Hitler's Hangman (49 page)

the realization of this utopia was to be achieved by using ‘all necessary

measures – shootings, resettlements, etc’. As usual, Hitler did not give

any explicit orders for systematic mass murder, but his fundamental

message was unmistakable: there was no space for Communists, Jews and

other undesirables in the German Garden of Eden. His subordinates,

particularly Himmler and Heydrich, were eager not to disappoint

their Führer.84

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Characteristical y, Hitler remained uncommitted to any concrete vision

for the territories formerly ruled by the Soviet Union, but decided, much to

Himmler’s and Heydrich’s disappointment, that at the end of military

operations in the Soviet Union the occupied territories would be adminis-

tered by civilian authorities under the overal authority of the newly

appointed Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg.

Rosenberg was a Baltic German, born in 1893, who had studied in Moscow

and became head of the Nazi Party’s Foreign Policy Office in 1933. If

Heydrich had hoped that Hitler would give Himmler political control over

the newly occupied territories – thus al owing the SS to co-ordinate

Germanization policies beyond Poland – his hopes were dashed. For the

time being, Hitler limited SS authority to policing matters in the newly

conquered territories. Heydrich was to serve as the liaison between Rosenberg

and the SS, and was thereby, in his own words, ‘responsible to the Reich

Leader SS for political matters in the occupied territories’.85

The potential for future conflict was clear from the start: Rosenberg

wished ultimately to divide the newly occupied territory into four civilian

Reich Commissariats: Ukraine, Ostland (the Nazi term for the territories

comprising the Baltic States and Belorussia), the Caucasus and Russia

proper. Only two of these, the Reich Commissariat Ukraine (under Erich

Koch) and the Reich Commissariat Ostland (under Hinrich Lohse), were

ever created in reality. Heydrich, by contrast, saw the Reich commissioners

as natural rivals and interpreted his policing mission as an inherently

political
task that should be carried out without any interference from

civilian administrators. As he pointed out in a letter to Kurt Daluege, ‘90%

of all matters in the East are of a primarily political nature and therefore

of major interest to my own apparatus.’86 Unsurprisingly, Heydrich

requested in a letter to the chief of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers

that the Sipo be granted the right to issue orders in policing matters to

the civilian administration in the occupied East, a request that immedi-

ately prompted Rosenberg’s sharpest objections.87

Heydrich’s attitude towards Rosenberg’s administrations and the

civilian authorities in the East was partly influenced by his enduring

dislike of the Old Fighters who were appointed to key positions in the

East simply for being long-serving party veterans. Neither Lohse nor the

grossly overweight Erich Koch was exactly what Heydrich considered an

appropriate type for the creation of a new German Garden of Eden. An

additional key figure in the new administration, the Governor of White

Ruthenia (the part of Ostland carved out of pre-1939 Eastern Poland and

Soviet Belorussia) was Wilhelm Kube, another Old Fighter of the Nazi

movement against whom Heydrich had instigated a police investigation

in December 1935, leading to Kube’s conviction for embezzlement and

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

195

his temporary loss of all party functions.88 Vain and corrupt, Kube held a

grudge against Heydrich, and future dealings with him would be very

difficult indeed. Furthermore Rosenberg advocated an anti-Bolshevik

wartime alliance with local Eastern European nationalists, an idea that

Heydrich considered inherently flawed and potentially dangerous. A racial

war could not be won by relying on lesser races, but only by permanently

subduing them.89

Hitler’s refusal to grant Himmler overall political responsibility for the

racial reorganization of the occupied East was yet another bitter setback for

the ambitious SS leadership. However, the lesson Himmler and Heydrich

drew from this defeat was characteristic: instead of scaling down their

ambitions, they decided to unleash a policy of systematic ethnic cleansing

of the former Soviet territories
before
the civilian administrations were

properly installed and not, as originally planned,
after
the defeat of the

Soviet Union.90 It was in this context of increasing radicalism, mixed with

the euphoria of an apparently imminent victory, that Heydrich proposed to

Himmler on 20 October 1941 that Leningrad and Moscow, the two major

‘symbols of Judaeo-Bolshevism’, should be razed to the ground. The most

remarkable thing about this proposition was not its radicalism, but its

privileging of ideological objectives over military necessities.91

If the overall aim of the SS leadership was to unleash an unparalleled

programme of expulsions and exterminations in the former territories of

the Soviet Union, a genocidal onslaught which – according to the esti-

mates discussed at the start of the war – would kill some 30 million former

Soviet subjects, the implementation of such a vast extermination

programme aimed at the entire native population of Eastern Europe

remained utterly utopian in the summer of 1941. It was simply impossible

to raze major Russian cities to the ground, to shoot 30 million people or

to cut off their food supply and let them starve without running the risk

of serious unrest in the affected areas. However, from Heydrich’s point of

view, these concerns did not apply to the much smaller group of Soviet

Jews. As a first step towards the elimination of all alien population

elements in the East, the SS would render entire regions ‘Jew-free’

through a combination of mass executions in the shadow of war and the

ghettoization of those who could still be exploited as forced labourers.

By eliminating the Jews of Soviet Russia
during
the war, Himmler and

Heydrich could demonstrate that they, rather than Rosenberg or any

other civilian or military authorities, possessed the ideological determina-

tion and experience necessary to implement Hitler’s plans for the racial

reordering of Eastern Europe. By putting into effect anti-Jewish policies,

the SS leadership would demonstrate how German rule in the East could

be efficiently implemented and managed.92

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Such considerations were not merely cynical and strategic, but very

much in line with Heydrich’s own unshakeable ideological convictions.

The war against the Soviet Union, perceived by Heydrich as a life-and-

death struggle between two irreconcilable political ideologies, led to an

intensification of the moral paradigm shift that had already manifested

itself during the Polish campaign. In Heydrich’s eyes the SS had to prove

its dedication to Hitler’s racial fantasies and to display hardness against

the broadly defined enemies of the German people.

As the ideological shock troops of Nazism, the SS would fulfil Hitler’s

orders unconditionally, a task that was difficult but historic. According to

this twisted logic, the killing of tens of thousands, ultimately millions, of

undesirables was a task without alternative and anyone who did
not

murder the racial-ideological enemies of the Reich effectively committed

a crime against future generations of Germans. This task was to be carried

out with ‘decency’, not to enrich the perpetrators or to give them sadistic

pleasure, but in full consciousness of the historic sacrifice that had been

made in order to create a better world. The perpetrators were the victims

of an indecent world in which such tasks had been brought upon them.

Just like Himmler, Heydrich convinced himself that the bloody task ahead

of the SS was without alternative, describing himself on occasions as the

‘chief garbage collector of the Third Reich’ – carrying out an unpleasant

and dirty task that nonetheless needed to be done for the sanitary health

of the body politic and the future of the German nation.93

Shortly after Hitler’s Garden of Eden speech, Heydrich substantial y

increased the number of men attached to SS
Einsatzgruppen
on the Eastern

Front. At the same time, Himmler assigned police reserve battalions and SS

cavalry to the higher SS and police leaders in the Soviet Union and charged

them with the task of cleansing the area of partisans and other loosely

defined enemies. Local Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Belorussians and

Ukrainians, agitated by their experience of Soviet occupation and the

kil ing of thousands of their countrymen by the NKVD before the Red

Army’s retreat, were also recruited into police auxiliary units in order to

bulk up the kil ing squads. Some of the
Einsatzgruppen
leaders in the field

received further personal encouragement from Himmler, who travel ed

through much of the occupied East over the fol owing weeks. Others, such

as Otto Ohlendorf, received their orders directly from Heydrich.94

Heydrich decided to visit Ohlendorf ’s
Einsatzgruppe
D in late July and

combined his inspection tour with a brief excursion to the front. Caught

up in the general euphoria of imminent victory, he did not want to miss

out on fighting before the war was over. It was time for another heroic

gesture. On 20 July 1941, around four weeks after the start of the German

campaign, Heydrich interrupted his work in Berlin for a three-day trip to

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

197

the southern Russian front, near Jampol, where he rejoined Fighter

Squadron 77 with which he had already flown in air raids over Norway

the previous year.95

Heydrich’s excursion had not been authorized by Himmler. It was, as

Himmler stated later ‘with proud joy’, the ‘only secret in the eleven years

of our shared path’.96 Heydrich arrived in his own plane, a Messerschmidt

109, which he had apparently borrowed from Air Force general Ernst

Udet in exchange for a special police permit to drive through Berlin at

night and during air raids. As in Norway, Heydrich enjoyed his ‘adventure

trip’, drinking wine and playing card games with both ordinary soldiers

and fellow officers until late at night, while flying a number of attacks on

retreating Russian troops during the day.97

The fighter squadron’s mission was to secure a strategically vital bridge

over the Dniestr river. The pilots were instructed to prevent the bridge’s

destruction by the retreating Red Army, so that the German soldiers could

cross the river unhindered. On 22 July, shortly after 2 p.m., the squadron

encountered heavy Russian flak. Heydrich’s aeroplane was hit and the

engine malfunctioned. An emergency landing left the pilot stranded in

the Olshanka District – behind Russian lines. Back at the Luftwaffe base,

panic spread and the commander feared that Heydrich was either dead or

– even worse – in the hands of the NKVD. Only a few hours later, an

infantry officer called to report that an advance patrol had rescued a

downed pilot. The pilot of the plane was seemingly uninjured, but had

clearly suffered some brain damage since he kept insisting he was the head

of the Reich Security Main Office.98

Once safely back in Berlin, Heydrich prepared himself for an important

meeting with Hermann Göring that took place in the early evening of

31 July 1941. It was here that Heydrich obtained Göring’s signature on a

deceptively simple document of a mere three sentences, a document that

presumably originated from Heydrich himself. Extending the powers

entrusted to Heydrich on 24 January 1939 to organize a solution to the

Jewish question within the (by then substantially enlarged) German Reich

through emigration, Göring now authorized Heydrich to make ‘all neces-

sary preparations’ for a ‘total solution of the Jewish question in the

German sphere of influence in Europe’. Furthermore, he empowered

Heydrich to co-ordinate the participation of those organizations whose

jurisdiction was affected and to submit a ‘comprehensive draft’ of a plan

for the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’.99

The question remains as to how Heydrich at this point envisaged the final

solution. Did he stil view it as the mass expulsion of European Jewry from

the German sphere of influence into the inhospitable regions of Siberia

where they would be decimated by the climatic conditions and forced

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labour, as he had in the spring of 1941? Or was the term ‘final solution’