Hitler's Foreign Executioners (9 page)

The SS paramilitary police force sand thenew, armed VT regiments had been blooded by the Polish campaign. A few German army commanders may have grumbled about ‘excesses’, but Himmler smeared complainers with the most damning word in the Nazi lexicon: disloyalty. In any case, many Wehrmacht soldiers did not hesitate to join in with cowardly attacks and murders if they had the opportunity. In Hitler’s armies, hatred of Poles and Jews was pervasive. Army denunciations reflected anxiety about the rising power of the SS rather than moral outrage. Hitler had few difficulties sabotaging isolated efforts to penalise SS men accused of ‘excess’. On 17 October 1939 a ‘Decree relating to the Special Jurisdiction in Penal Matters for members of the SS and for Members of Police groups on Special Tasks’ abrogated the power of Wehrmacht military courts to court-martial SS personnel. But still Himmler had to tread carefully. He could not afford to be openly confrontational. Even after the lightning triumph in Poland, Hitler had nothing to gain from undermining his delicate transactions with his Wehrmacht
generals – even though he was commander-in-chief of the army. So when Field Marshall Walther von Brauchitsch insisted on a meeting to discuss SS tactics, Himmler proved to be more conciliatory; he assured von Brauchitsch that he wanted ‘good relations’ with the Wehrmacht and promised that ‘special operations’ would be carried out in ‘a more considerate way’ in future. Himmler’s act of kowtowing evidently worked, for soon afterwards von Brauchitsch officially dismissed the reports of SS atrocities as mere ‘rumours’. The majority of the German army top brass let the SS get on with its appointed tasks of ‘maintaining security’ and dealing with ‘hostile elements’. This moral abdication had fateful consequences. In the mind of German commanders and front-line soldiers, it normalised the mass murder of unarmed civilians deemed to be hostile in some way to the Reich. In occupied Serbia, for instance, it was the Wehrmacht not the SS that took the lead role in the mass murder of Serbian Jews in the summer of 1941.
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As the victorious Wehrmacht withdrew its armies from Poland, the SS muscled in to undertake what Hitler called a ‘new ordering of ethnographic relations’.
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The Nazi-Soviet Pact had divided the Polish lands between Germany and the Soviet Union. But to begin with, Hitler dithered about what to do with his portion – until Stalin forced his hand. Although the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini tried to persuade Hitler to create a relic Polish state to placate the French and British, Stalin insisted on the annihilation of the Polish state. As enticement, the Russians offered to cede the Lublin district in return for German recognition of Soviet interests in Lithuania. The offer intrigued Hitler and Himmler. Once the SD Special Task Forces had completed the liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia, the problem of what to do about the
Ostjuden
(eastern Jews) became a more pressing concern. Himmler concluded that the Lublin region offered a solution, albeit temporary, as a ‘reservation’ or dumping ground for ‘the whole of Jewry as well as other unreliable elements’.

These decisions foreshadowed the catastrophe that would soon engulf the former Polish territories and the coveted east. By the end of the year, the SS had set in place the most important instruments of occupation strategy. With the connivance of the Wehrmacht, Hitler had redefined warfare not merely as blitzkrieg but as the means of achieving racial dominance: the Polish nation had been destroyed and its elites liquidated. The ‘Jewish Problem’ was now a matter of open discussion – and many thousands of Jews had been forced into the Soviet domain. Himmler had also begun the process of Germanisation by resettling ethnic Germans ‘imported’ from the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The first efforts had been made to exploit the chauvinist emotions of non-German nationalists – in this case, the Ukrainian OUN, whose militia had participated in the campaign. The Nazi elite had begun to think in practical terms about the vexed questions of empire, race and nation
– and Himmler’s new appointment as Reichs Commissar for the Consolidation of German Nationhood (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, RKFDV), made in October, meant that the SS would now control the process of deportation and resettlement in occupied territories, beginning with Poland, ‘to purge and secure the new German territories’. Hitler expressed nothing but contempt for the conquered Poles – as he explained to Nazi ‘party philosopher’, Alfred Rosenberg, he had ‘learnt a lot’ in Poland. The Jews were ‘the most appalling people one can imagine’. The Poles, he went on, exhibited ‘a thin Germanic layer underneath frightful material’.
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Himmler saw matters differently. Occupation was an opportunity: ‘It is therefore absolute national political necessity to screen the incorporated territories … for such persons of Teutonic blood in order to make this lost German blood available again to our own people.’
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For Himmler, the successful conclusion of the Polish campaign offered an opportunity to consolidate his ideological vision.

At the end of October, Himmler published an ‘SS Order’, which set out the fundamental principles of the SS, and its strategy for the future.
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He begins by citing a favourite maxim: ‘Every war is a bloodletting of the best blood.’ Throughout Himmler’s lectures and speeches, ‘blood’ is repeated like a Wagnerian leitmotif. Racial strength, Himmler asserts, depends on the shedding of blood – and its replacement by fecund SS men. ‘He can die at peace who knows that … all he and his ancestors demanded and fought for is continued in his children.’ Himmler further developed his blood obsession in a second speech given to the new Gauleiters, who now ruled the former Polish lands. He began with a typical assertion: ‘I believe that our blood, Nordic blood, is the best blood on this earth … Over all others, we are superior.’ He points out that over many centuries, bearers of Nordic blood had become the rulers, experts, members of cultural elites when settled among lesser races. Inevitably, they had mixed with their inferior hosts and polluted the Nordic bloodline. This was dangerous, for Nordic blood conferred tremendous power even when it was diluted. He noted that in the recent war, the gallant defender of Warsaw had been General Juliusz Rommél – evidently from Teutonic stock. If Germanic or Nordic blood was so threatening in the wrong veins, as it was, what was to be done? One solution was simply to liquidate the elites and subtract their contaminated bloodline from the national stock. But mass murder was just one possible solution. ‘While we are strong,’ Himmler proclaimed ‘
we must do our utmost to recall all our blood, and we must take care that none of our blood is ever lost again.
[my italics]’
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For Hitler, racial admixture or miscegenation was an irreversible catastrophe. Himmler took a strikingly different view: lost Germanic blood might somehow be recovered.

Himmler went on to explain what he meant by ‘recalling our blood’. He assumed that, with the exception of Jews, race was not fixed – it was to some degree fluid. The execution of unarmed civilians is a cowardly act. But according to Himmler ruthlessness or ‘hardness’ was character forming: ‘An execution must always be the hardest task for our men … but they must do it with “a stiff upper lip”’, he once said. Since good character was an expression of racial inheritance, it followed that the cultivation of ‘hardness’ through voluntary participation in violent actions offered individuals with some measure of Germanic blood the chance to ascend the rungs of the racial ladder. Soldiers, of course, not only kill – they get killed. For Himmler, sacrifice was another means by which an ethnic group could elevate its racial status. Recruits who laid down their lives as SS warriors guaranteed the racial values of their comrades. Borrowing from a garbled version of Lamarckian inheritance, Himmler asserted that these racial characteristics acquired through violent action and sacrifice would be inherited by future generations that would be progressively ‘Germanised’. Himmler was not troubled by the abundant contradictions of this twisted, semi-mystical rationale for mass slaughter. Instead he looked forward to building a ‘Germanic blood wall’ to guard ‘Germanic, blond provinces’.

This was the first preliminary sketch of an evolving master plan – and its depraved sophistication fundamentally contradicted Hitler’s petty-minded bigotry. The problem, naturally, was implementation. How was the German or Nordic blood to ‘be recalled’ in practice? By the beginning of 1940, Himmler had at least the rough outline of a solution. His police battalions and armed SS units would offer ‘Germanic’ recruits the chance to ‘top up’ their racial qualifications through blood sacrifice. Himmler’s next task would be to refashion the new Waffen-SS as a receptacle of reclaimed Germanic blood, ‘wherever it might be found’.

In the aftermath of the Polish campaign, Himmler energetically impressed on Hitler the heroic part played by the SS ‘Leibstandarte’. Realising that the Wehrmacht remained squeamish about fully embracing a ‘war of annihilation’, Hitler agreed to expand the ‘armed SS’ from one to three combat divisions: the Totenkopfdivision, the SS-VT and the SS Polizei Division. By now, Hitler and his generals had begun planning Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), the invasion of Western Europe and Himmler faced an unexpected dilemma. In the short term, he had no idea how to acquire the manpower to fill these new divisions. Army recruitment had drained the well close to the bottom, and the Wehrmacht high command, thoroughly rattled by SS aggression, would do whatever it could to cut off supplies of men and materials to
the SS. The new ‘armed SS’ made only an insignificant contribution to the attack on Western Europe.

Nevertheless, on 19 July 1940 Hitler stood once again in the Kroll Opera House to announce the successful completion of the latest blitzkrieg. ‘The German armoured corps,’ he proclaimed, ‘has inscribed for itself a place in the history of the world. The men of the Waffen-SS have a share in this honour.’ He then acknowledged a beaming Himmler: ‘Party comrade Himmler, who organised the entire security system of our Reich as well as the units of the Waffen-SS.’
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By that summer, Waffen-SS combat units could muster some 100,000 men. The manpower problem had been solved, for the time being at least, by one of Himmler’s most forceful henchmen. While Himmler waffled about Germanic empires and Nordic bloodlines, Gottlob Berger, a bluntly spoken wedge of man with a talent for making enemies, got on with the job. That summer, as SS administrators tightened their grip on Hitler’s European empire, Berger embarked on a new campaign to streamline his command organisation and channel fresh recruits into SS divisions. Although the term ‘Waffen-SS’ had been officially in use since March, Himmler bound his private army even closer to the ‘general SS’ by setting up the Kommando der Waffen-SS inside the SS Main Office. Like any Reich agency, the SS was a battleground of aggressive egos and empire builders. Ambitious military types despised the ‘schoolmasterly’ Himmler and made the dangerous mistake of thinking he could be bullied. Ambitious generals like Theodor Eicke and ‘Sepp’ Dietrich had, with Hitler’s tacit approval, treated their SS divisions, the ‘Leibstandarte’ and Totenkopfdivisions, as personal fiefdoms. Himmler and Berger would use the new Kommando to tame these malcontents and promote their own tame placemen. Himmler was determined that the armed SS – the Waffen-SS and its kin the police – would take a vanguard role in the renewed assault on the east. He knew that this could not be put off for much longer. His destiny was the conquest of the east.

As Himmler streamlined the SS, Hitler was becoming preoccupied with Britain’s refusal to ‘knuckle under’ (accept defeat) and with the ‘Russian problem’. The two issues were closely connected. Hitler assumed that the British were convinced that his fickle ally Stalin would eventually join the war – against Germany. This may have been a rationalisation on Hitler’s part designed to appease his nervous generals, since his principal war aim was ultimately the destruction of the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ enemy in Moscow and the German resettlement of the east – an ambition fully endorsed by the impatient Himmler. According to Goebbels, Hitler saw the coming war with Russia in completely Manichean terms: Bolshevism was ‘enemy number one’.
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On 31 July, Hitler called his senior military advisors to the Berghof, and informed them that he had made a ‘final decision’ to ‘finish off Russia’ in the spring of 1941.
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Hitler rationalised this by arguing that ‘England is counting on Russia … if Russia is beaten, there is no more hope for England’. As his plans matured, Hitler would abandon this kind of rationalisation, even when he discussed strategy with the Wehrmacht generals. SS Chief Himmler understood completely the implications of renewing the National Socialist ‘war of annihilation’ that Hitler characterised as ‘deliberately racial’. As his eastern plans took shape in the winter of 1940/41, Hitler openly combined strategy with ideology. This meant that the Wehrmacht must ‘fight an ideological war alongside the SS’. Instead of merely taking on ‘special tasks’, SS values would shape German invasion strategy. This meant that the Waffen-SS would need to acquire a lot more clout – and that meant recruiting.