Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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illustrates—with photographs to demonstrate the inferiority of the Soviet

peoples—their view of ‘eastern people’: ‘a frightful creature [ . . . ] just an

approximation to a proper human being [ . . . ] but intellectually and spiritu-

ally inferior to any animal.’

The ‘new agrarian order’ was not the only bone of contention between

Rosenberg and Himmler. Responsible in the meantime for the liberally

interpreted ‘police measures for guaranteeing the security’ of the occupied

eastern territories, the ‘consolidation of the ethnic German nation’, and

the combating of bandits—a responsibility that he was to extend to the

whole of the Soviet Union in 1943—Himmler could envisage neutralizing

Rosenberg. His correspondence with the Minister for the East concerning

disputes over responsibility ﬁll several ﬁles, but the extensive memoranda

Rosenberg composed in the course of these disputes merely document his

inexorable retreat.

In April 1942 Himmler even went so far as openly to express his total

contempt for Rosenberg in a letter to Alfred Meyer, of all people, who was

the state secretary in the Ministry for the East and Rosenberg’s deputy. After

expressing a hypocritical regret at his frankness, he went on to write that, of

course, Rosenberg was ‘not a soldier and none of us expects him to be or to

become one. We party comrades value and honour him for making his

name as the Reich leader of the NSDAP responsible for ideology. But, even

if he is Minister for the East, Party comrade Rosenberg must leave soldierly

matters to the people who are responsible for them and who have to answer

for them.’

As far as Himmler was concerned, Rosenberg was nothing but a

wimp. At the beginning of 1943, since Heydrich, his original contact-man

with Rosenberg, was no longer available, he agreed with the Minister for

the East that in future the head of the SS-Main Ofﬁce, Berger, would fulﬁl

this role in the rank of a state secretary.

Although not directly affected by Himmler’s responsibility for combating

bandits, during 1942 the occupied countries of central, western, and north-

ern Europe were also exposed to repression at the hands of the SS and

security police.

In Norway the SS and police court intervened in the political persecution

of the population for the ﬁrst time from the middle of 1942 onwards; that is

to say, it dealt with cases in which the investigations were carried out and

the charges were brought by the security police. By the middle of 1944 a

total of 127 death sentences had been passed in such trials.

Moreover, in

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response to acts of sabotage, in October 1942 the German occupation

authorities declared martial law in the district of Trondheim. Thirty-four

people were summarily executed. At the same time the security police

ordered the arrest of all male Jews in this district, a measure that two

weeks later was extended to every Jew in the country and led ﬁnally to

the deportation of the Norwegian Jews. Once more, as in France and in

the Protectorate, an ‘act of reprisal’ in a German-occupied country had

concluded with violent anti-Jewish measures.

Belgium was under military administration, and the Wehrmacht’s Secret

Field Police, which was responsible in the ﬁrst instance for the suppression

of resistance, repeatedly shot hostages. Here the representative of the Chief

of the Security Police and SD attached to the head of the military adminis-

tration—Belgium was the only country in which Himmler did not succeed

in appointing a HSSPF until 1944—pursued an independent policy of

repression. From June 1941 until August 1942 he succeeded in getting the

RSHA to issue 600 orders for protective custody and deporting those

involved to concentration camps in the Reich.

In France Himmler succeeded in appointing a HSSPF in March 1942,in

other words, at the same time as the ﬁrst transports of Jewish hostages to

Auschwitz.

Carl Oberg, who was appointed to the post on 1 June 1942,

secured the right to issue directives to the French police and, through the

transformation of the stations of the Secret Field Police, which were

distributed throughout the country, into stations of the security police and

SD, acquired an executive apparatus operating throughout the country.

Helmut Knochen, who had been in charge of the Sipo commando in Paris

since 1940, became the commander of the security police.

In July 1942

Oberg used his strong position to secure an agreement with the French

police chief Rene

Bosquet for close cooperation between the German and

French police, which in turn was granted greater freedom of action in the

occupied zone.

During the course of the summer Oberg and Knochen not only drove

forward the anti-Jewish policy in the occupied and unoccupied zones but

ordered further mass executions of hostages on 11 August and 21 Septem-

ber. However, as attacks by the resistance in September and October

increased Oberg came to the same conclusion that the military administra-

tion had reached the previous year, namely, that from the point of view of

the occupation authorities ‘reprisal’ executions were counter-productive (at

the same time he successfully persuaded Himmler to take account of the

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doubts of the Vichy government about the wisdom of deporting French

Jews). Oberg now prepared other types of ‘atonement’, which from 1943

onwards took the form above all of the deportation of Jews and opponents

to German concentration camps.

The excessive revenge taken by the security police in the Protectorate

after Heydrich’s death in June 1942 has already been referred to. After this

wave of terror the HSSPF tried to calm the general situation. The most

important priority of the occupation authorities was to exploit the country

economically, and that required quiet on the political front. Although

arrests were made and death sentences passed for resistance activities, the

reprisals were far less severe than the terror that reigned in Poland or

Yugoslavia.

As is evident from the examples of France and the Protectorate, Himm-

ler’s top functionaries in the occupied territories were by no means always

in favour of a policy of boundless terror. That was not only a reﬂection of

security police considerations but a result of the fact that another factor was

becoming increasingly important: the growing need for forced labour in the

concentration camps. In view of this it seemed more advisable to deport

resisters to concentration camps rather than shoot them.

The failure of the SS armaments concern

Until the beginning of 1942 the SS, in the shape of the ofﬁcial responsible

for economic matters, Oswald Pohl, had largely been responding to requests

from industry without developing a strategy for building up its own arma-

ments capacity.

That changed during the winter crisis of 1941–2, when

the switch from ‘Blitzkrieg’ to a more substantial mobilization of all the

resources required for ﬁghting what looked like turning into a total war was

becoming evident. As a contribution to solving the emerging shortage of

labour, Himmler ordered the employment of Jewish workers en masse and,

as has already been shown, with the establishment of the Business and

Administration Main Ofﬁce created the preconditions for the ‘economiza-

tion’ of the concentration camp system.

On 16 March Richard Glu

cks, who was in charge of the Concentration

Camp Inspectorate, met representatives of the Armaments Ministry in order

to discuss various possibilities of deploying prisoners. Glu

cks explained that

the SS did not wish to have any inﬂuence on the decisions about what was

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to be produced, but, in accordance with a ‘decree of the Reichsfu

hrer-SS

[ . . . ] the actual production process itself [had to] take place within the

camps’.

Walter Schieber, the departmental head within Speer’s Arma-

ments Ministry, then set about establishing such projects. For example, it

was arranged that the Wilhelm Gustloff Works in Weimar would produce

riﬂes in KZ Buchenwald, and a number of other projects were under

discussion.

In July 1942 Himmler seized the initiative. After a meeting with Schieber

he produced for Pohl a list of various armaments projects (for example, apart

from riﬂes, the production of pistols and anti-aircraft guns) to be carried out

in four camps. Himmler was particularly interested in an Opel factory near

Auschwitz which the SS was to construct and operate. He hoped that this

would accelerate the SS’s motorization.

It was not by chance that an SS

armaments concern was being created at this juncture. For in this same

month of July Himmler introduced de facto military conscription for ethnic

Germans in south-east Europe, which he envisaged leading to a further

expansion of the Waffen-SS. These recruits had to be armed and equipped.

In fact, however, all these initiatives more or less came to nothing. It was

possible to begin producing riﬂes in Buchenwald only in the spring of 1943,

and even then production was slow to get going. In August 1944 the

production facilities were destroyed in an air raid. The plan to produce

hand-guns in Neuengamme had to be aborted, and the same happened to

most of the other projects. It was only in Auschwitz that fuses for shells were

produced—instead of the planned anti-aircraft guns.

Factory production never got going in the concentration camps because

high-calibre machine tools were difﬁcult to acquire, because productivity in

the KZ plants was comparatively low as a result of the terrible living and

working conditions,

but above all because Himmler had overlooked the

fact that the precondition for his plans—a cooperative relationship with

industry

—could not exist so long as the SS controlled production. For

industry was determined to keep control of the manufacturing processes

that had been transferred to the concentration camps.

On 15 September 1942 Speer and Pohl reached agreement on the need to

deploy more KZ prisoners for armaments production. Pohl informed

Himmler of the details, addressing the decisive point quite openly: ‘we

must no longer narrow-mindedly insist on all the manufacturing processes

being transferred to our camps. So long as we were engaged only in piddling

things, as you Herr Reichsfu

hrer quite rightly described our previous

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operations in view of their limited scope, we could demand that this should

happen.’ But in the case of armaments plants with 5,000 or more prisoners

this was no longer feasible; as Speer pointed out, these had to be situated ‘on

green-ﬁeld sites’. According to the agreement with Speer, Pohl went on,

the SS should take over vacant or understaffed plants, ﬁll them ‘100% with

our prisoners’, and run them as SS armaments plants, but outside the camps.

In this way Speer wanted to ‘accommodate 50,000 Jews capable of work in

closed plants that already existed’. Pohl wanted these prisoners ‘withdrawn

from the eastern emigration’.

By doing this Pohl had ignored Himmler’s instruction that production

should be moved to the camps. But in any case, the agreement was unreal-

istic since the KZ prisoners who were being thrown together and who were

not adequately trained would not have been in a position to take over

complete production processes at short notice. Moreover, the SS did not

have the requisite experience to prepare and organize the production

processes.

In the armaments conference, which ran from 20 to 22 September, Speer

then alerted Hitler to the fact that it would be inadvisable to move the

manufacturing facilities to the KZs and that Himmler’s demand that the SS

should have a ‘decisive inﬂuence on these businesses’ was inappropriate.

The more sensible solution would be to introduce a second shift of KZ

prisoners in certain plants. Hitler agreed with Speer and, as compensation

for the prisoners that he was placing at the disposal of industry, promised

Himmler that between 3 and 5 per cent of production would be allocated to

the Waffen-SS.

That represented the end of the SS armaments concern. In

future the SS restricted its role to hiring out prisoners, and for this purpose

established satellite camps all over the Reich linked to the relevant plants.

In September 1942 Speer aborted one more ambitious armaments project

that Himmler had been pursuing since the end of 1941. As already men-

tioned, according to a Fu

hrer order of January 1942 the Reichsfu

hrer had

been promised ‘the establishment, equipping, and running’ of a light metal

foundry in the VW works. From spring onwards hundreds of prisoners

had been employed there: a special KZ (‘workers’ village’) had been built

near the plant. In the middle of September 1942 Speer banned the con-

struction of the building on the grounds that the economic relevance of the

project to armaments production was dubious. This meant that Himmler’s

attempt to engage in armaments production through this show project had

also failed.

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Terror at home

When, in the autumn of 1941, it began to become clear that the war was not

going to end soon the criminal police (Kripo) acquired new tasks. On the

previous assumption that the war would soon be over, from the summer of

1940 onwards it had concentrated on the regime’s aims in the sphere of

population policy. But now the effects of the air war, wartime economic

offences, and the increased surveillance of young people and foreigners

created new priorities for the criminal police, operating under the terms

of a completely new interpretation of ‘preventive policing’.

The air war confronted the Kripo with a variety of problems: bomb

victims had to be identiﬁed and looters brought to book. Above all, in the

second half of the war property offences, facilitated by the black-out

measures and the damage to or destruction of buildings, rose enormously

in the cities that had been attacked. Moreover, many people’s normal

inhibitions were removed by the immediate threat under which they

were living and by the destruction of their usual way of life. Youth gangs

emerged in the rubble of the bombed cities and the black market ﬂourished.

Cases of homicide and robberies also increased.

The so-called delinquency of young people was of particular concern to

the Reichsfu

hrer. On 26 January 1942 he sent Heydrich a report by the

Reich Youth Leadership which described the leisure activities of the so-

called ‘Swing Youth’ (Swing-Jugend)in Hamburg: young people from main-

ly middle-class backgrounds, who played banned ‘swing music’ at parties

and elsewhere, expressed their opposition to the Hitler Youth and other

institutions of the Nazi state. Himmler was livid:

All of the leaders, and that means both male and female leaders and those teachers

who are hostile to us and support the Swing Youth, are to be sent to a concentra-

tion camp. There the young people must ﬁrst receive a beating and then be made to

perform the toughest possible exercises and forced to do hard work. I consider that

a work camp or a youth camp is inappropriate for these blokes and these useless

girls. The girls must be forced to do weaving and in summer to work on the land.

These young people must be conﬁned to a concentration camp for a lengthy period

of two or three years. It must be made clear that they will never be allowed to study.

Enquiries must be made to see how far their parents have supported them; if they

have supported them then they too should be sent to a concentration camp and

their property should be conﬁscated. Only if we act brutally will we be able to get

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on top of this anglophyle [sic] trend at a time when Germany is ﬁghting for its

existence and prevent it from sprea ding.

From 1942 onwards the regime was concerned that increasing criminality

and evidence of social delinquency might damage Germany’s image as an

orderly state and have a negative impact on the mood of the home front. In

Hitler’s view, it was the ‘mob’ who were primarily responsible for starting

the revolution of 1918. In his draconian opinion, in the event of a revolt

breaking out, ‘within two days all criminals should be killed’.

The transi-

tion to the systematic extermination of criminals and ‘asocials’ in the second

half of 1942 was a logical consequence of this attitude. It was largely carried

out by the Reichsfu

hrer-SS.

This new murderous form of ‘criminal prevention’ was also aimed at the

east European forced workers in the Reich, who in the meantime numbered

millions. In September 1941 Himmler had objected in vain to the decision

to bring civilian workers into the Reich in addition to Polish workers and

Soviet POWs. The amount of resources that were involved in pursuing

escaped POWs or foreign workers who were returning to their home

countries of their own accord was considerable. In the ﬁrst six months of

1943 over 300,000 people were arrested as a result of this search activity.

100

Himmler’s veto was, however, ignored,

101

and so, on 20 February 1942,

Heydrich issued the so-called Eastern Workers’ Decrees, which regulated

the treatment and guarding of civilian Soviet workers. The Gestapo was

now made solely responsible for combating criminality, sexual relations

with Germans, and other offences, and it was to impose very harsh sentences

on offenders. Consignment to a concentration camp or ‘special treatment’

were the two options. According to these regulations, offences by Soviet

forced workers were to be dealt with by the judicial system only when a

death sentence could be anticipated.

102

On 18 September 1942 the Reich Minister of Justice, Otto Thierack, and

his state secretary, Curt Ferdinand Rothenberger, met Himmler in his

Ukrainian headquarters to deal with a number of agreements involving

the judicial authorities. The results of this meeting were far-reaching. In

the ﬁrst place, in future ‘inadequate’ judicial verdicts were to be subject to

‘correction’ by ‘police special treatment’, with Himmler and Thierack

reaching agreement on individual cases. If they failed to agree then Hitler’s

opinion was to be sought via Bormann.

636 a europe-wide reign of terror

Secondly, they agreed on the ‘handing over of asocial elements from the

prison system to the Reichsfu

hrer-SS for extermination through work’.

This was to affect, without exception: ‘those in preventive detention,

Jews, Gypsies, Russians and Ukrainians, Poles serving a sentence of over

three years, Czechs, and Germans serving a sentence of over eight years

with the approval of the Reich Minister of Justice.’ It is not surprising that,

as already mentioned, the ‘handing over’ of these prisoners was agreed at the

very same moment when the decision was made increasingly to employ

KZ prisoners in armaments production. Moreover, Himmler and Thierack

were in agreement that in future ‘Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, and

Ukrainians [should no longer be tried] by the normal judicial process’;

instead, in future such cases would be ‘dealt with by the Reichsfu

hrer-SS’.

In addition, during the meeting Himmler proposed that ‘many more

special institutions should be established in the prison system in accordance

with the principle that those who were incapable of rehabilitation should be

conﬁned together, while those who were capable of rehabilitation should

be conﬁned together according to their particular offence (e.g. fraudsters,

thieves, violent criminals)’. While the Justice Minister considered the pro-

posal to be ‘correct’ in principle, he objected to Himmler’s more far-

reaching demand that the prosecution service should be integrated into

the police apparatus. He agreed to look into Himmler’s further demand that

criminal records should in future be kept by the police.

103

On the basis of this agreement, from the autumn of 1942 onwards

commissions of assessors composed of ofﬁcials from the Justice Ministry

visited prisons to select which prisoners should be sent to a concentration

camp—by mid-1943 a total of 17,307 judicial prisoners. By 1 April 1943

5,935 of them were already dead. The selections continued.

104

Furthermore, in summer 1942 the regulations for political surveillance

were made more strict. Anyone considered ‘unworthy of serving in the

armed services’ was in danger of being taken into preventive detention if

he committed the most minor offence.

105

Moreover, in December 1942 the

Reich Criminal Police Ofﬁce issued orders that those ‘criminals and asocials

who cannot be arrested’ were to be sent to the camps, where they ‘should be

appropriately detained’, a formulation which must be seen as an indication

that this group of people should be murdered.

106

It has been estimated that

in the middle of 1943 there were far more than 20,000 prisoners in preven-

tive detention in concentration camps. By the end of 1943 a total of

between 63,000 and 82,000 had been in preventive custody, of whom

a europe-wide reign of terror 637

between 26,000 and 34,000 are estimated to have died.

107

Himmler himself

remarked, in a speech on 14 October 1943, that at that time there were

40,000 political prisoners as well as 70,000 ‘asocials’, ‘career criminals’, and

‘preventive detainees’.

108

However, the agreement between Thierack and Himmler of September

1942 was not restricted to the substantial emptying of German prisons and

the ‘relief ’ of the judiciary from the trouble of prosecuting east European

forced workers. It also helped Himmler to achieve a goal that he had been

pursuing for two years: police control of the prosecution of Poles in the

annexed eastern territories. The Reich governors were strongly opposed,

because they feared that this would worsen an already tense situation, and

Thierack ﬁnally revoked his approval. However, typically, the RSHA

ignored this and instructed the Stapo ofﬁces to ‘deal with’ such cases

themselves, although, in view of the Reich governors’ opposition,

109

do so with some discretion.

Himmler and the Greater Germanic Reich:

a reconstruction

As has been shown in detail in the preceding chapters, between April and

September 1942 Himmler took a number of far-reaching decisions covering

a whole range of areas; some of these had very serious consequences.

First, at the end of April and beginning of May the Reichsfu

hrer-SS made

the ﬁnal arrangements for the inclusion of the whole of Europe in the

murder of the European Jews. At the end of May and beginning of June,

after Heydrich’s assassination, he decided to extend and speed up this

programme of mass murder to the extent that the ‘ﬁnal solution’ would

essentially be achieved by the end of the year. During the following months

he was exceptionally preoccupied with pursuing this goal. Moreover, the

extension of the deportation programme to the whole of Europe from the

middle of March 1942 also strengthened the position of the apparatus of

repression that he had built up in the occupied countries concerned and of

his ‘advisers’ in the allied states.

Secondly, in July 1942 Hitler assigned to Himmler responsibility for

‘combating bandits’ in the occupied eastern territories. The fact that at

the end of the year Himmler reported to him that, as the result of this

638 a europe-wide reign of terror

assignment, over 363,000 Jews had been shot in the area of Russia-South

alone (well over 90 per cent of all the victims of his ‘combating bandits’)

clearly indicates how he understood this task.

Thirdly, in June 1942 Himmler ordered his chief planner, Konrad Meyer,

to broaden the settlement plans in order to develop an ‘overall settlement

plan’ for the whole of Europe, which would cover Poland, large parts of the

occupied Soviet Union, Alsace and Lorraine, Upper Carniola and South

Styria, as well as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. At the same

time, he ordered that the period during which settlement was envisaged as

taking place should be reduced by ﬁve–ten years to a period of twenty years.

In June he announced the Germanization of the Protectorate; in July he laid

down parameters for the settlement of the district of Lublin; in August he

was taking decisions concerning settlement policy in the Ukraine and at the

same time was intensively involved in the ethnic ‘cleansing’ of Alsace and

Lorraine.

Fourthly, in the summer of 1942 Himmler was able signiﬁcantly to

broaden the basis of recruitment for the Waffen-SS. In July 1942 he declared

that, ‘on the grounds of the iron law of ethnicity’, ethnic Germans through-

out eastern Europe were liable to military conscription, and therewith

initiated a systematic policy of recruiting the ethnic Germans of south-east

Europe. In August1942 Hitler assigned to Himmler sole responsibility for

‘relations with all Germanic ethnic groups in Denmark, Norway, Belgium,

and the Netherlands [ . . . ] involving the NSDAP’, which strengthened his

position for the recruitment of ‘Germanic volunteers’. Also in August 1942

Himmler mobilized all Germans in the General Government and the Soviet

Union who were capable of bearing arms into ‘alarm units’ subordinate to

him; and he created special militias for those ethnic Germans who were not

recruited into the SS. During August he was also able to expand recruitment

into the Waffen-SS within Germany itself.

Fifthly, in July 1942 Himmler made another attempt to establish an SS

armaments concern in order to free the Waffen-SS from dependence on

Wehrmacht allocations. However, when these attempts failed in September

1942, and when the SS’s major construction projects, for which it wanted to

utilize most of the KZ prisoners, were postponed, he moved to hiring out

KZ prisoners to industry. He immediately concentrated on increasing the

number of prisoners; they were to double during the following six months.

Sixthly, on 18 September 1942 he made an agreement with Justice

Minister Thierack for ‘asocial elements’ among judicial prisoners (in

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