Hitler's Hangman (37 page)

lation, informing Heydrich personally of the ‘progress’ of their work

through daily reports. The conquest of Poland, widely perceived by the

Nazis as a racially inferior country, significantly expanded conceptions of

what was possible and permissible. The SS-engineered terror unleashed in

the first days of the invasion far exceeded Heydrich’s previous campaigns

of violence, persecution and discrimination in the Reich itself after 1933

and in Austria, Bohemia and Moravia after 1938.2

The task forces in Poland liberally interpreted their brief to eliminate

the ‘enemies of the state’ behind German lines, and to shoot ‘hostages’ or

‘partisans’ in retaliation for any sign of hostility towards the invaders. SS

units rounded up politically undesirable Poles, professionals and intelli-

gentsia, either shooting them on the spot or putting them in concentra-

tion camps, and thus following Heydrich’s insistence that a comprehensive

strike against Poland’s broadly defined elites should be carried out swiftly

and be completed by the beginning of November.3

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Polish atrocities against ethnic Germans offered a welcome pretext for

SS retaliation. In the first week of the war, Polish soldiers and civilians,

reacting to real or alleged cases of sabotage by the German minority,

arrested some 10,000–15,000 ethnic Germans and force-marched them

eastwards. Attacked by Polish neighbours and soldiers, between 4,500 and

6,000 ethnic German civilians were killed during the first days of the

campaign, some as a result of maltreatment during the forced marches,

others through mass shootings by regular Polish troops.4

Rumours of ethnic German civilian snipers firing on retreating Polish

troops also exacerbated an already tense atmosphere. Simultaneously, an

almost neurotic fear of partisans or ‘Francs-Tireurs’ operating in the rear

of the rapidly advancing German troops, coupled with widely held anti-

Polish sentiments, spread among the army leadership, creating a climate

in which harsh ‘policing actions’ seemed not only acceptable but desirable.

‘A difficult battle with [Polish] insurgents has erupted,’ the army’s General

Quartermaster, Eduard Wagner, noted as early as 3 September, empha-

sizing that this form of resistance ‘can be broken only through the use of

draconian measures’. Three days later, both Wagner and the Chief of the

General Staff, Franz Halder, demanded an increase of special police forces

for the army’s rear to combat partisans.5

The general atmosphere of nervousness and fear worked in the SS leader-

ship’s favour. When, on 3 September, two days after the beginning of the

German invasion, more than one hundred local ethnic German Poles were

murdered and mutilated in the Pomeranian city of Bromberg (Bydgoszcz),

Heydrich and Himmler recognized the massacre as a welcome opportunity

for an intensification of their activities. Not only did the atrocities against

German civilians in Bromberg seem to justify violent transgressions by the

Einsatzgruppen
, but, in Heydrich’s and Himmler’s view, they also cal ed for

an extension of the task forces’ ‘anti-partisan’ mission, as outlined in the

agreement between the army and the SS prior to the outbreak of war, as well

as for greater autonomy from a Wehrmacht leadership al egedly unable or

unwil ing to ‘pacify’ the rearward areas of newly occupied Poland.6

On the very day of ‘Bromberg’s Bloody Sunday’, Himmler authorized

the formation of an additional
Einsatzgruppe
, the ‘Special Purpose task

force’ under the command of Udo von Woyrsch – a notoriously radical

member of the Lower Silesian nobility – to ‘safeguard’ Upper Silesia’s

industrial areas, and issued his infamous order to ‘radically suppress’ the

‘uprising’ with ‘all means available’, calling for all ‘insurgents’ to be ‘shot on

the spot’ without trial. One week later, on 10 September, Himmler

ordered
Einsatzgruppe
IV to arrest 500 Polish hostages in Bromberg, pref-

erably intellectuals and Communists, who were to be ‘ruthlessly shot at

the slightest sign of upheaval or resistance attempts’.7

E x P E R I M E N T S W I T H M A S S M U R D E R

143

In order to make sure that their men were fulfilling their tasks as

intended, Himmler and Heydrich embarked on an inspection tour of the

task forces in western Poland between 3 and 13 September, leaving Werner

Best to take over Heydrich’s responsibilities as head of the Security Police

during his absence.8 Their presence had a distinctly radicalizing effect on

the task forces. On 11 September, Heydrich met two of his
Einsatzgruppen

commanders, Bruno Streckenbach and Udo von Woyrsch, in the recently

conquered city of Kraków (Krakau). Heydrich reiterated that the harshest

possible measures were to be taken against insurgents. Jews in particular

were to be ‘induced’ to flee across the German–Soviet demarcation line.

Woyrsch was well qualified to carry out this task, having overseen some of

the worst anti-Jewish massacres of the Polish campaign over the previous

days when his task force embarked on a killing spree in East Upper Silesia,

resulting in the death of some 500 Jews in Katowice (Kattowitz), Będzin

(Bendzin) and Sosnowiec (Sasnowitz). As a direct result of the meeting

with Heydrich in Kraków, Woyrsch’s task force doubled its efforts to

terrorize the Jewish population into flight, burning a group of Jews alive in

a synagogue in Dynów and carrying out mass shootings in a variety of

locations across the countryside.9

Although Hitler had indicated to his most senior generals, Walther von

Brauchitsch and Willhelm Keitel, that his plans called for the ‘physical

annihilation’ of Poland’s intellectual, social and political elites, the army

commanders in the field were given no explicit instructions regarding

Hitler’s mandate for shootings and expulsions. Over the first weeks of the

Polish campaign, Himmler and Heydrich consciously left the army lead-

ership in the dark about the ‘extraordinarily radical’ order they had

received from Hitler, and in so doing they proved their loyalty to the

Führer. Even if they were ‘wrongly’ accused by the army of committing

‘random’ and ‘brutal’ acts of violence – so Heydrich explained in a letter to

the head of the Order Police, Kurt Daluege – they were willing to accept

sole responsibility for these acts, thus protecting Hitler from any criticism

for authorizing atrocities.10

Yet while a great number of army leaders, concerned by what they

considered serious lapses in military discipline, frowned upon the violent

excesses of the SS and some even sought to have men like Udo von

Woyrsch court-martialled, the initial response to Heydrich’s harsh ‘policing

actions’ was not uniformly negative: many junior military commanders on

the ground actively supported the SS’s cleansing campaign. In the days

that followed the massacre of ethnic Germans in Bromberg, for example,

the army turned over 500 prisoners to the SS for execution, and a sweep

of one of the neighbourhoods of the city netted another 900 prisoners, of

whom 120 were immediately shot in nearby woods and fields. In addition,

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

fifty pupils from a local school were executed after one of them fired

at a German officer, while the army itself shot another fifty civilian

hostages, most of them priests, teachers or civil servants. In all, it is esti-

mated that at least 1,300 Polish civilians were killed in Bromberg between

5 and 12 September by members of Einsatzgruppe IV, with as many as

5,000 deaths estimated in the wider region.11

German atrocities were by no means confined to Bromberg and were

not only carried out by the
Einsatzgruppen
. Ordinary army units, military

police and ethnic German militias were also involved. More than 12,000

executions were carried out in September alone, with a further 4,200

taking place in October. At the same time, the
Einsatzgruppen
undertook

more than 10,000 arrests in fulfilment of their assignment to ‘neutralize’

potential anti-German elements of the population. All in all, more than

40,000 Poles fell victim to the mass killings between September and

December 1939.12

In fulfilling their gruesome tasks, the
Einsatzgruppen
were also actively

supported by the so-called
Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz
, a civilian militia

formed in early September and composed of ethnic German Poles.

Having lived under Polish rule for nearly twenty years, many of these

ethnic Germans had been subjected to acts of violence in the weeks

immediately before and after the outbreak of the war. Suddenly thrust

into a position of power and intoxicated by the opportunity to settle old

scores, those who joined the
Selbstschutz
went on a rampage of violence,

killing thousands of Polish civilians, most notably in West Prussia where

ethnic conflict had a long-standing tradition and racial hatred had been

intensified by Nazi agitation in the months leading up to the war. Under

the leadership of Himmler’s personal adjutant, Ludolf von Alvensleben,

the West Prussian
Selbstschutz
soon acquired particular notoriety, killing

more than 4,000 Poles by 5 October.13

Heydrich, always critical of
unsystematic
terror, considered some of the

Selbstschutz’s atrocities ‘impossible’, not so much because of the ethnic

Germans’ ‘understandable’ rage, but because he feared that they were

‘uncontrollable’ and easily exploitable by enemy propaganda. More

specifically, he objected to the widespread theft and plunder that went

hand in hand with the
Selbstschutz’s
activities. In line with his twisted

understanding of decent and indecent behaviour, Heydrich condoned and

even demanded the murder of ‘suspect’ Jews and Poles, but abhorred

crimes committed against property, including the plundering of Jewish-

owned shops. He frequently initiated internal investigations against SS

men suspected of such crimes.14

Heydrich’s attitude to theft warrants further explanation. In his view,

theft – unlike the killing of political enemies – was a crime committed out

E x P E R I M E N T S W I T H M A S S M U R D E R

145

of inferior motives. Furthermore, given that the property of Jewish expel-

lees would be confiscated, that property now no longer belonged to

the Jews but to the German people. In other words: his men were

stealing from their own people and that could not be tolerated under any

circumstances.15

During his inspection tour of south-western Poland, Heydrich was thus

pressing for more systematic and less random cleansing operations,

leading to the targeted but comprehensive liquidation of previously iden-

tified ‘enemy groups’ deemed especially dangerous to pacification. At the

same time, he felt that the conservative army leadership was hindering

that task. On 8 September, in a conversation with the head of military

intelligence, Wilhelm Canaris, his former naval superior, Berlin neighbour

and occasional riding companion, Heydrich complained bitterly about the

army’s lack of understanding regarding the SS enforcement of pressing

‘security measures’ behind the lines. He also expressed his dissatisfaction

over the German military courts’ apparent reluctance to sentence Polish

partisans to death. The 200 executions per day currently enforced by the

military courts were absolutely insufficient, he argued in a fit of anger, and

if he had his way, the time-consuming practice of holding military tribu-

nals for suspects would be abandoned altogether. Enemies of the Reich,

he concluded, should ‘be shot or hanged immediately without trial. We

can show mercy to the common people, but the nobility, the Catholic

clergy and the Jews must be killed.’ As soon as Warsaw was conquered, a

new agreement with the army would have to be reached on ‘how we

should squeeze out all of these elements’.16

Canaris was appalled and reported Heydrich’s comments to Lieutenant

General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, who in turn transmitted the

information to General Halder. Halder already knew about the atrocities

committed by Heydrich’s
Einsatzgruppen
, telling the general staff office

Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth on 9 September that ‘the

butchery of Poles behind the front was intensifying at such a rapid pace

that the army would probably have to take measures against these acts

soon’. Halder admitted that it was Hitler’s and Göring’s intention ‘to

destroy and exterminate the Polish people’. The rest of what Halder told

him, Groscurth noted in his diary, was so horrible it ‘could not be