Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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matter dealing with sabotage by a subhuman insurgency going on there’.

Oberg should kindly leave his Paris ofﬁce and get down to Marseilles. He

also sent Daluege, the chief of the order police, and Major-General of Police

Walter Schimana, using this opportunity to inform Oberg of Schimana’s

appointment as chief of the order police in France.

On the following day Oberg received another telex from his Reichs-

hrer, once again reproaching him for having ceded the impending opera-

tion in Marseilles, contrary to the Fu

hrer order:

The moment something happens in Marseilles, without consulting me, you, Herr

Oberg, change the Fu

hrer order, run after the Wehrmacht, and ensure that a

divisional commander takes command in Marseilles. I must say I didn’t expect

such bureaucratic-type behaviour from you. Any other SS man, above all, any

other Higher SS and Police Leader, would have been glad for the SS to be able to

tackle such a difﬁcult task on its own and would have taken care of it himself and

would have felt able to leave his comfortable ofﬁce in Paris.

Moreover, Oberg had also contravened another Fu

hrer order: four tanks,

which on Hitler’s instructions had been sent to reinforce the order police in

France, could not be put into operation there, allegedly on account of a lack

of suitable personnel.

You have had the honour of becoming a Higher SS and Police Leader and so you

should also have been prepared to take on the burden, just as I have, of seeing to

everything personally, from whether the prostitutes in a small French town are

subject to inspections to prevent our troops from catching diseases, to whether

there are men available to drive tanks that have been placed at your disposal. But

this cannot be done simply through meetings or at soire

es.

‘Disobeying any more Fu

hrer orders or changing them in a bureaucratic

manner’ would lead to his dismissal.

A few days later he ordered Oberg to

deploy the French police ‘to clear out this French nest of criminals’. After

all, they could expect losses and he wanted to avoid them being German

ones.

On 18 January he urged Oberg to ‘arrest the great mass of criminals in

Marseilles and put them in concentration camps’—he gave a ﬁgure of

‘around 100,000’! Moreover, Himmler demanded ‘the extensive dynamit-

ing of the crime district. I do not want German lives to be put at risk in the

underground alleys and cellars.’ The ‘lower part of Marseilles’ should be

blown up in such a way that ‘those living there are killed simply by the

effects of the blast’. The French police should not only be obliged to

650 a new opportunity?

participate but should also understand that ‘they ought to be deeply grateful

to us for doing it’.

Hitherto there had not been a comparable police action in the occupied

western territories. Had Himmler got his way, German occupation policy

would have been reduced to that of a brutal regime of terror, which would

undoubtedly have had serious consequences for the relationship between

occupiers and the indigenous population in the rest of the western terri-

tories. Oberg appears to have been only too conscious of the fact. Despite

Himmler’s increasingly urgent requests and threats, he pursued his own

policy. In his negotiations with the French police during the following days

he managed to evade Himmler’s draconian instructions,

and reached

agreement with his interlocutors on the following course of action: on

22/3 January 1943 the French police carried out raids in Marseilles and,

instead of the ﬁgure of 100,000 that had been requested, arrested 6,000

people; the 20,000 inhabitants of the harbour quarter were driven from their

homes and had to undergo an inspection. The German security police

delivered up 2,200 people, most of them Jews, to the police prison camp

at Compie

gne near Paris, and 782 Marseilles Jews were deported to Sobi-

bor. Part of the harbour quarter was then in fact blown up. Surprisingly,

Himmler expressed himself satisﬁed with Oberg’s minimalist version of his

massive cleansing plans. Evidently the German and French security autho-

rities had found a compromise through which Himmler’s strategy of exter-

mination could be modiﬁed.

Himmler, however, stuck rigidly to one feature of the Marseilles cleans-

ing operation: he was determined to send 1,500 French prisoners to build a

railway in the Narvik district in Norway, and put the RSHA under pressure

with a stream of telexes so that his ‘ﬁrm’ promise to Hitler could be kept.

The reasons why Himmler was only partially successful in enforcing his

extremely brutal policy in Marseilles, and why his orders were evaded by

Oberg, even though the latter was already a target of Himmler’s disapprov-

al, may have had nothing to do with events in the south of France. For, at

the beginning of 1943, it cannot have been a secret within the security

apparatus that, immediately after he had managed to persuade Hitler to

agree to his hard line over Marseilles, Himmler had fallen into bad odour

with his ‘Fu

hrer’; for a time the authority of the Reichsfu

hrer appeared

seriously damaged.

For, on 16 December 1942, the former leader of the Romanian Iron

Guard, Horia Sima, who with 260 followers had escaped to Germany after

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his unsuccessful coup of January 1941, had ﬂed German internment to

Rome, despite having given his word of honour that he would stay. This

ﬂight was extremely embarrassing for Himmler. He had never been able

completely to free himself from the suspicion that he had personally ap-

proved the 1941 coup, which had been supported by members of the SD.

And now it appeared as if, by tolerating the ﬂight, he had once again tried to

sabotage the German policy vis-a

-vis Romania of supporting the Antonescu

regime. What made it worse was the fact that he had not immediately

reported the ﬂight to Hitler, so that the latter did not hear of it until days

later. A serious crisis developed in relations with Romania when, on 26

December, Marshall Antonescu demanded Sima’s extradition. Hitler was

extremely annoyed about Himmler’s behaviour with regard to Sima and

demanded that the latter keep him continually informed about the progress

of the hunt for him. Finally, after considerable efforts, Sima was arrested in

Rome and brought back to Germany. Hitler revoked his original order to

execute him, and instead he and his followers were put in concentration

camps.

Resistance throughout Europe

Oberg not only survived the Marseilles affair but continued to oppose

Himmler’s radical policy, despite repeated admonitions from the Reichs-

hrer. Oberg controlled over 200 security police throughout France, in

other words, a relatively widely spaced network, whose members, mostly

unqualiﬁed and not able to speak French, were basically unable to cope with

the increasing activities of the resistance.

Thus, contrary to Himmler’s

wishes, Oberg considered it inadvisable to attempt to become the overlord

of the French police, but preferred rather to adopt a policy of cooperation.

He delayed the transfer of French politicians and American journalists from

French internment to German concentration camps long enough until, in

April 1943, after a conversation with the French police chief Bouquet,

Himmler reluctantly came to agree with him.

At the end of 1943, however, Himmler put an end to the cooperation of

Oberg and Bousquet. He ordered Oberg to request Prime Minister Laval to

dismiss Bouquet (the previous month Oberg had vigorously opposed such a

step)

and to appoint Joseph Darnand, chief of the French militia, the

Vichy regime’s special force, as his successor. This appointment was clearly

652 a new opportunity?

intended to bring about the amalgamation of the militia and the police along

German lines. Moreover, Darnand was an Obersturmfu

hrer in the French

Waffen-SS.

In February 1944 a quarrel broke out between Berger, the head of the

Main Ofﬁce, and Oberg. ‘On the express orders of the Reichsfu

hrer SS’,

Berger wanted to establish an Einsatzkommando of the Waffen-SS for France

and to amalgamate the French right-wing paramilitary leagues in order to

provide a counterweight to the Free French army in the event of an Allied

landing. Berger concluded his missive with an argument that was hard to

refute: ‘German mothers won’t be weeping for foreigners who get killed.

And I’m saying that on the anniversary of my son’s death.’

Oberg, who was

primarily concerned to prevent anything that threatened to disturb French

domestic politics, opposed this policy and did so with a very ingenious

argument. ‘In accordance with the Fu

hrer’s directives, while on the surface

we should be following a policy of cooperation,’ nevertheless we should

‘never [lose] sight of the fact that our aim is to destroy France once and for all.’

The ‘creation of such a uniﬁed, French national organization, or something

similar, with the aid of the SS would, however, provide the basis for a truly

national reconstruction of France, in other words be contrary to the Fu

hrer’s

directives’. And the ‘creation of such a uniﬁed organization’ would remove

‘the possibility, when the time comes, of playing off the various political

forces in France, including Darnand’s militia, against one another’.

Himmler informed Berger that he must drop his plans for the time being,

but he wanted to discuss the matter thoroughly with him.

In fact, the

right-wing leagues in France were not amalgamated into a uniﬁed militia,

nor did Berger achieve his aim of establishing a recruiting ofﬁce for the

Waffen-SS in France. Once again Oberg had succeeded in imposing his

relatively careful approach and in using delaying tactics to block Himmler’s

radical policy.

Himmler’s brutal orders for the suppression of all opposition provoked

resistance from his own people in the other occupied territories as well. The

regional German police authorities, most of which were dependent on the

cooperation of local forces, frequently modiﬁed Himmler’s draconian or-

ders. It became apparent that the Higher SS and Police Leaders and com-

manders of the security police did not simply represent Himmler in the

occupied territories, but increasingly the reverse—namely, the interests of

the area for which they were responsible, as they understood them, vis-a

-vis

Himmler. In fact he himself must, in the meantime, have reached the

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conclusion that the indiscriminate shooting of hostages, which had been the

norm in 1941, was not necessarily conducive to keeping the resistance at

bay. Thus, despite his verbal advocacy of shootings, in practice he tended to

support mass arrests and deportations to German concentration camps,

particularly as he had an increasing need for slave labour. His policy of

repression was, therefore, clearly contradictory: his brutal announcements

and extreme orders cannot disguise the fact that he lacked a strategy to cope

with the complex demands of the European resistance movements. Thus his

approach varied from country to country, as will become clear from the

following examples.

In the Protectorate, as already mentioned, the retaliatory excesses of June

1942 were followed by a certain degree of calm. In 1943, however, Himmler

demanded a tougher policy. On 3 July, against the background of increasing

Czech hostility to the Germans, he ordered the acting Reich Protector,

Daluege, ‘immediately to take into protective custody and send to a concen-

tration camp all those ofﬁcials and employees of the Czech authorities who

have shown a lack of commitment to their service or work’, and also, as a

‘preventative and deterrent measure’, ‘immediately to take 500 Czechs into

protective custody and transfer them to a concentration camp’.

In fact this

no longer meant Auschwitz, because two months before he had instructed

the Gestapo not to send any more Czechs there as the President of the

Protectorate, Emil Ha

cha, had expressed concern about the ‘high death-rate’

in the camp.

In September 1943 Himmler authorized his HSSPF Karl

Frank, ‘for the purpose of restoring order as quickly as possible [ . . . ] to have

Czech troublemakers and saboteurs hanged on the spot’. According to his

own statements, Frank ensured that around 100 death sentences were passed

each month, but these were announced only locally in order to play down

the importance of the resistance movement.

In Denmark too Himmler followed a comparatively cautious policy

during the ﬁrst half of 1943. He received ﬁrst-hand information about the

country from Werner Best, who had been appointed Reich Plenipotentiary

in November 1942 and with whom his relationship had improved some-

what since the latter had left the RSHA in 1940. The former administrative

chief of the Gestapo was answerable to the Foreign Ministry, but also

supplied Himmler with his regular assessments of the situation.

In return

Himmler initially supported Best’s political line of continuing the low-key

and cooperative policy as practised hitherto. The Reich Plenipotentiary

limited himself to submitting ‘recommendations’ to the Danish government,

654 a new opportunity?

which was substantially independent. Even the relatively small Jewish mi-

nority in the country and refugees from other countries were left in peace.

In July 1943 Himmler informed Best that he had told Hitler that, ‘from a

purely security and sabotage point of view’, Denmark was ‘at the moment

the best country’.

Only a few weeks later, however, Himmler was to judge the situation

very differently. During the summer of 1943 more and more acts of

sabotage, strikes, and disturbances took place, and at the end of August

Hitler responded by imposing a military state of emergency. And in this

critical phase of German occupation policy the Danish Jews were also no

longer going to be protected. Despite the state of emergency the acts of

resistance increased. Finally, in December 1943 Himmler appointed a

Higher SS and Police Leader in Denmark in the shape of Gu

nther Pancke,

a clear denigration of Reich Plenipotentiary Best and a critique of his low-

key policy towards the Danes, since he was thereby deprived of his control

over the German police in the country. Himmler had good reason to tell

Best, in a personal letter in October, ‘not to be sad’ about the appointment

of his rival.

The Reich Plenipotentiary responded by altering his policy: at

the end of 1943 he subordinated Danish civilians to SS and police jurisdic-

tion by creating a ‘Police Field Court’, and in January 1944 had this measure

sanctioned by Hitler. During the following period this court repeatedly

sentenced members of the resistance movement to death.

In the occupied Netherlands the Higher SS and Police Leader, Hanns

Rauter, had long been taking a hard line with the local resistance move-

ment. In February 1943 he proposed to his Reichsfu

hrer responding to an

act of sabotage that had just taken place by arresting 5,000 students (‘sons of

plutocrats’) who belonged to the ‘reactionary camp’, returning all former

NCOs of the Dutch armed forces to prisoner-of-war camp, and shooting

ﬁfty hostages. Himmler agreed, but advised: ‘I would not shoot the hostages

if we are going simultaneously to arrest the ﬁve thousand.’

After a further

attack a few days later, however, he wanted the number of ‘sons of pluto-

crats’ increased. Moreover, in ‘most cases’ the fathers ought to be arrested at

the same time. Civil servants who could be shown to have given false

information ‘also belonged in the KZ, but they should be put in the quarry’.

And ‘there mustn’t be any climb-downs. The emigration of the Jews must

be kept going.’

When, on the following day, a member of Mussert’s militia was mur-

dered, Himmler informed Rauter that the previous day Hitler had reiterated

a new opp ortunity ? 655

that ‘there must be absolutely no concessions; the toughest possible action

must be taken’. Not only must the 5,000 ‘sons of plutocrats’ and their fathers

be arrested, but, in addition to the NCOs, the ‘prominent pro-English

reserve ofﬁcers’ should also be interned.

A few weeks later a doctors’ strike broke out, and once again Himmler

told Rauter: ‘I’m in favour of taking really tough action.’ Three or four

hundred strike leaders should be arrested and deported straight away to

concentration camps in the Reich.

At the beginning of May there was

another strike, and this time almost a million Dutch people took part.

Rauter broke it in the most brutal fashion, among other things by carrying

out a hundred summary executions. His Reichsfu

hrer was full of praise for

Rauter’s ‘vigorous action’.

In September 1943 Rauter suggested establishing police courts martial.

Himmler approved, and added that offenders’ families should also be pun-

ished by ‘conﬁscating their property, furniture and other effects, in fact

everything’.

At the same time Rauter worked out how one could deal

with the resistance without becoming obviously involved in the role of the

occupying power. As ‘retribution’ for an attack they should not be content

with ‘locking up 100 well-known agitators’ from the province concerned in

a concentration camp; rather, they could use ‘suitable men from the ‘Ger-

manic SS’ ‘to carry out a reprisal under the leadership of our people and

ﬁnish off three of the leading agitators’.

Once again Himmler approved

the plan, and Rauter lost no time in carrying it out. The very same month

the Germanic SS went into action, and a total of ﬁfty-ﬁve people fell victim

to the so-called ‘Operation Silver Pine’.

This represented the birth of a new concept of ‘counter-terror’ for

combating the European resistance movements. In retaliation for attacks

by the resistance, prominent persons who were known to be opponents of

the Nazis were, where possible, ambushed and murdered, with the iden-

tities and motives of those involved remaining a mystery. The aim was to

leave it uncertain as to whether the attacks were carried out by the occupa-

tion authorities themselves or on their instructions, or whether indigenous

right-wing forces acting on their own initiative were responsible. The

counter-terror was thus used in the ﬁrst instance in the ‘Germanic countries’

in which the Nazi regime claimed that, because of ‘blood ties’, there was a

broad basis for collaboration with the R eich; and in fact in a number of cases

indigenous ‘comrades’ supported the SS’s counter-terror.

656 a new opportunity?

On 30 December 1943 Hitler summoned Best, Pancke, and the com-

mander of Wehrmacht troops in Denmark and ordered them to engage in

counter-terror. The whole operation was organized by Alfred Naujocks,

who had been responsible for the attack on the Gleiwitz radio station in

1939. At the beginning of 1944 he brought a commando to Denmark,

which the SS sabotage expert, Otto Skorzeny, had placed at his disposal.

Danish Nazis who had joined the Schalburg corps, a unit not unlike the SS,

participated in the preparation of the attacks. During the following weeks

numerous individuals engaged in Danish public life were murdered in the

street or in their own homes, and public buildings were blown up.

In the summer of 1944 the counter-terror was extended to Norway and

Belgium. In Oslo, during the course of ‘Operation Flower Picking’, a

commando of the German security police murdered around two-dozen

people who were suspected of supporting the resistance movement.

Brussels the ‘Jungklaus Ofﬁce’, which had supposedly been established to

recruit volunteers for the Waffen-SS, but in fact was the control centre for

all the activities of the SS and SD in Belgium, became involved in the

preparations. The attacks, to which Himmler gave his express approval on 4

June 1944 and for which he issued detailed guidelines, were carried out with

the aid of Belgian fascists and were largely directed at well-known ﬁgures

who had been prominent opponents of collaboration.

In occupied eastern Europe, however, where in Himmler’s view they were

dealing with ‘subhumans’, the methods of repression were far more brutal.

In the spring of 1942 he had already effectively emasculated Hans Frank

through the appointment of Kru

ger as state secretary for security and

omnipotent RKF representative, and with the aid of Bormann and Lammers

he continued to put Frank under pressure, among other things by carrying

out major police and resettlement operations in order to demonstrate

Frank’s incompetence and that of his administration. Hitler was not, how-

ever, prepared to dismiss Frank, who had in fact become disillusioned, for

fear of a loss of German prestige in the General Government. Meanwhile,

Himmler was hoping that an increase in terror would strengthen the SS’s

position in this region.

In November 1942, following reports about a Polish uprising that was

alleged to be about to take place, Himmler ordered that a large number of

Poles suspected of subversion should be sent to concentration camps.

The

uprising did not take place, and yet in January 1943 Himmler raised the

a new opp ortunity ? 657

matter again. Now, however, he associated the ‘bandit activities’ with

unemployment in the General Government. As with the 1938 ‘asocial

operation’ in the Reich, his main concern was to increase the numbers

held in concentration camps through a programme of massive arrests:

‘I therefore order that from now onwards all proletarian types whether

male or female should be sent to the KL [concentration camps] in Lublin,

Auschwitz, or in the Reich. The numbers arrested must be sufﬁciently large

to decrease signiﬁcantly those people who are not in employment in the GG

and thus achieve a distinct alleviation of the threat from bandits.’

As a result, between 15 and 22 January Himmler’s men arrested around

20,000 people indiscriminately; the ‘action’ affected above all people who

were not unemployed, producing considerable unrest among the popula-

tion and thereby increasing the potential threat of resistance. The civilian

population, who had not been warned in advance, objected strongly, and

Kru

ger not only had to admit that mistakes had been made but eventually

felt obliged to reassure the civilian administration that such actions would

not be carried out in future.

Himmler did not allow himself to be affected

by this. ‘We must not be put off such actions by unavoidable mistakes, since

all in all the removal of asocial, criminal types will in the ﬁnal analysis

alleviate the situation.’

Apparently among the ‘mistakes’ was the fact that,

in the course of the mass arrests, Himmler had wanted to ‘transfer’ to

concentration camps the 20,000 Polish ofﬁcers who were still held as

prisoners of war. In the event, the Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, intervened

to prevent this.

On 19 June 1943 Himmler was able to persuade Hitler to extend his

range of responsibilities for ‘combating bandits’, and to convince him for

this purpose to ‘return’ to him a number of SS and police units that had been

transferred to the front. As in the previous September, in order to achieve

this he utilized a meeting in which the ‘partisan problem’ and the ‘Jewish

question’ formed the subject of discussion. Himmler’s commission to ex-

pand the ‘combating of bandits’ was evidently linked to Hitler’s order to

him ‘to carry out ruthlessly [ . . . ] the evacuation of the Jews [ . . . ] in the

course of the next three to four months’.

Two days later Himmler appointed von dem Bach-Zelewski commander

of the units involved in combating bandits. At the same time he declared the

territories of Upper Carinthia and Lower Styria, the General Government,

the district of Bialystock, the regions of Russia-Centre and Russia-South/

Reich Commissariat Ukraine, as well as Croatia to be ‘bandit combat

658 a new opportunity?

areas’.

He was now in a position to engage in unrestricted terror over large

parts of south-east and eastern Europe. In April 1944 upper and central Italy

were added to the ‘bandit combat areas’.

In the case of the General Government its classiﬁcation as ‘a bandit

combat area’ meant that among other things the powers of the security

police courts martial were extended. Now, on principle, Poles who were

guilty of the slightest offence ‘against the work of German reconstruction’

could be shot on the spot without any formal legal process.

Between

October 1943 and July 1944 (in other words, before the Warsaw uprising)

the occupation authorities murdered 8,000 people in Warsaw alone.

The extent of the terror, disguised as ‘combating bandits’, that was

exercised in the occupied Soviet territories and the very varied motives

that lay behind it may be illustrated by the following example. In the course

of 1943 the Nazi leadership developed the notion that the threat posed by

the partisans in occupied Soviet territories could be effectively combated by

the creation of ‘dead zones’, an idea that was also affected by economic

considerations. Initial experiments were undertaken.

On 10 July 1943 Himmler announced in an order that Hitler had decided

‘that the territories of the northern Ukraine and Russia-Centre plagued by

bandit activity’ were to be ‘cleared of all their population’. The whole of the

male population capable of work was to be ‘transferred’ to Sauckel, ‘on the

basis of POW conditions’. The women would be assigned to Sauckel ‘for

work in the Reich’. ‘Part of the female population and all children without

parents will be placed in our reception camps.’ The territories that had been

emptied in this way were to be managed by the Higher SS and Police

Leaders, with some areas being planted with Kok-Sagys, a rubber-type plant

in which Himmler was particularly interested, and others ‘exploited for

agriculture’. ‘The children’s camps are to be established on the borders of

these territories so that the children can be used as labour for Kok-Sagys

cultivation and for agriculture.’

Anyone who remained in the ‘dead zones’ after the civilian population

had been deported or murdered, their property plundered, and their houses

destroyed, would then automatically be considered ‘a bandit suspect’ and

shot on sight. In the General Commissariat of White Ruthenia in August

1943 the ‘dead zones’—contiguous territories—already made up 16 per cent

of the arable land; in July 1944 in the area under military administration in

eastern Byelorussia as much as 75 per cent!

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