Hitler's Foreign Executioners (7 page)

Barely noticed by the outside world, on 15 August a few hundred Ukrainians had arrived in Slovakia, a client state of the Reich, to begin training as a Bergbauernhilfe (BBH). Although Hitler was hostile to Ukrainian political demands, Abwehr head Admiral Wilhelm Canaris had been cultivating the Ukrainian nationalist faction (the OUN), and its anti-Semitic leader Andriy Melnyk since the mid-1930s. Although the Nazi-Soviet Pact, signed in August, complicated German relations with the Ukrainians, Canaris pushed ahead with a special training programme, appointing Colonel R. Sushko, a prominent OUN man, to lead the Bergbauernhilfe into action against the Poles. But when the Soviets began their occupation of eastern Poland, Canaris was forced to abandon his plans. Hitler’s Bolshevik allies in Moscow naturally opposed the arming of any anti-Soviet nationalists. The BBH was reclassified as a police unit and took ‘self-defence’ actions against Polish troops as they fled towards the Romanian border. In other words, they murdered them. These Ukrainian recruits were the first of Hitler’s foreign executioners.
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The Polish government, vainly hoping for French and British support, had delayed mobilisation – but in any case, their armed forces, despite putting up tremendous resistance, proved pathetically inadequate in the face of the German blitzkrieg. The astonishingly swift and co-ordinated air and ground attack had shredded Polish communications. Lines of command disintegrated. In just twelve days, German forces overran the western half of Poland, and the Polish government fled Warsaw, as the German armies threw a ring of steel and fire around the city defences.

Hitler followed the Polish campaign with rapt attention. On 3 September, his special headquarters train began steaming east from Berlin’s Stettiner Bahnof. He frequently called for halts so that he and his doting entourage could tour the rapidly advancing front line in motor vehicles. In Danzig, jubilant crowds of ethnic Germans greeted Hitler and his exultant entourage. Then his train steamed on towards the beleaguered Polish capital which was ringed by 175,000 German troops. On 25 September, waves of Luftwaffe bombers and transport planes rained down fire and destruction backed by massive barrages launched from rail-mounted artillery. Exhilarated by this fiery Armageddon, Hitler insisted that the Polish government must surrender unconditionally. On 27 September, Polish forces defending the city capitulated. Hitler’s blitzkrieg had killed 70,000 Polish troops and wounded
130,000. Nearly half a million had been taken prisoner. Tens of thousands of others had fled into Romania and Hungary. Poland had ceased to exist; its territory was occupied by totalitarian forces who would install two destructive but distinct reigns of terror: one animated by race, the other by class.

On 5 October, Hitler boarded a Junkers Ju 52 to fly over Warsaw’s empty and smouldering streets and gloat over the smoking ruins of the hated Polish capital. Five years later, a multinational SS army would finish off the job. Hitler’s war against Poland and its peoples did not end with the destruction of the Polish armed forces. As Wehrmacht divisions smashed the Polish armies, an undeclared shadow war had begun. This shadow war would be waged by Himmler’s paramilitary police, Heydrich’s Special Task Forces and the armed SS-VT. Himmler’s spectacular success in Poland meant that the SS would eventually secure the right to manage the occupation of conquered territory – and to set in motion monstrous plans for the Germanisation of the east. These plans would soon draw in non-German collaborators who would become Hitler’s foreign executioners.

When it came to waging war on the enemies of the Reich, Himmler exploited a strategy that already had a long tradition in German military practice, but would now become the defining principle of SS warfare. In German,
Bandenbekämpfung
literally means the ‘combating of bandits’.
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Although the term predated the Hitler period, Bandenbekämpfung provided a strategic rationale for the systemic slaughter of any group of people deemed to be
banditen
(members of criminal gangs). As we will see, this might include unarmed civilians and Jews and genuine partisan fighters, and their alleged supporters. The term may first have been used during the Thirty Years War but it officially became part of strategic doctrine after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, when German auxiliary troops, later called
Etappen
(from the French word
étape
, meaning stages), fought French resistance fighters known as
francs-tireurs
. But Bandenbekämpfung could embrace a multitude of sins, for it was also used to justify armed responses to acts of civil disobedience, as opposed to attacks by francs-tireurs. In the period after 1871, Bandenbekämpfung would be used to justify attacking rebellious African tribes people in the German colony of Namibia during the Herero Wars and later German communists on the streets of Berlin. It was this slippery classification of the enemy as bandits that appealed so powerfully to Himmler. The Bandenbekämpfung concept permitted the targeting of a broad cast of ethnic and ideological enemies – from armed partisans to unarmed civilians.

In September 1939 the German army was equipped to launch a sledgehammer blow against the Poles. But the Wehrmacht planners had little time to build up Etappen units in significant numbers. This neglect was Himmler’s opening – and he seized it ruthlessly. On 3 September, Hitler formally appointed his SS chief to take charge of ‘law and order matters’ behind the front line, the so-called ‘Army Rear Area’. We can be certain that Himmler was expecting to receive such an order, for on the very same day, SD Chief Heydrich issued a policy document, ‘Basic principles for Maintaining Internal Security during the War’, which listed potential targets to be eliminated ‘through ruthless action’.
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Himmler issued secret orders to Special Task Force commanders, sanctioning execution of insurgents ‘on the spot’, and the taking of civilian hostages. This order signalled that SS security forces would fight according to the doctrines of Bandenbekämpfung, which would have a profound and deadly impact on both Wehrmacht and SS tactics.
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Anti-bandit ‘actions’ legitimated the murder of targeted non-combatants by both Wehrmacht soldiers and SS police. While it is, of course, true that Polish franc-tireurs harassed German forces throughout the Polish campaign, they were not the main targets of Himmler’s Bandenbekämpfung. Instead, the SS exploited internal security needs to liquidate Polish leadership cadres like the intelligentsia, aristocracy and clergy, as well as communist officials and Polish Jews.

In the first weeks of the war, some of the worst atrocities took place in the town of Bydgoszcz (German Bromberg) in the Polish Corridor.
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This region of Poland was ethnically very mixed, and in Bydgoszcz a local ethnic German militia clashed with retreating Polish troops. Attacks on ethnic Germans invariably provided an excuse for indiscriminate reprisals – backed by anti-Polish campaigns in the German press that referred to ‘Bromberg Bloody Sunday’ and grossly inflated ethnic German casualties. Once Brigadier General Eccard Freiherr von Gablenz had formally occupied the city on 5 September, SS police arrived and began rounding up thousands of Poles, mainly teachers, civil servants, lawyers and other members of the city’s professional elite. Hundreds were executed in artillery barracks and in the old market square. When SS officer Lothar Beutel reported to Berlin that more attacks on ethnic Germans had taken place, an enraged Hitler demanded full-scale reprisals. Between 9 and 10 September, Einsatzgruppe IV and SS police (6th Motorised Police Battalion) carried out sweeps, aided by ethnic German informers, in the Schwedenhöhe district where Polish units had made their last stand. The commander of ‘Aktion Schwedenhöhe’, Helmut Bischoff, demanded that his police show that ‘they were men’; they must be ‘tough and harsh’. Most complied. Even unarmed Poles who ‘looked suspicious’ were shot dead. By the end of Aktion Schwedenhöhe, SS police and German soldiers killed at least 1,000 Poles,‘priests,
teachers, civil servants, rail operators, postal officers, and small business owners’, as well fifty students attending the Copernicus Gymnasium. Himmler and the SS consistently referred to victims as
Banditen
– opportunist killers who, as ‘criminals’, deserved no mercy. The victims of Aktion Schwedenhöhe were nothing of the sort. The figure of the bandit would provide the mendacious rationale for the genocidal murder of targeted ethnic elites.

In 1939 the main target was the Polish elite, but the SS police battalions rarely hesitated to humiliate and attack Polish Jews. In many towns, SS commanders set up sentry posts outside synagogues to terrorise Jewish neighbourhoods. The SS men humiliated and dishonoured Jews by cutting their hair and shaving their beards; they forced them to clean streets and sidewalks with toothbrushes. These SS ‘ordinary men’ relished such tasks; they gloated about meting out rough justice to ‘Jewish vermin’. These humiliations proved, naturally, to be a prelude to murder. In Bydgoszcz, for example, the SS had liquidated the entire Jewish population of the city by November. Walther von Keudell, a former district president of Königsberg, commended the SS police for the ‘energetic use of their weapons’, their ‘courage and common sense’.

The bloody climax of the SS police campaign in Poland engulfed the town of Ostrów Mazowiecka on 11 November. Two days earlier, precisely one year after Kristallnacht, a fire broke out in the centre of town – and ‘Jewish arsonists’ were blamed. As punishment, the local Nazi leader (Kreisleiter) ordered a group of Jews to operate a water pump and enlisted German soldiers to beat the Jews as they worked. The following day Police Battalion 11 gathered all the Jews of the town together and officers convened a kangaroo ‘police court’.
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In the meantime, SS police reinforcements arrived from Warsaw. The court pronounced the Jews guilty of arson – and on the morning of 11 November, PB 11 escorted
all
the Jews of Ostrów Mazowiecka to an execution site in a nearby wood; ditches had been dug the day before. As they herded the men, women and children in groups of ten to the edges of the ditch, officers from the Warsaw police battalions ordered their men to open fire. To begin with, a few hesitated. But a kind of terrible momentum quickly built up, and SS men began firing spontaneously; no further orders needed to be given. A few SS men baulked when they saw Jewish children being led to the execution pit. But one of the officers shouted that Jews had tried to assassinate Hitler a few days earlier in Munich; after this, shooting resumed. In Ostrów Mazowiecka, SS policemen slaughtered 156 Jewish men and 208 women and children.

In the wake of Daluege’s Order Police Battalions (Orpo) came Heydrich’s SpecialTask Forces – the elite killers of Himmler’s security militias. To lead these Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units, the Einsatzkommandos, Heydrich and his
recruitment chief Werner Best had turned to a cadre of elite SS officers. Best especially favoured an older generation, born in Silesia, who had ‘won their bones’ fighting with German Freikorps against the Poles after Germany’s defeat in 1918 and had ever since cultivated violent anti-Polish sentiments. During the Weimar period, many of the younger SD recruits had absorbed radical nationalist and anti-Semitic doctrines at German universities. These German students, organised in reactionary fraternities, the
Burschenschaften
, had become Hitler’s most fanatical backers and, after 1933, were generously rewarded. Membership of Himmler’s SS provided a fast track for academic careerists. In universities, the new power brokers expelled Jewish professors and impatient young
Doktoren
gratefully occupied their vacated positions. Outside the universities, SS agencies like the Race and Settlement Office, the RuSHA, and SS
-
Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage, a think tank that investigated German prehistory and related topics) took on many of Germany’s best and brightest. The Nazi seizure of power was a young man’s revolution and the sclerotic German armed forces had already been thoroughly radicalised by this ‘NSDAP generation’.

This meant that the men Heydrich recruited to lead the Einsatzgruppen were not thuggish brutes by any means. But the kind of education they had received in the Weimar period appears to have reinforced bigotry rather than encouraged genuine critical thinking. One SD recruit, Friedrich Polte, who attended a number of universities, wrote an autobiographical sketch when he gave up his doctorate and joined up. He described his academic studies as a ‘revolutionary mission’ that would expose the factual evidence of ‘international conspiracies’.
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In 1939, of the twenty-five Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommando leaders, fifteen had acquired the prestigious
Doktortitel
.
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For example, Dr Alfred Hasselberg, Dr Ludwing Hahn, Dr Karl Brunner and Dr Bruno Müller had all studied law, and like many German lawyers had rushed to join the NSDAP bandwagon in 1933, eager to become the judicial vanguard of the New Order. For this highly politicised elite, membership of the SS or SD was highly seductive – and useful. Lawyers and other professionals soon dominated the higher ranks of the German police. Himmler’s
Doktoren
, as meticulous as they were dedicated, would play a deadly role in the Nazi genocide. Their fanatical commitment to mass murder, in the words of historian Joshua Rubenstein,‘staggers the imagination’.
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