Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

(and because the working prisoners were, from the perspective of the SS,

valuable capital, who furthermore were not to be left to the enemy as

witnesses to the horrors of the concentration camps) Himmler decreed

that the concentration camps were to be vacated and ‘evacuated’.

As early as 17 June 1944 Himmler had transferred the command of the

concentration camps to the Higher SS and Police Leaders in the event of so-

called ‘Situation A’ arising (deﬁned at ﬁrst as an uprising (Aufstand ) on the

part of the prisoners and then principally as the approach (Anna

herung)of

enemy troops).

The process of clearing and evacuation was to result in

renewed selection of the prisoners: as a rule, the guards murdered weak and

ill prisoners before the evacuation; in a number of concentration camps

German prisoners were released. The prisoners were normally made to

march on foot, mainly in winter weather and in catastrophic conditions.

Anyone who got left behind was killed by the accompanying guards, and in

many cases with local assistance. Concentration camps located further inside

the Reich were the destination of these death marches from the main camps.

The process of collecting a large number of prisoners in a decreasing

number of camps resulted frequently in an almost complete breakdown in

provisioning. Living conditions that were in any case disastrous became

even more wretched.

First of all the former ghettos and camps for Jewish forced workers in the

Baltic States, which on Himmler’s instructions had been redesignated as

concentration camps, had been cleared since the summer of 1944. Prisoners

from the Kaiserwald camp complex close to Riga, from the Kowno con-

centration camp, and from Vaivara were deported by the SS mainly to

Stutthof but also to Auschwitz.

From September 1944 onwards a large

number of prisoners were killed in two improvised gas chambers with

Zyklon B.

At the end of the year the ﬁrst rail transports of prisoners left

the main Stutthof camp and in January eleven columns were formed, each

with a thousand prisoners, who were supposed to march on foot to Lauen-

burg (Le˛bork), 140 kilometres away. Only about one-third of the prisoners

reached the city.

From the summer of 1944 onwards Auschwitz was also being gradually

cleared. At that time the camp still held some 130,000 prisoners, half of

whom were now being moved to other concentration camps.

The evac-

uation of the remaining 67,000 prisoners began in the middle of January

1945: the prisoners were marched westwards in columns; guards shot

around a quarter of them during the march. Part of the marching columns

710 collapse

reached Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia, which became a

transit camp for the camps and prisons in the east that had been cleared.

Finally, 44,000 prisoners from the Rosen concentration-camp complex

were taken in rail transports to camps situated further westwards.

Even if one of the motives behind Himmler’s evacuation of the camps

was to retain as long as he could a large number of prisoners as potential

objects of exchange, treatment continued to be harsh. The fact that the

evacuation resulted in the death or murder of many prisoners was clearly not

contrary to his intentions. The supposed humanitarian pose that Himmler

adopted in conducting negotiations towards the end of the war for the

release of Jews must be viewed against the background of this brutal and

cynical evacuation process.

A military commander at last

At the beginning of September Hitler gave his commander of the Reserve

Army the task of preventing troop units from retreating from those occu-

pied territories the Germans still held but which were outside the actual

theatre of operations, and of setting up combat units in the rear area.

In a

speech on 21 September to the commanders of the military districts and

those in charge of training, Himmler reported proudly how in the previous

weeks he had criss-crossed the areas under threat (‘down the whole of the

western front from Trier to Mu

hlhausen (Mulhouse), Colmar, Metz’),

spoken with ‘thousands of soldiers’, and wherever he considered necessary

had intervened, taking to task the negligent commander of a troop transport

and personally demoting the incompetent commanding ofﬁcer in Trier.

‘Brutal action against signs of indiscipline in the rear area’ was what he

recommended to the ofﬁcers present.

The fact that in his entire military

career Himmler himself had never made it beyond precisely this rear area

(and never would do) did not seem to trouble him.

In Hitler’s eyes, however, Himmler’s stance as a merciless enforcer and

fanatical driver of men clearly qualiﬁed him for further military responsi-

bilities. In September he entrusted to him the task of creating a home guard

(Volkssturm). The idea for a militia that would take on security responsi-

bilities as the need arose was something Himmler had been considering for

years. Back in January 1942 he had created the rural guard (Landwacht), and

in December this was extended to be a rural and urban guard. In line with

collapse 711

an agreement reached between Himmler and Bormann, members of the

SA, SS, and Nazi Party who had had not been called up for military service

were the preferred source of recruits. This force was deployed, for example,

to supervise forced workers or recapture escaped prisoners.

Since June 1944 the Nazi leadership had been contemplating some kind

of home guard in the event of a direct threat to Reich territory by enemy

forces.

In the middle of September Bormann, Himmler, and Keitel agreed

that a home defence force (Volkswehr) should be set up. On 26 September

Hitler signed the ‘Decree Concerning the Formation of the German

“Volkssturm”’—that sounded distinctly more martial and historically sig-

niﬁcant. The decree stated that all men capable of bearing arms between the

ages of 16 and 60 would be called up to the Volkssturm; ‘establishment and

leadership’ would be the responsibility of the Gauleiters, while Himmler, in

his capacity as commander of the Reserve Army, would be responsible for

‘military organization, training, equipment, and supplies for the German

Volkssturm’. Even ‘combat operations’, Hitler’s decree read, were, ‘in line

with my instructions’, placed under Himmler’s control.

Himmler had already announced the creation of a home guard to com-

manders of the military districts and commanders in charge of training on 21

September,

and the ofﬁcial notiﬁcation came on 18 October in Ko

nigsberg

at a roll-call of the Volkssturm there. For his speech, which was broadcast on

the radio, Himmler had chosen a heavily symbolic date. This day, 18

October, he reminded his listeners, was the 131st anniversary of the Battle

of the Nations at Leipzig, an ideal opportunity to make reference to the

Volkssturm of 1813 and its role in the Wars of Liberation. Himmler tried to

bolster the people’s courage: back then an improvised militia had succeeded,

in a military situation judged to be hopeless, in making an important contri-

bution to the victory over Napoleon. A similar role was to be reserved for the

present Volkssturm: ‘Our enemies must be taught to understand that every

kilometre they advance into our country will cost them rivers of their own

blood. Every building in the town, every village, every farm, every forest will

be defended by men, young and old, and—if necessary—by girls and women

too.’

On 12 November, in all Gaus, at least as far as the conditions of war

permitted, the Volkssturm guard was ceremoniously sworn in.

Himmler appointed Berger as Chief of Staff of the Volkssturm, and the

latter gathered a suitable team. A dynamic character, Berger soon exceeded

his powers, which in fact were entirely conﬁned to the military side of the

Volkssturm’s creation, and this led Bormann to complain to Himmler.

712 collapse

Although Himmler admonished Berger to ‘stick to his proper task’, in the

end the two of them had their way over Bormann.

On 16 October Berger issued training instructions for the Volkssturm,

which required ‘ideological activation’ in particular, as well as weapons

training and ﬁeld exercises.

In theory 6 million men were potentially

available, more than were in the regular army.

The military quality of this

ﬁnal call to arms was, however, more than inadequate: for their ‘service’ in

the Volkssturm (exercises in the evenings and at weekends) people wore

worn-out civilian clothing or uniforms belonging to any and every military

and non-military organization. An armband was the sign identifying the

wearer as a combatant as deﬁned by international laws of war.

The Volks-

sturm had few weapons at its disposal, and its ﬁrearms, collected from all sorts

of places, were mostly of doubtful value. Military training as a rule was limited

to a superﬁcial orientation.

It was believed in all earnestness that such serious inadequacies in a

ﬁghting force consisting primarily of adolescent boys and old men could

be compensated for by guerrilla tactics, by means of which—supported by

tricks and guile—every copse and every farm was to be fought for. Bor-

rowing an idea from the Chief of the General Staff, Heinz Guderian, Berger

recommended to the men of the Volkssturm the novels of Karl May* as

‘training literature’.

In fact the Volkssturm was used above all for basic tasks such as evacuating

towns and villages before enemy troops arrived.

From October, however,

battalions were deployed at the front in East Prussia,

and from November

on the western front near Metz. But the results were so negative that in

February Hitler ordered that Volkssturm units should in future be used only

to protect the rear areas. Nevertheless, in the following months Volkssturm

units were to be repeatedly sent to the front, above all in the east.

Even if the military value of this last effort remained slight, the fact that

the structure of the Volkssturm, down to its local groups, mirrored that of

the party organization

showed what Himmler’s and Bormann’s ﬁrst prior-

ity was with regard to it, namely, that all men capable of bearing arms should

be recorded and disciplined by the party (Volkssturm soldiers were subject to

the jurisdiction of the SS and police courts). The primary motive for

the creation of the Volkssturm was therefore, in all probability, the Nazi

leadership’s fear that the war could be brought to a premature end by means

* See translators’ note,p.80.

collapse 713

of a rebellion on the home front. Nazi leaders at the highest level in the ﬁnal

phase of the war were driven by this anxiety, and the memory of 1918,

which was constantly adduced in this connection, reveals to what extent

members of the Nazi elite had fallen victim to the myth of the stab in the

back, which they themselves had conjured up often enough.

In his radio address of 18 October Himmler alluded to a further organi-

zation that he had brought into being along with the Volkssturm: ‘Even in

the territory they believe they have conquered,’ he warned the Allies, ‘the

German will to resist will constantly spring to life again, and, like were-

wolves, death-defying volunteers will damage and destroy the enemy from

the rear.’

On 19 September Himmler had already appointed Obergrup-

penfu

hrer Hans Pru

tzmann, former HSSPF for Russia-South, as ‘General

Inspector for Special Intelligence’, and authorized him to create small

undercover units that would carry out acts of sabotage behind enemy lines

on German territory under threat of occupation. These partisans were to be

trained in the camps of the guerrilla combat troops, special anti-partisan

units led by Otto Skorzeny. They were placed under the HSSPF. Prepara-

tions for guerrilla ﬁghting on German soil were given the name ‘Werewolf ’.

This was an allusion to the title of a book (Der Wehrwolf ) by Hermann

ns,* much read in its day and one disseminated by the regime, a heroizing

portrayal of a secret resistance group of peasants from the Lu

neburg Heath at

the time of the Thirty Years War who defend their homes against maraud-

ing freebooters. The spelling ‘Werwolf ’, which Himmler himself used, was

at the same time a reminder of the creature of folklore, a human being who

under cover of night transforms into an animal.

The fact that the werewolf units were originally conceived for ﬁghting in

border areas temporarily occupied by the enemy was responsible for the

relatively late preparations for an armed underground in Gaus located in the

German interior. Only a few more far-reaching plans to continue the ﬁght

even after a surrender were developed, as such considerations were forbid-

den on principle in view of the Nazi rhetoric of ultimate victory.

In spite of these signiﬁcant obstacles, the creation of the werewolf units

was by no means without effects and consequences. For the idea current

today that they all simply broke up after the Allies swept over them is not

entirely accurate. Although the attempt to build up a guerrilla movement in

* Translators’ note:(1866–1914), a writer on rural and patriotic themes, often located in the

neburg Heath area.

714 collapse

occupied Germany was unsuccessful (the decisive prerequisite—namely,

support from the population, which was in fact sick of war—was lacking),

new research indicates that werewolves and other fanatics from the civilian

population who continued the ﬁght against the Allies on their own initia-

tive even after the occupation did in fact carry out thousands of attacks, and

hundreds of allied soldiers and German ‘collaborators’ fell victim to them.

The most spectacular werewolf operation was the murder on 25 March

1945 of Franz Oppenhoff, who had been appointed Oberbu

rgermeister of

Aachen by the Allies on 31 October 1944. The Aachen district court, which

carefully reconstructed this case in 1949, discovered that the murder was

carried out on the personal orders of Himmler, passed on by Pru

tzmann in

November 1944 to the responsible HSSPF. The HSSPF’s attempt to ignore

them was in vain. Himmler issued numerous reminders in letters and by

telephone, and the murder was eventually carried out by a commando

group that had been smuggled through the front line.

When, in the autumn of 1944, after Allied troops had occupied almost the

whole of France, the western frontier of the Reich came under threat,

Himmler was given a further military task: in November Hitler appointed

him Commander-in-Chief of the Upper Rhine, with the powers of an army

group commander, his job being ﬁrst and foremost to construct a sort of

defensive front out of the assorted units of the Reserve Army, Volkssturm,

border patrols, and police.

In the ﬁrst week in January units of the army group Upper Rhine

reinforced the offensive of army group C, located north of it in Alsace

(Operation North Wind), which was designed to exploit the retreat of

American troops from the Saar front following the Ardennes offensive.

Army group Upper Rhine mounted as part of this operation three fairly

large assaults without achieving any strategic advantage.

100

In the war diary

of the Wehrmacht High Command there is no trace of any contribution

made to the ﬁghting by the Commander-in-Chief Upper Rhine.

During this period Himmler set up his headquarters in a special train at

Triberg station in the Black Forest. The main advantage of this remote

location was that the mobile headquarters could be moved into the security

of railway tunnels in the event of air raids.

101

On 21 January 1945 Himmler

and his train went to Schneidemu

hl,

102

where he took up a new post: Hitler

had appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the army group Vistula. As

Goebbels noted in his diary, this decision was ‘mainly due to the fact that the

collapse 715

troop formations retreating from the advancing Soviets have become fairly

disordered and a ﬁrm hand is required to turn them back into solid ﬁghting

units’.

103

This task was ‘absolutely safe’ in Himmler’s hands.

104

As he conﬁded to Goebbels, Hitler appeared at this time ‘extremely

pleased with Himmler’s work’. The propaganda minister thereupon sug-

gested that Hitler appoint Himmler ‘as soon as possible Commander-in-

Chief of the army’, in other words, transfer to him the function Hitler

himself had assumed since 1941. Hitler was not yet willing, however, ‘to

take this far-reaching measure until Himmler has proved his ability by

handling successfully several large operations’.

105

This was precisely what

Himmler was to attempt on the Vistula.

With regard to Himmler’s work as commander of the army group

Vistula, we have the record of his most important military colleague in

this function, the memoirs of Colonel Eismann, who in the middle of

January 1945 was made 1st General Staff Ofﬁcer of the group.

106

Hans-

Georg Eismann ﬁrst met Himmler in January 1945 in Schneidemu

hl, where

the train of the Reichsfu

hrer-SS was parked. He recalled: ‘Himmler

received me seated at the desk of his elegant saloon wagon, listened to my

report, and then moved to a larger table in the middle of the room on which

a map of operations from the Wehrmacht High Command was lying. He

questioned me brieﬂy about my previous experience and then proceeded to

deliver a kind of lecture about the current situation with reference to the

map.’

The army group Vistula was tasked with closing a 120-kilometre gap that

had been opened in the front between the army groups Centre and North,

in order, as Eismann wrote, ‘to form a viable defensive front at least along

the general line of Central Silesia to the lower Vistula’. The section of the

front that had to be defended quickly lengthened to 450 kilometres, how-

ever.

On his induction by Himmler, Eismann recorded: ‘The essence of the

somewhat unclear explanations was, however: With the army group Vistula

I shall stop the Russians in their tracks, then beat them and force them to

retreat. That was a tall order [ . . . ] It was difﬁcult to avoid the reaction that

this was a blind man discoursing on colour.’ When Eismann posed the

question of ‘what reinforcements would be available and at what time’, he

received ‘from my commanding ofﬁcer a rather loud and ungracious lecture

on my having the typical attitude of the General Staff ’, which ‘reached its

climax in the assertion that General Staff ofﬁcers only ever had concerns and

716 collapse

were scholars with only academic learning who could not improvise. Their

mindset was defeatist and so on. He, Himmler, would put a stop to such

concerns and get to grips with things with single-minded energy. That was

the only way to get on top of difﬁcult situations.’ Of course, these com-

ments, as Himmler assured him when he asked, had not been directed at

Eismann personally.

Eismann also produced a very detailed description of his new boss:

To look at, medium height, a slightly elongated upper body, slightly bow- legged, a

little plump rather than slender. He wore the familiar simple grey uniform. His

head viewed face-on resembled a fairly pointed triangle. Particularly striking was

his proﬁle with its receding chin. Very lively eyes, usually somewha t screwed up,

which in conjunction with his cheekbones gave his face a slightly Mongolian

appearance. Narrow lips, though not cruel-looking. Altogether this large face had

nothing daemonic or cruel or in any way signiﬁcant. It was the face of the man in

the street. His hands were striking, at least for anyone who attaches any importance

to what hands tell us. They w ere not at all elegant. Rather clumsy, not large hands

with long ﬁngers and broad ﬁngertips, but rather soft like women’s hands when he

shook hands with you. Apart from that my impressio n of Himmler was of an

animated man with varied interests, perhaps a little over-active and with very

strong views.

The staff that Eismann found in place was completely inadequate, and

essentially had neither equipment nor communications at its disposal. In

the special train there was only a telephone. There were no communication

links to the two subordinate armies.

How did Heinrich Himmler, Commander-in-Chief of the army group Vistula,

assess the situation described above? The answer is: not at all. He was simply unable

to reach an operational assessment of the situatio n as a whole. He stared, mesmer-

ized, at the vast gap he had to close. [ . . . ] The words ‘method of attack’ and ‘strike

at the ﬂank’ were ones he used constantly but it did not occur to him that the

Russians were on the point of capturing the ﬂank of his own desperate se cond army.

Yet one glance at the map he had constan tly in front of him made this plain. For

him there seemed to be nothing but ‘attack’.

In July 1944, in an address to ofﬁcers, the Reichsfu

hrer-SS had summarized

his military maxims in the following insight: ‘The time for intelligent

operational methods is past. In the east the enemy is on our borders. The

only type of operation available here is to advance or stand still.’

107

Himmler concentrated on holding the strongholds of Thorn, Posen, and

Schneidemu

hl. On 30 January 1945 he put forward the commandant of

collapse 717

Schneidemu

hl, ‘as an example of a staunch and undaunted commander and

fortress commandant’, for a military honour, because the latter had ‘person-

ally shot with his own weapon’ a number of his retreating soldiers and had

ordered a sign to be hung round their necks with ‘This is what happens to all

cowards’ on it.

108

The same day he gave orders for SS-Standartenfu

hrer

Karl von Salisch, the former police chief of nearby Bromberg, to be shot for

‘cowardice’, as well as dismissing the former district governor and the city’s

mayor and having them drafted into a ‘probation battalion’.

109

But in the

ﬁnal analysis such drastic measures were the helpless expression of a rigid

defensive stance, which was catastrophic for the operational leadership of

the army group, and which, according to Eismann’s observations, was the

result of Himmler’s fear of Hitler: ‘The dreaded Reichsfu

hrer-SS was

completely at the mercy of his own fear of Hitler. It made him unable

even to present any kind of reading of the military situation to Hitler with

forcefulness, let alone to gain acceptance for it. This fundamentally subaltern

attitude did much damage and cost a great deal of unnecessary bloodshed.’

Eismann was forced to state that Himmler not only ‘lacked any previous

knowledge and experience for such a difﬁcult and purely military task’, but

he also complained that the latter as commander of the Reserve Army was

incapable of ‘obtaining suitable reinforcements of men and materials

promptly for his own army group’.

On a visit to Berlin at the beginning of March Himmler met Goebbels,

who was surprised at how ‘disproportionately optimistic’ Himmler was

about the situation.

110

Himmler’s colleague Eismann had a completely

different impression: ‘The more unfavourable and difﬁcult the situation

became for army group Vistula, the more Himmler realized that there

were no laurels he could gather there. He now also doubtless recognized

that he was not up to the responsibilities of military leadership and became

aware that his enemies in the Fu

hrer’s headquarters were making the most

of this.’

111

Shortly after Hitler visited army group Centre in March Himm-

ler suffered an angina attack. From then on, Eismann recalls, the lectures on

the situation took place, if at all, at his sickbed; ﬁnally Himmler went to

Hohenlychen, to the sanatorium of his schoolfriend Gebhardt, until on 21

March Hitler relieved him of his duties as Commander-in-Chief of army

group Vistula.

As military commander of the Volkssturm, commanding ofﬁcer of the

Reserve Army, and last but not least, as Chief of the German Police

Himmler still had scope for ﬁnding a role in the defence of the Reich. In

718 collapse

the ﬁnal weeks of the war he issued a series of martial decrees designed to

ensure steadfastness and create terror. On 28 March 1945, for example, he

ordered: ‘The displaying of white ﬂags, the removal of anti-tank obstacles,

the failure to report for Volkssturm duties, and similar behaviour are to be

dealt with with the greatest severity [ . . . ] All males in a building where a

white ﬂag is displayed are to be shot. There must be no delay in implement-

ing these measures.’ On the 15 April the order was: ‘No German city will be

declared an open city. Every village and town will be defended and held by

every means possible. Any German man who fails to uphold this funda-

mental national duty will forfeit his honour and his life.’

112

In the ﬁnal months of the war the Gestapo murdered thousands of

people. At the latest in February 1945, the lower level regional ofﬁces of

the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce were given permission to make their own

decisions about the ‘special treatment’ of prisoners, and Gestapo ofﬁces

made considerable use of this freedom. At the end of March Himmler

issued a command that anyone bearing arms had the right to shoot looters

on the spot: in many places, after air raids in particular, the Gestapo

therefore killed suspects. In addition, in the last weeks of the war the

Gestapo dismantled a large number of their prisons. Those prisoners who

had been destined for ‘special treatment’ or who were not freed by the Allies

were shot as part of mass executions. The main victims of all these measures

were foreign workers.

113

Putting out feelers for peace

After the Allies made a successful landing in June 1944, followed in the

succeeding weeks by heavy German military defeats, Hitler attempted to

break up the Allied coalition by preparing a counter-offensive in the west

and by circulating rumours about a separate peace. It is quite clear that he

intended to cause confusion by creating the spectre of a separate peace and

thus to set about preparing the ground for an actual separate peace treaty.

Among Hitler’s closest associates these ideas were treated seriously.

When, for example, the Japanese ambassador Hiroshi Oshima apprised

Hitler in September 1944 of his government’s proposal to approach the

Soviet Union with the aim of initiating peace negotiations with Germany,

Goebbels encouraged Hitler in a detailed memorandum to make a similar

approach to Stalin.

114

In the same month Foreign Minister Ribbentrop

collapse 719