by J. Lee Ready
Obersturmfuehrer Adolf Eichmann was appointed the head of Section B4 of Amt IV responsible for implementation of Nazi policy towards the Jews in the Reich and all occupied territories.
Despite the SD, Gestapo and Kripo coming together under this umbrella, they each protected their own preserve and not only did not talk to each other, but mistrusted each other.
Himmler had also been busy creating regional Higher SS and Police Fuehrers - HSSPF, whose own headquarters would mirror that of the SS RSHA, meaning they would command the Gestapo, Kripo and SD in their respective regions. They would also command the Orpo. Thus each HSSPF had two deputies, a BdO - Befehlshaber des Orpo running the ordinary police, and a BdS - Befehlshaber des Sipo running the Gestapo, SD and Kripo.
Every HSSPF region would be divided into districts, each run by an SS and Police Fuehrer [SSPF], each of whom had two deputies, a KdO - Kommandeur des Orpo running the ordinary police, and a KdS - Kommandeur des Sipo running the Gestapo, SD and Kripo.
The Orpo in any given area of the Third Reich [Germany, Austria, Sudetenland, Memelland, Danzig and Wartheland consisted of stationary German police units and transitory German Police Reserve companies and battalions. Within sub-districts of the Czech Protectorate the local Czech police reported to the local KdO, just as within sub-districts of the General Government the local Polish and Ukrainian police reported to the local KdO.
In other words if Himmler wanted a man arrested for treason, he would order the RSHA to do it, which in turn would read the man’s address and order the relevant HSSPF to accomplish the arrest, who would order the SSPF for that man’s district to do it, who would order his KdS to do it, who would command his Gestapo chief to move on it, who would send a couple of Gestapo agents to perform the ‘midnight knock on the door’.
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Himmler was still having trouble with the army conscripting his top people. E.g. Oberfuehrer Willy Schmelcher was a World War One veteran and police chief of Saarbruecken, yet none of this kept him from being drafted into the infantry as a leutnant. As a result of this frustration, and as part of his restructuring program, Himmler again with Hitler’s aid managed to gain permission from the armed forces to allow up to 26,000 soldiers from the age brackets 19-21 and 27-30 to trade their army uniform for a police uniform. Together with the conscription of the Wartheland Volksdeutsch police this gave Himmler a total of almost a quarter million Orpo.
For most Germans the Gestapo and Kripo were always hovering somewhere in the background, but there was an exception. None of the men holding police jobs, such as Brigadefuehrer Wilhelm Koppe the HSSPF for Wartheland or Gruppenfuehrer Karl Zech the SSPF for Cracow, had authority over the SS KZL or SS Wv in their regions or over the deeds taking place inside the camps, nor did they have authority over the SS einsatzgruppe, nor over the SS Totenkopfverbaende. In fact Himmler ordered Zech to help SS Einsatzgruppe I round up thousands of Jews in Cracow, but Zech knew these people had committed no crime, so he refused to obey the order - and Himmler dismissed him at once. To replace him Himmler brought in Obergruppenfuehrer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krueger. Following his dismissal, Zech a World War One hero, was given an SS administrative job, but his continued refusal to act with cruelty towards innocent people eventually led Himmler to throw him out of the SS. Watched by the SD, Zech knew his days were numbered, and he committed suicide, perhaps to protect his family from arrest. Krueger, the younger brother of Walter Krueger, was a World War One veteran that had refused to live under the French in his native Alsace. Moving to Germany he had risen in the SA to be head of training. Following the Night of the Long Knives he had prudently switched to the SS.
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However, there was no complication in the Fulda-Werra district of Germany. Their own senior nobleman, Josias the Arch Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont, was promoted to obergruppenfuehrer in the SS and appointed HSSPF for the area, and he ran this fiefdom from his own home, Schaumburg Castle. That a senior aristocrat was able to behave like a medieval despot and to do it with Himmler’s blessing ran contrary to everything the SS and the Nazi Party stood for! Proving again that these notions were just lies!
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Himmler decided that the General Government should be run as a total police state, and to reinforce the existing police, he raised several police regiments by asking for volunteers from the Volksdeutsch population of Wartheland and the General Government and from the German police and Police Reserve. He stationed one regiment in each of the following cities: Cracow [Krakau], Warsaw, Lublin and Radom, and he established eight mobile battalions. One of the police commanders was Polizei Major Friedrich Bock, who must have enjoyed his ‘revenge’. After his service in World War One, and then with the Freikorps fighting the Russian Bolsheviks, his birthplace was overrun by the Poles. Now here he was ‘returning the favor’!
Ironically while Hitler’s wish was to take the Poles and Ukrainians down a peg, Himmler was offering a chance for them to raise their social status. Only the Volksdeutsch members of the Polish police had been inducted into the Orpo, i.e. Ordnungspolizei. Poles and Ukrainians of the Polish police were considered Ordnungsdienst – Order Service – a lower level of humanity, though they came under Orpo orders. However, soon Himmler created twelve new police regiments, the 202nd Police Regiment manned completely by Poles, and eleven regiments manned completely by Ukrainians, and these fellows would be Ordnungspolizei, not Ordnungsdienst. To ensure that everyone realized these regiments were equal to ‘Germans’, but were not ‘German’, the members were officially known as Schutzmannschaften [Guard Man Squads], but everyone called them ‘Schumas’. As Schumas were not German citizens the German armed forces could not conscript them, thus this gave Himmler a source of manpower.
Furthermore as a sop to the Ukrainian people Himmler decreed that their local Ukrainian-manned police [Ordnungsdienst] would no longer be answerable to Polish police chiefs, but would report directly to the German Orpo, through the chain of command – KdO, SSPF, BdO, HSSPF. It was soon obvious that the Nazis for some reason looked upon Ukrainians as sitting higher on the racial ladder than Poles. Indeed the German Army had already allowed an all-Ukrainian militia under Stepan Bandera to fight alongside them in the invasion of Poland.
Himmler sent the German 301st Police Battalion to Warsaw, but they were not meant as reinforcements for Police Regiment Warsaw or the local Polish police, but instead arrived with their own mission - to incarcerate and if need be execute enemies of the Reich. Most of the time they did not know what offence their victims had committed, if any. They simply shot them like automatons. Of course many in the battalion refused to become mindless executioners and they were given less strenuous work or transferred elsewhere. It was noticeable to many that this, the most murderous Nazi unit in occupied Poland, was not an SS unit. Because Himmler controlled both the SS and the police, he sometimes gave SS-type missions to police units and police missions to the SS.
This is more evidence of the linking between the SS and police, and evidence that the police were not as ‘innocent’ as they claimed in the post-war world. Certainly the Polish and Jewish people under Nazi occupation saw no difference between German police and SS.
In addition the German Army had its own command structure within the Wartheland and the General Government, and its generals were constantly at loggerheads with the various SS and police commanders, complaining about the brutality of the entire SS and police apparatus. Even Nazi party officials complained. And consistently their complaints fell on deaf ears.
The army generals had been warned by Hitler to turn a blind eye and allow the SS einsatzkommando and others to do their work. However, several incidents just could not be ignored. In one such occurrence a member of the SS Verfuegungstruppe artillery joined up with an army military policeman and together they had gone on a rampage shooting to death fifty Jewish civilians. The army military police arrested them and they were tried by court martial, found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. But then
the SS stepped in and convinced the military court to reduce the sentences to life imprisonment. And then Himmler even overruled his own SS and ordered the SS soldier to be released, and soon Hitler freed the military policeman! The army generals and SS leaders backed down and the two killers walked free! Following this incident Himmler got Hitler to agree that in future no member of the SS or police would be subjected to an army court martial.
However, Himmler did agree to the disbandment of Troeger’s SS einsatzgruppe. Its people were sent to the three KdS at Bromberg, Danzig and Graudenz.
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When the army generals learned that Warsaw was getting a new SSPF, Gruppenfuehrer Paul Moder, they perhaps hoped he would put a stop to the brutality, but under his direction there was no let up on the oppression of the Poles. Therefore the army generals took another tactic, partly to curtail the excesses of the SS and police: namely they demanded that Hitler disband the entire SS Verfuegungstruppe, complaining that these units had performed poorly and had suffered higher casualties than should have been expected. The army thought these SS soldiers would be better used by assigning them to army units on an individual basis. How much of this was true and how much was branch bias is not known. Certainly the army was trying to reduce Himmler’s power. But Hitler turned against his generals and not only allowed the SS Verfuegungstruppe to continue to train, but authorized its expansion to three divisions, and declared that conscripts and serving soldiers who wished to transfer to the SS Verfuegungstruppe should be allowed to do so until the manpower limit was reached.
Naturally the generals were outraged. But in any case it was not the SS Verfuegungstruppe who were responsible for oppressing the Poles. They were far too busy regrouping and retraining for the next battle.
On the one hand Germany needed soldiers, for as the generals pointed out the French and British were on the western border of Germany ready to pounce, but on the other hand one could see Himmler’s point. Take the case of Friedrich Alpers. He had already served his country in World War One and as a Freikorps soldier. After becoming a lawyer he joined the SA, but then switched to the SS in 1932. In 1933 he began to take a series of Nazi party administrative jobs, but kept his SS membership as a reserve officer. However, the Luftwaffe conscripted him and turned him into a paratrooper with a rank six grades lower than his SS rank. They kept him until he was killed in action. Was this really a good use of manpower, one might ask?
The ordinary soldiers of the army and SS Verfuegungstruppe knew nothing of these political intrigues, and in any case they had no time to stop and ponder, because as soon as the Poles were defeated the German Army began a mass transportation to the western German border. Unbelievably the French and British armies had sat and watched while the Poles were crushed, and then sat and watched while Hitler moved his army to face them. No wonder the British press called this a ‘Phony War’.
Back in Poland entire populations began to move. Already Polish citizens that had come to Wartheland after the Polish conquest of that region had been expelled back to the General Government. Now Hitler ordered all Jews and Gypsies indigenous to the Wartheland to be expelled to the General Government. Their transportation, usually by train, was organized by the local KdS. Those who could not move, such as bedridden sick and elderly were shot on the spot. Patients of mental institutions and those with contagious diseases, such as Tuberculosis, were also shot. In fact Polish Christians who fit these latter two criteria were also shot. Most of the shooting was performed by einsatzgruppe members. In Posen the 101st and 103rd Police Battalions were directly involved in these expulsions. In Lublin the 104th Police Battalion helped Police Regiment Lublin expel ‘undesirables’ from Lublin and Zamosc. These cops had been recruited in Hamburg. The local police also assisted.
Gruppenfuehrer Wilhelm Rediess, HSSPF for East Prussia, took this opportunity to order his police to expel all Jews from this district of Germany to the General Government, though he had no legal authority to do so.
Hitler needed soldiers so he began to conscript all able-bodied Volksdeutsch men aged 19-45 from the Wartheland and the General Government. Mischlings whose native language was German were also conscripted. Thus many a Volksdeutsch member of the Polish Army currently languishing in a German POW camp was suddenly set free, given a German uniform and sent to a unit!
Even more ironic was the fate of ethnic Poles who already lived in Germany [pre-1939 borders], because for conscription purposes they were treated just like ethnic Germans.
The ridiculousness of the racial laws came into play again; proving once more that it was all a lie. Within East Prussia and the Volksdeutsch districts of the Wartheland the Jews had become indistinguishable from the Christians especially as many were Christian, until Brigadefuehrer Guenther Pancke the chief of the SS RuSHA [Race and Settlement Office] entered upon the stage and clarified the difference between Jews and Mischlings. This was important, because Jews had to leave, Mischlings could stay. Indeed some Mischlings were serving in the very police units that were expelling the Jews. Because the SS RuSHA performed their duties according to the Nazi Nuremberg laws, those people who had thought of themselves as Poles, Volksdeutsch or Ukrainians, but who had more than two grandparents who had worshipped God in a synagogue instead of a church, were suddenly declared to be Jews.
It got worse. All Jews in the General Government were ordered to move to certain neighborhoods within the major cities, which had been set aside as ghettoes. Polish Christians in these neighborhoods were forcibly moved out, but were compensated. The districts chosen were woefully too small to house all the Jews, but no matter. Neighborhoods where 5,000 people had lived were now expected to hold 100,000. The largest ghettoes were set up in Warsaw, Lodz, Lublin and Cracow. The Polish police crammed them in like sardines, often two families to one room, which had once been someone’s bedroom or an office. This caused serious resentment among these people of course, not just because of the loss of their homes and the overcrowding, but because of the differences among them. Bankers were forced to live alongside laborers. City Jews of Polish language and culture were forced to live alongside Yiddish-speaking rural Jews and Jews who spoke Ukrainian, Byelorussian and Lithuanian. The fact that Christian Jews, Jewish Jews and irreligious Jews were forced to live together was particularly galling to all concerned. Within the ghettoes there were several Christian clergy who had been labeled Jew, and these Roman Catholic priests, Eastern Catholic priests, Ukrainian Orthodox priests and Protestant ministers said mass or delivered sermons wherever and whenever they could.
The blue-uniformed Polish police was ordered to guard the perimeter of these ghettoes to make sure that the Jews who left did so only with permission [e.g. to go to work] and took no belongings with them. Most Polish policemen already hated Jews, so the order was well received. The only bad side as far as the Polish cops were concerned was that several of their senior chiefs had been demoted to allow Germans and Volksdeutsch to take their jobs. Following the pruning of the Polish police by the Nazis, namely the removal of Volksdeutsch, Ukrainians, Jews, volunteers for the Schumas and politically unreliable elements, about 8,000 Polish cops remained. This was not enough and Himmler began a steady recruitment drive to expand the force.
Himmler also brought in members of the German criminal prison service to guard the ghettoes.
As if the situation was not already intolerable, by late 1939 the expelled Jews from the Wartheland and East Prussia began to arrive in the General Government. Families living two to a room were now expected to take in a third family.
The SSPFs placed control of day-to-day ghetto affairs in the hands of the Jews themselves, so in each ghetto a Judenrat [Jewish council] was formed. To enforce its regulations each Judenrat created a Jewish police force [Ordnungsdienst] armed with clubs; about 2,500 in the Warsaw ghetto, 1,200 in Lodz etc. If necessary they could call upon Polish or German policemen from outside the ghettoes. Josef Scheinkman a Polish Jew had changed his name to Josef Szerynski, had become a Ch
ristian and had risen to colonel of Polish police. This did not fool the SD. They knew a Jew when they saw one and they sent him to the Warsaw ghetto. There he took command of the Jewish ghetto police.
In the Warsaw ghetto another Jew, Abraham Ganzweich, ran a Jewish anti-black market police unit. This was a laugh: for without the black market [i.e. illegal business transactions such as food for jewelry] the Jews would have starved to death. Furthermore, the Polish and German policemen assigned to the perimeter were usually open to bribes. In reality Ganzweich’s team was under Gestapo orders and their real purpose was to seek out news of organized anti-Nazi resistance within the ghetto. They were a de facto Jewish Gestapo!
Ghettoization was not just cramped: it was downright fatal. It has been estimated that within the first two years of the General Government’s existence about a half million Jews died owing to poor rations, insufficient heating fuel, rampant disease, non-existent medical care, extreme despair and depression and in some cases executions by German police, Polish police, SD and Gestapo. The elderly and small children were the first to die off. Eventually so many died, that the sight of a human corpse in a ghetto street caused no alarm.
There is no doubt that a high proportion of the Christian population of Poland was glad to see the Jews removed in such a manner. Anti-Semitism was rife in Poland before the German invasion. On 1 September 1939 the Polish Army had called in all able-bodied men from late teens to their forties to face the Nazi invaders, but a considerable number of Jewish Poles had refused to serve and had hidden. Their reason was twofold: Jews had lived under German control during World War One or earlier and had survived, and secondly they hated the Christians who had oppressed them since achieving Polish independence in 1918, so they saw no need to fight for the Poles. The Christians saw things differently and decided that as the Jews had refused to aid their country in her hour of need, then whatever happened to the Jews now was none of their business.
