Hitler's Foreign Executioners (39 page)

Himmler understood this future SS hegemony in racial terms. In 1943 he lectured Waffen-SS officers:

From his European GL offices, Dr Jakobsen energetically promoted this mythic ideal tricked out as a ‘European crusade’ with a flood of pamphlets and periodicals like
Der Aufbruch
(
The Uprising
) and
Die Germanische Gemeinschaft
(
The Germanic Community
). Translated into every European language (except Yiddish), these SS pamphlets sold hundreds of thousands of copies. From very early on, the GL emphasised that the task of the Germanic people, including Waffen-SS recruits, was to safeguard Europe. According to one widely read pamphlet, that provided raw material for an eight-week training module: ‘Germany will never abandon the task of racially and politically defending Europe. The most valuable races of Europe shall never again be spoiled by alien blood and ideologies of alien races.’ The Waffen-SS was an ‘assault force for the new Europe’ that would claim the east for the west. The task of the SS was to ensure that only people of Germanic blood could occupy the Reich. Himmler’s ‘European Union’ was a kind of blood reservoir whose contents would be poured into the vast expanses of Eurasia, from the Pyrenees to the Urals.

In
Hitler’s Willing Executioners
, Daniel Goldhagen singles out a remarkable story of wartime heroism to bolster his case that the Holocaust was a German phenomenon.
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In 1943, Danish government officials and ordinary civilians saved the lives of 7,000 Jews who were about to be deported by the German occupation authorities. According to Goldhagen, ordinary Germans willingly participated in ‘exterminatory anti-Semitism’ or, at best, exhibited cruel indifference to the fate of European Jews. Danes behaved in an exemplary, heroic way; the majority of Germans did not.
But analysis by a younger generation of Danish historians has shed a less flattering light on the Danish record. Denmark, as well as other Scandinavian countries, contributed many thousands of ‘Germanic’ Waffen-SS volunteers, who eagerly participated in the German crusade against Bolshevism. Many hundreds of these SS volunteers worked for the police and terror units that helped to round up Danish Jews who had not been able to escape in 1943.

It was not, of course, the fault of northern Europeans that the Nazi elite so fervently believed that Scandinavians were blood brethren. National socialist ideology embraced Danes and Norwegians, Dutch and Flemish as Germanic peoples, related by blood. Hitler said in 1934: ‘the Nordic countries … as well as Holland and Belgium [belong] to Germany.’ Alfred Rosenberg believed in ‘the big common destiny of Scandinavia and the people of the Baltic Sea’; the necessity of ‘one entire awareness of the Nordic countries’. According to Rosenberg, this ‘Nordic ideal’ made it imperative to form a ‘German-Scandinavian Block’ charged with defending Northern Europe against the Bolshevik menace. Himmler warned that ‘all good blood on this world, all Germanic blood, which is not German … could be our ruin’. What he meant by this was that because Nordic blood possessed such potency, it might be used against Germany if it was purloined by enemy nations. That’s why a ‘Germanic empire has to be created … as a home for Nordic blood’, as ‘his will be the strongest magnet, which can attract this blood’. Himmler declared that he had been ‘assigned by the
Führer
, to advance the Germanic idea of the empire’. Hitler, he emphasised, did not intend ‘to let one Germanic go to America. We must integrate all the Norwegians, Swedes, Danes and Dutch’.
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And in the Nordic nations, Himmler’s ‘pan-Germanism’ was reciprocated. There were many Danes, as well as Norwegians and Swedes, who longed to be integrated into Hitler’s European union.

In his autobiography, the late Swedish film and theatre director Ingmar Bergman confessed not only that his father held ultra-right-wing opinions but that he had himself been deeply impressed by Hitler when he visited Germany on an exchange visit in 1936 and lived with a family of ardent national socialists. They proudly took Bergman to hear Hitler speak at a Party rally – ‘unbelievably charismatic’, he recalled. When he returned to Sweden, Bergman, his brothers and some friends attacked the house of a Jewish family and daubed it with swastikas. Bergman’s confession provides yet another reminder of the centrality of anti-Semitism in National Socialist ideology, and how easily it contaminated other national cultures. Clergy of the Church of Sweden applied the German Nuremberg Laws when Swedish couples applied for permission to marry and prohibited marriage between Swedes and partners of Jewish descent. A mythology of racial superiority infected the
national cultures of the Nordic nations – and when Himmler and Berger set up recruiting offices in Copenhagen and Oslo, many young men eagerly signed up. By the end of the war, 13,000 Danish citizens had volunteered to serve in the armed forces of the Third Reich; just over half ended up enlisting. The majority, about 12,000, volunteered for service in the Waffen-SS and ended up serving in three different formations: the Frikorps Danmark (Danish legion), the SS Division ‘Wiking’ and, following the disbandment of the Danish legions, the SS Division ‘Nordland’. About 1,500 SS volunteers came from the German minority in southern Jutland; they ended up serving in the SS Totenkopfdivision and the 1st SS Brigade – both units had a direct involvement in ‘special actions’ against Jews in the east.

Many Danish volunteers embraced German racial doctrines. And, crucially, these beliefs shaped how they acted as SS volunteers. Here are two extracts from letters written by Danish SS volunteers:

One of the most revealing documents discovered by the Danish historians is the wartime diary of an SS volunteer called Harald.
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Harald was recruited on 30 July 1941 and discharged on 17 January 1944. His diary records the history of the Frikorps Danmark from its beginnings in 1941 to 1943, when it was dissolved and replaced by the SS ‘Nordland’. When he volunteered Harald was 40 and because of his age was appointed quartermaster in charge of supplies. He did not have front-line experience. Nevertheless, Harald served with the Frikorps in Demjansk, Neval and Zagreb and had daily contact with Danish SS recruits who ‘did the real fighting’. He provides a grim picture of everyday service in the Danish SS and we hear a lot about the boredom, complaining and drinking; the longing for home and family:

But the diary offers a lot more than just a record of often banal experience; it is the testimony of a believer. For Harald was a member of the Danish Nazi Party (DNSAP) and among the first wave of Danish SS recruits.

We know very little about Harald before he began writing his diary in 1941. He was an illegitimate child and seems to have endured an unstable childhood. When he was just 13 he was accused of fraud, but escaped punishment when he was adopted as a ward of court. Later he was in trouble again for assault, probably a pub brawl. Harald eventually married although very little is known about his partner. By the time he volunteered to join the Waffen-SS in 1941, the couple had a grown-up daughter. Harald often refers to family, and when his periods of leave ended he often suffered depression. In 1940, Harald joined the Danish National Socialist Party, which had been established in 1930, and was led by a doctor, Frits Clausen. The DNSAP, like most of the European far right, had modest electoral success and was plagued by schisms. Many DNSAP members grumbled that Clausen was not radical enough about Denmark’s ‘Jewish problem’. The Danish Anti-Jewish League split away from the DNSAP and tried to forge closer links with the German NSDAP. Its leader Aage Andersen published a newspaper
Kamptegenet
, modelled on Julius Streicher’s poisonous
Der Stürmer
.

After the German occupation began in 1940, Clausen hoped to be appointed Danish national leader. Instead the German Plenipotentiary in Copenhagen, Cecil von Renthe-Fink, marginalised the DNSAP. Fanatics made Hitler nervous. Later in the war, Himmler cultivated Clausen, who served on the Eastern Front, and later had him sent to a German sanatorium to cure his chronic alcoholism. For Harald, the DNSAP was a family affair: his wife also joined up and later worked as a cleaner for German staff stationed at Kastrup Airport.

In June 1941, following Hitler’s authorisation of national legions, the Germans ordered the Danish government to launch a recruitment drive for the Waffen-SS. For Clausen and the failing DNSAP, the German invasion was a godsend. On 23 June, he made a speech calling on Danes to enlist in the war against
Der Weltfeind
(World Enemy), meaning of course ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. The Danish government protested. Clausen turned for help to a Danish army officer and nationalist Lt Col C. P. Kryssing, who persuaded the Danish War Ministry to permit foreign military service. Danes had already enlisted in the SS ‘Nordland’ regiment, now
Clausen and Kryssing offered enough volunteers to form a separate battalion, the Frikorps Danmark. On 19 July, 435 officers and men, led by Kryssing, whose two sons also enlisted, staged a ceremonial passing out parade in Copenhagen, attended by Danish officials, to the sound of a German marching band.
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Recruitment offices staffed by DNSAP men were set up all over Denmark. On a cloudy summer’s day Harald walked into the Copenhagen SS office. Soon afterwards he and 600 other SS volunteers took an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler and pledged to ‘struggle against Bolshevism’.
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Many officers came from regular and reserve ranks in the Danish army. To be accepted, volunteers like Harald had to prove Aryan ancestry, financial solvency and that they had no criminal record.

Over the next two and a half years, Harald’s diary was his loyal companion. He made daily notes – and there is rarely more than a week between full entries. In Copenhagen, he boarded a train for Langenhorn near Hamburg, where he was placed in a mixed SS regiment, the SS ‘Standarte Nordwest’, which comprised Danes, Dutchmen and Flemish volunteers. After just one week, the Danish volunteers transferred to the Frikorps Danmark. As training began, the German officers became increasingly impatient with the patriotic Kryssing. Although he had cooperated with Clausen, he was not at all a convinced ideological National Socialist and openly objected to any ideological training of his recruits. In October 1941 the Germans transferred the Frikorps Danmark to barracks in Treskau. It was here that serious tensions escalated between Kryssing and the SS, and then between Kryssing and the fanatical DNSAP volunteers. A German Hauptsturmführer, Masell, recommended that the Frikorps relocate to another camp closer to the SS ‘Junkerschule’ at Posen-Treskau. Here, he argued, the Danish recruits could be properly inducted in SS discipline and doctrine. Kryssing strenuously resisted. In November 1941, Harald made this entry in his diary:

This was prescient. At the beginning of 1942, Himmler, who had followed the disputes with Kryssing, was informed that neither the Danes nor the Norwegians were ‘combat ready’. He sent SS-Gruppenführer Krüger to find out why. His report concluded that, as Harald had observed, the Danish officers in the Frikorps
were either incompetent or covertly hostile to Germany. He claimed that Kryssing and his deputy Sturmbannführer Jörgensen often expressed anti-Nazi sentiments and were incapable or unwilling to impose discipline. Feuds between rival Danish factions unsettled both officers and men. There was an obvious solution: get rid of the Danish officers and replace them all with Germans. But the cautious Krüger persuaded Himmler to replace Kryssing with another Danish officer, SS-Hauptsturmführer Christian von Schalburg, then serving with the SS ‘Wiking’ division. Schalburg, Krüger believed, was a ‘reliable national socialist’. That was an understatement.
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