Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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Rademacher’s August memo, at any rate, is the fact that he now estimated

the number of Jews to be sent to Madagascar as 6.5 million, an indication

that the Jews from south-east Europe as well as those from the French

colonies in North Africa were to be included in the deportation plans.

The Madagascar plan had a direct impact on German Jewish policy in

Poland. As Governor-General Frank informed his colleagues a few days

later,

111

on 8 July Hitler had assured him that in the light of the Madagascar

project there would be no further deportations into their territory. On 9

July Himmler announced to the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce that there

would be no more deportations into Frank’s territory, thereby ﬁnally

closing down the project for a ‘Jewish reservation’ in the General Govern-

ment.

112

Right from the start it had been Frank’s civil administration that had been

responsible for the measures directed against the Polish Jews—their regis-

tration and public identiﬁcation through a badge and their exclusion from

the economy. Moreover, it had gradually introduced ghettoization.

113

addition, in June 1940 the civil administration took over responsibility for

Jewish forced labour from the SS. This was, above all, the result of the high-

handed and brutal forced-labour policy pursued by Odilo Globocnik, the

SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district, which had caused serious

problems and by the summer of 1940 was considered to have failed.

However, the new distribution of responsibilities did not prevent Globoc-

nik from maintaining forced-labour camps in order to pursue his pet

project: the creation of the ‘Moat’, a dilettante plan for a defensive line

along the border with the Soviet-occupied zone. Globocnik’s unstoppable

activity in the ﬁeld of Jewish forced labour was also primarily responsible for

the fact that the Lublin district developed into the centre for slave labour

within the General Government. It was here that Jews from other districts

tended to be deployed on major projects and housed in special camps under

primitive and completely inadequate conditions.

114

Between autumn 1940 and January 1941 the German leadership ﬁnally

gave up the Madagascar plan, after they had been forced to accept that there

would not be a separate peace with Britain. Within the context of the

planning for ‘Barbarossa’

115

(the invasion of the Soviet Union), a new ‘post-

Madagascar project was being developed.

116

On 22 October, in a speech to party comrades during his stay in Madrid,

Himmler had once again stated that ‘all Jews from the Greater German

Reich’ would be placed in a ‘closed ghetto’ in the General Government.

117

510 shifting borders: the year 1940

However, in view of Frank’s opposition to deportations into his territory,

and against the background of the start of German planning for the war

against the Soviet Union, it was obvious that this objective would have to

be revised.

A memo of Eichmann’s, dated 4 December, in which he produced

ﬁgures for a speech by Himmler, provides an indication of how the Reich

Security Main Ofﬁce was envisaging the future ‘ﬁnal solution of the Jewish

question’ at this time.

118

Eichmann distinguished between two phases: ‘the

initial solution of the Jewish question through emigration’ and the future

‘ﬁnal solution of the Jewish question’, by which he meant ‘the resettlement

of the Jews away from the economic sphere of the German people to a

territory which is still to be designated’. According to Eichmann, this

project would ‘involve around 5.8 million people’, whereas the Reich

Security Main Ofﬁce had used a ﬁgure of 4 million. Thus, in the meantime,

the territories of Germany’s allies and satellites in south-east Europe as well

as the French colonies in North Africa were now also being included.

In a speech to the Reich leaders and Gauleiters on 10 December 1940,on

the subject of ‘Settlement’, Himmler described the ‘emigration’ of the Jews

from the General Government as a vital future task in order ‘to make more

room for Poles’. Himmler had thereby clariﬁed the link between the

settlement of ethnic Germans in the annexed Polish territories, the further

expulsion of indigenous Poles to the General Government, and the need to

deport the Jews from the General Government in order to make way for

this new wave of immigration. The Reichsfu

hrer-SS did not, however, say

what the destination of this ‘Jewish emigration’ was to be.

119

At the end of 1940 and beginning of 1941 Hitler gave Heydrich the task

of working out a ‘project for a ﬁnal solution’ to be implemented after the

war, which he presented to the ‘Fu

hrer’ in January 1941. Hitler had given

his instructions to Heydrich via both Himmler and Go

ring; thus the Hitler–

ring–Heydrich chain of command in Jewish policy that had existed since

1936 was still intact, alongside that of Hitler–Himmler–Heydrich. We do

not have the text of Heydrich’s plan, but the content can be reconstructed

from various documents.

120

The draft envisaged the deportation of all Jews from Europe. The

destination of the transports was to be the General Government, but that

would serve only as an intermediate stopping place.

121

The (top-secret) ﬁnal

destination of the deportations was to be the Soviet territories that were to

be occupied. When Heydrich went to see Go

ring in March 1941 in order to

shifting borders: the year 1940 511

discuss the matter and his responsibilities, Go

ring pointed out the need for a

clariﬁcation of Rosenberg’s position. This was because he had been desig-

nated as the future Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories.

122

It is not absolutely clear, however, what those involved actually meant at

this point by a ‘ﬁnal solution’ within the Soviet Union that was going to be

occupied, and presumably it was not yet clear to them either. At the

beginning of 1941 Himmler, at any rate, temporarily considered the idea

of a mass sterilization of Jews. He asked Viktor Brack to work out a plan for

it. However, after he received the plan in March 1941 he appears not to

have pursued this idea any further.

123

It seems that Himmler and the other

decision-makers preferred to postpone dealing with the issue of what was to

happen to those who had been deported until after the anticipated victory

over the Soviet Union.

512 shifting borders: the year 1940

PART

The Greater Germanic

Reich: Living-Space and

Ethnic Murder

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An Ideological War

of Annihilation

he Nazi leadership had been preparing for a renewed extension of the

war since the beginning of 1941: late in July 1940 Hitler had decided to

invade the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941. Again this war was planned

as a Blitzkrieg, in other words, the expectation was that the Soviet Union

would collapse like a house of cards under the blows delivered by the

Wehrmacht and would by autumn be completely defeated. What was

new about this war, however, was that from the start it was conceived as

an ideological and racist war of annihilation. The Soviet Union was not

simply to be defeated; the intention was to eliminate its ruling class,

decimate the nations living on its territory by the violent destruction of

millions of people, and to exploit the survivors as slave labour for the

construction of the new German ‘living-space’ (Lebensraum).

Himmler assumed that he would play a key role in the conquest, control,

and reshaping of this gigantic territory. He planned to deploy four divisions

and a series of further ﬁghting units, mostly at the most forward part of the

front: his police organization would employ his methods of terror to

dominate the conquered territory, and he himself as Settlement Commissar

would organize the necessary expulsions and resettlements of the indige-

nous population, in order to make way for ‘Germanic’ settlers. The vision of

a forcible seizure of land to colonize in the east that he had outlined as the

SS’s future task suddenly seemed to come within reach. On 10 June 1941 he

put to the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, his

suggestion that he, Himmler, should be given responsibility for maintaining

control in all occupied eastern European territories in police ‘and political’

security matters, so that, as Settlement Commissar, he could ‘see to the

paciﬁcation and stabilization of the political situation’.

This claim to power

put him in direct competition with Alfred Rosenberg, whom Hitler had

already appointed on 20 April to be ‘responsible for the central coordination

of questions concerning eastern Europe’, though with the qualiﬁcation that

Himmler would in future ‘occupy a special position’ alongside him in the

east. The negotiations that Himmler then conducted with Rosenberg about

their future responsibilities in the east turned out to be tough: ‘To work

with Rosenberg, let alone under him, is deﬁnitely the most difﬁcult thing

there is in the NSDAP’, as Himmler wrote to Bormann.

Now 40 years old, Himmler hoped that his new tasks would boost his

career, which in the previous few years had stagnated, and result in his being

admitted to the innermost circle of Nazi leaders. After the great political

successes of 1933 and 1936, since 1938 he had had to accept several painful

defeats: his misdirected investigations into von Fritsch had seriously

threatened the relationship between Hitler and the Wehrmacht, had played

a signiﬁcant role in provoking a state crisis, and brought down Hitler’s

displeasure on him. He had found himself increasingly forced to keep his

various ‘Germanic’ and occult activities ‘under wraps’, as he was in no

doubt that Hitler regarded these ventures with suspicion. His radical pro-

posals regarding the role of the church could not be put into practice. The

atrocities carried out by the SS in Poland and his order to procreate had

provoked massive criticism from the Wehrmacht, with the result that he

had to give way publicly and accept being marginalized during the police

‘processing’ of the conquered north and west European states. In Romania

his SD had supported the Iron Guard’s failed putsch and as a result had

destabilized German–Romanian relations; for that reason Ribbentrop, the

Foreign Minister, curtailed Himmler’s foreign-policy ambitions wherever

possible. Even Himmler’s various resettlement programmes had ground to a

halt. And although Waffen-SS units had been deployed in the very van-

guard of Blitzkrieg operations from the autumn of 1939 onwards, since the

end of 1939 he had been able to establish only one additional division,

‘Viking’; the concentration of these units into an independent SS army

corps that he had planned as early as 1938 had not come about. Instead, his

units had always been distributed over the whole of the front, with the result

that he was unable to establish a link between their military effectiveness and

strategically decisive operations.

Now that there was a prospect of conquering vast territories in the east

Himmler hoped to be able to turn the situation again to his advantage.

516 an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilati on

Preparations

As a result of the predominantly negative experiences Himmler had had in

cooperating with the Wehrmacht during the military campaigns of 1940,he

attempted early on to reach agreement with the military about the deploy-

ment of security police and SD in the attack on Russia.

Heydrich had been negotiating with the army Quartermaster-General

on this question since February 1941.

On 13 March Keitel, chief of

the Wehrmacht High Command, issued guidelines stating that ‘special

responsibilities in the zone of army operations’ would be given to the

Reichsfu

hrer-SS ‘at the Fu

hrer’s request [ . . . ] in preparation for the political

administration’. These special responsibilities, as the guidelines ominously

put it, ‘result from the impending ﬁnal struggle between two opposing

political systems’.

What was meant by these special responsibilities was

made abundantly clear by Hitler to his generals during March, in a number

of statements. He stated unequivocally that the coming war was a ‘battle

between two ideologies’

that could be won only if the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik

intelligentsia’

were annihilated.

Keitel’s guidelines of 13 March also indicated, however, that in fulﬁlling

their ‘special responsibilities’ the units of the Reichsfu

hrer-SS would no

longer be subordinate to the Wehrmacht, as they had been in the war

against Poland, but were rather to act independently. By this means the

leadership of the Wehrmacht believed it could distance itself from the

renewed and extended mass murders which, if Poland had been anything

to go by, were in the ofﬁng.

Against the background of these provisions Heydrich, in close consulta-

tion with Himmler,

agreed a draft arrangement with the Quartermaster-

General at the end of March.

In the ‘Regulations for the Deployment of the

Security Police and the SD in Conjunction with the Army’ we read that

‘the carrying out of particular tasks by the security police outside the scope

of the army units’ made it ‘necessary to deploy special security police (SD)

units in the ﬁeld of operations’. Their duties were, however, only vaguely

deﬁned: where they were near the army front line they were to ‘secure’

documentation and people; in the rear area they had responsibility, amongst

other things, for ‘identifying and combating activities hostile to the state and

the Reich’. The special units (Sonderkommandos) had to execute their duties

an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilat ion 517

‘on their own responsibility’, but were to be subordinate to the armies or to

the commanders of the rear areas ‘with regard to marches, provisions, and

quartering’.

What was actually meant by the formulation ‘on their own

responsibility’ was that the anticipated mass liquidation of communist

ofﬁcials in the area of army operations was to be carried out by the

Sonderkommandos, but that they could rely on the army’s logistical support

in carrying this out.

The negotiations had just been concluded when unforeseen events

occurred: on 27 March the Yugoslav government, which was friendly

towards Germany, was toppled in a military putsch, and the Nazi regime

had to reckon with the country entering the war on the side of the British.

Hasty preparations were therefore made to attack Yugoslavia and also

Greece (which at the time was already at war with Italy). On 6 April the

Nazi attack began; Yugoslavia capitulated on 17 April and mainland Greece

was occupied by the end of the month.

An extremely simple solution was found to the question of what role

Himmler’s security police and SD were supposed to play in this improvised

war: Heydrich’s draft agreement with the Quartermaster-General provided

the basis for action, though with a small but very signiﬁcant change. When

the people whom Himmler’s henchmen were to ‘secure’ were listed, not

only ‘e

migre

s, saboteurs, and terrorists’ were included but speciﬁcally ‘com-

munists and Jews’ also. This revealed that the war in the Balkans was to be

waged as an ideological war, just as was planned for the war against the

Soviet Union. In accordance with the agreement two security police and

SD Einsatzgruppen took part in the ﬁghting, one in Yugoslavia and one in

Greece—from the perspective of the SS leadership a signiﬁcant improve-

ment over the affront they had been forced to endure the previous year

when France, Belgium, and the Netherlands were occupied.

One day before Yugoslavia’s surrender, on 16 April, Himmler, who had

set up his headquarters during hostilities in Bruck an der Mur, had a meeting

in a hotel in Graz with Heydrich, Wolff, Daluege, the chief of his Leader-

ship Main Ofﬁce Hans Ju

ttner, and the army Quartermaster-General

Eduard Wagner. On the basis of the draft of 26 March, they came to a

ﬁnal agreement about the ‘Regulations for the Deployment of the Security

Police and the SD in Conjunction with the Army’ for the imminent war

against the Soviet Union. Although ‘communists and Jews’ were not

expressly mentioned in the ﬁnal version, the events that led up to the

518 an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilati on

agreement demonstrate that the participants were in no doubt as to who was

meant as the prime target of the ‘war of two ideologies’.

At the beginning of May Himmler interrupted his war preparations and

made a ﬂying visit to Greece, which had recently been occupied, just as he

had taken a look at the newly conquered western territories the previous

year. On 6 May he ﬂew to Athens, arriving the following day after a

stopover in Budapest. There he visited the Peloponnese and Corinth, and

ﬁnally German troops in Larissa. From Athens he ﬂew on to Belgrade,

where he inspected an ethnic German village.

Back in Germany on 11 May, he was confronted with an alarming

situation: the previous day Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy, had ﬂown on his

own initiative to Scotland in a Messerschmitt and parachuted down in order

put a peace proposal to the British government.

Leaving Gmund, where

he had wanted to relax for a few days, Himmler had a meeting on 11 May in

Munich with Go

ring to discuss the situation then travelled with him to

Obersalzberg, where talks continued into the night. Himmler’s Gestapo was

to take responsibility in the days that followed for arresting and interrogat-

ing important close friends of Hess. Two days later there was a hurried

meeting of Reich and Gau leaders on the Obersalzberg, which Himmler

most probably also attended.

Hitler dealt relatively quickly with the crisis occasioned by Hess. The

hrer’s former Deputy was declared insane, and was succeeded in the role

(but without the title) by Martin Bormann, who had up to that time been

the Deputy’s deputy. Bormann, who was now head of the Party Chancel-

lery, was friendly with Himmler. They both belonged to the radical wing of

the party and this expressed itself, for example, in the strong anticlericalism

that was fundamental to both of them. Bormann’s appointment therefore

increased Himmler’s chances of ﬁnding Hitler disposed to listen to his ideas,

and in fact Himmler’s position grew more secure in the course of the

ensuing months.

One result of Hess’s ﬂight was a Gestapo campaign in June against

astrologers, clairvoyants, dowsers, spiritualists, and representatives of other

occult teachings, which Hess in part espoused; this was a means of providing

evidence to show the outside world that Hess had quite simply been the

victim of mumbo-jumbo. The campaign was not without its dangers for

Himmler, as it threatened circles he felt connected to, for example the

adherents of anthroposophical agriculture or of the Cosmic Ice Theory. For

an ideolog ical war of ann ih ilat ion 519