent to work in Germany’.

In this he was following a

directive from Go

ring, about which he was evidently not happy. As late

as February he was refusing to transfer the men who had been taken prisoner

during the anti-partisan campaigns to the Plenipotentiary for Labour Mo-

bilization, Fritz Sauckel; the people locked up in concentration camps were

‘suspect bandits’, and should not be released as ‘free workers’.

However,

in view of the acute labour shortage in the German war economy, from the

summer of 1943 onwards he had to give way.

By being given the responsibility for combating bandits, Himmler had

acquired the authority he needed to suppress all opposition in the occupied

eastern territories. In the ‘east’, as a matter of principle, the security police

and SD did not conﬁne themselves to responding to acts of resistance that

had already occurred but rather proceeded prophylactically: at the latest

from 1942 onwards they were instructed to kill all communists in the

occupied Soviet territories, even if there was no evidence that they had

committed any actual acts of resistance. This practice became routine.

Moreover, in the Polish territories which had been temporarily under

Soviet occupation from 1939 to 1941 the ‘eastern types’ and ‘Soviet people’

who had come to this area during this period were often murdered or put in

forced labour camps simply because of the suspicion that they might be loyal

to the Soviet state. Those functionaries who had been evacuated eastwards

by the Soviets were particularly affected by these measures. Furthermore, all

those who were assumed to be of ‘asiatic’ descent were suspect. They were

considered per se to be agents of the Soviet regime and were killed

arbitrarily and without pity.

Himmler’s policy in the eastern territories was basically quite simple: by

acting with extreme brutality he aimed to reorganize the ‘living-space’ that

had been conquered. He rejected concessions or favours to the indigenous

population. Thus, he not only objected in April 1942 to Rosenberg’s

proposal for a ‘new agrarian order’ offering the rural population the prospect

of having private property (a scheme which failed anyway);

he also vehe-

mently opposed any attempt to promise the Russians a ‘nation state’.

The

pamphlet The Subhuman issued by Himmler’s SS Main Ofﬁce clearly

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