Hitler's Foreign Executioners (33 page)

On Monday 30 June, the
Heinrich
sped east toward the old Polish border with Lithuania. In Grodno, he met RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich. As they toured Grodno, a famous centre of Jewish culture, it was apparent that Special Task Force A had somehow neglected to deal with the city’s Jewish district. An embarrassed Heydrich made an urgent call to the SD operational office in Tilsit; a few days later SD and security police units arrived to mop up in Grodno and neighbouring towns like Augustowo.
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After this regrettable operational lapse, Himmler began to make unscheduled visits to Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga and Minsk to cajole SD commanders into stepping up their efforts. He insisted that no mercy could be shown. ‘Hardness’ was all: the mark of a true SS warrior.

On the evening of 15 August, Himmler, accompanied by his adjutant Karl Wolff, flew into Minsk, the main city of Belorussia. At the splendid old Leninhaus, they met the hatchet-faced commander of Special Task Force B, Arthur Nebe, with the ubiquitous HSSPF Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski and arranged to observe the execution of a number of ‘
Partisanen und Juden
’.
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Wolff revered Himmler as an ‘unparalleled man’ of ‘extraordinary qualities’, but he was positive that Himmler had never before seen a man shot. A party of German police drove the two men from their hotel in the centre of Minsk to an athletics field, where two pits had already been dug. Himmler’s little party did not have long to wait. A big Mercedes truck rumbled into the field, and SD men threw open the tailgate and hauled out their catch of ‘Jewish spies and saboteurs’. They pushed and shoved these terrified, weeping men to the edge of the pit. Some begged for mercy. Wolff noted that the Jewish ‘saboteurs’ had been stripped of their clothes, but wore ‘rags’ to spare the Reichsführer-SS the sight of completely naked ‘sub-humans’. The SD executioners forced their victims to lie face down and began loading their weapons. At this point, Himmler moved to a higher vantage point directly overlooking the execution pits. A nod from Himmler and the SD officer gave the order to fire. Instantly, there was an eruption of blood and brain matter. The SD ‘shooters’ had taken up positions much too close to their victims. Wolff glanced at his boss. Brain matter was visibly smeared across Himmler’s jacket. The SS chief was sweating profusely, his face turning a distinct shade of green. A second volley – Himmler swayed. Wolff caught his arm. Himmler turned away and vomited.

As the SD men began covering the corpses, Wolff took his shaky boss back to Minsk to recover. In an interview conducted after the war, Bach-Zelewski claimed that he had taken advantage of Himmler’s reaction to admonish him about what his men had to endure. According to Wolff, Himmler merely used his usual catechism that they must all be ‘hard’, without mercy. They were all burdened by a tremendous responsibility to clean up the east. After a short lunch, taken in the Leninhaus, Himmler recovered sufficiently to enjoy a tour of the Minsk ghetto and a hospital for the ‘retarded’ at Novinki.
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The sight of these human vermin, ‘lives not worthy of life’, no doubt reassured him that his great mission was right.

Hitler liked to describe the Soviet Union as possessing a ‘Slavic-Tartar body’ and ‘Jewish head’. In his mind, decapitation was essential – and in July, as Hitler’s armies pushed back the Soviet armies along a 1,000-mile front line and gobbled up vast new territories, anything seemed possible. On 3 July, Colonel General Franz Halder wrote in his diary that it was no overstatement to say that ‘the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks’.
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Halder rejoiced prematurely; but inside the Wolf’s Lair, an exultant Hitler proclaimed that a new German empire would
soon reach out as far as the Ural Mountains: an iron wall to hold back the Slavic ‘rabbit family’ (
Kaninchenfamilie
). Every big Soviet city would be levelled. German soldier-farmers would be trained to govern the Slavic helot class, and industrious German peasants would till the rich, black soils of the new Germania. Hitler imagined prosperous Teutonic families taking tours of their vast new domain, speeding along grand autobahns in brand new ‘Folk Cars’ (Volkswagens) and soaking up the sun on the Caucasus Riviera. And of course, any Jewish ‘bacilli’ that might have spoilt this idyll would have been banished long before. In human history, Hitler concluded ‘there’s always killing’.

It was with this vision in mind that Hitler called his paladins to Rastenburg on 16 July to plan a glorious future for the conquered east. There was a new world to be won. Unlike the French or British empires, which had evolved gradually and piecemeal, this new German Reich would be thrown together in months not centuries.
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Himmler would miss the conference: Stalin’s son Yakov had been captured near Smolensk and, as we learn from his diary, the SS chief hurriedly left Rastenburg to gaze on this trophy captive. But Himmler could afford to be relaxed: only Alfred Rosenberg posed any possible threat to SS dominance of the east. Hitler had appointed him ‘Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories’, complete with a new ministry – the ‘Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete’, or RMfdbO. Himmler could rely on Hermann Göring to slap down any attempt by the new minister to impose his feeble will. He could meet young Yakov Stalin with a light heart.

Inside the main conference room at Rastenburg, Hitler began speaking at 3 p.m. and the meeting dragged on late into the evening, with a single break for coffee. It was, as everyone understood, Hitler’s show. Hitler forbade what he called
Schaukelpolitik
(indecisive ‘back and forth’ strategy). He conjured up a vision of the east as a ‘Garden of Eden’, a tabula rasa to be planted with purely German stock. When Rosenberg dared suggest that the Ukrainian lands, whose people had endured famine under Stalin’s rule and hated the Soviets, might be granted limited independence, Hitler unhesitatingly rejected the idea. He forbade any deal-making with hopeful nationalists; he would not tolerate recruiting foreign militias: ‘We must never permit anybody but the Germans to carry arms! Only the German may carry arms; not the Slav, not the Czech, not the Cossack, not the Ukrainians!’
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The day after the Rastenburg conference, Party Chancellery head Martin Bormann forwarded minutes to Himmler. He noted that Hitler had reiterated the plan to exploit anti-German partisan attacks to mask the mass murder of civilians; because the Russians ‘have now given out the order for a partisan war behind our front’, ‘it gives us the possibility of exterminating anything opposing us’. In a nutshell, this was SS military doctrine. But on one vital matter, the ‘loyal Heinrich’
chose to ignore Hitler’s orders. He understood that the task of ‘cleansing’ the east would require enormous human resources that could not be supplied by Germany alone. This meant that non-Germans must be armed. At the very moment that Hitler proscribed arming non-Germans, SD commanders had begun recruiting Lithuanians and Latvians and other eastern peoples to do the dirty work of ethnic cleansing. On 25 July Himmler authorised the recruitment of auxiliary police units in the occupied east – from ‘suitable elements’ in the local population. These Schutzmannschaft or Schuma battalions would soon become a vital instrument of genocide, killing at least 150,000 so-called ‘superfluous eaters’ (mainly Jews) between July and December 1941 alone.
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In almost every other respect Hitler strengthened Himmler’s hand. The day after the Rastenburg conference, on 17 July, he issued ‘An Order of the Führer on the Administration of the New Territories in the East’. This specified that where the army had crushed enemy resistance, German military administrators would hand over power to civilian bodies formed ostensibly under the aegis of Reichsminister Rosenberg. The Führer Order set out a rudimentary organisational structure: the conquered territories would be broken up into Reichskommissariate, each headed by a Reichskommissar, subordinate, in theory, to the Reichsminister. Later on the same day, Hitler published a supplementary order establishing the two first Reichskommissariate: Reichskommissariat Ostland – which comprised Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belorussia – and Reichskommissariat Ukraine, which would become the fiefdom of Gau Leader Erich Koch who had no intention of kowtowing to Alfred Rosenberg. Not content with unleashing Koch on German-occupied Ukraine, Hitler issued a third order on 17 July that stripped Rosenberg’s ministry (the RMfdbO) of any security powers and handed them lock, stock and barrel to Himmler and the SS. All matters concerning the policing of the eastern Reich Commissariats would be handled by the SS – and through directives issued by Himmler to the Reich Commissars. The HSSPF like Bach-Zelewski and Jeckeln, the so-called ‘little Himmlers’, took their orders from the Reich Commissars, but only in theory. In practice, all directives passed through SS channels. But Himmler did not win outright. Hitler’s topsy-turvy distribution of powers, giving with the one hand and taking away with the other, guaranteed that the SS and Reich Commissar Koch would now wage a succession of brutal turf wars.
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In the Baltic, which was absorbed into the Ostland Commissariat, Rosenberg had, to begin with, the upper hand. He had been born in Reval (now Tallinn)
in Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire. He had been educated in Riga and Moscow where he witnessed Bolshevik Revolution at first hand. A rabid anti-Bolshevist and professed Jew hater, Rosenberg had escaped to the west bringing with him the anti-Semitic ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ – a poisonous tome that he introduced to Hitler and his circle. As a Baltic German, Rosenberg had an obsessive interest in restoring the old Teutonic Order in the Baltic. The man he appointed as commissar, Hinrich Lohse, shared his vision. A fanatical Nazi consumed by the same venal obsessions as other Nazi potentates Hans Frank and Erich Koch, the ‘gross, vain and silly’ Lohse boasted that he would reclaim the lost lands of the medieval Teutonic Knights and Hansa merchants. He was, he claimed, ‘treading the fateful path of the great political legacy from West to East’ to ‘replace chaos with a system of European order, and in place of destruction reconstruction and culture’. His subordinates called him ‘Duke Lohse’ after he insisted that he was ‘working for my own good’ but so that ‘my newly born son will be able to place the crown of “Herzog” [duke] onto his head’.
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Regardless of their grandiose ambitions, Rosenberg and Lohse faced fierce competition. By August 1941 three cutthroat and competitive Reich agencies had turned the Baltic states into rival fiefdoms. Black-clad SD men led by Special Task Force commander Franz Stahlecker had been the first to arrive, followed by Wehrmacht administrators and finally, months later, by Rosenberg’s ‘Eastern Ministry’ men in their yellow, hand-me-down so-called ‘pheasant’ uniforms. ‘To the objective observer,’ Stahlecker complained in his Consolidated Report, ‘a picture of disunity emerges, where guidelines are totally absent and where German administrative offices and their staff greatly lack preparation for their duties.’ This was disingenuous. From the moment German troops entered the Baltic, it was the SD, Himmler’s giant security force, that called the shots. Stahlecker explained: ‘the security police was well ahead of everyone else … it was the only office that established a certain stability.’ The SD took its orders not from Commissar Lohse but the regional HSSPF, Hans Prützmann – and thus directly from Himmler in Berlin.
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This jostling for power should not be taken to imply that there was any fundamental doctrinal divergence among Hitler’s paladins. In a letter, written shortly after the 16 July meeting at Rastenburg, Rosenberg set out his own version of National Socialist occupation strategy: ‘The aim of the Commissars for [Ostland] must be to establish a protectorate of the Reich, and then by winning over the racially valuable elements and by a policy of resettlement measures this region must be made one with the German Reich.’ He then explained that in the Baltic region, these ‘racially valuable elements’ were hierarchically distributed in a gradient running north-east to south-west. At the ‘top’, in Estonia, Rosenberg argued,
50 per cent of the population had been strongly ‘Germanised’ through infusions of German and Swedish blood. Estonians, he concluded, were ‘people akin to us’. Lithuanians, however, occupied a position at the ‘low’ end of the scale because they had been so thoroughly ‘Polonised’. Latvians fell somewhere between these poles. Himmler concurred with Rosenberg’s analysis. This Baltic racial gradient would have a powerful impact on German occupation policy and SS recruitment of non-German Schuma battalions and Waffen-SS divisions.

In the long run, the rival Nazi bosses all assumed that the Reich would eventually completely ‘digest’ the Baltic nations. In the short term, that is until the war had been won, the German occupiers needed to buy time. To do this they set up so-called self-administrations to do the donkey work of government. This meant that the Germans would have to square a circle in the sense that they would need to recruit, say, credible Latvian officials while stifling Latvian nationalism. The Germans had already had their fingers burnt in Lithuania when nationalists had declared independence. Stahlecker’s solution, hatched up with the army group commander General Franz von Rocques, was sly. According to Baltic German Harijs Marnics, who worked closely with the Germans occupiers, ‘it was recommended that the terms ‘Latvia’ and ‘Latvian people’ should not be used, so as to get the Latvians to forget about their nation’.
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From the German point of view, this made historical sense. Before 1920, Latvia and Estonia had never existed as sovereign nations. When Latvians proclaimed independence in 1918, they had to set out their borders using the thirteenth-century defensive frontier drawn up by the Teutonic Knights as a bulwark against Russian incursion. Since the idea that Latvia was a nation state at all was a figment of deluded Latvian imaginations, the German occupiers assumed that it would evaporate along with its name. A German official put a mollifying gloss on this scam: ‘the times of political independence are in the past … they have been exchanged for times of peace and prosperity under the protection of the German Reich.’
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Ignorant of the long-term German master plan, many Latvians continued to bask in the glow of deliverance from Soviet tyranny – and there would be no shortage of eager collaborators.