Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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Thus the order beneﬁted security through the depopulation of territories

‘suspected of harbouring bandits’, and the economy by providing forced

labour; the establishment of camps for the ‘bandit children’ corresponded to

Himmler’s racial principles; and with the production of Kok-Sagys he

hoped to be able to deliver a raw material important for the war economy.

(The day before, Himmler had had himself appointed by Go

ring as ‘Special

Representative for Plant Rubber’ in order to be able to embark on large-

scale Kok-Sagys production.)

Himmler had already issued the order to transfer people from ‘territories

plagued by bandits’ to the Reich as labour in October 1942, but the

operation had not got under way. His order of 10 June was, however,

actually put into effect. In September 1943, in his role as commander of

the units involved in combating bandits, von dem Bach-Zalewski gave the

requisite instructions and ensured that they were carried out during the

coming months.

In the process the motives for and methods of combating

partisans had changed radically by comparison with those of the previous

year. Whereas in 1942 ‘combating bandits’ was primarily motivated by the

aim of murdering the Jews as ‘bandit suspects’, now, since the murder of the

Jews in eastern Europe had been largely achieved, it was primarily a matter

of securing labour. This developed into a key motive for the combating of

partisans.

By contrast, an alternative strategy, continually discussed within the

German leadership, of trying to gain allies among the indigenous population

by promising them some form of political autonomy or other privileges

invariably met with strong resistance from Himmler. ‘We must never’, he

noted in a minute from November 1942, ‘promise the Russians a national

state. Otherwise we may be making commitments [ . . . ] which one day we

shall have to keep.’

In his notorious Posen speech to the SS-Gruppen-

hrer of 4 October 1943 he adopted a similar tone, when he ﬁrmly rejected

the idea that was current in the Wehrmacht that they could work with the

Russian general Andrei Andreyevitsch Vlasov, who was a German POW, to

recruit Russian auxiliaries to ﬁght Stalin. The motto: ‘We can’t defeat the

Russians; that can be done only by the Russians themselves’, would lead to

defeatism.

A year later, however, having in the meantime become com-

mander of the Reserve Army and personally responsible for providing

Wehrmacht replacements, Himmler was to reconsider his position. Yet,

in Posen he reiterated to his leadership corps: ‘I don’t care in the least what

happens to the Russians or the Czechs [ . . . ] Whether other nations are

660 a new opportunity?

prosperous or die of hunger only interests me in so far as we have slaves for

our culture; otherwise it doesn’t interest me.’

From the autumn of 1942 onwards, in the light of the change in the war

situation, Himmler had also been intensifying the repressive policy in the

Reich. In the ﬁrst place this affected the millions of foreigners who were

living there, as already described in the previous chapter.

In December 1942 Himmler decided to transfer the leadership of the

RSHA, which he had taken on himself after Heydrich’s assassination, to

Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner, who had been HSSPF Danube in

Vienna since 1938, had little experience of police command but had the

reputation of knowing something about secret intelligence matters, and was

regarded as absolutely loyal to Himmler. In view of the military and political

changes that were likely to happen, the Reichsfu

hrer valued these qualities

particularly highly. Moreover, he approved of Kaltenbrunner’s robust

Ill. 30. On 16 September 1944 Hi mmler, now commander

of the Reserve Army, came to an agreement with General

Vlasov on the deployment of Russian troops alongside the

Wehrmacht. The photogr aph taken afterwards showing the

men shaking hands was purely for show, as in private

Himmler had never concealed his contempt for the general.

a new opp ortunity ? 661

behaviour when dealing with other institutions of the Nazi state.

The

ofﬁcial appointment occurred on 30 January 1943.

One of the challenges facing the new head of the R SHA came from the

Reich Ministry of Justice. In November 1942 Thierack had withdrawn

from the agreement he had made in September that in future Poles and

eastern workers would be subject to punishment by the Gestapo. He had

responded to objections from the Reich governors in the eastern territories.

However, after negotiations lasting several months Kaltenbrunner managed

to force the ministry once more to give up this responsibility. On 30 June

1943 the RSHA informed the Stapo ofﬁces that, as a matter of principle, the

punishment of Polish and Soviet Russian forced workers was ‘to be carried

out’ by the Gestapo using ‘Gestapo methods’ or ‘special treatment’. The

RSHA laid down in this edict that cases involving Soviet and Polish forced

workers should be handed over to the judiciary only if a sentence by a court

was considered necessary ‘for political reasons of morale’, and if assurances

had been given by the court that a death sentence could be anticipated.

The

RSHA had already ensured in March 1943 that it could arrest Poles who had

been released from prison after serving a sentence of more than six months

and order that they should be consigned to a concentration camp.

Escaped POWs, the crews of aircraft that had been shot down, or Allied

paratroopers who had been caught also faced harsh treatment. In the

summer of 1943 Himmler issued an edict which could be interpreted as a

licence for lynch justice. It was ‘not the task of the police to interfere with

conﬂicts between German national comrades and British and American

terroristic airmen who have bailed out’.

On 4 March Gestapo chief Mu

ller

decreed that, following their capture, escaped POWs (except for Britons

and Americans) were to be transferred to the security police and SD, who

should send them to Mauthausen, where they were to be shot. The internal

code-name for this procedure was ‘Operation Bullet’.

Persecution of the Jews intensiﬁes

With the Anglo-American landings in Morocco and Algeria in November

1942 the Jews throughout Europe also came under further pressure. Initially

that applied particularly to the Jewish minorities in the Mediterranean. As a

counterstroke to the Allied landings in North Africa German troops occu-

pied Tunisia and brought around 85,000 Tunisian Jews under their control.

662 a new opportunity?

A specially formed Einsatzgruppe Tunisia introduced a regime of forced

labour, and around twenty Jewish men were deported to the extermination

camps. The total victory of the Allies in North Africa in May 1943 pre-

vented a catastrophe.

The anti-Jewish measures had much more far-reaching consequences in

the south of Europe, which the Germans feared might come to form the

rear area for a new southern front of ‘Fortress Europe’. We have already

seen from the example of Marseilles that, after the occupation of southern

France by German and Italian troops on 11 November 1942, Himmler was

determined to clear this area of Jews as well.

In January and February Jews

were arrested in large numbers in both northern and southern France, and

in February the deportations were restarted. However, since on the one

hand the Italian authorities were not prepared to support anti-Jewish

measures in their occupation zone of south-east France and offered sanctu-

ary to Jewish refugees, and on the other, the deportation of Jews with

French citizenship threatened to disrupt the policy of collaboration, in

March the security police developed a new strategy: they demanded that

the French government strip those Jews who had acquired French citizen-

ship of their nationality. The deportations were postponed for the time

being, on the assumption that this would be approved.

Italy’s attitude became a serious problem,

as Himmler frequently ex-

plained to Ribbentrop. Their ally’s policy provided ‘the excuse for many

circles in France and throughout Europe to stall over the Jewish question

because they can point out that not even our Axis partner is prepared to

cooperate over the Jewish question’.

In February, therefore, he ‘urgently’

requested the Foreign Minister to approach the Italians and ‘urge them no

longer to sabotage [ . . . ] the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce’s Jewish measures.

Our attempts to persuade the governments of Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria,

and Slovakia to deport the Jews in these countries are also facing serious

difﬁculties because of the Italian government’s attitude.’

Nevertheless the RSHA increased the pressure on Bulgaria as well as on

Greece. In February a special commando arrived in Saloniki to organize the

deportation of the local Jewish community, which Himmler had already

announced in November 1941. Between mid-March and mid-August 1943

a total of 45,000 Jews were deported from Saloniki and the adjacent

Macedonian communities to Auschwitz, where almost all of them were

murdered.

The Bulgarian Jewish commissar, Alexander Belev, and the

German Jewish adviser in Soﬁa, Dannecker, signed an agreement on 22

a new opp ortunity ? 663

February that envisaged the deportation of 20,000 Jews by May 1943.

fact in March 1943 the over 3,000 Jews living in Thrace and the over 7,000

living in Macedonia—both territories had been occupied by Bulgaria—

were arrested by the Bulgarians and deported to the General Government,

where the majority were murdered in Treblinka.

The deportation of the

Jews from Old Bulgaria was thwarted by increasing opposition from within

the country itself.

At the beginning of 1943 the Nazi leadership had resumed on a large scale

its extermination and deportation programme in the General Government.

The ‘labour deployment’ in the Reich had been reorganized so that Jewish

workers could now be dispensed with. For this reason, in February the SS

removed the remaining German Jews still employed in armaments produc-

tion in the Reich from their factories (‘Operation Factory’) and deported

them to the east.

In January 1943 , while on a visit to Warsaw, Himmler ordered the

dissolution of the Warsaw ghetto. Of the 40,000 Jews still living there

8,000 were to be ‘deported in the next few days’. The 16,000 people who

at that time were still working in various plants were to be deported ‘to a

KL, preferably Lublin’, and those plants that were actually involved in

armaments production, but only these, should be ‘concentrated in some

place in the General Government’.

The others were to be closed. The

transfer of production to Lublin at short notice proved impossible, however.

On 15 February, therefore, Himmler ordered Pohl to establish a concentra-

tion camp within the ghetto itself for those ghetto inhabitants whom

armaments plants claimed to need as workers.

However, the deportation

of those not required as workers ordered by Himmler began a few days after

his visit. From 18 January onwards the transports from Warsaw to Treblinka

were under way. Between 5,000 and 6,000 people arrived there during the

following days.

Then something completely unexpected happened. When, on 19 April,

the occupation authorities set out ﬁnally to clear the Warsaw ghetto they

were confronted by several hundred armed resisters. It took troops under

the command of SS-Brigadefu

hrer Ju

rgen Stroop, who were heavily armed

and far superior in numbers, four weeks to subdue the insurrection. On 16

May 1943 they managed to destroy the last pocket of resistance of the

desperate Jewish ﬁghters.

The courage and stamina of the Jewish defenders surprised—indeed,

shocked—the Nazi leadership. It was now that the decision was taken to

664 a new opportunity?

conclude the ‘ﬁnal solution’—and not only in the General Government—as

soon as possible and no longer to take into consideration the possible utility

of Jewish labour. In May, before the end of the ghetto uprising, Himmler

used the occasion of a presentation by Ulrich Greifelt, the head of his Main

Ofﬁce for Ethnic Issues, to insist that it was a ‘priority in the General

Government [ . . . ] to remove the 300,000–400, 000 Jews still living

there’.

Friedrich-Wilhelm Kru

ger, the HSSPF responsible for the General

Government, explained on 31 May that he had ‘only recently received the

order to carry out the dejewiﬁcation in a very short period of time’.

According to Kru

ger, Himmler also wanted to put an end to the employ-

ment of Jews in the armaments industry and in forced labour camps.

Under the impact of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, from April 1943 onwards

the SS accelerated the bloody liquidation of those ghettos that still existed as

well as the small forced labour camps, a campaign that had begun in March.

In May 1943 SSPF Katzmann ordered the dissolution of all ghettos in the

district of Galicia.

Between May and the end of June 1943 around 80,000

people fell victim to this mass murder, which was carried out with extreme

brutality. At the end of June 1943 Katzmann reported to the HSSPF-East,

Kru

ger, that ‘with effect from 23 June 1943 all Jewish quarters have been

dissolved’ and, as a result, ‘apart from those Jews in the camps under the

control of the SS and Police Leader, the district is now free of Jews’.

In June 1943 only a few tens of thousands of Jews were still living in the

General Government, mainly in forced labour camps, which were largely

controlled by the SS. Nevertheless, on 19 June Himmler ordered that ‘the

evacuation of the Jews must be carried out ruthlessly and must be got

through despite the unrest that will occur during the next three to four

months as a result’. Resistance in the area did increase—this provides part of

the context for the declaration that the whole of the General Government

was now a ‘bandit combat area’, by which Hitler increased Himmler’s

freedom of action there.

In order to pre-empt potential resistance from employers, who might

insist on continuing to employ their Jewish workers, Himmler now pursued

a policy of transforming the remaining ghettos and camps into concentra-

tion camps. This ensured that the inmates were now at last totally subject to

the SS and prevented any attempt by other agencies to gain access to them.

Himmler endeavoured to ensure that only those Jews could remain alive for

the time being who, on the basis of the strictest criteria, really were essential

to war production.

a new opp ortunity ? 665

The Warsaw ghetto, which had already been declared a concentration

camp in February 1943, was ﬁnally dissolved in June 1943 . Moreover,

Himmler ordered the removal of all traces of its existence.

In July 1943

he also ordered that Sobibor extermination camp should be transformed

into a concentration camp and that the prisoners should sort captured

ammunition.

Those Jews in the General Government who had survived

June were concentrated in forced labour camps, most of which operated as

satellite camps of Majdanek.

In January 1944 the work camp Plaszow

(near Cracow) as well as those in Lemberg, Lublin, and Radom were

declared to be concentration camps.

With his order of 21 May 1943 that all Jews from Reich territory,

including the Protectorate, were to be deported ‘to the east’ or to There-

sienstadt, Himmler closed the last bolt-hole for those Polish Jews who had

hitherto been able to stay alive in Polish territories directly administered by

the Reich, namely eastern Upper Silesia, the Warthegau, and the district of

Bialystock.

Between 22 and 24 June 1943 the SS deported 5,000 Jews from

Sosnowitz and Bendzin to Auschwitz, and in the ﬁrst half of August the last

ghettos in Upper Silesia were cleared.

Himmler encountered difﬁculties,

however, with the transformation of the Ło

ghetto into a concentration

camp, for Arthur Greiser, the Reich Governor of the Warthegau, blocked

the order which would have deprived him of ‘his ghetto’.

The dispute

lasted from June 1943 until February 1944, when Himmler and Greiser

agreed to permit the ghetto to remain as a ‘Gau-ghetto’. However, only as

many Jews were permitted to live there as had to be ‘deﬁnitely retained in

the interests of the armaments economy’.

On the other hand, Himmler’s

order of August 1943 that the more than 100 Jewish forced labour camps in

the Warthegau should be liquidated had been carried out by October.

The Bialystock ghetto was also ﬁnally dissolved between 16 and 23 August,

after Globocnik had reported to Himmler on 21 June that the workshops

there were being transferred to Lublin. More than 25,000 people were

deported to Treblinka or to Majdanek, where they were to be deployed

as forced labour.

However, it was not only the occupation authorities for whom the

Warsaw ghetto uprising had acted as a wake-up call. Jewish resistance to

the extermination policy now ﬂared up in other places as well. The SS were

faced with an armed resistance group when clearing the Bialystock ghetto,

and the same thing happened in August in the Glubokoje ghetto near

Vilnius.

Moreover, in August there was an organized mass break-out

666 a new opportunity?

from Treblinka, and on 14 October the inmates of Sobibor revolted, killing

eleven SS men.

And this was happening against the background of the

inexorable advance of the Soviet army. The Sobibor uprising probably gave

Himmler the ﬁnal impetus to order Kru

ger to liquidate the last important

camps in the Lublin district. At the beginning of November the prisoners in

the Lublin camps were shot in a massacre lasting two days, code-named

‘Harvest Festival’. The same thing was occurring simultaneously in other

camps in the General Government. There were around 42,000 victims in

the Lublin district alone.

After the Warsaw ghetto uprising Himmler acted in the same way in the

occupied Soviet territories, namely in the Reich Commissariat Ostland,

where a signiﬁcant number of Jews still remained. On 21 June 1943, after

meeting with leading SS functionaries, he ordered that ‘all Jews living in

ghettos in Ostland territory are to be placed in concentration camps’. At the

same time he banned ‘Jews from leaving concentration camps for work’,

and reiterated an order that he had already issued in April to build a

concentration camp near R iga.

100

Those ‘members of the Jewish ghetto

not required’ were to be ‘evacuated to the east’, in other words, to be

murdered.

101

This guaranteed Himmler total control over the Jewish forced

workers in Reich Commissariat Ostland. One should recall in this context

the commission to conclude the ‘ﬁnal solution’ that he had been given by

Hitler two days previously. Conﬁning surviving Jews in concentration

camps; continually selecting Jewish forced workers in the concentration

camps for extermination; reducing the work opportunities for Jews outside

the camps, for example with the Wehrmacht; and hunting for Jews in

hiding under the cover of ‘combating partisans’ with the aid of von

dem Bach-Zelewski, who, as already mentioned, on this very 21 June had

been appointed head of the units for combating bandits—these were the

methods with which Himmler hoped to carry out as quickly as possible

Hitler’s commission in the General Government and in Reich Commissariat

Ostland.

102

In this way his extermination policy continued its merciless course in the

Reich Commissariat. The two last large ghettos in the Baltic states apart

from Riga, Kaunas

103

and Vilnius,

104

were liquidated in September 1943,

their inhabitants deported to Estonian and Latvian work camps or mur-

dered. Some of the inhabitants of the Kaunas ghetto, however, were

retained by the SS and the ghetto was transformed into a concentration

camp. Also in September, and linked to these measures, the KZ Valvara in

a new opp ortunity ? 667

Estonia was established as a transit camp.

105

The last three ghettos in the

General District of White Ruthenia were destroyed between August and

October 1943.

106

The Warsaw ghetto uprising had an impact in other European countries

dominated by Germany. In May 1943 another two transports left Croatia

for Auschwitz, with around 2,000 people.

107

In Slovakia the Germans

pressed in June for deportations to be restarted, but their request fell on

deaf ears.

108

In May the RSHA ordered the number of those to be deported

from the Netherlands to be suddenly increased. Between 18 May and 20

July almost 18,000 people were deported to Sobibor in eight transports.

In Belgium the Gestapo ofﬁce in Brussels informed Mecheln camp on

29 June that, following an order from Himmler, ‘now the Jews with

Belgian nationality are to be immediately included in the deportation

programme’.

109

On 20 September 1943 the ﬁrst deportation train left the

country with only Belgian Jews on board. Five more were to follow by the

end of the year. Almost 6,000 people were deported to Auschwitz.

110

In June 1943 Himmler returned to the plan that he had been following

since the beginning of the year, of persuading the French government to

deprive French immigrant Jews of their French citizenship and thereby

make them free for deportation. Himmler pressed Oberg, his HSSPF in

France, for the immediate publication of the deprivation-of-citizenship law,

which Laval had already signed.

111

In the Reichsfu

hrer’s view the deporta-

tions ought to be ﬁnished by 15 July 1943.

Once again, however, Himmler’s order could not be carried out. This

time it was Laval, not Oberg, who was responsible. On 25 July, the day of

Mussolini’s fall, the Prime Minister decided to cancel the publication.

112

Laval managed to put off Oberg and Knochen for several weeks

113

before

ﬁnally declaring, on 24 August, that he would not sign the law.

114

response the security police began acting independently, seeking out Jews

and deporting them. Also, when they acquired the opportunity to get their

hands on Jews who had ﬂed to the Italian zone of occupation in south-east

France this was to have an impact on Jewish persecution throughout France.

Gypsy policy

At the end of 1942, as part of the programme of racial selection and

systematic mass murder that applied throughout the area controlled by

668 a new opportunity?

Germany, Himmler and the SS began also signiﬁcantly to increase the

persecution of the so-called Gypsies.

After the outbreak of war Gypsies in the Reich had been kept in camps

‘pending their ultimate deportation’, as stated in the relevant RSHA direc-

tive.

115

In the autumn of 1939 the idea had been that, as part of the Nisko

plan, the Reich German Gypsies would be deported to the General Gov-

ernment along with the German Jews.

116

In fact that happened only in May

1940; under a speciﬁc order of Himmler’s, 2,500 Gypsies were deported

from R eich territory to the General Government.

117

However, after a

certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing about the progress of the deportations,

in the summer of 1940 Himmler announced that the ‘evacuation of Gypsies

and Gypsy half-castes from Reich territory’ was to be postponed ‘until the

Jewish question [has] been generally solved’.

118

In November 1940 the

Reich Criminal Police Ofﬁce held out the prospect that the ‘the Gypsy

question’ in Reich territory ‘would be ﬁnally settled’ after the war.

119

This remained the situation until 1942. During this period evidently

neither Himmler nor the RSHA had concrete ideas about the future fate

of those who had been deported. They were left to themselves; the majori-

ty—there are no exact ﬁgures—died as a result of the miserable conditions

in the General Government. A minority survived or returned to the Reich

during the war, where some of them were able to hide until the end.

120

In November 1941 the halt to the deportations decreed in 1940 was lifted

for a particular group of Gypsies: 5,000 Gypsies from the Burgenland were

transported to the Ło

ghetto in the course of the deportation of Jews from

the Reich. Himmler endeavoured to set aside concerns of the district

governor responsible, Friedrich Uebelhoer, that the Gypsies might engage

in arson by advising Uebelhoer to shoot ten Gypsies for every ﬁre in the

ghetto. ‘In this way,’ Himmler advised, ‘you will get the best possible ﬁre

brigade for the ghetto; it will be the keenest there has ever been.’

121

January 1942 all those Gypsies who had not succumbed to living conditions

in the ghetto were killed by gas vans in Chelmno.

On 20 April Himmler telephoned Heydrich with the order: ‘Gypsies not

to be exterminated’, as is clear from his notes on telephone conversations.

122

It is unclear whether this order of Himmler’s applied to the Gypsies who

were still living in the Reich, to those who had been deported to the

General Government, or whether it was a general directive applying to all

Gypsies. It appears, however, that with this directive the Reichsfu

hrer-SS

was initiating a more differentiated Gypsy policy. For in the summer of 1942

a new opp ortunity ? 669