Hitler's Foreign Executioners (6 page)

Himmler and Heydrich both understood that they had to move carefully to tighten their grip on power. They must appear to be the servants of the New Order – not its aspiring masters. The SS brand was ‘loyalty’. It is surprising to discover that Hitler was unsettled by the ferocious bloodletting of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, and the growing power of the SS disquieted both Hermann Göring and a relic conservative faction led by the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick. In the course of the next two years, Himmler cunningly discredited his opponents and cemented his own power. He did this mainly by exploiting the prejudices shared by the Nazi leadership and many ordinary Germans. He assumed that Germans were a superior people, with a natural right to hegemony in Europe and the east. Conquest and settlement of the east was of course a widespread obsession among both conservative Germans and radical nationalists like Hitler. But Himmler had acquired an emotional ‘Eastern obsession’ in his adolescence and it was he rather than Hitler who made this ultra-imperial aspiration such a pervasive ingredient in National Socialist thinking. Himmler’s foreign policy – meaning German acquisition of eastern territories – was itself profoundly connected to his domestic thinking. German ethnic rights to natural hegemony were threatened and undermined by the enemy within: the Jews. In SS ideology, Jews, a people without a nation, naturally took on the role of ‘international conspirators’ with connections and kin in both Moscow and the capitalist economies. German destiny was, as ever, vulnerable to the mythic
‘stab in the back’. Radical imperialism thus depended on scapegoating – and in the National Socialist mind, Slavic peoples, black people, Freemasons and Gypsies (Roma) might all take supporting roles to the Jewish leads. Himmler assiduously cultivated this dual mythology of blood-sanctioned imperialism and its shadow world of internal enemies. Himmler’s allegedly eccentric fascination with German mythology was not in any sense whimsical; it was a means to reinforce the status of the SS as the standard-bearer and aggressive protector of Germanic values. It was in a sense a ‘sales campaign’.
⁶

After the breakthrough of 1934, Himmler played these two chords with monotonous persistence. By representing Germany as an embattled state, he drove home again and again the message that the New Order depended on its security apparatus, the SS. His efforts paid off in May 1936, when Hitler appointed him chief of the German police, thus binding together all the German police agencies under a single banner. Himmler had specified his own job description to Hitler, insisting in a private letter that he was to be ‘Chief’ not ‘Commander’ which implied a more circumscribed role. His appointment as Reichsführer-SS and chief of the German police on 17 June signalled Himmler’s defeat of his main rivals, above all Interior Minister Frick.
⁷
Heydrich was a cunning negotiator. It was he not his boss who secured the final wording of Hitler’s decree which referred to the ‘unified concentration of police responsibilities in the Reich’, and the responsibilities of the new chief of police as ‘the direction and executive authority for all police matters within the competence of the Reich and Prussian ministries of the interior’.
⁸

The consequences of Himmler’s triumph were both organisational and ideological. He welded together all uniformed police into the Order Police (
Ordungspolizei
) and handed command to SS General Kurt Daluege. He appointed Heydrich chief of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei, or Sipo) which took over all detective police, both political and criminal. This administrative reorganisation was an astonishing feat for it yoked together the SS and German police, creating at a stroke the foundations of an SS/police state. Although the Sipo and the SD remained administratively separate, they shared a single head, namely Heydrich – and two years later would be amalgamated under his command as the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA).

To fully appreciate the ideology of this administrative legerdemain we need to understand the pernicious theoretical underpinning of Himmler’s ambition. In his world view, Germany’s imperial ambition depended on combating internal enemies; forces that threatened Germany’s natural rights of conquest. These foes of the Reich were by definition criminals – and criminality was itself the mark of ‘alien’ ancestry. Accordingly, the defence of the Reich depended on liquidating
any criminal element – conceived in racial and genetic terms. It was this overlap between the figure of the criminal and the racial outsider that reinforced the exclusion of German Jews and justified a radical solution to the ‘Jewish problem’. Criminal behaviour was ‘Jewish’; all Jews were potentially enemies of the state. This pseudo-logic implied in turn that Himmler’s policemen were also soldiers – warriors tasked with defending the Reich as its borders expanded. By fusing national security with imperial ambition, Himmler prepared the way for mass ethnic slaughter. The roots of the German genocide can be traced back to his appointment as RFSS and police chief.
⁹

We can now return to September 1939; to the moment when Himmler’s SS would be ‘blooded’ in the first act of Hitler’s ‘war of annihilation’.

For Himmler’s SS, planning for Case White, the invasion of Poland, began as early as May 1939. All the major offices of the Reich participated and protracted negotiations concerning the deployment of SS paramilitary police and the embryonic Waffen-SS, the SS-VT regiments (
Verfügungstruppe
), were convened between representatives of the Gestapo, the OKH (the Army High Command), and the office of military intelligence, the Abwehr. True to form, Himmler’s number two, Heydrich, secured a leading part in these preparations, and reported directly to Hitler. At SD headquarters, Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8 in central Berlin, he set up a new office to direct Operation Tannenberg: the ‘Zentralstelle II P’, the P referring, of course, to Poland. He appointed Franz Six, considered to be an expert on ‘Jewish matters’, to head the new department. SD bureaucrats under SS-Oberführer Heinz Jost began compiling target lists (
Sonderfahndungsliste
) that named some 61,000 Polish Christians and Jews, broadly categorised as ‘anti-German elements’ – meaning those ‘elements hostile to the Reich and to Germany in enemy territory behind the troops engaged in combat’.
¹⁰
These diligently compiled file cards would provide the blueprint for mass murder.
¹¹

Heydrich later confided to Daluege that Hitler had given him an ‘extraordinarily radical order’ for the ‘liquidation of the various circles of the Polish leadership’, meaning clergy, nobility, Jews and the mentally ill.
¹²
Hitler’s criminal order prefigured the notorious Commissar Order (
Kommissarbefehl
) and the
Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlaß
issued before Operation Barbarossa two years later, which sanctioned illegal summary mass executions. In 1939, however, nothing was put in writing – and Hitler demanded an operational smokescreen that referred to ‘elements hostile to the Reich’. This obfuscation filtered down through the ranks. The
main instrument of mass murder – though not as we shall see the only one – would be the Einsatzgruppen. These ‘Special Task Forces’ or ‘death squads’ had already been deployed during the Anschluss with Austria, and later in the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia. At the beginning of July, Heydrich appointed SS-Brigadeführer Werner Best, a 36-year-old lawyer, to begin the selection of appropriate staff that would soon be sent into action in Poland. They would be recruited from every branch of Himmler’s police forces and become the main agents of the Nazi genocide – and later, the first recruiters of non-German auxiliaries. Most of these dedicated killers were German law graduates in their early 30s.
¹³

In mid-August, Heydrich met his Task Force commanders and informed them that Hitler had personally tasked him with combating Polish ‘resistance’: ‘everything was allowed, including shootings and arrests,’ he revealed.
¹⁴
The target lists already compiled by Jost made perfectly clear what ‘resistance’ meant: the word was merely window dressing for the decapitation of Polish civil society. But Heydrich refused to specify how these ‘radical’ instructions should be carried out; that was down to individual commanders in the field. Much would depend on the intuition and initiative of young German men. These Special Task Forces would be backed by ethnic German ‘Self-Defence Corps’ (
Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz
), recruited from the German minority in Poland which was saturated with fanatical National Socialists, eager to take revenge on their Polish fellow citizens.
¹⁵

German troops began to move east towards the Polish border as early as June. Against a background of frantic diplomatic manoeuvring, Hitler ordered Heydrich to provide a suitable
casus belli
to launch his war. He claimed that ethnic Germans in Poland had been persecuted with ‘bloody terror’ – now he needed some evidence. Heydrich hatched up Operation Himmler. At the end of August a cadre of SS and SD men secretly assembled at the police school in Bernau where they were issued with Polish army uniforms and papers. Since the Poles had refused to provoke a war, the SS would do it for them. Heydrich assigned these ‘provocation’ teams a series of targets on the Polish border, including a radio station at Gleiwitz. Here they waited for Heydrich’s coded signal ‘grandmother has died’. Led by SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks (the author of a post-war autobiography,
The Man who Started the War
), the first unit of provocateurs attacked the radio station, inadvertently killing a German policeman, and broadcast in German accented Polish that ‘The hour of freedom has struck!’ to the accompaniment of pistol shots. Another sham Polish team attacked the German customs post at Hochlinden, where they deposited six corpses dressed in Polish uniforms, referred to as
Konserve
or ‘preserved meat’. These human props had been provided by Heydrich’s rival SS General Theodor Eicke, the man who had shot Ernst Röhm in 1934 and become head of the Concentration
Camps Inspectorate and commander of the SS Death’s Head division. Eicke had selected and poisoned the unfortunate
Konserven
for Operation Himmler at Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin. Military intelligence, the Abwehr, supplied their uniforms. Yet another SD team struck a German forestry station at Pitschen, daubing its walls with ox blood. For the benefit of the press, astonished that Poland had attacked Germany, Heydrich had ordered a model of the border which featured flashing red lights where Polish attacks had taken place. The message conveyed by these macabre theatrics was obvious: Polish forces had violated the borders of the Reich. Germany was under attack!

These staged provocations resembled a grotesque comic opera. This truly was gangster diplomacy. In the early hours of 1 September, at 4.45 a.m., Hitler broadcast to German troops massed on the Polish border: force would be met by force. An hour later, the German training ship
Schleswig-Holstein
, anchored in Danzig harbour, turned its guns on the Polish garrison and opened fire. A total of 1,500 German aircraft roared into the air and crossed swiftly into Polish airspace. Five German armies, made up of sixty divisions, comprising more than 1.5 million men swept across Polish borders, led by five panzer tank divisions. As German forces pounded the Polish armies from air, land and sea, Hitler was driven to the Kroll Opera House, which had temporarily replaced the Reichstag. Wearing his Iron Cross and dressed in a field grey uniform, Hitler slandered the Poles as warmongers and reassured the governments of France and Great Britain that he merely wished to settle the status of the Pomeranian Corridor and Danzig. It was sheer mendacity. The Germans intended to obliterate the Polish nation.

Case White delivered a powerful straight punch combined with swift, ruthless encirclement. From the north, the 4th Army drove through the Polish Corridor between Pomerania and East Prussia towards Warsaw. From East Prussia, the 3rd Army pushed south towards the Bug River, cutting behind helplessly confused Polish divisions. From Silesia, German armies struck north-east.
¹⁶
These hammer blows took full advantage of new borders created after the destruction of Czechoslovakia. In return for a promise of 300 square miles of Poland, puppet dictator Joseph Tiso granted the German 8th, 10th and 14th Armies permission to cross the Slovakian border with Poland, alongside German-trained Slovakian troops, to slice into Polish forces from the south.
¹⁷
With relentless momentum, the German forces penetrated deep inside Poland. In less than twenty-four hours, the Luftwaffe Stuka bombers had eliminated 75 per cent of the dilapidated Polish air force.

In August, Hitler’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had signed a non-aggression pact with his Soviet opposite number in Moscow. Its secret protocols guaranteed the division of Poland and Eastern Europe between the two
dictatorships. On 11 September, Stalin had withdrawn his ambassador from Warsaw – but as Hitler’s armies crushed the Poles, the Soviets prevaricated, hoping the Germans would perform much of the hard labour of conquest. On 17 September, when German victory and thus the destruction of Poland as a nation was certain, the Soviets finally struck from the east, finally snuffing out any chance that the Poles could continue to resist.