Hitler's Hangman (47 page)

political commissars, were to be kil ed on the spot.46 Unlike in the case of

Western Europe, Himmler would now be ‘granted special responsibilities

on behalf of the Führer’ in the rear area of the army where the SS would act

‘independently’ and on its ‘own responsibility’. In this way, the Wehrmacht

leadership believed it could keep its distance from the mass murders that

were expected to occur on an even larger scale than had been the case in

Poland.47

Negotiations between Heydrich and the General Quartermaster of the

army, Eduard Wagner, about the exact nature of SS and Wehrmacht

collaboration in the forthcoming campaign against the Soviet Union

began in February 1941 and intensified in mid-March when Heydrich

returned from a brief holiday on the Baltic coast. The atmosphere was far

more cordial than during their previous discussions in the lead-up to the

Polish campaign of 1939. The draft agreement of late March 1941 speci-

fied that the ‘implementation of certain security policy tasks’ required the

‘deployment of special commandos of the Security Police’ in the opera-

tional area.48

The exact task of these special units was only vaguely described: in the

rear operational areas near the front, the task forces would be in charge of

the ‘identification and combating of subversive activities against the

Reich’. The
Einsatzkommandos
were to fulfil their tasks ‘on their own

responsibility’, receiving their orders for ‘executive measures against the

civilian population’ directly from Heydrich. At the same time, they were

subject to the army’s authority in all matters of ‘transport, supply and

lodging’. Phrased differently, Heydrich and Wagner had agreed that the

intended mass liquidations of Communist functionaries in the army’s rear

would be the sole responsibility of the
Einsatzgruppen
, which, in turn,

could rely on the Wehrmacht’s logistical support. Close co-operation with

the army was to be ensured through an SS task-force liaison officer on the

staff of each army. The military would be kept informed of all of Heydrich’s

orders and instructions to the
Einsatzgruppen
.49

186

HITLER’S HANGMAN

On the same day, 26 March, Göring asked Heydrich to produce a

brief memorandum for the army, informing them of the ‘dangerous

nature’ of the Soviet Union’s political commissars, secret police and

Jews, so that they would ‘understand who they will be putting up against

the wall’.50

The negotiations between the SS and the army were still under way

when unexpected events occurred in South-eastern Europe. On 27 March

the pro-German Yugoslav government under Dragiša Cvetković was

toppled by a military coup, giving rise to fears in Berlin that the new rulers

in Belgrade would join the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany. Both

the army and the SS leadership hurriedly made preparations for an impro-

vised attack on Yugoslavia. Simultaneously, Hitler decided to invade

Greece, which was already at war with Germany’s ally, Italy, and had

successfully resisted the Italian advance with the aid of its British ally. On

6 April the Wehrmacht marched into Yugoslavia, which capitulated less

than two weeks later. Greece was occupied by German troops by the end

of April. Heydrich hastily requested Himmler’s permission to join the

advancing armed forces and briefly participated in the attack as a fighter

pilot, but the swiftness of the German victory prevented him from having

any major involvement in combat.51

Two
Einsatzgruppen
of the Security Police and the SD followed the

advancing German troops into the Balkans – one in Yugoslavia, the other

in Greece. The question of what role Heydrich’s Security Police and SD

should play in this improvised war was handled pragmatically on the basis

of the draft agreement that Heydrich and Wagner had worked out in late

March, although with one small but highly significant modification: the

list of persons whom Heydrich’s men were to arrest included not only

‘emigrés, saboteurs and terrorists’, but also the far less delimited group of

‘Communists and Jews’. From Heydrich’s point of view, the deployment

of SS
Einsatzgruppen
in the Balkan campaign was a major improvement

when compared to the setbacks experienced the previous year during the

occupation of Denmark, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.52

On 16 April, one day before the surrender of Yugoslavia, Heydrich and

Himmler met with Wagner in a hotel room in the Austrian city of Graz.

On the basis of the draft of 26 March, they reached final agreement on a

‘regulation of the deployment of the Security Police and the SD within

the framework of the army’ for the impending war against the Soviet

Union. Although ‘Communists and Jews’ were not expressly mentioned in

the final document, all of the participants in the meeting were fully aware

would be the main target of the conflict ahead.53

Heydrich had not waited for the conclusion of this agreement to start

his own preparations for the war against the Soviet Union. Throughout

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

187

March, he and his chief of personnel, Bruno Streckenbach, selected

leading officers for the originally envisaged three
Einsatzgruppen
, each of

which was to follow one army group into the Soviet Union. Eventually, a

fourth task force was added for the Romanian front. Task Force A, led by

Dr Franz Walter Stahlecker, was to follow Army Group North through

the Baltic States. Task Force B, under the command of Arthur Nebe, was

instructed to advance with Army Group Centre through Belorussia and

central Russia all the way to Moscow. Task Forces C and D, under the

command of Dr Dr Otto Rasch and Dr Otto Ohlendorf, were to operate

in the Ukraine, Romania and the Crimea. Each of the task forces was, in

turn, subdivided into two special commandos operating directly behind

the front and two task force commandos operating in their rear. Compared

with the 3 million Wehrmacht soldiers that were about to plunge into

Soviet territory, Heydrich’s
Einsatzgruppen
were almost insignificant in

size: in total, the four task forces numbered only 3,000 to 3,200 men,

composed of members of the SD and the Security Police, and also of

ordinary policemen and members of the Waffen-SS.54

As in previous campaigns, the leadership of the
Einsatzgruppen
was

dominated by highly educated Nazis from Heydrich’s RSHA empire,

most of them under the age of forty. Of the seventeen leading officers of

Einsatzgruppe A, for example, eleven were lawyers, nine of them with

doctoral degrees. Thirteen of the men had been members of the Nazi

Party or one of its affiliated organizations before 1933 and all of them had

been long-standing members of the SS and police apparatus prior to

the outbreak of war in 1939. Whatever their previous postings, many of

the leading officers of the
Einsatzgruppen
had risen through Heydrich’s

SD and presumably impressed him not just because of their widely shared

ideological views on Jews, Bolsheviks and Slavs, but because they exempli-

fied the RSHA’s dominant ethos of energetic ruthlessness, initiative and

activism. Throughout May and early June, those assigned to the task forces

assembled in the border police training schools in Pretzsch and the neigh-

bouring towns of Düben and Bad Schmiedeberg in Saxony where

Heydrich repeatedly visited them before the invasion.55

Himmler and Heydrich met several times in late May and early June to

finalize their preparations for Operation Barbarossa.56 No detailed records

of these meetings have survived, but it is likely that they discussed the

overall SS strategy for the war against the Soviet Union, which was

revealed two days later. On 11 June, Himmler gathered the entire SS

leadership – including Heydrich, Daluege, Wolff and the three designated

higher SS and police leaders for the occupied Soviet territories, Hans-

Adolf Prützmann, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski and Friedrich Jeckeln –

for a four-day conference at the Wewelsburg, a medieval castle near

188

HITLER’S HANGMAN

Paderborn in Westphalia that Himmler wished to develop into the cultural

and spiritual centre of the SS.57

During this meeting, the SS leadership revelled in the forthcoming

possibilities for demographic engineering that would dwarf the experi-

ments of the previous eighteen months. Himmler referred to an estimated

death toll of 30 million people among the populations of Eastern Europe.

His speech reflected the murderous mood that prevailed within the

highest SS leadership in the days and weeks preceding the attack on the

Soviet Union. They were entirely aware that they were about to embark on

a campaign of historically unprecedented and racially motivated extermi-

nation.58

These murderous plans of truly genocidal proportions were by no means

confined to the top echelons of the SS leadership. Five weeks earlier, on 2

May 1941, the state secretaries of various ministries had met with General

Georg Thomas, head of the War Economy and Armaments Office, in

order to discuss the economic preparations for the war against the Soviet

Union. They agreed that the invading Wehrmacht would have to be

supplied with food from within Russia if Germany was to win the war.

Furthermore, agricultural products essential for the provision of the home

front such as oil and grain would have to be shipped back to Germany. ‘In

so doing’, the meeting’s protocol laconically stated, ‘x million people’ in the

conquered Soviet Union ‘will doubtless starve to death’. Three weeks later

the target group of potential victims of the so-called hunger plan was

further specified to include ‘many tens of millions’ of Soviet citizens.59

It is likely, though impossible to prove, that the abstract figure of ‘tens of

mil ions’ of people who would have to die to secure Germany’s victory

entered Himmler’s and Heydrich’s mindset through one of the key figures

present at the May conference: Herbert Backe. Born in 1896 to German

parents in Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, Backe was interned

as an enemy alien in 1914 before moving to Germany at the end of the

Great War. In the 1920s, Backe studied for a diploma (and later a doctorate)

in agriculture, first at the University of Göttingen, then in Hanover. In

his doctoral thesis Backe explained the inevitable decline of Soviet Russia

as a result of racial inferiority and argued that Germany had a natural right

to occupy the uncultivated Slavic lands in the East. Some of Backe’s

published articles caught the attention of Walther Darré, the future

Nazi Minister for Food and Agriculture. He invited Backe to join the

Nazi Party, which he did in 1931. Three years after the Nazis’ seizure

of power, Backe was recommended to Göring, who was looking for an

agriculture expert for his office of the Four-Year Plan, a position

that put Backe in direct competition with his former mentor. Darré. It was

at that time that Heydrich and Backe met. The former was particularly

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

189

impressed with and inspired by Backe’s unreserved radicalism. Heydrich

and Backe became close friends and they frequently met for dinner at

their houses in Berlin.60 Backe had been working on the hunger plan in

his capacity as state secretary in the Reich Food Ministry since the

beginning of 1941 and was also responsible for drafting the so-cal ed

Twelve Commandments for future administrators in the occupied East.

Backe emphasized that ‘we wish not to convert the Russians to National

Socialism but to make them our tools . . . The Russian has stood poverty,

hunger and austerity for centuries. His stomach is flexible; hence no

false pity!’61

Two days after the meeting of the SS leadership at Wewelsburg Castle,

Heydrich briefed the commanding officers of his SS task forces, first at a

conference in Berlin on 17 June and then again at the closing ceremony at

the border police training school in Pretzsch shortly before the German

attack on the Soviet Union. According to the post-war testimonies of several

Einsatzgruppen
members present at these gatherings, Heydrich spoke of a

mission that demanded ‘unprecedented severity’.62 As the commander of

Task Force D, Otto Ohlendorf, recal ed after the war, Heydrich explicitly

ordered that Communist functionaries and Jews, who in Heydrich’s mind

had amalgamated into a single enemy, were to be executed.63

After the meeting in Berlin on 17 June, one of the designated