Hitler's Foreign Executioners (66 page)

On 23 March 1945 Adolf Hitler summoned a group of German army generals to his private apartments in the battered Chancellery in Berlin. He was not happy: ‘We don’t know what all is strolling around out there [sic]. Now I hear for the first time, to my surprise, that a Ukrainian SS Division has suddenly appeared. I didn’t know anything about this Ukrainian SS Division.’ Hitler was just getting started: ‘The Indian Legion are a joke!’ He was referring to a German army infantry regiment, the Indische Freiwilligen-Legion Regiment 950, which had been recruited by the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose in German and Italian POW camps. The legion had been taken over by the Waffen-SS in August 1944. ‘There are Indians who couldn’t kill a louse, who’d rather be eaten themselves. What are they still supposed to be fighting for, anyway?’ Hitler had a good idea who was to blame for this dire state of affairs: ‘Tomorrow I’d like to speak with the Reichsführer [Himmler] right away. He’s in Berlin anyway … We can’t afford the luxury of having units like that.’
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The next day, Himmler was forced to endure a ferocious dressing down. A month later, on 28 April, Hitler was informed that the ‘loyal Heinrich’ had tried to open ‘peace negotiations’ with the Allies through a Swedish intermediary, Count Folke Bernadotte.
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Reuters had put out the story and it had been picked up by the BBC. The news provoked one of the last and most violent of Hitler’s infamous temper tantrums. He sent orders to have Himmler banished from the movement and executed. Two days later Hitler was dead. The order was never carried out.

The excommunication of Heinrich Himmler seemed to be a precipitate fall from grace and power set in motion by his futile attempt to negotiate with the Allies. But Himmler had known for more than a year that Hitler’s game was up. After the failure of the bomb plot in July 1944, the SS and its armies had dominated the Reich. Germany had at last become an SS state. In August, Hitler had chosen the Waffen-SS to destroy Warsaw and snubbed the German army. In Hitler’s court, grandees like Hermann Göring had fallen from grace; Martin Bormann and Propaganda Minister Goebbels were Himmler’s last rivals. In public, Himmler continued to profess absolute loyalty to the Führer. In private he knew that radical changes would need to be made to ensure that his SS empire somehow survived the certain defeat of Germany. Hitler was a broken man – but his hold on power would need to be loosened if the tide of collapse was to be stemmed. In the bitter winter of 1944/45, the old bonds between Hitler and Himmler began to crumble. In Hitler’s mind, the SS chief had let him down once too often. Given command of Army Group Vistula, he had failed and ended up feigning illness in a sanatorium. Above all, he had contaminated the once mighty armies of the Reich with the impure blood of ‘Ukrainians’ and other foreign recruits – and for this he could never be forgiven. To unfold the downfall of Heinrich Himmler we need to return to the summer of 1944, as Waffen-SS recruitment strategy entered its final phase.

The Nazi Reich had been shattered. Germany was under assault from east, west and south. Armadas of Allied bombers battered German cities day and night virtually unopposed by the Luftwaffe. More than 3.5 million German soldiers were missing or dead. On the home front, morale continued to plummet. Hitler had not been seen in public for many months and his voice was rarely heard on German radio. He refused to visit ruined German cities or wounded troops in military hospitals. In every corner of Europe, there was chaos and misery. From the east, great refugee armies fled the relentless advance of Stalin’s armies. In a futile attempt to cover up traces of the worst genocide in human history, SS men drove tens of thousands of camp survivors on death marches back towards the old German borders. Chronic disarray plagued the Nazi elite and the high command of the Wehrmacht. Hitler, drugged on amphetamines and other medications, deluded into fantasies of victory by the promise of new ‘wonder weapons’, spent his waking hours raging at his generals. In the hell of the collapsing Reich two men still prospered. One was Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and now Minister of Armaments, whose ruthless application of ‘total war’ management strategy and ruthless exploitation of slave labourers kept German factories at work. The other was SS chief and Minister of the Interior, Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful member of the Nazi elite. As he scrapped with his Wehrmacht generals, Hitler enjoyed singing the
praises of their hated rivals. The Waffen-SS was, he told lunch companions at the Chancellery, ‘an extraordinary body of men, devoted to an idea, loyal unto death’. But a barely acknowledged tension crackled between the two Nazi leaders. The seeds of Himmler’s downfall had been sown.

By the summer of 1944, just over half the men serving in the Waffen SS were not ‘Aryan Germans’. The bloating of the Waffen-SS had begun in the summer of 1942 and had depended on non-German recruitment. The ‘Nordland’ division alone consisted of Dutchmen, Danes, Norwegians, Flemings, Swedes, Swiss and ethnic Germans. By the summer of 1943, Bosnians, Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians fought in Waffen-SS uniforms. In the summer of 1944, Himmler acquired yet more SS warriors by gobbling up the Wehrmacht Osttruppen divisions recruited in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, as well as the Indian Legion and a shabby bunch of British fascists known as the Britisches Freikorps.

Even as the German armies fell back towards the old borders of the Reich, the lure of Himmler’s elite, black-uniformed
Übermenschen
continued to entice many young men. One late convert was a French idealist who, in June 1944, made his way to the recruiting office of the SS ‘Charlemagne’ division in Paris. His name was Christian de la Mazière.
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In August 1944, Paris was paralysed in torpid ennui. The city baked in a brutal heat wave. Metro stations stood silent and empty; electricity came on only between half past ten and midnight. In theatres and music halls, actors and entertainers performed by candlelight. Noxious odours bubbled up from the slow, murky waters of the Seine. In the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysées, dazed Parisians and a few German officers sipped weak coffee under limp cafe awnings or trotted aimlessly between appointments, waiting for something to happen. From the roof of the old Napoleonic Naval Ministry, now the German Admiralty, a red and black swastika flag still hung. According to one reporter, ‘the city was decomposing’.

In Normandy, the Allied armies had at last ‘forced the lock of the door’ and their supreme commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower had some hard decisions to make. For once, American and British strategists unanimously agreed that the main push should be towards the ‘Siegfried Line’ that defended the old German border. A single American army (the 12th) would be diverted to encircle but not attack Paris. Eisenhower had no desire to get bogged down in a protracted and bloody battle in the ‘City of Light’. But General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the French Free Forces, bitterly opposed this Allied plan to downgrade the French capital. He
had always imagined marching in triumph down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées to the Place de l’Étoile to reclaim France and salvage her reputation. De Gaulle’s relationship with the other Allied powers had never been harmonious. Now his spies had discovered that the French Communist Party planned to strike against the Germans and liberate Paris. This would mean that this proud and reactionary figurehead would be shoved to one side. Whoever liberated Paris would rule France. De Gaulle had to stop the communists at all costs.

In the meantime, Hitler had summoned Major General Dietrich von Choltitz to his Rastenburg headquarters. In the aftermath of the July bomb plot, Hitler was a wreck. After delivering a hysterical attack on the perfidious Prussian officer corps, he appointed the astonished von Choltitz ‘Fortress Commander’ for Paris with orders to punish any civil disobedience. Behind Hitler’s decision to appoint Choltitz was an even more draconian plan. The German general had distinguished himself on the Eastern Front as a practitioner of ‘scorched earth’ tactics. As he retreated, his forces left in their wake a swathe of burned villages, mangled factories and ruined crops. ‘Why should we care if Paris is destroyed?’ asked Hitler – and that, in short, would be Choltitz’s future task.

Paris had once been the most coveted posting for German officers and diplomats. German ambassador Otto Abetz was a noted bon vivant, who had spent many blissful hours at Maxim’s and the Hôtel Bristol consorting with celebrity hangers-on like the actress Arletty and the opium-addicted poet Jean Cocteau. Now in August, with unseemly haste, their German friends had begun to prepare for the end. The 813th Pionierkompanie began setting explosives at key locations: at electrical and water facilities, and beneath the beautiful old bridges that spanned the Seine. German engineering units mined the Palais du Luxembourg, the French Chamber of Deputies, the Foreign Office, telephone exchanges, railway stations and factories. U-boat torpedoes were brought to Paris and positioned in tunnels beneath the city. On 16 August, Hitler ordered Gestapo and civilian administrators to leave Paris and three days later de Gaulle ordered free French forces to begin attacking German positions. The Paris uprising had begun.

Both the British and the Americans blamed Stalin for the tragedy of Warsaw. They had no desire to be held accountable in the eyes of the world if Paris now suffered the same grisly fate. Eisenhower was also aware that the French revolt was fast turning into a civil war waged between the Communist Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), led by Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy (‘General Rol’), and the Free French Gaullists. The Bolshevik spectre stalked the grand boulevards. Allied anxieties worked in de Gaulle’s favour. In any case, General Leclerc (the nom de guerre of Comte Philippe de Hautecloque), the commander of the Allied 2nd Armoured
French Division, had ignored American orders and begun advancing towards Paris. Inside the city, Gaullist Yvon Morandat outflanked General Rol and formed a Cabinet. Faced with a Gaullist coup, Eisenhower had few options left – and at last approved an attack on Paris, unaware that a French one was already underway. German SS men began executing their prisoners; in one Gestapo prison at Mont Valerien they shot 4,500 men. At Rastenburg, Hitler was heard to ask ‘Is Paris burning?’ At his headquarters in the ‘City of Light’, von Choltitz vacillated.

Robert Brasillach, a pro-German fellow traveller, wrote later: ‘You could feel that everything was at an end.’ After five years of docile occupation, astute Parisians began polishing their credentials as résistants. A few well-known ‘collabos’ were summarily shot and some pitiful women who had enjoyed horizontal liaisons with German officers were publicly shaved and shamed. But even as the German occupiers prepared to abandon the city, the French far right was not a spent force. On 21 April, an Allied air raid had badly damaged Sacré Coeur, the church built to atone for the sins of the 1871 Paris Commune, and the Parti Populaire Française (PPF), led by a veteran of the Eastern Front Jacques Doriot, staged a noisy, well-attended rally to protest against Allied barbarism. A star speaker was Léon Degrelle, recently promoted SS-Sturmbannführer and resplendent in black Waffen-SS uniform, displaying an Iron Cross. On 3 May, French fascists gathered en masse in Pére Lachaise cemetery to commemorate the centenary of their prophet, the Catholic anti-Semite Éduard Drumont.

As the flame of revolt sputtered into life all over France, the Germans responded by applying the techniques of Bandenbekämpfung to the Western Front. In western central France, the multinational SS ‘Das Reich’ (Alsatian French nationals served in its ranks) descended on the village of Oradour-sur-Glane and executed male villagers and burned women and children to death in the village church. Even as Himmler’s elite troops turned their weapons on unarmed French civilians, Himmler launched a new recruiting campaign. In Paris, posters declared ‘
La SS t’appelle!
’ and, in the last summer of Hitler’s war, thousands of young Europeans responded to the final SS call to arms.

Despite its grand sounding name, the Waffen-Grenadier-Brigade der SS ‘Charlemagne’ (französische Nr. 1) had been stitched together from an older French SS unit, the 7th Storm Brigade, which had suffered very high losses on the Eastern Front, and the notorious French police, the Milice Française. Commanded by Joseph Darnand, this paramilitary force, set up in 1943 by Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval, had worked closely with the German authorities to root out and deport tens of thousands of French Jews. In July, Himmler had summoned Darnand to Berlin, promoted him to Obersturmführer and put him in charge of forming a
new SS division. It was one of the paradoxes of wartime collaboration that Darnand was instinctually anti-German; but he hated and feared ‘Jewish-Bolsheviks’ a great deal more than the despised ‘Fritzes’. Many of the Frenchmen who answered Darnand’s summons would end their lives defending the Chancellery in Berlin, just a few hundred metres from Hitler’s smouldering corpse.

Christian de la Mazière was a young Gallic volunteer who answered Himmler’s call. Many of his comrades died on battlefields in Pomerania and Berlin – but de la Mazière survived and lived long enough to write a uniquely cogent account of why he volunteered to join the SS ‘Charlemagne’ in the dying days of the Reich. Like so many lives on the far right, Mazière’s opened with an authoritarian and bigoted father. Claude-Nicolas de la Mazière descended from decayed aristocratic stock and, when Christian was born, managed an elite cavalry school in Saumer. Like many born into this embittered and faded class, Claude-Nicolas was Catholic, a patriot and, following French tradition, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite. In the century since the Enlightenment, French Jews had been legally emancipated by Napoleon; some had prospered. This had hardened ancient hatreds especially among relics of the Ancien Régime in rural areas, where Catholic priests still promulgated their ancient libel that Christ had been murdered by the Jews. French anti-Semitism was energised in an even more menacing guise after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the humiliation of the Second French Empire. Many well-known Jewish families had roots, if not relatives, in Germany or Eastern Europe and some used Yiddish at home. To men like Claude-Nicolas de la Mazière, French Jews would never be French enough.
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According to the founder of L’Action Française, Charles Maurras, the public expression of anti-Semitism was a public duty, a matter of ‘patriotic will’. For opportunist politicians, Jews provided useful scapegoats. They could be vilified as conspiratorial agents of international capital or on the other hand as Marxists, red in tooth and claw. In 1894, French anti-Semites found their cause in the trumped up Dreyfus Affair, and a leader in the shape of Charles Maurras. When Dreyfus was finally exonerated, the Jew-hating French far right dreamt of revenge.