The Himmler's SS (22 page)

On 27 May 1942, Heydrich, then Deputy Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, was blown up by Czech agents in Prague and he died a week later. Upon his death, he was awarded the Blood Order (the last posthumous bestowal of that revered decoration) and he became only the second ever recipient of the Deutscher Orden or German Order, a new Nazi version of the medieval Teutonic Order. Heydrich's assassination caused shockwaves throughout the Nazi hierarchy and stunned Himmler, as it emphasised his own vulnerability to attack. His heavily armed personal escort battalion, the Begleitbataillon RfSS, was immediately doubled in size. On 1 January 1943, after some considerable anxiety and indecision, Himmler finally appointed SS-Ober-gruppenführer Dr Ernst Kaltenbrunner to fill the combined posts of Chief of the RSHA and CSSD, as Heydrich's successor.

It was inevitable that sooner or later the RSHA would clash with the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht intelligence service under Admiral Canaris, but it was not until Canaris was implicated in the 20 July 1944 plot against Hitler that the Abwehr was finally absorbed by ämter IV and VI of the RSHA, leaving the German armed forces as the only major European military organisation without its own intelligence network. As the war drew to a close, Sipo and SD men furnished themselves with false papers and scurried underground, only to be rooted out again to face trial for their wartime activities or, more often, to continue in their old specialist roles as agents of the Americans or Russians, as East and West prepared for what then seemed an almost unavoidable confrontation.

Hitler pays his last respects to Reinhard Heydrich at the Wagnerian state funeral service held for him in the Mosaic Chamber of the new Reich Chancellery, 9 June 1942. Karl Wolff and SS-Gruppenführer Gauleiter Dr Friedrich Rainer are among the guard of honour, drawn from the SS, police, NSDAP, army, navy and Luftwaffe. Despite all of his Security Police responsibilities, Heydrich still found time to fly over sixty operational missions as a fighter pilot on the Russian front, being shot down behind enemy lines and winning the Iron Cross 1st Class.

One part of the police organisation was engaged in more active combat duties than the rest of Orpo and Sipo. During the period 1940–2, a large number of younger members of the Ordnungspolizei, supplemented by Allgemeine-SS conscripts, were transferred to thirty newly created independent Police Regiments comprising around 100 battalions, each of 500 men. They were organised and equipped on military lines and served as security troops in the occupied countries. In February 1943, these German formations were officially designated SS-Police Regiments, to distinguish them from the recently formed native ‘Police Rifle' units, and they subsequently gained a reputation for extreme brutality and fanatical loyalty to Himmler and the Nazi régime. Relatively few SS-Police Regiments were garrisoned in the west. The 4th, 14th, 19th and 29th went to France, and the 26th and 27th to Norway, while Denmark was allocated only two police battalions. In Belgium, no German police deployment at all was felt necessary. The Italian situation was somewhat more volatile, with widespread partisan activity after 1943, and necessitated the presence of the 10th, 12th and 15th SS-Police Regiments and several local units.

Soldiers of the Polizei-Division, distinguished by their use of a combination of army, police and SS uniform insignia, during mortar training, April 1940.

The vast majority of SS-Police Regiments were posted to Russia, eastern Europe and the Balkans, where roaming partisan bands of brigade strength or even larger caused constant havoc behind the German lines. In 1942, Himmler was made responsible for all counter-guerrilla operations, and he appointed SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach, formerly head of Oberabschnitt Nordost, as his Chief of Anti-Partisan Units (Chef der Bandenkampfverbände). It quickly became apparent that the territories to be controlled, particularly in Russia, were so vast that the SS-Police needed additional support. Consequently, various pro-German local militias and home guard units composed mainly of Balts, Cossacks and Ukrainians were consolidated into an auxiliary police force known as the Schutzmannschaft der Ordnungspolizei, or Schuma, later expanded to include a Schutzmannschaft der Sicherheitspolizei. Members of the Schuma were generally nationalists at heart, whose main aim was the defeat of communism, and they viewed the Germans as liberators. Moreover, on a practical level, their service in the Schuma ensured that they and their families received favourable treatment from the Nazis. Schuma units often committed terrible atrocities against their own compatriots, in an effort to prove that their loyalty to the Reich was beyond question and that they were ‘more German than the Germans'.

This postcard, produced for ‘German Police Day' in 1942, depicts members of the Ordnungspolizei and Sicherheitspolizei on joint patrol on the eastern front. Its symbolism emphasises the close ties between the SS and the police, and the fact that both organisations were fully involved in combat.

While he was HSSPf in Serbia, SS-Gruppenführer August Meyszner (left) was responsible for all counter-guerrilla operations in the country. Here he confers with SS-Obergruppenführer Artur Phleps of the ‘Prinz Eugen' division during the spring of 1943. Of particular note are the differing patterns of collar patch and the puttees worn by both men.

In Poland, twelve SS-Police Regiments supported the Wehrmacht in maintaining order, backed up by the Polish police and twelve Schuma battalions. Fourteen SS-Police Regiments served in Byelorussia, as did seven Police Rifle Regiments, which were mixed German-Russian units, and a vast number of Schuma battalions. In Estonia, twenty-six Schuma battalions were formed, being redesignated ‘Estonian Police Battalions' in May 1943 and issued with German police uniforms on account of their reliable record. An estimated 15,000 Latvians and 13,000 Lithuanians served in sixty-four other Schuma battalions which were deployed right across the eastern front, from the Ostland to Yugoslavia, while the Ukraine alone supplied 70,000 volunteers to staff a further seventy-one Schuma battalions. In Croatia, pro-Nazis set up a regimental-sized ‘Einsatzstaffel', based on the Allgemeine-SS and dressed in quasi-SS uniform, and 15,000 more went into a multi-national ‘German-Croatian Gend-armerie' of thirty battalions. On a smaller scale, the Serbians produced ten auxiliary police battalions, and the Albanians two Police Rifle Regiments. All of these native auxiliary formations (and there were many more than those mentioned briefly here) were completely separate from the foreign legions of the Wehrmacht. They were police organisations directly subordinate to the local Orpo and Sipo commanders and, ultimately, took their orders from Himmler through his HSSPfs. In effect, they were remote extensions of the Allgemeine-SS, operating in the occupied territories.

Each Oberabschnitt commander normally held the post of Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer or HSSPf, the Senior SS and Police Commander in the region. He acted as Himmler's representative and had technical jurisdiction over all SS and police formations based in the Oberabschnitt. The close relationship between the SS and police subsequently resulted in a joint admin-istration at regional level, and this amalgamation was particularly convenient in newly occupied territories where it was necessary rapidly to set up tried and tested administrative structures for both the SS and the police. In the conquered countries, therefore, as in Germany itself, SS headquarters and police command posts were usually established in the same building, with frequent interdepartmental transfers of staff. During 1943–4, Hans Prützmann became Höchste SS- und Polizeiführer (Supreme SS and Police Commander) in southern Russia, and a similar post was held by Karl Wolff in Italy, making these two officers the highest ranking of all the HSSPfs.

Subordinate to the HSSPfs, a number of local SS- und Polizeiführer and Polizeigebietsführer directed SS and police operations in areas particularly troubled by partisans and other civil insurgents. In addition, each major city across Germany and the occupied territories had its Befehlshaber der Ordnungspolizei (BdO) and its Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (BdS), whose authorities were restricted to their local uniformed police and security police forces, respectively.

In practice, the ultimate authority of the Senior SS and Police Commanders was increasingly challenged during the war by the Chiefs of the SS Hauptämter, who felt that they should have supremacy in all matters relating to the functioning of their departments, and also by Waffen-SS generals, who demanded total autonomy of action in deploying their troops. In so doing, they went against Himmler's direct orders, for the HSSPf system was devised as an essential administrative step in the Reichsführer's planned progression towards the Staatsschutzkorps, and he bolstered it to the end. He regularly issued decrees confirming the jurisdiction of his HSSPfs over all SS and police officials in their regions, without exception, specifically including members of the Allgemeine-SS, Waffen-SS, Orpo, Sipo and SD, and representatives of the Hauptamt RKF and VOMI. However, as the Reich began to fall back on all fronts, the HSSPfs in previously occupied territories had their fiefdoms snatched away from them by the advancing Allies, and the struggle for survival overtook the grand notion of the State Protection Corps. By 1945, the HSSPfs had become figureheads with little or no means of actually directing the vast forces still technically under their command.

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As well as being a great consumer of goods and materials, the SS was also a large-scale producer of them. Before the war, Himmler indulged in limited productive economic enterprises, or SS Wirtschaftsunternehmungen, such as the Apollinaris mineral water works at Bad Neuenahr. Great publicity was given to the SS porcelain factory at Allach, a satellite of Dachau concentration camp, which manufactured top quality decorative pieces as well as basic ceramic utensils for kitchen use. The sword smithy at Dachau, which kept alive the tradition of making high-grade damascus steel edged weapons, was another example of the acceptable face of the SS economy, with workers being very well treated to protect their precious skills. The war, however, and the acquisition of large fertile territories, greatly enlarged the scope of these activities. Farming and stockbreeding in Poland, and lumbering, mining and fishing in Russia, all entered the field of SS economics. Ad hoc SS Economic Operations Units, or Wirtschaftskommandos, were formed to coordinate local entrepreneurial projects, and between 1941 and 1944 the SS exploited the wealth, resources and population of the conquered East on a massive scale.