Hitler's Foreign Executioners (31 page)

The Pripet action had another sometimes overlooked significance. Himmler could not deploy the Special Task Forces in the marshes because they were officially attached to the German army groups which skirted the marshes, punching into the Soviet Union to north and south of this huge trackless waste. Himmler turned instead to the elite Waffen-SS cavalry brigade, the ‘Florian Geyer', which he believed was better suited to penetrate this marshy terrain and root out ‘bandits'. Himmler designed these SS brigades to rival Heydrich's SD Special Task Forces – and they would prove to be equally as murderous. The SS brigades, like the Special Task Forces, became the vanguard troops of the ‘Final Solution'.
⁴

Beginning in the mid-1930s, Himmler had adroitly engineered a succession of decrees that were designed to weld together German police forces and the armed SS. Himmler thus erased the distinction between combat and security; between SS policeman and SS warrior. Both would be devoted to fighting a National Socialist war. In May 1941 Himmler put the finishing touch to this plan by forming an executive body that would, in theory, yoke together the many different roles the SS would need to take on in the occupied east. Himmler assigned to this ‘Command Staff of
the Reichsführer' (Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS or KSRFSS) a lynchpin role coordinating mass murder by police battalions, the SS brigades and different Waffen-SS units. To head the Command Staff, Himmler appointed a career army officer, the 56-year-old Kurt Knoblauch, who had joined the SS in 1935. Himmler hoped that this hardnosed ‘professional' would smooth co-operation with the German high command, the OKH, that had proved so troublesome during the Polish campaign.
⁵

Throughout the spring and early summer of 1941, while SD Chief Heydrich busied himself with his Special Task Forces, Himmler used the KSRFSS to recruit vanguard SS combat units. This ‘private army' comprised just two SS infantry brigades and an SS cavalry brigade. The brisk growth of the KSRFSS in the spring of 1941 meant that when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa at the end of June, Himmler had under his direct command elite combat units, equipped to Wehrmacht standards and ready to wage war against the ‘Jewish-Marxist enemy'. To manage the deployment of these brigades, Himmler would rely on his Higher SS and Police Leaders (HSSPF) like SS General Bach-Zelewski who would, in July 1942, become Himmler's chief ‘bandit hunter'. After the war, Bach-Zelewski confessed that ‘the fight against partisans was used as an excuse to carry out other measures, such as the extermination of Jews and gypsies, the systematic reduction of the Slavic peoples'.
⁶
The Pripet Marshes action enabled the rise to power of this highly proficient killer, who was often called on to lecture Wehrmacht officers about ‘The Jewish Question, with Special Regard to the Bandit Movement'.
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SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was a fanatical Nazi shackled to a Polish surname. Soon after June 1941, Himmler appointed him HSSPF Central Russia, later promoting him Chef der Bandenkampfeverbände (head of the war on bandits). Wherever Himmler posted Bach-Zelewski, death and destruction followed. He commented in his war diary that when he flew over burning villages ‘his trigger finger itched'.
⁸
In 1945, the Allied prosecutors possessed only fragmentary information about Bach-Zelewski's activities in the east and called him as a witness for the prosecution in return for immunity. Hermann Göring famously called him a
Schweinhund
. Bach-Zelewski later claimed that it was he who had provided the former Reichsmarschall with a cyanide capsule to cheat the Allied hangman. But in 1960, German investigators prosecuted Bach-Zelewski for ‘multiple illegal killings' committed in Warsaw in 1944. Thanks to these zealous prosecutors, we know a great deal about Bach-Zelewski's career in the SS and his activities as a dedicated
génocidaire
.
⁹

As a Higher SS and Police Leader, HSSPF Bach-Zelewski wielded enormous power. He and his fellow HSSPF, like Friedrich Jeckeln, were often referred to as ‘little Himmlers'. As Hitler's forces crushed Poland then occupied much of Western Europe and Scandinavia, Himmler sent forth his loyal SS emissaries. After 1941, the
HSSPFs would become the bureaucratic backbone of SS strategy in the east. In their respective domains, they had a free hand to do Himmler's bidding and the authority to call on all the SS and police agencies, including Heydrich's Special Task Forces and Daluege's Order Police, as well as the specialised SS brigades and Waffen-SS battalions. Every HSSPF was also an SS-Gruppenführer (General). The KSRFSS was the SS equivalent of the Wehrmacht general staff, and it provided Himmler with a means to promote competitive initiative and reward the best performers. Men like Bach-Zelewski and Jeckeln would become the front-line managers of genocide.

The power invested in the HSSPF also reflected Himmler's constant fear of ambitious rivals. In Berlin, he could just about control, as both Reichsführer-SS and chief of the German police, the fast expanding SS Main Offices (Hauptämter) and the sprawling police apparatus. But as the SS empire bloated, Himmler needed loyal placemen on whom he could rely to do his bidding. The HSSPF would be, as it were, ‘family' – steadfast members of the SS ‘Sippenorden' (kinship order). Bach-Zelewski testified after the war that a few weeks before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler brought his SS-Gruppenführers together at the SS ‘Order Castle' at Wewelsburg, near Paderborn. Here Bach-Zelewski, Friedrich Jeckeln and SS notables gathered together in a gloomy, subterranean crypt decorated with Teutonic insignia. In his address, Himmler solemnly revealed that Germany was on the threshold of greatness or the edge of destruction. Hitler had demanded a solution to the problem of living space, and to ‘make room', it would be necessary to remove all the Jews of Europe and diminish the Slavic population by up to 30 million people.
¹⁰
These monumental tasks demanded resolute harshness. Two years later, in his infamous speech to SS officers at Posen, he reiterated the same creed:

These Wewelsburg pep talks were just one way that Himmler groomed his top brass. He understood the value of men conditioned (we would say brutalised) by past combat experience. Bach-Zelewski and most of the other higher SS commanders had been profoundly shaped by their experience of the First World War ‘Storm of Steel'. This was the SS esprit de corps.

In 1939, a German ‘racial geographer' described the Pripet Marshes as ‘one of the least developed and primeval areas of Europe', inhabited by people ‘vegetating in hopeless apathy'. In the main city Pinsk, sometimes called the ‘Jerusalem of the
Marshes', lived (this geographer reported) ‘greasy unkempt [Jewish] women whose forms ooze with fat' and who dangled their adolescent brats over street ditches ‘to do their morning business'. Jews, the geographer went on, were ‘parasites', ‘alien to the landscape' ‘foreign bodies', ‘beneficiaries of work done by others'. Like swamp water, the Jews of the marshes would need to be drained away. Himmler was determined to master this watery gateway to the east; he too viewed the Pripet as a miasmic breeding ground for people ‘hostile to the German Reich in heart and soul'.
¹²

On 27 July, Kommandostab chief Knoblauch sent Himmler's first set of orders concerning the deployment of the SS cavalry brigade to HSSPF Bach-Zelewski and commander of the 1st Cavalry Regiment, ‘Florian Geyer', Hermann Fegelein. The plump SS general and the dashing cavalry officer met in Baranowicze in the Brest province, where Bach-Zelewski had set up mobile headquarters, to plan how to implement Himmler's order for ‘Scouring the Marshes by Cavalry'. Most of the time, Himmler relied on word-of-mouth instructions and avoided sending any orders by radio – hence his frequent journeys by train or aircraft across the rear areas of the German front line. ‘Scouring the Marshes …' is a rare document that makes no explicit reference to Jews. That would have been superfluous; Himmler assumed that Bach-Zelewski would ‘read between the lines'. His language was distinctly quaint:

He ended: ‘Either the [local villagers] beat to death any partisan or marauder by themselves and let us know about it – or they will cease to exist.'
¹³

As Himmler intended, such vague instructions forced both Bach-Zelewski and Fegelein to issue plainer orders to the Reitende Abteilung (mounted troops) of the ‘Florian Geyer'. Fegelein added a few details about ‘Soviet marauders', but sharpened the racial implications of Himmler's instructions: Jews had to be treated ‘for the most part as plunderers'. This meant they would be shot on sight.

As Bach-Zelewski and Fegelein prepared their assault on the Pripet Marshes, HSSPF Jeckeln and the 1st SS Brigade began another ‘cleansing action' to the south. According to his office diary, Himmler busily sped back and forth behind the German front line, usually in a Junkers 88, co-ordinating the deployment of his SS brigades and meeting with German army commanders to make sure they would raise no objection to his ‘security measures'. Few ever did. In Riga, he met HSSPF Hans-Adolf Prützmann, who later informed a subordinate that he had been
instructed to ‘resettle Jews'. ‘Where to?' Prützmann replied: ‘in the next world.'
¹⁴
From Riga, Himmler flew on to SS headquarters in Baranowicze, where the SS cavalry brigade had mustered, to meet HSSPF Bach-Zelewski and Fegelein. Soon afterwards, Fegelein issued another clarification to his commanders:

In the case of the SS cavalry brigade, Himmler had reason to be concerned that they might let him down. The SS cavalrymen who rode into the Pripet Marshes were a multinational military unit, recruited from every corner of the German diaspora: from Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Tyrol.
¹⁶
Most had yet to be tested in combat, but all had been heavily indoctrinated with SS ideology.

On 30 July 1941 the two SS cavalry regiments rode pell-mell into the Pripet Marshes. Fegelein had appointed a 46-year-old former car salesman Gustav Lombard to lead the 1st Regiment along a northerly route in the direction of Pinsk. Franz Magill, a professional riding instructor with a drink problem, led the second. In this mysterious new world, the air was stifling and humid. Legions of mosquitoes rose up to assault the SS riders as they blundered through entangling low brush and copses of beech and pine. The horizon stretched away beneath a hot, white dome of sky. Horses and men sweated and cursed as they battled through sucking, swampy ground. The Pripet was a labyrinth of islands, separated by marsh and streams. During the next weeks, the SS men would have to ford no less than thirty-five rivers and streams to reach their prey.
¹⁷

Magill and Gustav Lombard had written orders to make wireless reports three times daily so that Himmler could assess the progress of the operation; he insisted that they list murdered Jews as ‘looters' or ‘partisans'.
¹⁸
Magill was a well-known drunk. From the start of the Pripet action, he appeared to be underperforming and recorded just a handful of kills. His reports exasperated Himmler; he rebuked Magill for being ‘soft' and Fegelein dispatched another message: ‘explicit orders of Reichsführer: all Jews must be shot. Drive Jewish women into the marshes.' Magill's counterpart Lombard was ‘on message'. Soon after receiving Fegelein's message, he ordered his men: ‘Not one male Jew is to remain alive, not one remnant family in the villages.' That phrase ‘not one remnant family' (
keine Restfamilie
) was a death warrant for women and children as well as male Jews.
¹⁹
Still Magill had difficulties.
Fegelein nagged him to perform. Magill responded with this macabre information: ‘The driving of women and children into the marshes did not have the expected success, because the marshes were not so deep that one could sink. After a depth of about a metre there was in most cases solid ground (probably sand) preventing complete sinking.'
²⁰
This pedantry grated on Himmler. Lombard had few problems executing instructions. He efficiently drowned women and children by simply using the deeper village ponds.

Magill had another chance to impress Himmler when he reached the first large towns. On 5 August, SS-Hauptsturmführer Walther Dunsch led the leading squadrons of Magill's 2nd SS Brigade along the Brest–Pinsk road into Janów. Dunsch ordered all Jewish males to assemble in the marketplace for ‘labour assignments'. As the SS men fanned out through the town, local villagers helpfully pointed out the streets and houses where Jewish families lived. Magill reported: