Hitler's Foreign Executioners (10 page)

For Himmler, the planned attack on the Soviet Union, initially codenamed ‘Otto’, presented both another opportunity to reinforce the status of the SS and a fearsome challenge. In 1940, Berger still depended on a pool of native German citizens for recruitment. The German army, represented by the OKW, still controlled the flow of military-age manpower to both the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. The army did everything in its power to starve the Waffen-SS. On 7 September, in a speech to the officers of the SS ‘Leibstandarte’, Himmler announced that he had a solution to the manpower problem. ‘We must,’ he declared, ‘attract all the Nordic blood in the world to us, depriving our enemies of it.’
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His proposal was expedient – but fitted perfectly with his developing pseudo-biological philosophy.

And the SS recruiters would begin by tapping the German
diaspora
.
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It was estimated that some 13 million Volksdeutsche lived outside the Reich, mainly in Hungary, Romania and Russia – a number comparable, as Valdis Lumans points out, to the population of medium-sized state.
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The lost Germans had fascinated Himmler for some time and he knew that the key to exploiting this tantalising human reservoir was the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Office, VoMI), a Nazi Party organisation founded in 1935 to look after the interests of ethnic Germans living outside the Reich and, of course, promote National Socialist ideology. By controlling VoMI, Himmler could influence the Volksdeutsche leadership. In 1937, Himmler engineered the appointment of SS-Obergruppenführer, Werner Lorenz, as VoMI chief. As an NSDAP agency, VoMI officially came under the aegis of deputy party leader Rudolf Hess and the NSDAP treasurer. But in 1938, Hitler granted VoMI state authority as well – meaning that it was no longer simply a party organisation but a kind of hybrid. In theory, Hitler’s decision should have made the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop an equal partner with
Hess, but Himmler swiftly exploited VoMI’s ‘mixed’ status and ordered Lorenz to saturate its staff with SS placemen. By 1940, the SS dominated VoMI, and through its hundreds of offices wove a web of connections to German minorities scattered across the Balkans, Poland, the Baltic States, France, Belgium, Denmark, Austria, the former Czech republic and the Netherlands.

Himmler’s plan to exploit German Volksdeutsche communities as a recruitment reservoir was not as straightforward as it might appear. German anthropologists like Hans F.K. Günther, the so-called
Rassenpapst
(Race Pope) argued that ethnic Germans had become excessively contaminated by intermixing with their Slavic neighbours. Günther’s many books were widely read – and although Nazi propaganda often celebrated the typical Volksdeutscher as a heroic Aryan paragon, many Germans regarded them as second-or third-rate, ‘not quite’ Germans. The Austrian-born Hitler, arguably a Volksdeutscher himself, thoroughly despised most ethnic Germans as ‘degenerates’. There were in any case, according to specialists, different Volksdeutsche ‘species’. Some ethnic Germans inhabited territories that had been separated from the Reich as recently as 1919. Others, like the Sudeten and Carpathian Germans of Czechoslovakia, had once been subjects of the German-speaking Austro-Hungarian Empire. Other Volksdeutsche, the relics of medieval Germanic empires, had much older roots. Germans first immigrated to Hungary in the tenth century; 200 years later, the Teutonic Order and Hanseatic merchants colonised the Baltic region. German migrants tended to form business or cultural elites: the oldest of all German universities was founded in Prague in 1348. The so-called ‘Volga Germans’ had originally come to Russia in the mid-eighteenth century at the invitation of the German-born Catherine the Great. After the Russian Revolution, Lenin declared the Volga region the ‘Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic’, with its capital at Engels – commemorating another notable German exile.
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Whatever their history and origins, these Volksdeutsche communities aggressively celebrated their German roots and identity. Ethnic Germans rarely displaced indigenous, usually Slavic peoples; they tended to become state officials, academics and landowners. Like the British ruling class in India, ethnic Germans proscribed fraternisation and sheltered inside what they called
Sprachinseln
(language islands). This isolationism encouraged disdain for both Slavs and Jews. After the First World War, with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this long-cultivated aloofness underwent a poisonous and reactionary transformation, and many ethnic Germans would prove themselves the most fervent Nazi ideologues. In 1939, when Hitler charged Himmler with a massive resettlement programme, he would turn to these islands of German speakers to fill the new
Gaue
carved form the vanquished Polish lands.

Naturally, human nature being what it is, many Volksdeutsche could not resist the temptations of their Slavic or Jewish neighbours, however zealously ethnic German communities protected their ethnic boundaries. Gene flow is unstoppable. This meant that in the new Reich, Aryan status could not be conferred automatically on every Volksdeutschen. So when the German resettlement programme got underway, every ethnic German applicant had to be rigorously screened by the Oberste Prüfungshof (Highest Court of Examination) and then classified in the
Volksliste
: an exacting hierarchy that descended from Category 1 (‘pure and politically clean specimens’) to Category 4 (‘renegades’ with ‘alien blood’). German ‘proofing’ officials were shocked by the ‘racial quality’ of the Volksdeutsche they examined. They complained frequently that many ethnic Germans behaved just like Poles and Ukrainians; they lacked the proper German values. Worse, they confessed to sleeping with Polish and Ukrainian women. As Doris L. Bergen succinctly puts it, the ‘Volksdeutsche notion was always tenuous’.
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Although Himmler’s fastidious race experts might question the right of some ethnic Germans to join the Nordic club, the average Volksdeutscher, for his or her part, shared the xenophobic prejudices of the ‘Master Race’. During the Weimar period, scores of German support organisations had sprung up to promote the interests of the Volksdeutsche, especially those regarded as ‘victims of Versailles’. After 1933, these contacts deepened. Hitler’s frequently renewed promises that he would ‘roll back Versailles’ ignited the aspirations of a new ethnic German generation. Across the German
diaspora
, Nazi agitation cells proliferated, especially in southern Russia and eastern Poland where ethnic German communities had long been riddled with the most virulent anti-Semitism. According to Valdis Lumans: ‘National Socialism was even more attractive to the average Volksdeutscher than to his Reich counterpart.’ In his book about the German occupation of Greece, Mark Mazower confirms that ethnic Germans eagerly rallied to the cause of ethnic destruction. Following the German occupation of Greece in 1941, SS-Standartenführer Dr Walther Blume recruited middle-aged Volksdeutsche as concentration camp guards – and they soon became feared for their extreme cruelty. These men had been recruited in Hungary and Romania and had few illusions about their less than exalted place in Hitler’s New Order; they understood well enough that Germans from the ‘old Reich’ despised them and their kind. This sense of exclusion fuelled their merciless treatment of camp inmates, especially Greek Jews. Camp commandant Sturmbannführer Paul Radomski, an ethnic German recruit, was described by his superiors as ‘energetic and made of iron’. He was in fact a murderous brute.
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Himmler eyed these millions of German exiles greedily. Since race rather than citizenship qualified someone to join the Waffen-SS, Himmler pressured the VoMI
to begin recruiting ethnic Germans. In Germany, VoMI officials arranged physical training programmes and athletic visits for young ethnic Germans from abroad – and, once they were on Reich soil, pressurised them to volunteer for service in the Waffen-SS. Guided by the SS, VoMI became a recruitment agency. Friedrich Umbrich (b. 1925) recalled his first encounter with emissaries of Himmler’s SS in a memoir called
Balkan Nightmare
. Umbrich was an ethnic German, born in Transylvania he grew up in the little village of Belleschdorf – today Idiciu in modern Romania.
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Saxons had lived in this lush, green valley between the Carpathians and Transylvanian Alps for six centuries. In the aftermath of the First World War, after the signing of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, the Transylvanian Saxons woke up to find they had become Romanians. This sparked feelings of profound anxiety and resentment. Umbrich admits that after 1933, the Romanian-Saxon community was caught up in the ‘hysteria sweeping Europe’; in other words, National Socialism. VoMI officers soon arrived in Transylvania, bringing rousing songs and propaganda films extolling the virtues of the new Germany with its
Tüchtigkeit und Einigkeit
(efficiency and unity). Saxons had a long tradition of making do and compromising with their neighbours. All the Umbrichs spoke fluent Hungarian. They tolerated the few Jews who lived in the village – including a childless couple who would vanish ‘unexpectedly’ in 1940. But the men from VoMI promised a bright new future as part of a greater Germany.

Sometime after September 1940, Umbrich tells us, ‘three tall, handsome SS men’ appeared in Belleschdorf. Their bearing was proud and erect, their uniforms were crisply pressed, their long leather boots polished and shining. The SS men politely requested to speak to a village leader and were directed to the Umbrich household, where they spoke with Friedrich’s father. They brought a message: ‘
Der SS-Röntgenzug ist unterwegs!
’ (‘The SS x-ray train is coming!’) The SS had come to show off German medical prowess and, as Friedrich later understood, to check their physical suitability to serve in the SS. The ‘day of the x-rays’ was a festive occasion – and the SS men praised the Saxons’ excellent German and gobbled down their food and slurped their best schnapps. Sixteen-year-old Friedrich was impressed by the intimidating German machines and the strapping SS men who set them up in the village church; it was the beginning of a spectacular feat of seduction. Two years later, Friedrich was fighting Serbian partisans in the Balkans.

Many of SS recruitment chief Gottlob Berger’s kin were ethnic Germans scattered all over Europe. In Romania, where he launched his recruitment drive, he had close kin among the Transylvanian Saxons. Andreas Schmidt, the head of the German minority, was Berger’s son-in-law. Schmidt was a radical Nazi and a Volksgruppenführer with close ties to the NSDAP in Berlin. At the end of the
1930s, Schmidt had brought together the ethnic German group of Romania, the GEGR and the local NSDAP. He was a brutish fanatic and wholeheartedly devoted to the Nazi cause. He enthusiastically embraced his father-in-law’s campaign to recruit for the Waffen-SS in Romania. But Romanian leader Ion Antonescu insisted that his government would regard service in a foreign army as desertion. So Schmidt and his father-in-law smuggled more than a thousand ethnic German Waffen-SS recruits, disguised as labourers, across the border for training in Prague.
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It was a logical next step to look beyond the ethnic German world to the Nordic nations like Denmark and Norway that had been overwhelmed by the German army in 1940. It was becoming increasingly evident that the expansion of the Waffen-SS would depend on Berger’s foreign recruitment drive. It was a strategy that had been forced on the SS by the Wehrmacht but Himmler embraced it with a passion. In occupied Europe, the ‘Almighty’ Berger would need to negotiate some thorny obstacles. To entice foreign recruits into the Waffen-SS, he would have to overcome natural scruples about serving an occupying power. The Hague Convention, still accepted by Germany, made conscription illegal in any occupied nation; any SS recruits thus had to be ‘volunteers’.
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Even some of the European pro-German radical nationalist movements like the Dutch National Socialists (NSB) were bitterly divided between those who longed to serve Hitler’s Reich and others who, rightly, feared that their own national cultures would be extinguished. Berger nevertheless set to work and set up SS recruiting offices in Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Recruiting criteria were identical for both foreign and German applicants: Dutch and Flemish men who joined the SS ‘Westland’ and ‘Nordland’ regiments, for example, had to be over 17 and under 40, possess ‘Aryan racial characteristics’, be in good health and meet the minimum SS height requirement of 165cm. But Berger’s first efforts yielded very modest results. By the summer of 1941, the new SS Standarte ‘Nordland’ and ‘Westland’ had, between them, attracted only a few hundred Danish, Norwegian, Dutch and Belgian volunteers.
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But Himmler was not discouraged. He was increasingly obsessed with building a pan-European army – and by the end of that fateful year, the tally of ‘Germanic’ volunteers would look very different.