by J. Lee Ready
A mere handful of Poles had a more humane attitude, such as young Zofia Baniecka, who helped scores of Jews escape, and Mother Superior Mathylda Getter, who hid hundreds of Jewish children in her convent, and the well-known Catholic writer Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, who administered a Jewish rescue organization until she was arrested by Polish police and sent to a concentration camp.
At the end of November 1939, the expulsions having been completed, Heydrich’s six SS einsatzgruppe were disbanded, the personnel being sent back to their original branches - SD, Gestapo and Kripo, but they did not have to travel far: members of SS Einsatzgruppe I were placed under the orders of the KdS for Cracow; those of SS Einsatzgruppe II were sent to the KdS for Lublin; the members of SS Einsatzgruppe III were divided among the KdS for Radom and the KdS for Lublin; those of SS Einsatzgruppe IV would come under the KdS for Warsaw; the personnel of SS Einsatzgruppe V were sent to various installations; and SS Einsatzgruppe VI’s men were sent to the Gestapo stations at Lodz and Posen. Sturmbannfuehrer Ernst Kah became head of the SD in Warsaw. He was Himmler’s kind of man, an agricultural economist. Just the sort to discover which of the Poles harbored anti-Nazi sentiments, thought Himmler, evidently!
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Meanwhile those Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Kashubians who were indigenous to the Wartheland were not safe, for they were informed by the Nazi authorities that they would eventually be relocated to the General Government. However, the SS RuSHA came to their rescue. Following their pseudo-scientific investigations they declared that some Poles, Lithuanians, Kashubians and Ukrainians might be racially German, i.e. Aryan, and even if these families were not aware of it and did not speak German. To decide which ones were ethnically suitable, the SS RuSHA, who considered themselves to be world-class race experts, resorted to a method that was hardly an ingenious empirical scientific process. Specifically, they asked people if they were ‘German’. If the individual said ‘Yes’ then that individual and his/her offspring were declared to be Volksdeutsch. They did not even have to say ‘Yes’ in the German language.
The advantages of saying ‘Yes’ were many. Each inhabitant of the Wartheland and General Government could only buy as many groceries as his/her allotted food coupons would permit. A Jew was allowed the bare subsistence level of coupons. A Pole was allowed a few more. A Ukrainian more still. A German or Volksdeutsch was practically unrestricted. Claiming to be a long lost Volksdeutsch suddenly increased one’s food ration tremendously. Also, Volksdeutsch could not be kicked out of their homes. They could not be fired for racial reasons. Indeed they were offered promotions or better jobs. Additionally, many a Polish wife whose husband was in a German prisoner of war camp, signed on the dotted line as a Volksdeutsch in order to free her husband, for not only was the German Army setting free those Volksdeutsch prisoners who had been captured in Polish uniform, but they were releasing the husbands of Volksdeutsch. Moreover, a Pole with two Christian grandparents and two Jewish grandparents was considered by many Nazis to be a Jew, believing the term Mischling only related to the German-Jewish mix. If this Pole signed up as a Volksdeutsch he/she would be recognized as a 1st degree Mischling, and would not be forced to evacuate. Thus even cops and civil servants in such a quandary regained their jobs by signing up. Those Poles who refused to sign, which was most, came up with a nickname for those who did: ‘Margarine Germans’, i.e. people who became ‘German’ for more food.
Within weeks of the German conquest about 110,000 Poles, who had refused to sign up as Volksdeutsch, nonetheless did volunteer to work in Germany, where decent pay would help their families survive.
However in early 1940 the SS RuSHA began to realize that their ruling allowing anyone to sign up as a Volksdeutsch was silly. So they decided that all Poles born in the Wartheland before 1919, i.e. who had once held German citizenship, would now automatically become citizens again, as would their kids! They did not even have to sign up. Individual will was not taken into consideration. However, any Pole who had come to the Wartheland since 1918 would be expelled to the General Government, unless of course he or she opted to sign up as ‘German’.
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The Volksdeutsch of that part of Poland occupied by the Soviet Union were in a pitiable state. First of all they were occupied by Communists, who spirited away several of their community leaders. Then they were shoved on the road by the NKVD with but a suitcase and deported to the General Government. Once inside German territory they were placed in refugee camps run by a new SS department, the SS VOMI - Volkstumundmittelstelle [Folkdom Centralization], until they could be given jobs and homes stolen from Jews and Poles. Naturally they blamed Stalin for their plight, but in fact Hitler had not only approved but had asked Stalin to do this. Within the SS VOMI camps SS recruiters plied their trade and many of the male refugees enlisted into the SS there and then simply to put food in their family’s mouths and put their families at the head of the list for housing. None of these people had ever been German citizens. Indeed some had fought against Germany in World War One as members of the Russian Army.
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In September 1939 the Nazis had set loose the dogs of war, but the coming of the war also unleashed the Nazis as never before, and Himmler and Hitler together decided on another move that would test their powers of secrecy. Could they get away with mass murder inside Germany without alerting the people? Operation T-4 would experiment with this concept and at the same time provide a final solution to the question of the mentally and physically handicapped.
In 1939 the euthanasia of newborn infants that were judged to be physically or mentally inferior to the point of helplessness throughout their lives was nothing new. In all countries individual doctors and midwives had been practicing this for centuries, sometimes with the permission of the parents, sometimes not. Eugenics scientists in many countries had discussed forcible euthanasia of adults. This had support in the United States and Germany. Once the Nazis had taken over they made it known to the German medical profession that euthanasia of newborns would be tolerated, indeed encouraged owing to the Nazi concept of making the volk [Germanic tribe] healthier. Furthermore children up to about aged three who had shown no improvement in their handicap could be euthanized. The most common method was orally administered poison, usually Laminal.
T-4 would be a new project. First of all its patients [read victims] would be of all ages. Secondly this would be a formal organization using state facilities created for the project. Its name was an abbreviation of the physical address of its headquarters - Number 4, Tiergarten, Berlin.
Hitler offered Himmler this mission and that most grateful of lackeys eagerly accepted. However, Himmler’s SS never gained official control over T-4. Technically speaking it remained a section of the Ministry of the Interior. So once again Himmler had to take a back seat. Hitler knew how to keep his sycophants in their place.
The civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior that was given responsibility for the actual creation of the T-4 program was Viktor Brack, who by coincidence was a reservist in the Allgemeine SS. One of his advisers would be the Austrian psychiatrist Max de Crinis, who was working in the SS RUSHA. Another adviser was Werner Heyde. This psychiatrist was a Freikorps veteran, who had once been Eicke’s psychiatrist. He had later worked for Eicke within the SS KZL. Yet another adviser was Hans Hefelman, an agricultural economist. Brack contacted several medical officials, including Hans Lammers and Leonardo Conti to run the project. But quickly it was handed to Walter Schultze, Karl Brandt and Phillip Bouhler instead, with orders to organize the shipment of such people for ‘special treatment’. Like all military-style bodies the SS used euphemisms for killing - e.g. when American soldiers killed a sniper, they ‘took him out’. British soldiers ‘bagged him’. When the SS executed someone they assigned him to sonder handlung [special treatment].
Brandt was flattered. At thirty-four years of age this Alsatian had only been a Nazi for seven years and already he was Hitler’s personal physic
ian with the SS reserve rank of obersturmfuehrer. Now he was being entrusted with this highly secret mission. Schultze was a Freikorps veteran, a Bavarian state health official, a doctor of medicine and university professor, and a reserve SS brigadefuehrer. Bouhler was a policeman and official at the chancellery, and also a reservist SS officer.
Himmler needed an inspector for the program, and he chose a fifty-four year old policeman [and SA reservist] Christian Wirth, who now transferred to the SS. Wirth helped set up killing clinics around the country at Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, Hadamar and Hartheim. Obersturmfuehrer Franz Stangl was put in charge of Hartheim, which was near Linz in Austria. Hauptsturmfuehrer Irmfried Eberl took command of Brandenburg. Later this twenty-nine year old Austrian psychiatrist took command of Bernburg. Personnel of the SS KZL wearing white coats over their uniforms would transport the patients in buses or ambulances. These doctors and administrators soon agreed that where there was some dispute that certain patients might not warrant euthanasia, i.e. their medical problem might be curable, it was all right to take race into account. Those with Jewish, Gypsy or Negro blood were marked for death, even if deemed curable.
The doctors experimented with several killing methods, including oral poisons, injections and gas chambers filled with carbon monoxide piped in from a running truck engine, the latter an idea of Gruppenfuehrer Arthur Nebe. Over time it was agreed that the most humane method of killing children was to simply feed them a smaller portion each day until they starved to death - humane for the medical staff, that is. The pain of the victims was irrelevant. The relatives of those killed were given false death certificates, blaming such things as pneumonia.
During the first year of T-4 perhaps a few thousand innocent Germans were murdered, including newborn infants, because their mental or physical condition was deemed irreversible and would make them dependent on others throughout their lives. It goes without saying that any relatives who probed too closely were arrested by the SD and sent to a concentration camp. The same fate awaited any medical staff that blew the whistle. Psychiatrist Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer had serious reservations about the program. The SD suspected he was influenced by his son, Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a well known Lutheran pastor of the Confessing Church. It must be remembered that treatment of the mentally ill throughout the modern world at this date in history was what today we would call barbaric. Electric shock and lobotomy were routine. Leaving patients in shackles or solitary for years was common. And not all were truly ill. Both in Britain and the USA teenage girls could be forcibly held in an insane asylum simply because they had born an illegitimate child. A husband could commit his wife to an asylum against her will, so that he would be free to dally with his mistress. Naturally the Nazis rejected Freudian therapy, because he was a Jew.
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By 1940 Himmler felt quite smug. The restructuring of the police apparatus seemed to be working. The ghettoization of Jews in Poland was going well. The T-4 program was up and running, and on 25 January 1940 the SS Wv had chosen the town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz) in Wartheland as the site of a new large concentration camp.
Furthermore, Hitler had approved the expansion of the SS Verfuegungstruppe. Himmler had a new plan to gain more soldiers, which he had worked out with his recruiters, including the new chief recruiter, Oberfuehrer Gottlob Berger. This man was a fighter, and who better to recruit, thought Himmler. Berger, despite being severely wounded several times in World War One as a soldier of the Wurttemberg Army, had gone on to fight in the German Civil War as a member of the Einwohnerwehr and had then joined the SA and the Border Police. He had been jailed for his part in the Munich Putsch. Eventually Berger was thrown out of the SA because he was too radical. He was Himmler’s kind of man and Himmler had taken him into the SS initially to run the SS sports department. Himmler was always interested in sport and often recruited sports personalities – e.g. he had established an SS cavalry unit by bringing in Hermann Fegelein, an ex-police officer, and Gustav Lombard, because they were internationally renowned equestrians.
With the coming of the war Himmler had called up several thousand SS reservists and assigned them to the SS KZL to relieve those regular outer perimeter guards that had been mobilized by Eicke into their SS Totenkopfverbaende units. SS KZL service was considered by Hitler to be off limits to the military conscription committees, being equal with such professions as munitions worker and ship builder. At the beginning of 1940 with Berger’s help Himmler began transferring these new outer perimeter guards of the SS KZL into new formations of the SS Totenkopfverbaende, leaving the concentration camp guard towers vacant yet again. Hitler naturally could not let this happen, so he approved the transfer of more SS reservists to the guard towers. Most of these SS reservists had already been called up into the army at the outbreak of war, but the army now lost them to the SS KZL. By this method Himmler increased the size of the SS Totenkopfverbaende to no fewer than ten standarten with over 25,000 personnel. At last, Himmler had discovered a loophole in the army’s conscription policy.
This subterfuge was necessary, because the army was not living up to its agreement: e.g. thirty-eight year old Oberfuehrer Georg Altner head of the Kripo in Dortmund was conscripted into the army as a leutnant. Thirty-six year old Heinz Reinefarth was conscripted into the army as a feldwebel, despite his SS rank of sturmbannfuehrer. Naturally this was humiliating for him, but he was still in a good mood because his hometown had been liberated. He was from the Wartheland, and his family home had been under Polish occupation for twenty years, during which time he had lived ‘in exile’. Wilhelm Schroeder had been a fighter pilot in World War One, but since then had progressed in the SS to the rank of oberfuehrer, but was now suddenly conscripted into the army as a leutnant. Franz Kutschera, who had been an Austrian sailor in World War One, and then in turn a Czech gardener, an Austrian Nazi Party official and was currently an oberfuehrer in the Allgemeine SS, was conscripted by the German Army as an infantry grenadier. Obersturmbannfuehrer Wilhelm Harster the BdS for Kassel was called up as a grenadier. However, SS Oberfuehrer Anton Wintersteiger had volunteered to serve in the army as a leutnant!
With millions of Germans already in uniform to the point that some fellows had actually been dismissed as redundant, there is no doubt that the army generals were deliberately trying to sabotage Himmler’s SS at every turn by the calculated conscription of senior SS officers.
The SA had also been emasculated by the conscription of its members, but Lutze had at least gained permission from Hitler to create an armed militia, the SA Wehrmannschaft. It would consist of SA members unable to serve in the armed forces owing to age or infirmity or essential civilian occupation, and they would undergo basic military arms instruction as infantry, engineers, signalers etc.
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If the SS Verfuegungstruppe soldiers knew anything about T-4, and they probably did not, they had their own lives to worry about. They were earmarked for the invasion of Western Europe. With this in mind Obergruppenfuehrer Paul Hausser created a new structure. The SS Verfuegungstruppe would henceforth be known as the Waffen SS [armed SS], with the same status as the German Army, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. Initially the Waffen SS would contain two units, the SS LAH Standarte and the SS Verfuegungstruppe Division. The latter would include pioneers, anti-tank gunners, artillery, reconnaissance and three motorized infantry standarten: SS Germania, SS Deutschland and SS Der Fuehrer.
Then Himmler made the move Eicke had been yearning for. Despite protests from Hausser, Himmler formally accepted the SS Totenkopfverbaende into the new Waffen SS and ordered Eicke to form a division from some of his standarten. Eicke chose to use the 1st SS Oberbayern Totenkopf, 2nd SS Brandenburg Totenkopf, 3rd SS Thueringien Totenkopf and 4th SS Ostmark Totenkopf [part]. In addition to the division, Eicke also raised two new brigades: the 1st SS Motorized Brigade of the 8th and 10th SS Totenkopf Standarten; and the 2nd SS Motorized Brigade of the 4th SS Ostmark Totenkopf [part] and 5th SS Totenkopf Standarten [part
]. All of these men had been outer perimeter camp guards, though some for only a few weeks, except many of the 8th and 10th who were Polish Volksdeutsch recruited after the German invasion of Poland the previous September.
Eicke needed a host of new officers of course, and he preferred to pick promising enlisted men and send them to officer’s school, such as twenty-one year old Siegfried Siegel.
The army generals now realized they had been hoodwinked, but their complaints were ignored. Eicke’s ‘soldiers’ now had the same status as German Army soldiers. Hausser too was indignant. He had consistently argued to keep Eicke’s guards from gaining the same status as his own fighting forces, because he did not want his ‘boys’ to be mistaken for concentration camp guards, i.e. tarred with the same brush. But now Himmler had overruled him.
However, Hausser was successful in keeping yet another brand new division out of the Waffen SS. This was a new pet project of Himmler, the SS Polizei [Police] Division, which was filled with Allgemeine SS reservists and ordinary German policemen. Perhaps the title was a feeble attempt to fool the army. Himmler chose fifty-two year old Polizei Oberst Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch to command it, and forty-nine year old Polizei Oberstleutnant Alfred Wuennenberg, the police inspector for Stuttgart, as a regimental commander. Both soon transferred to the SS, though Wuennenberg continued to use his police rank in communications. Pfeffer-Wildenbruch accepted the SS rank, but refused to use the ‘Hitler Gruess’ [stretched arm Heil Hitler salute] that was required of all SS personnel. Instead he continued to use the conventional police [and army] salute. He was not a Nazi. Another regimental commander was Polizei Oberst Hans Schulze, but it took a while for him to decide to join the SS. One of the artillerymen was Polizei Oberstleutnant Fritz Schmedes, [a Frisian?] who had commanded an artillery battery in World War One and then with the Freikorps in the civil war and Polish War, and had eventually become a policeman. Though assigned to this division, Schmedes refused to join the SS. Another artilleryman was Polizei Major Friedrich Bock, who had recently commanded the 3rd Police Battalion in the General Government. He too refused to join the SS. Alfred Borchert, however, was an Allgemeine SS reservist as well as a Polizei oberstleutnant.
