Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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particular those from ‘racially inferior’ population groups) to be transferred

to concentration camps. His aim of subjecting these people to a regime of

‘extermination through work’ was in accordance with both his strategy of

racial extermination and his merciless utilitarian policy of exploitation.

Seventhly, by simultaneously removing from Thierack the responsibility

for the prosecution of Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians in Reich territory he

had created the opportunity of ﬁlling his camps. For now, if civilian forced

workers made themselves in the least suspect they were liable to be sent to a

concentration camp. The same is true of the regulations he issued in

October, that in future persons suspected of being partisans were on princi-

ple to be punished with KZ incarceration, and that ghetto inhabitants in

Poland who were required for armaments projects should also be conﬁned

to concentration camps or forced labour camps.

It is clear from these turning-points that, believing the victory of the Third

Reich was in sight, Himmler was pushing forward certain developments and

was combining them in such a way that, taken together, they represented an

attempt to create a qualitatively new regime and one in which the SS would

have the key role. It should once more be emphasized that in the case of the

majority of these decisions there is evidence of prior consultation with

Hitler, and in the other cases we can assume that he was acting in the spirit

of his ‘Fu

hrer’, a procedure that had characterized Himmler’s political style

since his earliest days in the NSDAP. In order to describe the new regime

that he envisaged Himmler fell back on the term ‘Greater Germanic Reich’

that he had already used at the end of the 1930s. But now, in 1942, his image

of this regime had acquired far clearer contours.

The Greater Germanic Reich was not to be simply a Greater German

Reich enlarged by annexed territory, but a qualitatively new supranational

regime under totalitarian rule that was systematically constructed on the

basis of a racial hierarchy. A ruling elite composed of members of the

Germanic nations would in future dominate the European continent and

assign to other nations their respective places according to their racial

quality: as allies of the new empire, as nations under its ‘protection’, or—

the role envisaged for the Slav nations—as work-slaves who would not have

the right of an independent national existence.

In the meantime, however, Himmler had ensured that without the SS

this empire would be inconceivable:

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- The SS had constructed a Europe-wide apparatus of repression, which

not only brutally suppressed all opposition tendencies and any resistance

but, in addition and above all, systematically and massively murdered all

potential opponents and ‘racial inferiors’ on the basis of alleged biological

criteria, a policy that in the ﬁrst instance was directed at the Jews but also

targeted, above all, east European Gypsies and sections of the Slav

population. Basically it represented a version of the policy of racial

‘general prevention’ that Himmler had developed for the Reich during

the late 1930s but which in a radicalized version was now being extended

to the whole of Europe. The victims of this policy were now no longer

being placed in preventive detention but murdered. But this bloody task,

the difﬁculty of which he often complained about in tones bordering on

self-pity, was, as far as he was concerned, an unavoidable aspect of a more

far-reaching project to transform Europe and secure the future of the

‘Teutons’ (Germanen).

- The SS worked on an overall plan to Germanize large areas of central and

eastern Europe, and had either begun or already carried out a number of

resettlement projects. It controlled the ethnic German groups in south-

east Europe and was responsible in the ﬁrst instance for relations with the

‘Germanic forces’ in north-west Europe. This provided it with important

sources of future settlers.

- By opening the Waffen-SS to ethnic Germans, ‘Germanic volunteers’,

and non-Germanic legionnaires from European countries, Himmler had

created a model for the new regime within the SS itself, in which the

individual was already being graded in accordance with his racial ‘value’.

- With the massive amount of forced labour carried out by KZ prisoners,

and the idea of ‘extermination through work’, the SS was providing proof

that it was in a position not only usefully to employ an army of slave

workers, but also to utilize this deployment as an effective instrument of

repression and for the liquidation of all political and racial undesirables.

- The SS had successfully enforced its claim that it alone possessed the

necessary expertise authoritatively to deﬁne the new racial hierarchy and,

using the ‘proven’ instrument of racial assessment, to determine on what

level of this racial hierarchy each individual was placed. The SS was not

concerned about the fact that racial assessments were largely arbitrary, as

the criteria with which they were operating in fact represented racial

fantasies. For it had both the power to force through this policy of racial

segregation and the ‘world-view’ to legitimize these measures.

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Furthermore, the turning-points between spring and autumn 1942 indi-

cate that Himmler’s view of how this new regime should be constructed had

shifted dramatically. While at the end of the 1930s he had assumed that the

Reich would be able to achieve the status of a world power only in the

course of several generations, now his view of the period involved had been

reduced as if in a time lapse. The huge Reich was already in the process of

being created, and he must act now in order to secure a decisive role for

himself and his SS. The motive of speeding up developments that were

already in progress was decisive here, for in view of the Wehrmacht’s

impending victory a window appeared to be opening which would permit

the realization of ideas that had previously appeared utopian. The ‘ﬁnal

solution’ of the European ‘Jewish question’ had to be implemented now and

not after the end of the war. Further settlement projects in eastern Europe

had to begin at once and not in the distant future. The extermination of the

‘asocials’ had to happen immediately. Himmler wanted to initiate a dynamic

which, within a few months, would have subjected the area controlled by

Germany to a process of quasi-revolutionary change.

It is important to bear in mind the exceptional amount of power that

Himmler had concentrated in the SS leadership in the months between

spring and autumn 1942. Despite the reverses and delays referred to, he had

installed an unbridled system of terror and mass murder throughout Europe;

using the instrument of ‘extermination through work’, he ruled over an

army of slave workers; he had begun the resettlement of millions of people,

selected according to racial criteria, and was in the process of setting up

a second army alongside the Wehrmacht, whose composition ignored

national boundaries and whose structure preﬁgured the future Greater

Germanic Reich.

In September 1942 Himmler could assume that he had successfully laid

the foundations of the Greater Germanic Reich of which he dreamt.

However, this situation lasted only a few weeks. For, with the landing of

the Allies in North Africa in November 1942 the fortunes of the war began

to change, and as a result the prospects of further decisive steps in the

direction of a Greater Germanic Reich rapidly disappeared. In particular,

large-scale settlement projects were even less viable than they had been

before and, in view of the war situation, it was inadvisable to differentiate

too obviously between the ‘Germanic brother nations’ and other Eur-

opeans.

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Himmler, however, was not frustrated by this development, nor did it

mean a decline in his power. His original idea might not succeed, but

nevertheless, as far as he was concerned, he was still a winner. For in

many areas the dynamic of the development that he had unleashed or driven

forward could not be stopped. The mass murder in the camps, the slave

labour, as well as the ‘combating of bandits’ and merciless repression in the

occupied territories were, not least thanks to his own efforts, so ﬁrmly

integrated into the Nazi conception of war that they continued undimin-

ished, all the more so as the situation deteriorated.

Thus Himmler soon found a new role. Now he projected an image of

himself as the man who, through the use of exceptional terror, was guar-

anteeing the internal security of the Reich and of the territories occupied by

Germany. In the two-and-a-half years remaining to him as Reichsfu

hrer-SS

he accumulated a monopoly of power for this purpose that he had never

previously achieved. The more the Third Reich headed towards its down-

fall, the more powerful became the Reichsfu

hrer-SS.

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PART

Downfall in Stag es

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A Turn in the War—A New

Opportunity?

ith the landing of Allied troops in North Africa in November 1942

the military initiative was passing more and more to the Allies. From

now onwards the southern ﬂank of Axis-dominated Europe was increas-

ingly exposed and, on 11 November 1942, Germany and Italy decided to

occupy the unoccupied zone in the south of France. As a result Himmler

acquired a new task: the elimination of all ‘enemies’ of the Reich who,

under the protection of the Vichy regime, had hitherto been able to evade

persecution.

He envisaged that a crushing blow against this army of ‘enemies’ who

were allegedly concentrated in the south of France would mark the start of a

generally harsher policy of repression. This would now have to take prece-

dence over the vision of a Greater German Reich that had so preoccupied

him during the previous months. Now that the threat to the Reich from

outside was growing Himmler felt it incumbent upon him to secure the

‘internal theatre of war’,

and that meant the merciless elimination, using all

available means, of all enemies within the area controlled by Germany. This

would be carried out by crushing political resistance in the occupied

territories, by including countries in the campaign of Jewish persecution

that had not hitherto been involved, along with a renewed escalation in the

murder programme, as well as by extending the ‘campaign against bandits’

to the whole of eastern Europe. Moreover, during the coming months

Himmler was able substantially to increase his power. He considerably

enlarged the Waffen-SS by recruiting ‘ethnic alien’ volunteers; he was

appointed Reich Minister of the Interior, thereby acquiring control over

the Reich’s internal administration; he signiﬁcantly increased the slave army

in the concentration camps; and, when he took over responsibility for the

missile programme, it looked as if he was going to get his hands on a

substantial part of the armaments industry. However, his impact as head of

the Waffen-SS, Interior Minister, and organizer of armaments production

turned out in fact to be modest. The more the Third Reich came under

military pressure during the coming years, the more Himmler’s role became

reduced to that of head of a merciless terror machine.

This development began at the end of 1942, when he tried to bring the

south of France, which had just been occupied by German troops, under his

control. On 14 November, four days after the occupation, he instructed the

commander of the security police in France, Helmut Knochen, to send him

‘daily reports of arrests of politically dangerous elements and leading ﬁgures

in the previous regime. Every effort must be made to catch these dangerous

opponents.’

As always when he wished to enlarge his sphere of responsibilities or to

give it a new focus, he appealed directly to Hitler. On 10 December, in the

course of a long interview, he explained the situation in the south of France

to his Fu

hrer, and why as radical a policy as possible was required to deal

with it. It was minuted that Himmler had been informed that

there are currently at least 1.5 million deadly enemies of the Axis living and moving

around freely in the previously unoccupied part of France, namely 600,000–

700,000 Jews, 500,000–600,000 anti- Fascist Italians, 300,000–400, 000 red Spa-

niards, around 20,000 Anglo-Saxon s, 80,000 Poles, Greeks, etc. They represent a

not inconsiderable threat to the supplies and security of the German–Italian

Mediterranean army. In addition, there are hostile French amounting to a number

many times larger than that and consisting primarily of communists, Gaullists, and

church people.

Hitler was impressed with this account of the situation. He instructed

Himmler, as the latter carefully noted, to ‘get rid of ’ the 600,000 to 700,000

Jews in France, including North Africa. The ‘red Spaniards’ were to be

‘made to work’, the Gaullists, English, and Americans were to be arrested,

and the Italians in the unoccupied area were to be deployed as forced labour

and their leaders locked up in concentration camps.

A few days later Himmler once again approached Hitler. He wanted the

whole of the French police force to be centrally organized under Bousquet,

the police secretary-general of the Vichy government. Moreover, what was

needed in order to ‘strengthen its effectiveness’ was for ‘every brave and

manly French policeman to have the absolute backing of his superior’

648 a new opportunity?

(which was equivalent to giving them carte blanche for arbitrary beha-

viour), for ‘ofﬁcers to have ﬁnancial security’, for Himmler’s own police

apparatus ‘to have the right to use all the facilities of the French police in the

way of records and for search operations’, the creation of a special police

unit for combating the ‘political enemies of Europe’, and the deportation to

Germany of ‘all those others guilty of destroying the unity of Europe such as

Blum, Gamelin, Daladier’.

During the following days Himmler developed the idea of making an

example of the south of France, which had just been occupied. In order to

leave no doubt about the new radical policy, he wanted to carry out a ‘major

operation’ and one that would involve the French police. He calculated that

this would enable him to make it complicit in his policy of persecuting what

were, after all, 1.5 million ‘deadly enemies’ and binding it closer to the

occupation authorities. Marseilles was selected as the location of the opera-

tion. In Himmler’s mind this Mediterranean port was a labyrinthine ‘nest of

criminals’ that simply needed exterminating.

A punishment operation in Marseilles

In the middle of December 1942 a police regiment specially established for

this purpose arrived in Marseilles and, from this point onwards, Himmler

became personally involved in the ‘measures’ to eliminate ‘the criminals’ in

the city, referring to a commission from Hitler to the SS.

On 3 January

several bombs went off in Marseilles; the communist resistance had carried

out a number of attacks on the occupation authorities. The following day

Himmler ordered his most senior representative in the country, HSSPF

Oberg, to launch an energetic and concerted operation to be carried out by

the order and security police: ‘I demand the toughest and most radical

action. Naturally, you are also responsible for the part of France that has

hitherto remained unoccupied. However, the image of the French govern-

ment and its deﬁnite independence must be preserved.’

On the same day, however, the Wehrmacht—as Himmler presumed,

after consultation with Oberg—had already declared a state of emergency in

Marseilles, so that it would be responsible for any retaliatory measures.

Himmler was annoyed, and reminded Oberg on 5 January that ‘the Fu

hrer

has deﬁnitely given us the responsibility for Marseilles’.

The ‘Marseilles

affair’, he insisted to Oberg in a telex sent on the same day, is ‘a purely police

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