Hitler's Foreign Executioners (22 page)

Himmler used the very same metaphors when he discussed recruiting Germanic volunteers for the Waffen-SS: ‘I really have the intention to gather Germanic blood from all over the world, to plunder and steal it where I can.’ It was a short step, in other words, from the classroom to the parade ground. Although the Generalplan Ost proposed the extinction of at least 80 per cent of indigenous peoples, Himmler also recognised the level and complexity of ethnic diversity in the east and proposed exploiting certain racial ‘splinters’, as he put it, as ‘mayors and policemen’. Recruitment of non-German volunteers thus formed part of a grossly ambitious imperial plan that depended on the physical liquidation of many millions of ‘surplus’ people.

Between the spring and summer of 1941, occupation experience in the Balkans and close involvement with the Romanian ‘National Legionary State’ had taught Himmler and his SS planners valuable lessons. In Croatia and Romania two thorny problems had become all too evident. Now they would have to be solved. First, factions like the Hlinka Guard, the Ustasha and the Iron Guard could not be relied upon to perform the task of mass murder in an orderly manner. They had a tendency to run amok or lacked ‘staying power’. Their energies needed to be disciplined. That was the German way: a matter of proper organisation and proper training. Surgeons not butchers! The second problem – nationalism – would prove much less tractable.

The birth of nationalism in the old empires in the nineteenth century was from the start wedded to extreme ethnic chauvinism directed mainly at Jews. This union was if anything deepened as new nations stumbled on to the stage of history. When the old empires collapsed at the end of the First World War, a new bout of nation building bonded nationalism ever tighter to chauvinism. Most, if not all, ultranationalist ideologues believed that Jews, either as the agents of international capital or as Bolsheviks intent on spreading a revolutionary message, menaced the fragile new nation states that emerged from beneath the wreckage of the old empires.

Why was this a problem for the Nazi imperial strategists? The reason is simple: anti-Semitism and nationalism came as a package. The Germans wished to exploit the one without satisfying the other. Hitler was no nation builder. In Western Europe and Scandinavia, Nazi administrators, whether military or civilian, soon found to their cost that failed ultranationalist demagogues like Vidkun Quisling in Norway, Anton Mussert in the Netherlands and Léon Degrelle in Belgium assumed that German occupation would provide the fast track to power. This was a delusion: for Hitler, collaboration was a one-way street. Power could flow in one direction only. Hitler ultimately planned to rebuild the Holy Roman Empire, the First Reich, by extending the western borders of Germany as far as the Pyrenees. That was bad news for the conquered peoples of Europe. On 9 April 1940, he proclaimed that ‘the Greater German Reich will arise today’: Danes, Norwegians, Dutch and Flemings would join together in a new community defined by its racial purity and dominated by Germany. In this ‘Germania magna’ the old national borders would be dissolved away. In the end, Hitler failed to rebuild the old Reich, but because he expected to he had no interest in promoting nationalists.

In the east, the Germans would encounter the same difficulty, but in an altogether different form. At the end of the First World War, a number of brand new nations had emerged kicking and screaming from the wreckage of Europe’s old empires. For two short decades, the peoples of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania tasted the joys of sovereignty. Then in 1939 Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler and snatched it away. Soviet armies and the hated agents of the Soviet security service, the NKVD, occupied the Baltic States and eastern Poland. A year later, Hitler’s armies drove out the Soviet occupiers. Many greeted the German invaders as liberators – and nationalists looked forward to the revival of their sovereign rights. They had no idea that for Hitler military conquest would mean the extinction of these insolent ‘little states’. The only winners would be the minority deemed suitable for ‘Germanisation’.

Nazi ideologue and head of the ‘Ministry of the Occupied East’ (Omi) Alfred Rosenberg flirted with the idea of granting some kind of suzerainty status to a
few privileged eastern peoples like the Estonians. Rosenberg, who took the most ‘liberal’ approach to Eastern European nationalist aspirations, had no doubt that in the long term anything resembling a nation state would be completely digested by the ‘Greater German Reich’.

Hitler’s contempt for Slavic nationalism was profound. But in the German political tradition, his views were by no means original. Michael Burleigh argues in his essay ‘The Knights, Nationalists and Historians’ that the idea of
Drang nach Osten
, expansion to the east, was a leitmotif winding through German foreign policy – from Otto the Great through to Frederick the Great, to Bismarck and the Wilhelmine Empire and on to Hindenburg and then Hitler. The nineteenth-century apostle of eastward expansion, von Treitschke, denounced the ‘anarchic crudity of the Slavs’ which made them incapable of state formation. Only the Germans could be masters, teachers, discipliners and the bringers of civilisation to their crude eastern neighbours.‘In the unhappy clash between races,’ Treitschke argued, ‘a quick war of annihilation’ would sort out ‘the brute beasts of the East’.
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How then might nationalist eastern collaborators be rewarded if German imperialism demanded the destruction of their nation states? That circle could never be squared. But in the euphoric aftermath of conquest, Himmler would offer nationalist factions an alluring reward: the chance to seek revenge on the Jews they blamed for the ‘Bolshevik’ occupation of their nation states.

Evidence of this murderous skulduggery can be found in the Einsatzgruppen reports, a huge collection of German documents discovered in RSHA headquarters in Berlin at the end of the war by American lawyer Benjamin Ferencz. In cold, detached language they document how Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen executed 2 million Eastern European Jews in forest clearings and excavated pits between 22 June 1941 and 21 May 1943. The entire document collection weighed 200 tonnes – testimony to German managerial and reporting zeal. It comprises 195 ‘Morning Reports USSR’ and 55 longer ‘Weekly Reports’. When the four Special Task Forces crossed the Soviet border in June 1941 they brought with them back-up teams: secretaries and clerks, teletype operators and wireless operators equipped with the most up to date equipment. The duty of these men and women was to send detailed accounts of the previous day’s activity to local Task Force headquarters (for example in Tilsit on the Lithuanian border) by wireless or courier. Heydrich’s officers filed reports every morning until May 1942, when the ‘Reinhard’ murder camps and Auschwitz-Birkenau began to take on a bigger role in the genocide. After May,
reports had to be filed weekly. This raw data flow from the front line listed execution sites, numbers killed and, crucially for our purposes,‘the mood of the general population’. At the Special Task Force HQ, higher ranked officers collated the raw information and compiled ‘meta reports’ and dispatched them to Heydrich’s offices in Prinz Albrecht Strasse in Berlin. The Einsatzgruppe reports documented the mass murder in chilling, voluminous and meticulous detail. Heydrich distributed the final reports to high-ranking Wehrmacht, police and SS officers, to members of the German Foreign Office, and to Göring and the German industrial magnates.

Himmler and Heydrich both studied the ‘Morning Reports’ closely and radioed fresh instructions to Task Force officers in the field, invariably urging them to show greater ‘harshness’. Each Task Force commander was subordinate to the three Higher SS and Police Leaders (
Höhere Schutz Staffel-und Polizeiführer
, HSSPF) in charge of different regions of the occupied Soviet Union. These SS officers became the managers of genocide on a day-to-day basis – ‘little Himmlers’ who co-ordinated the work of the Special Task Forces with Order Police battalions and the 20,000-strong Waffen-SS brigades. We will hear a great deal about these men in the chapters that follow.

The charge of the Special Task Forces would be ‘carrying out fundamental special measures against the Jews’.
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Heydrich, it must be emphasised, set out a strict
Sprachregelung
(language rules) to camouflage German plans. The methodical large-scale execution of Jews and ‘Soviet Commissars’ was referred to using a blizzard of code words: action, special action, large-scale action, reprisal action, pacification action, radical action, cleaning up action, overhauling, cleared or cleared of Jews, freeing the area of Jews, special treatment or measures, rendered harmless, handled according to orders, severe measures, treating according to the previous procedure …
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It was not considered necessary to provide a crib. As well as the standard kind of Einsatzgruppe report, Ferencz discovered three ‘authored’ Einsatzgruppe reports that have special significance. Two bear the signature of the commander of Special Task Force A, Franz Walther Stahlecker. The third was written by the Swiss-born leader of Einsatzkommando 3, Karl Jäger (in his own words, a ‘person with a heightened sense of duty’).
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These chilling documents tells us a great deal about the management of mass murder in Lithuania and the other Baltic States.

The 40-year-old Stahlecker was a dedicated and proficient
génocidaire
. He fervently believed that ‘the East belonged to the SS’. Colleagues noted that Stahlecker was often ‘jumpy and unpredictable … obsessed that they [his superiors] would realise in Berlin that he was absolutely obedient concerning this [Heydrich’s] order: not just obedient, but had a special mission to carry it out’.
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Stahlecker would consider only those recruits who could ‘tolerate hardships and burdens of the soul’. In this respect, he himself provided the model. In his second, shorter report, Stahlecker
attached a map of the Baltic region and Belorussia on which he or his assistants had inscribed numerous graphic coffins which enumerated how many Jews had been killed in particular regions or places. The third special report was filed by Stahlecker’s subordinate, Karl Jäger (b. 1888), who became the commander of the Security Police and SD for Lithuania.
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Jäger lists with remorseless thoroughness the murder of precisely 137,346 Jews and communists. Jäger documents over a hundred ‘special operations’ in seventy-one separate locations (he made return visits to the same village if he discovered from informers that Jews had survived). The report demonstrates that the Einsatzkommando could move very fast: in the course of a single day in September, the SD men performed their ‘racial duties’ in four different villages. Roland Headland notes that ‘in no other surviving document do we get as detailed a picture of the steady accumulation of victims’.
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There are a number of studies of the SD Einsatzgruppen, both in German and English. Here I will focus on a somewhat neglected aspect of the reports. One of the tasks of the Special Task Force commanders was to provide information about the ‘Mood and general Conduct’ of civilians and the ‘value’ of local activists. Most of the reports contain paragraphs that provide very revealing insights into the thinking of both the Einsatzgruppe men and the ‘activists’ they encounter. One report, for example, makes the following observation: ‘All experiences confirm the assertion made before that the Soviet state was a state of Jews of the first order.’ For this reason, the report continues: ‘the Jewish problem has become a burning problem [sic] for the Ukrainian people.’ The SD men and many non-Jewish Eastern Europeans shared the same perception that the agents of Soviet rule were Jews – and that the entire edifice of Bolshevism was a ‘Jewish conspiracy’. It was this mythology of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ that would sustain the mass recruitment of non-Germans in the service of the Reich. The chimera of the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ forged a shared ideological language and practice that allowed the Germans to continuously refer to mass murder as ‘spontaneous actions’. In a letter to Special Task Force commanders, Heydrich emphasised that:

The point about ‘political assurances’ makes clear that ‘self-cleansing’ could be a prelude to independence.

Heydrich went on to make a second sometimes overlooked point. He insists that reports must ‘make clear that it was the local population that spontaneously took the first steps against the Jews’. Why? Because ‘it was preferable, that at least at the beginning, the cruel and unusual means, which might upset even German circles, would not be too conspicuous’. In other words, the inciting role of the German murder squads needed to be as covert as possible. In an especially telling aside, Heydrich recommended that the Special Task Force commanders film or photograph any ‘spontaneous pogroms’. This meant that SS propagandists would be able to show the world that Jews and other undesirables had somehow invited their own chastisement at the hands, not of Germans, but of their fellow Lithuanians or Latvians or Ukrainians. The ‘spontaneous’ slaughter of Jews by native executioners became, in a perverse twist, justification for persecution. Since it was Lithuanians who first carried out these slaughters, the victims surely deserved their fate. Germans merely facilitated natural justice.