Army of Evil: A History of the SS (48 page)
Read Army of Evil: A History of the SS Online
Authors: Adrian Weale
Waffen-SS units deployed on security operations in the East came under the auspices of the Command Staff of the National Leader of the SS. This operational headquarters was formed by the SS-Command Main Office to provide combat formations under Himmler’s direct military control that were used to round up Soviet stragglers, fight partisans and execute Jews. The two major formations were: the 1st SS-Brigade (motorised), which comprised the 8th and 10th Death’s Head regiments; and the SS-Cavalry Brigade, consisting of a hodge-podge of General-SS equestrian units under the command of Hermann Fegelein.
Fegelein was born in 1906 in Bavaria, the son of an army officer. He briefly attended university, spent six months in the army, then enlisted in the Bavarian Police for two years. He left the police to work at his father’s riding school in Munich, while also gaining a reputation as a competitive horseman. He joined the SS in 1933, served within various mounted units, and was appointed commander of the main SS riding school in Munich in 1936.
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A good-looking man with a glamorous reputation, Fegelein used his position at the riding school to butter up senior SS officers, a tactic that clearly worked, as he became an SS-colonel within a year of taking up the post. When the first Waffen-SS cavalry unit was formed in 1940 (the Death’s Head Mounted Regiment), he was made a lieutenant colonel
*
and placed in command, despite his lack of formal officer training.
On 28 July 1941, after a meeting with von dem Bach-Zelewski and Fegelein, Himmler issued orders to comb the Pripyat Marshes—in
Byelorussia and north-western Ukraine—which were a centre of partisan resistance. However, his oral instructions to his two subordinates were less equivocal: “all Jews must be shot. Drive the females into the swamps.”
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The sweep operation lasted for just ten days, from 2 to 12 August. When it was over, SS-Major Franz Magill, the detachment commander who led the forces on the ground, reported that some 6,526 men—the overwhelming majority of them Jews—had been shot. By 16 August, the overall operation (including the contributions made by police and army units) had murdered 15,878 men and captured 830 prisoners.
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A tiny proportion of the victims were undeniably partisans, but the vast majority were not, as is attested by the fact that no more than 500 rifles, 30 machine guns and 20 artillery pieces were recovered during the operation.
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Meanwhile, Himmler’s other main unit, the 1st SS-Brigade, had been equally busy. On 7 August, it had killed a total of 7,819 Jews around Minsk. Both it and the Cavalry Brigade subsequently became fully fledged combat divisions of the Waffen-SS: the 18th
Horst Wessel
SS-Volunteer Panzer-Grenadier Division and the 8th
Florian Geyer
SS-Cavalry Division.
Another special unit that was rampaging around Byelorussia at this time was Oskar Dirlewanger’s band of ex-convicts. The unit had been placed under the Command Staff of the National Leader of the SS by an order dated 29 January 1942, and transferred to Byelorussia the following month. Part of the reason for this seems to have been an ongoing investigation by an SS judge, Dr. Konrad Morgen, into allegations of “race defilement” against Dirlewanger. He was accused of having had sexual relations with a number of Jewesses while in Lublin, and his friend and protector Gottlob Berger had deemed it prudent to get him away from the area.
*
That was a terrible decision for the people of Byelorussia, because Dirlewanger’s troops then looted, raped
and murdered their way through the republic’s villages and settlements over the next two years. Even Fegelein, who was no stranger to atrocities, described them to Hitler as “real scoundrels.” Their behaviour was so appalling that prosecutors presented it at Nuremberg as evidence of the general criminality of the Waffen-SS.
While the likes of the Dirlewanger unit roamed the countryside, the original special task groups that had accompanied the army into the Soviet Union and the Baltic States transformed themselves into static Sipo posts under the command of the senior SS and police leaders. They collected intelligence on partisans, Jews and other threats (real and imaginary), and coordinated action against them after consultation with their senior SS and police leader. The subsequent campaign against the partisans of Byelorussia, western Russia and the Ukraine was as dirty a war as has ever been fought. It was primarily conducted by the German Army’s security divisions, but—as the activities of the Dirlewanger unit prove—Waffen-SS and police formations were heavily involved in it, too.
*
According to his somewhat sketchy SS personal file, at any rate.
*
Adherents to this doctrine proclaimed themselves to be “
Gottgläubig”
rather than adhering to any particular religion.
†
Nebe, especially, seems to have found his task in Russia distasteful, to say the least. It may well have been his experiences there that led him to flirt with the bomb plot against Hitler in July 1944, for which he was executed the following year.
*
He was a full colonel in the General-SS, but this did not equate with a military rank.
*
There were further allegations that Dirlewanger had subsequently had these lovers murdered to keep them quiet.
A
s we have seen, almost as soon as Himmler witnessed for himself the grim reality of “open air” executions in Minsk, it was decided that a more efficient method was needed to kill the large numbers of Jews now being targeted for extermination. This ultimately led to the Operation Reinhard death camps and Auschwitz, but Jews were being gassed in static locations—largely on the initiative of local commanders—before that process even began.
On 16 July 1941, SS-Major Rolf-Heinz Höppner wrote to Adolf Eichmann to inform him that, over the forthcoming winter, “there is a danger that not all of the Jews can be fed anymore. One should weigh earnestly if the most humane solution might not be to finish off those of the Jews who are not employable, by some quick-working device. At any rate it would be more pleasant than to let them starve to death.”
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Four months later, an extermination camp was built in the village of Chelmno nad Nerem (“Kulmhof-an-der-Nehr” under the German administration), some seventy kilometres north-west of Lodz. It came into operation on 7 December, the day after Zhukov had launched his counter-attack to the west of Moscow.
The camp was built around an empty manor house, known as the “Castle,” and was commanded by SS-Lieutenant Herbert Lange—the man who had earlier organised the gassing of over fifteen hundred mental patients in Poland and East Prussia. Since then, he had been employed as a Kripo investigator in Poznan. His guard force at Kulmhof comprised a fifteen-man Sipo special unit and between sixty and a hundred members of the 1st Company of the Litzmannstadt Police Battalion.
The first victims were local Jews from surrounding villages, but from mid-January 1942 the camp also started to exterminate deportees from the Lodz ghetto. Typically, the victims were transported by train to Kolo station, approximately fifteen kilometres away, where they were locked in the local synagogue until they could be transferred to the camp. Once sufficient trucks had been found, the prisoners were taken in batches to the Castle, where they were addressed by Lange (and later by his successor, SS-Captain Bothmann), who said that they were to become labourers either on the estate or further east, and that they would be treated fairly and fed well. However, first, for reasons of hygiene, they and their clothes had to be washed and disinfected.
The victims were then escorted into an undressing room on the first floor of the Castle, where they were made to strip and hand over any valuables. Next, they were taken downstairs to a corridor that led to the back of a truck. They were told that this would drive them to the baths. Many of the prisoners were even given pieces of soap in order to maintain this fiction. Walter Burmeister, one of the van drivers, described what happened next:
The gas vans were large vans, about 4–5 meters long, 2.2 meters wide and 2 meters high. The interior walls were lined with sheet metal. On the floor there was a wooden grille. The floor of the van had an opening which could be connected to the exhaust by means of a removable metal pipe. When the lorries were full of people the
double doors at the back were closed and the exhaust connected to the interior of the van…
The Kommando member detailed as driver would start the engine right away so that the people inside the lorry were suffocated by the exhaust gases. Once this had taken place, the union between the exhaust and the inside of the lorry was disconnected and the van was driven to the camp in the woods were the bodies were unloaded. In the early days they were initially buried in mass graves, later incinerated…I then drove the van back to the castle and parked it there. Here it would be cleaned of the excretions of the people that had died in it.
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Kulmhof eventually claimed the lives of at least 152,000 people—the vast majority of them Jews, but also at least 5,000 Gypsies, a number of Soviet POWs and at least 88 Czech children. A small number of Polish and Jewish prisoners worked in the “forest camp,” where the mass graves (and later improvised incinerators) were located, but every other prisoner who was taken there was killed there. That made it the first camp to be set up solely for extermination, and it served as a model for the Operation Reinhard camps that were established later in 1942.
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N
OVEMBER
1941, Reinhard Heydrich wrote to a number of officials from various ministries and National Socialist Party offices, inviting them to a meeting to discuss the “final solution of the Jewish question.” To underline both the importance of this meeting and Heydrich’s authority to call it, he enclosed a copy of a written order from Hermann Goering, dated 31 July 1941, which commissioned Heydrich to make preparations for a “total solution to the Jewish question,” to prepare a plan, and to coordinate the activities of the relevant government departments. The meeting was originally scheduled for 9 December, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s subsequent declaration of war on the United States necessitated a
postponement. It finally took place at an SS conference centre at 56–58 Am Grossen Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The invited officials were told to arrive at 12 p.m. for a conference, which would be followed by “breakfast.”
Those who attended were: SS-General Reinhard Heydrich (chief of the RSHA and
Reichsprotektor
of Bohemia-Moravia), chairman; Dr. Josef Bühler (representative of the General Government); Dr. Roland Freisler (Ministry of Justice); SS-Major General Otto Hofmann (Race and Resettlement Main Office, RuSHA); SA-Senior Colonel Gerhard Klopfer (NSDAP Chancellery); Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Chancellery); SS-Major Dr. Rudolf Lange (Commander-in-Chief of the Security Police, Latvia); Dr. Georg Leibbrandt (Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories); Dr. Martin Luther (Foreign Office); Regional Leader Dr. Alfred Meyer (Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories); SS-Major General Heinrich Müller (chief of Gestapo); Dr. Erich Neumann (director, Office of the Four-Year Plan); SS-Senior Colonel Dr. Karl Eberhard Schöngarth (SD, assigned to the General Government); Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (Ministry of the Interior); and SS-Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann (head of Section IV B4, Gestapo), secretary.
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According to Eichmann’s minutes, Heydrich opened the conference by reasserting his authority to coordinate policy relating to the “Jewish question”:
At the beginning of the discussion Chief of the Security Police and of the SD, SS-General Heydrich, reported that the Reich Marshal had appointed him delegate for the preparations for the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe and pointed out that this discussion had been called for the purpose of clarifying fundamental questions. The wish of the Reich Marshal to have a draft sent to him concerning organizational, factual and material interests in relation to the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe makes necessary an initial common action of all central offices immediately concerned with these questions in order to
bring their general activities into line. The National Leader of the SS and the Chief of the German Police (Chief of the Security Police and the SD) was entrusted with the official central handling of the final solution of the Jewish question without regard to geographic borders.
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