Hitler's Foreign Executioners (79 page)

40
   Ezergailis, p. 244.

41
   F. Michelson,
I Survived Rumbula
(New York, 1979).

42
   Quoted in Friedländer (2008), p. 262.

8  Western Crusaders

  
1
   Quoted in
The Danish Volunteers in the
Waffen
SS and their Contribution to the Holocaust and the Nazi War of Extermination
by Claus Bundgård Christensen, Niels Bo Poulsen & Peter Scharff Smith. I would like to thank the authors for their assistance with this chapter.

  
2
   NARA, T175, 110/2634766, Berger to Himmler, ‘20,000 Mann-Aktion’.

  
3
   Boog et al., p. 1049.

  
4
   Quoted in Förster, p. 1051. PA Handakten Ritter No 55.

  
5
   BA-MA Wi/I: OKW/WFSST/Abt L (II Org.), No 001331/41, 6 July 1941.

  
6
   BA-MA RH 22/30, ‘Report on the operations of the French Legion and lessons learnt’.

  
7
   Figures from Boog, op. cit.

  
8
   Boog, op. cit., p. 1056.

  
9
   BA MA RH 53–23/49, War diary of training staff, 19 October 1941.

10
   BA-MA RH 26–7/19, Combat Report on the French Legion, 23 December 1941.

11
   IMT, L–221, xxxviii.

12
   NARA T175, 111/2635480, Berger memorandum, ‘Vermerk v. Staf de Clerq’.

13
   Himmler,
Geheinreden
, p. 157.

14
   The definite study is in German: I. Heinemann,
’Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut’: Das Rasse- & Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas
(Göttingen, Wallstein Verlag, 2003).

15
   The Staatsarchiv, Nürnberg holds Heydrich’s correspondence about Steding’s book.

16
    ‘Jacob Burckhardt: Cold War Liberal?’ in
The Journal of Modern History
, Vol. 74, No 3 (September 2002), pp. 538–57.

17
   Himmler,
Die Schutzstaffel …
(1937), p. 31.

18
   See Klemperer,
The Language of the Third Reich
(London, 2000), pp. 162–3.

19
   Herzstein (1982), p. 74. Heinze served under SS leader Franz Alfred Six in the Lebensgebietsmäßige Auswertung (Life Space Evaluation Office).

20
   Heinrich Himmler,
Geheimreden
…, p. 234.

21
   Goldhagen (1997), p. 408

22
   See Christensen et al. (1999), p. 34.

23
   Quoted in Christensen et al. (1999), p. 34.

24
   Harald was arrested on 5 May 1945 and his diary confiscated by his captors. It ended up at the editorial office of
Land og folk
, a Danish communist paper, which suggests that it was somehow acquired by communist resistance fighters. Here the diary gathered dust for close to half a century. When
Land og folk
collapsed in 1990, the diary was offered for sale and was bought by the Danish Museum of Freedom.

25
   Diary, p. 27.

26
   Estes (2005), p. 5.

27
   See Boog et al., pp. 1076ff.

28
   See Christensen et al. (1998).

29
   See Friedlander (1995); Burleigh (1994).

30
   Per Sørensen, letter, 6 February 1942, quoted in Christensen et al., p. 33.

31
   Ibid., p. 334.

32
   Ibid., p. 8.

33
   Interview with *Kaj, 2 May 2007, arranged by Christian Barse.

34
   
De Jeugd die wij vreisden
(Utrecht, 1948).

35
   Estes (2005), Chapter 2, p. 6.

36
   For example, Dr Armand Langermann (veterinarian, Auschwitz), Dr Carl Værnet (SS-Sturmbannführer, SS doctor in Buchenwald) who invented an artificial gland, as a treatment for homosexuality.

37
   Danish National Archives, Rigspolitiet, Centralkartoteket, Bovruparkivet, B.269, cited by Christensen. In March 1947 a British military court tried and sentenced to death a 39-year-old Danish Waffen-SS officer from southern Jutland. This man had commanded the guards at the Wilhelmshaven-Banterweg camp in north-west Germany. In April 1945 he was ordered to evacuate 200 Jewish prisoners to Bergen-Belsen. Transfers of concentration camp prisoners at the end of the war frequently turned into death marches. In this particular case, the majority of prisoners died on the road from exhaustion, malnutrition or gross mistreatment. On arrival at Lüneburg camp, near Bergen-Belsen, the Danish SS man executed the surviving prisoners ‘to avoid spreading typhus’. He personally shot six prisoners. At Wilhelmshaven-Banterweg camp, this particular Danish volunteer had frequently tortured and mistreated inmates.

38
   Christensen, letter collection, No 62, November 1941.

39
   Widely quoted, see Evans (2008), p. 202.

40
   
http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/debatt/article2109354.ece
;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_deportees_from_Norway_during_World_War_II#List_of_Jewish_individuals_deported_from_Norway

41
   See Kott (2009), pp. 141ff.; and Embling (2009). The influential German race scientist Hans F.K. Günther idealised Norway and Norwegians. He married a Norwegian and spent some time in Skien conducting ‘research’. He argued that Norwegians had conserved their pure Nordic blood because they had been isolated from the rest of Europe. He claimed that Norwegian peasants physically resembled the old German nobility: ‘give them a people to conquer and they soon will show their inborn capacity for domination.’

42
   See R. Klein, ‘Das Polizei-Gebirgsjäger-Regiment 18: Massaker, Deportation, Traditionsplege’, in
Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 55
(2007).

9  The Führer’s Son

  
1
   
http://www.gutenberg-e.org/esk01/frames/feskvid.html
.

  
2
   See Kershaw,
Nemesis
, p. 395ff.

  
3
   Conway (1993), p. 261. I would like to thank Professor Martin Conway for his advice while I was researching this chapter. Nigel Jones generously wrote an account of his visit to Degrelle in 1999.

  
4
   See www.radioislam.org.

  
5
   
Guardian
, Ian Traynor, 17 September 2007; and by the same journalist
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/09/belgium-flanders-wallonia-french-dutch

  
6
   
Der Spiegel
, 19 September 2007.

  
7
   
http://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_pi11qp.htm

  
8
   See Kramer (2007) for a detailed discussion of the Holocaust of Louvain, pp. 6ff.

  
9
   See Degrelle’s own self-pitying account (1941).

10
   Letter from Hitler to Mussolini, in
Documents on German Policy Series D (1937–1945)
, Vol. 9, p. 439.

11
   See Halder,
War Diaries
, 17 May 1940.

12
   See Boog et al.,
Germany and the Second World War
, Vol. 5, pp. 86–8.

13
   Falkenausen had served in Imperial Japan and Ottoman Turkey. He spent most of the 1930s in China, where he was appointed military advisor to Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-Shek.

14
   Gasten (1993), p. 57.

15
   See Mazower (2008), pp. 232–8.

16
   See
Die Verlorene Legion
, p. 8 and another post-war apologia,
La Cohue
, pp. 517ff.

17
   NARA, T–501 Reel 94, fr. 541 Report, September 1941.

18
   Derks (2001), pp. 45ff.

19
   Ibid., p. 233.

20
   See Browning,
The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: a Study of Referat D3 of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940–1943
(New York, 1978).

21
   Goebbels,
Die tagebücher
, Part 2, iv.178.

22
   See J.H. Brinks, ‘Beyond Anne Frank; Dutch (pre)wartime Collaboration with Nazi Germany and its aftermath’, in Alan Stephens & Raphael Walden (eds),
For the Sake of Humanity: Essays in Honour of Clemens Nathan
(Martinus Nijhoff, Leiden, Boston, 2006), pp. 47–62. ‘Among the Dutch authorities, especially among the senior staff of police, there were quite a few who already during the interwar years offered their services to the Nazis. They saw Hitler et al. as the most reliable defence against the “Red peril”. The police commissioner of Amsterdam, Broekhoff, for example, personally reported in 1935 to the
Gestapo
in Berlin that the Dutch Minister of Defence would co-operate in the mutual fight against
“kommunistische und marxistische Umtriebe”
(communist and Marxist machinations). Under the pen-name of “David” Broekhoff took care of the exchange of information through which 250 German “illegals” who had fled to the Netherlands immediately after the occupation in May 1940 were arrested by the
Sicherheitspolizei
. Rotterdam’s then chief commissioner of police, Mr. L. Einthoven, too, figured, together with 17 other Dutch police officers considered to be “
deutschfreundlich
” (pro-German) in a list of names of the
Gestapo
.’

23
   Quoted in Conway, p. 293.

24
   Degrelle,
Discours prononcé à Liége
, pp. 9–11. Quoted in Conway, p. 302.

25
   See H. Möller,
Das NS-Erbe des Auswärtigen Amtes.

26
   In ‘a Legion Wallonne sur le front russe’, in Robert Aron (ed.),
Histoire de Notre Temps
(Librairie Plon, Paris, 1968). Charles d’Ydewalle argued that Fernand Rouleau was the real founder of the legion. Amateur historian Eddy de Bruyne proved that it was Rouleau who first approached the Militärverwaltung to propose the formation of a Walloon Legion while Degrelle hobnobbed with Abetz in Paris. Degrelle engineered the dismissal of Rouleau to aggrandise his own power.

27
   Degrelle (1985), p. 10.

28
   BA-MA, RH 24–4/54, 4th Army Corps, War Diary, 20 December 1941.

29
   Quoted in Estes (2007).

10  The First Eastern SS Legions

  
1
   K. Berkhoff,
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
(spring 2001), pp. 1–32.

  
2
   Tooze (2007), pp. 479ff.

  
3
   Solzhenitsen,
The Gulag Archipelago
, p. 218.

  
4
   Berkhoff (2004), Chapter 4; C. Streit, ‘Soviet Prisoners of War’, in
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust
, Vol. 3 (1990); S.P. Mackenzie, ‘The Treatment of Soviet prisoners of War’, in
Journal of Modern History
, 66, No 3 (1994).

  
5
   The ‘Abel mission’ is discussed in letters from Wolfram Sievers, the head of the SS-Ahnenerbe to Himmler, 22.5.43; Josef Grohmann,
Zu den anthropologischen Untersuchungen in russischen Gefangenenlagerns
(1943); Heinemann, pp. 532ff.; and Kater (1974), pp. 208–11.

  
6
   Abel’s work in the hellish German POW camps inspired other SS anthropological projects. In 1942, an unsigned letter proposed that the SS-Ahnenerbe begin collecting the skulls of ‘Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars’. The following year, Dr Bruno Beger, with the approval of Adolf Eichmann, travelled to Auschwitz where he carried out measurements of a group of Jewish and ‘Asiatic’ prisoners. The SS transferred the prisoners to another camp near Strasbourg where they were gassed and then dismembered. Their remains ended up in the anatomy department of the University of Strasbourg.

  
7
   
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/spiegelspecial/d-39863530.html

  
8
   
http://www.antisemitism.org.il/

  
9
   
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/estonia/3965268/Russians-protest-at-Estonia-SS-calendar.html

10
   
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/europe/estonia-accused-of-antisemitism-after-memorial-is-erected-to-ss-executioner-564715.html

11
   Information released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (2004): ‘The 658th Eastern battalion under the command of A. Rebane conducted punitive operations against civilians near the town of Kingisepp and the village of Kerstovo (the Leningrad region), committed brutal murders and burnt down the whole villages (Babino, Habalovo, Cigirinka, etc.) to intimidate the partisans. As evidenced by the witnesses and participants in these punitive operations, A. Rebane’s unit caught five or six Soviet partisans in the village of Cigirinka in November 1942. In the course of this operation the village was burnt to the ground and three villagers died (РГВА. Φ.451IΠ. OΠ.5 Д.149. Л.144–145).’

12
   Ezergailis (1996), pp. 194–5.

13
   Birn (2001), pp. 182ff.

14
   Trials of War Criminals, NMT, Green Series, v. 4. Sandberger was mounting a legal case that he was ‘following orders’.