Hitler's Foreign Executioners (70 page)

Now the Reich would be defended by old men, boys of the Hitler Youth and the last relics of Himmler’s foreign legions. Many SS veterans have had nearly seventy
years to rehearse their story and prepare their defence. But one French volunteer who survived the last days of the Reich, ‘Pierre’, tells his story with unvarnished rawness. For many decades after the liberation of France, Pierre naturally chose to remain silent about his service in the French Waffen-SS. But since his retirement, he has sought out other veterans; now, he says, they have little to lose by openly discussing their experiences. They do not discuss ideology and share a robust contempt for the patrician Christian de la Mazière, the SS ‘Charlemagne’ volunteer who made a highly publicised confession in the celebrated French documentary about wartime collaboration,
The Sorrow and the Pity
. Born into a lower middle-class Parisian family in 1920, Pierre attended mainly Catholic schools. The Catholic Church had always maintained close bonds with the anti-Semitic right. In the bitter aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, the Catholic founder of the Ligue antisémitique de France, writer and journalist Édouard Drumont (1844–1917) accused Jewish bankers and speculators of destroying the traditions of French Christianity. Voltaire had denounced Jews as wicked relics of antiquity, but for Drumont they were heralds of a corrosive modernity. His vitriol spilled into the pages of the Catholic newspaper
La Croix
, which persisted smearing the name of Alfred Dreyfus long after he had been exonerated. When Pierre turned 14, he joined the French Blueshirts (Mouvement Françiste), founded by another poison-tongued hack, Marcel Bucard. He says that he was inspired to join by one of his school teachers, who had taught him a ‘profound anti Bolshevism: a real threat to western civilisation’. Bucard banned Jews and Freemasons from joining the Blueshirts and his party was generously supported by the reactionary perfume magnate François Coty, as well as the Abwehr. In common with many young radicals in the 1930s, Pierre revered Adolf Hitler and was thrilled by his rise to power. Then in 1939, came the shattering news that the Germans had done a deal with the hated Bolsheviks. Pierre explains: ‘The German-Soviet friendship treaty which led to the occupation of Poland by the Germans and the Bolsheviks was a big disappointment to me: at least, it led me to join the [French] army without any ulterior motive and with a free mind.’

Pierre was 18 when he joined up. In May 1940, as the German advance pushed his unit back across Belgium, he was captured along with six other French soldiers by an infantry convoy of the German 7th Panzer Division. Pierre points out that ‘the six of us represented three different regiments – so you will have an idea of the chaotic circumstances following our retreat from Belgium’. The Germans herded their prisoners into trucks:

Pierre was taken to the POW camp Stalag VIIIC, close to Sagan in Upper Silesia. It was here, at evening roll call on 22 June 1940, that he heard the stunning news that the French had signed an armistice at the railway siding in the Compiègne Forest, where the Germans had formally capitulated in 1918:

As Pierre’s comrades struggled to adjust to life behind barbed wire, many had difficulty coming to terms with the shame of the French surrender. Pierre shared their humiliation. Like other young Frenchmen, he had a ready explanation for the catastrophe. France had been brought to her knees by ‘certain dark forces’. The French Prime Minister Léon Blum had led France to defeat. And no wonder: Blum was a Jew! He called himself a ‘socialist’ but the truth was he was a ‘Bolshevik’ and in league with the Russians. Since the Nazi-Soviet Pact remained in force when Hitler invaded Scandinavia and Western Europe, Pierre reconciled taking up arms against Germany with his fierce hatred of Bolshevism. But, he went on: ‘The German attack on Russia in 1941 made me once again change my frame of mind. Without participating, I had become an “interested spectator”.’

Pierre was released from Stalag VIIIC a year later. Back in German-occupied Paris, he was dismayed to find out that he was now liable for compulsory labour service (RAD) in a French factory, manufacturing goods for Germany. He hated the idea of working in a German factory. So he volunteered to join the Todt Organisation, the paramilitary engineering corps, as a Fremdarbeiter in OT-Einsatzgruppe West, becoming, in effect, ‘a military worker in uniform’. At the Todt ‘Information School’, Pierre trained as a telephone operator and, not for the first time, swore an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. The oath marked a ‘definite break’, he says, ‘between yesterday and tomorrow’. Pierre won’t say much about his time in the Todt Organisation (‘boring’), but at the beginning of 1944, he made a decision to ‘take up arms for the Reich’ and in May began training with the Waffen-SS at a camp in Duisberg. Did he not realise that Germany was headed for defeat? ‘We had hope,’ he says, ‘we had heard about the new wonder weapons. And besides, we hated the Bolsheviks.’

Pierre admits that SS training included ‘lessons in political theory’ but ‘Infantry School comprised combat, marches, ‘aiming at targets’, singing led by marvellous instructor sergeants, all bearers of the insignia of combat of their speciality and the Iron Cross Second Class. The comparison with the French army, he says, was not to the latter’s advantage! Once a week the officers took their meals at the same table as the men of their troop who were encouraged to talk freely and ask questions. ‘Unthinkable in France!’ Pierre had hoped to be assigned to the Kriegsmarine, the German navy, but in the last summer of the war the Waffen-SS needed not sailors but soldiers on the Eastern Front. Pierre ended up on a troop train to Greifenberg in Pomerania, where he joined the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolshevisme (LVF), formed in 1941 by French rightists like Bucard, Marcel Déat, Jacques Doriot and others. He was not happy: ‘Many of us were bitter and disappointed to find ourselves again under French orders. To calm us down we were sent into the neighbouring villages to dig potatoes!’ The LVF was in any case a spent force. Sent into action near Moscow at the end of 1941, the legion had been virtually annihilated. The French volunteers would never completely recover. In September, as Pierre was digging up Pomeranian potatoes, Himmler transferred all French nationals serving the Reich in the Waffen-SS, the Wehrmacht and the Todt Organisation to a new SS division: the Waffen-Grenadier-Brigade der SS ‘Charlemagne’ (französische No 1).
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By now Pierre spoke excellent German, and at the beginning of 1945 received promotion to Rottenführer (sergeant) and ‘translator to the High Command’. Pierre sums up the mood of the French SS men laconically: ‘We did not think about whether the war was going to be won or lost, nor did we make any prognosis; our role, the role of every soldier, was to obey … Without getting our hopes too high, we knew that Germany was always good for a surprise.’ In other words, he had every expectation that one of the powerful new ‘Wunderwaffen’ would soon be deployed.

The SS ‘Charlemagne’, commanded by Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg, was, as Pierre soon discovered, undermanned and poorly equipped. With just over 7,000 recruits, the ‘Charlemagne’ would never reach divisional strength. In September, the French SS men joined Himmler’s defence of Pomerania, and in the savage battles as the German armies fell back through East Prussia and Pomerania, the French suffered catastrophic losses. A ‘Charlemagne’ veteran, who transferred from the French ‘Milice’, remembered that ‘We marched all night. During the day we hid in the woods. We tried to eat in abandoned farms. Russian and Polish cavalry hunted us down … We went through Stettin, in flames … still on foot still pursued.’
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According to the memoirs of Felix Kersten, Himmler exalted in bloodshed: he proudly informed Kersten that of the 6,000 Danes, 10,000 Norwegians,
75,000 Dutch, 25,000 Flemings, 15,000 Walloons and 22,000 French serving in the Waffen-SS, 1 in 3 had been killed in action. Losses among eastern volunteers from the Baltic and Ukraine had been even more impressive.
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His sanguineous joy was driven by a perverted logic. For him, the catastrophe that engulfed the foreign volunteers had a different kind of significance. This was the blood sacrifice that would bind together the future ‘Germanised’ citizens of ‘SS Europa’. It was a kind of Spartan folly that in death lay rebirth. Himmler had often spoken of ‘harvesting Germanic blood’ wherever it might be found. Now that harvest would be winnowed in the savage winds of war.

A long way from the slaughter, Himmler took refuge inside the Hohenlychen clinic, which was protected from aerial attack by two big red crosses painted on its roof. He was already in disgrace. At the end of the previous year, on 26 November, Hitler had rewarded Himmler, whom we should recall was both SS chief and the Minister of the Interior, by making him commander-in-chief of the Army Group Upper Rhine (Heeresgruppe Oberrhein).
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According to the memoirs of Himmler’s masseur, Felix Kersten, Himmler vowed to drive the Allies into the sea. But the new Supreme Commander had seen little real military action – and Hitler’s appointment provoked a predictable response from Wehrmacht commanders like Guderian: ‘Then whom do we get? Hitler appointed Himmler! Of all people – Himmler!’
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When the Heeresgruppe Oberrhein was humiliatingly swatted aside by advancing American forces, Hitler recalled Himmler from his ‘watch on the Rhine’ and ordered him to rebuild the shattered 2nd and 9th Armies in North Prussia as a new Army Group Vistula (Heeresgruppe Weichsel). This second and, as it turned out, last promotion was, it would seem, a calculated slap in the faces of allegedly defeatist and treacherous Wehrmacht commanders.

Hitler’s appointment led not only to military disaster, but to a humanitarian catastrophe as well. As the Soviet forces raced pell-mell towards the Oder, tens of thousands of German civilians fled west before them, desperately hoping to reach safe havens inside Germany. At the end of January, Himmler halted his headquarters train at Deutsche Krone in western Pomerania (now Wałcz in the west of Poland) and summoned the local Gauleiter Franz Schwede-Coburg. Shortly afterwards, Himmler issued orders that no German citizens would be permitted to leave East Pomerania. As loyal citizens of the Reich they must stand firm. On 4 March, Soviet tanks reached Kolberg and cut off close to a million and a half refugees, compelling them to flee north to the Baltic ports where they sought to escape by sea. The tragic consequences are, of course, well known: Soviet submarines torpedoed grossly crowded refugee ships, including the
Wilhelm Gustloff
, with dreadful loss of life. The role played by SS Chief Himmler and the grotesque mismanagement of the German administrators has been conveniently forgotten.

It was said by Waffen-SS General Felix Steiner that Himmler’s ‘notions of military affairs were devoid of any real solidity … the most junior lieutenant could put him right’. His evaluation chimes with other eyewitness accounts – most notably, the diaries of Colonel Hans-Georg Eismann, who left a damning portrait of Himmler as military commander.
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His handshake, Eismann recalled, was soft and feminine; his eyes had a distinctly ‘Mongolian look’. Himmler was much preoccupied with health matters and petty obsessions dominated his daily routine, which had little to do with strategic necessity. He worked for an hour before lunch then retired for a siesta until mid-afternoon, then resumed work until 6.30 p.m. Himmler appeared to be exhausted, and unfocused. As a military commander, Eismann concluded, Himmler was like a ‘blind man talking about colour’. But it did not take a military genius to see just how dire was the plight of Himmler’s forces. Like the Wehrmacht commanders to whom he reported, it suited Eismann to point the finger at Himmler, but the harsh reality was that the Soviet tide could no longer be turned back. On 15 March, Zhukov launched a fresh offensive that took Himmler, and indeed the rest of the despised General Staff, completely by surprise, and smashed the surviving German forces in Pomerania. On the 19th, Soviet forces broke through to the Oder, south of Altdamm, and a despairing General Hasso von Manteuffel presented Hitler with an ultimatum: ‘Either withdraw everyone to safety on the west bank of the Oder overnight or lose the whole lot tomorrow.’
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For once, Hitler took a general’s advice – and the German forces pulled back across the Oder, and destroyed the main bridges.

Himmler had by then been forced to relocate his headquarters to a villa, 80 miles north of Berlin and conveniently close to the SS clinic at Hohenlychen. It was here that Himmler had, probably through the intercession of Kersten, begun to plan secret meetings with the head of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte, to hammer out a deal with the Allies, though he continued to insist that he could not contemplate ‘betraying Hitler’. Count Bernadotte had a single objective: to secure prisoner releases; he had no illusions that the Allies would ever contemplate a deal with the ‘hangman of the Reich’.
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Hitler had no idea that Himmler was contemplating such treachery. But the SS chief’s days of military glory were coming swiftly to an end. On 7 March, Himmler suffered a severe attack of angina. Dr Karl Gebhardt (who was responsible for some of the most gruesome medical experiments conducted in the SS camps) had him admitted to Hohenlychen as a patient. In Berlin, a whispering campaign accused Himmler of seeking personal military glory and leading his army group to disaster. Locked away in his subterranean fortress, Hitler finally turned against the man he had long believed to be his most loyal paladin. According to Goebbels’ diary entry for 11 March, Hitler raged
that Himmler was guilty of ‘flat disobedience’. On 15 March, a shamed Himmler was driven to the Chancellery to confront the apoplectic Hitler and received, head bowed, a ‘severe dressing down’.
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Humiliated, Himmler slunk back to his sick bed at Hohenlychen, and, after a visit from Guderian, surrendered his command of the Army Group Vistula. Hitler replaced him with the rather more competent General Gotthard Heinrici.