The Himmler's SS (18 page)

During September 1939, the advances of the Red Army into eastern Poland in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Pact brought some 136,000 Volksdeutsche under Russian occupation. In discussions with Berlin, however, the Soviets agreed to let these people leave. Moreover, the Reich also negotiated for the transfer of another 120,000 ethnic Germans living in the Baltic states. Throughout the winter of 1939–40, the first 35,000 east European Volksdeutsche were evacuated from Wolhynia. The provisions of the Russo-German Resettlement Treaty had to be completed by November 1940, and during October alone some 45,000 rapidly uprooted men, women and children made the long and so-called ‘final trek' from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to VOMI reception camps in Pomerania, East Prussia and the Warthegau before leaving for permanent resettlement in the incorporated Polish territory. By mid-1941, 200,000 ethnic German repatriates had been given possession of 47,000 confiscated Polish farms comprising a total of 23 million acres, in the two new Reichsgaue of Danzig-West Prussia and Wartheland.

As the Reich expanded further eastwards into the Ukraine after 1941, masses of Volksdeutsche were moved out from Romania, Hungary, Albania and Yugoslavia for resettlement in the newly occupied lands under the Eastern Ministry of Alfred Rosenberg. Each family was permitted only 50 kilogrammes of personal possessions or two horse-drawn wagon loads, and some wagon trains travelled as many as 2,000 miles in scenes reminiscent of the American frontier era. All arrivals were probed by SS doctors and racial examiners from RuSHA to confirm that they were suitable to be reclassified as Reichsdeutsche and given German citizenship, but long stays in VOMI's 1,500 resettlement and transit camps left many Volksdeutsche feeling disappointed, embittered and hopeless. By 1945, VOMI had forcibly moved as many as 1,200,000 ethnic Germans, the bulk of whom became displaced persons at the end of the war.

While VOMI dealt with the transportation of Volksdeutsche repatriates and RuSHA supervised their racial purity, their actual resettlement was the responsibility of a third SS organisation, the Reichs-kommissariat für die Festigung des deutschen Volkstums, or RKFDV, the Reich Commission for the Consolidation of Germanism. It was created on 7 October 1939, with Himmler as its Reichskommissar, and he immediately established a Berlin staff HQ, the Hauptamt RKF, directed by SS-Obergruppenführer Ulrich Greifelt. To administer the financing of its operations, a Land Bank Company was set up under SS-Obersturmbannführer Ferdinand Hiege and money poured in from the sales of confiscated Jewish and Polish property. Himmler intended that not only repatriated ethnic Germans but also crippled SS ex-servicemen and returned veterans should eventually be settled in the eastern territories as ‘Wehrbauern' or ‘peasant guards', to provide a buffer between the Reich proper and the unconquered wilderness beyond the Urals. From 1940, SS recruiting propaganda laid considerable stress on the opportunities which would be open to all SS men after the war, with the promise of free land in the east, and a number of SS soldiers invalided out from the services were employed on preparatory settlement work with the so-called ‘SS-Baueinsatz-Ost'. In the words of SS-Obergruppenführer Otto Hofmann of RuSHA, the east would ‘belong to the SS'.

In May 1942, SS-Oberführer Prof. Dr Konrad Meyer of the Hauptamt RKF finished drawing up the great resettlement plan on behalf of Himmler. Under its terms, the Baltic states and Poland were to be fully Germanised. The occupied east would be carved up into three huge provinces or Marks, namely Ingermanland, Narev and Gotengau, under the supreme authority of the Reichsführer-SS, who was to be their new liege lord. He would direct the settlers to the areas provided for them and grant them lands of varying types depending on their service, including ‘life fiefs', ‘hereditary fiefs' and ‘special status properties'. Provincial headmen appointed by Himmler were to supervise the Marches of the new SS empire. After a 25-year period of racial purification, it was calculated, their population would be 50 per cent Germanic. There would be a direct autobahn linking Berlin with Moscow, and a 4 metre-wide railtrack between Munich and Rostov. A system of twenty-six eastern strongpoints consisting of small towns of about 20,000 inhabitants, each surrounded by a ring of German villages at a distance of about three miles, would guard the intersections of German communications arteries. The villages themselves were to comprise thirty to forty farmhouses and have their own SS ‘Warrior Stürme' to which all male inhabitants would belong. Working along Viking lines, it was to be the greatest piece of continental colonisation the world had ever seen, designed to protect western civilisation from the threat of Asiatic invasion.

From the beginning, however, Himmler and the RKFDV encountered insurmountable obstacles set up not by the enemy but by competing Nazi satraps in the occupied lands, each intent upon securing his own niche of influence in the new empire. Neither Hans Frank, Governor-General of Poland, nor Alfred Rosenberg, Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, were SS men and they owed no allegiance to the Reichsführer. Several Gauleiters, particularly Erich Koch, Reichskommissar in the Ukraine, and Wilhelm Kube, Reichs-kommissar in Byelorussia, fought consistently to hinder the resettlement programme in their areas, which they saw as an SS impingement on NSDAP authority. Even Albert Forster, the Gauleiter of Danzig-West Prussia, who was an SS-Ober-gruppenführer and had been a member of the SS before Himmler himself, was so antagonistic to the prospect of taking Volksdeutsche settlers into his domain that ships carrying repatriates from Estonia to Danzig had to be re-routed.

In the end, the practicalities consequent upon the turn of the tide of war smashed Himmler's dream of an eastern Germanic empire run by the SS. The Reichsführer clearly viewed the Second World War as the final war of racial extermination which would secure the future of the Germanic peoples once and for all. The fairly modest racial policies of the early SS, which centred around its recruiting standards, had exploded out of all recognition by the spring of 1942, with the mass killings of the Einsatzgruppen and the commencement of the ‘conveyor belt' destruction of human life at Auschwitz. Had the war gone in Germany's favour, there is little doubt that the Jews, gypsies and Slav races would have been depleted to extinction in Europe. However, from 1943 Hitler felt that their labour, and that of the repatriated ethnic Germans, could be better used in solving Germany's pressing domestic manpower shortage, and Himmler had little choice but to listen and agree. Thereafter, Volksdeutsche were brought ‘home to the Reich' only to work in the thriving armaments industry and to staff factories and farms that had been sorely affected by Wehrmacht recruitment. In so doing, these ethnic Germans toiled alongside Poles, Russians and other imported labourers whom they were supposed to have replaced in the east. Ironically, huge numbers of anti-communist Slav volunteers in the Schutzmannschaft and Wehrmacht, technically Untermenschen by SS standards, were by that time being relied upon to bolster and defend the Nazi régime in the occupied territories, and had even been accorded the honour of their own range of medals and decorations. Many were employed as auxiliaries by the SS itself.

Heinrich Himmler had attempted to do too much too quickly, to reverse the developments of a thousand years in a single decade, and the whole racial programme had come crashing down about his head.

G
UARDIANS OF THE
S
TATE

Himmler's intention that his racial élite should eventually police and guard occupied Europe stemmed from the fact that the most important achievement of the SS from the earliest days of the Third Reich had been its dominance of the security apparatus within Germany itself, and the power and influence which that entailed. The failure of the Munich putsch in 1923, which was smashed by the police rather than the army, brought home to Hitler the realisation that unrestricted control of the police would be an essential element in the successful foundation of a long-term Nazi state. Consequently, the period immediately following the assumption of power on 30 January 1933 witnessed a concerted effort by the Führer to have his most trusted lieutenants nominated to senior police positions in the governments of the various provinces, or Länder, which existed under the Weimar Republic. Foremost among these men was Hermann Göring, one of the first Nazis elected to the Reichstag and its President since 30 August 1932, who received ministerial duties in both the national and Prussian governments. As Prussian Minister of the Interior, he became responsible for policing the Reich capital and two-thirds of the land area of Germany. Göring appointed Kurt Daluege, head of the Berlin SS, as his Chief of Prussian Police and Rudolf Diels, his cousin's husband, as Deputy Chief. He then moved swiftly to separate the Prussian Political Police, which dealt with subversives, from the rest of the organisation. On 27 April 1933 he created a new political department staffed by thirty-five men, to be called the Secret State Police or Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo), and assigned Diels to head it. The Gestapo was instructed that it could disregard the restrictions imposed by Prussian state law, and it was removed from the control of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior to new offices at 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Berlin, and made an independent force responsible to Göring personally. By mid-1933, therefore, Göring had a firm grip on the largest provincial police force in Germany and launched it and the SA against the communists and other opponents of the New Order.

Portrait photograph of Heinrich Himmler, circulated to all police stations in 1936 after his appointment as Chef der Deutschen Polizei. It was produced and distributed by the German Police Officers' Association, and bore an appropriate stamp on the reverse.

Diels, however, soon became a problem. He was a professional policeman, not a Nazi, and at once went to war against all extremists and law-breakers, regardless of political persuasion. His fledgling Gestapo, armed with machine-guns, regularly surrounded ad hoc SA and SS detention centres in Berlin and forced the Brownshirts to surrender and release their severely beaten political prisoners. Daluege and some SS men who worked their way into the Gestapo began to campaign viciously for the downfall of Diels and his faction, and such infighting developed that it eventually became commonplace for members of the Gestapo to arrest one another. Daluege even plotted to invite Diels to a meeting and then throw him out of an upper-storey window! But Diels continued to enjoy Göring's patronage and friendship, and retained his command of the Gestapo.

While Göring was the first official of the Third Reich to assert a measure of personal authority over the regular provincial police, it remained for Himmler to realise that ambition on a national scale. When the Gauleiter of Munich-Upper Bavaria, Adolf Wagner, became Bavarian Minister of the Interior at the beginning of March 1933, his natural choice as Police President of Munich was Himmler, who had been Head of Security at the NSDAP headquarters in the city for over a year. On 1 April, Himmler was appointed Commander of the Political Police for the whole of Bavaria, a position which gave him the power to challenge Göring's Prussian supremacy. He found an ally in the Reich Minister of the Interior, Dr Wilhelm Frick, a former Munich policeman who was a confirmed opponent of the autonomy of the Länder and an old enemy of Göring. With Frick's support, Himmler was nominated Chief of Police in province after province until only Prussia remained out of his reach.

In January 1934, Frick laid before Hitler a Bill for the Administrative Reorganisation of the Reich. As a result of its acceptance, all the provincial police forces were to be amalgamated to form the first national German Police Force, officially termed ‘die Deutsche Polizei', under the Reich Minister of the Interior. Swift changes were made, including the incorporation of the eagle and swastika into the design of existing police uniforms. Göring stood fast for a time in Prussia, and he might have frustrated the unification process entirely were it not for the growing dread of Röhm and the SA. The Stabschef was hungry for power and eager to trample on anyone who stood in his way. The menacing presence of the SA, and the fact that the SS was the only reliable body which could capably oppose it, finally persuaded Göring to compromise. He ousted his beleaguered protégé Diels on 20 April 1934 and appointed Himmler as Chief of the Prussian Gestapo, with SS-Brigadeführer Reinhard Heydrich as his deputy. Only two months later, the Göring/Himmler/Heydrich triumvirate successfully decapitated the SA in the ‘Night of the Long Knives'.

During 1935, the intrigues continued and Himmler took his turn at coming into conflict with Frick. The latter was anxious to pursue his aim that all German police forces should ultimately be subordinated to him alone, as Reich Minister of the Interior. To that end he sought the support of Daluege, still head of the uniformed police in Prussia, against Himmler. Frick proposed that Daluege should be nominated Chief of the German Police on the understanding that he would take his instructions only from the Ministry of the Interior. Not surprisingly, Daluege expressed interest, but both he and Frick were outmanoeuvred by Himmler and Heydrich, who had got wind of the plot to undermine them. On 9 June 1936, Heydrich approached Hitler direct and presented a strong case for giving Himmler the rank of Minister and title Chief of the German Police. The crux of Heydrich's argument was that Himmler's efficiency and personal loyalty to the Führer were beyond question, and he would cut out the ‘middle man', Frick. Frick retaliated but was successful only in his objection that Himmler should not be given ministerial rank. On 17 June 1936, the Reichsführer-SS was appointed to the newly created government post of Chief of the German Police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior (Chef der Deutschen Polizei im Reichsministerium des Innern), answerable only to Hitler. Heydrich was rewarded for his efforts by being put in charge of the security police, and Daluege accepted command of the uniformed police. The entire system was reorganised around these two major divisions and, with the introduction of a series of new police uniforms, all vestiges of the old Länder forces finally disappeared.