by J. Lee Ready
Yet at the same time Himmler would swiftly prosecute any SS officer he caught defrauding the SS: e.g. Oberfuehrer Hans Loritz was made kommandant of Sachsenhausen concentration camp complex in 1940 after his good work at Dachau. Yet when the Kripo caught him cheating the SS out of money, Himmler dismissed him at once. One of Loritz’s officers, the Alsatian Standartenfuehrer Hermann Florstedt, was also corrupt, but was not caught. Indeed he was later promoted and became kommandant of Majdanek.
And in addition Himmler claimed that the SS was at the forefront of the New Order, leading with purity of spirit and dedication to all things German, but here he was ordering an SS officer to make do, even if it meant stealing from fellow Germans. This is more evidence that the very fundamental ideology of the SS was a lie.
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One wonders if the business executives of the private companies that dealt with slave labor knew how poorly these slaves were treated, or if they even cared? Slave labor camps were so brutal that workers often collapsed or went mad. If that happened some guards would simply shoot them there and then, but most guards did not want to murder a helpless human being and this caused a dilemma. What could be done with slaves who could no longer perform? As a result of the guards’ reluctance to commit legal but immoral executions, Himmler came to the conclusion that a new T-4 program should be created. The T-4 staff was told to send teams to the various concentration camps and labor camps with the mission of deciding who should be destined for ‘special treatment’, the SS euphemism for execution. This program was named ‘14 f 13’ and would be commanded by Professor Werner Heyde. He insisted that actual psychiatrists should judge the slaves as no one else was qualified. So each camp complex received its own psychiatrist. E.g. Obersturmfuehrer Friedrich Mennecke, an SS psychiatrist, was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp to give mental health examinations to those inmates that the camp doctor had preliminarily assigned to ‘special treatment’. Mennecke was quite taken aback when he arrived, because he was handed a workload of scores and sometimes hundreds per day. He could not possibly interview this many ‘patients’, and he quickly realized that in reality all he was being asked to do was rubber stamp the camp doctor’s death warrants. He was also to judge physically incapacitated prisoners. E.g. those with tuberculosis were to be killed right away. The Nazis were not about to spend time and money nursing them. 14 f 13 was always under the command of T-4, not the SS KZL or SS Wv. As an incentive to remain in this job these psychiatrists were paid a bonus for each ‘examination‘. Piece work.
By 1942 the labor and concentration camps throughout the Reich reported a total average of 22,000 dead slaves per month! Many were victims of 14 f 13. And this did not include those ‘healthy’ slaves executed for an infringement of the rules.
There started to appear, perhaps by pure fluke, a biological-medical theme to Himmler’s system of mass murder. First of all the many agriculturalists and animal husbandry breeders in the high echelons of the SS, of which Himmler was one, began to establish a parallel between animal husbandry and human race control. E.g. Herbert Backe, a Georgian Volksdeutsch became the German farmer’s Nazi representative, and later he activated his reservist SS commission and joined the SS RuSHA to give advice on human race control.
The mission of the medical staff of T-4 was to eradicate the dead wood, as it were, namely executing the incurably insane and physically handicapped, thus leaving the sane and physically sound components of the Aryan tribe or body to thrive. It is no coincidence that Gruppenfuehrer Wilhelm Rediess, who was a proponent of T-4, was an agriculturalist.
And by 1941 the ’14 f 13’ psychiatrists were sentencing to death men and women who were no longer sound in mind and body because they had been pushed to the edge by Himmler’s slave labor system.
Not surprisingly every quack of the medical profession, including self-proclaimed healers, managed to gain an audience with Himmler and his chief SS doctor, Oberfuehrer Ernst-Robert von Grawitz. The two sat and watched as each charlatan demonstrated his new theory. If Himmler was sold on the idea, the quack was given a budget and facilities at a concentration camp to experiment on inmates.
In keeping with this pseudo-medical logic in the spring of 1941 Himmler announced in secret to his ‘inner circle’ of the SS that after this eradication of bad cells from the Aryan body, i.e. the ‘cure’ part of the program, would come the ‘prevention’ part of the program, namely the protection of the Aryan body from newly encountered bad cells by killing off those bad cells before they could infect the Aryan body. He further explained that he knew these bad cells would be encountered because Hitler had in secret ordered a military invasion of the Soviet Union. The orders for the armed forces were to defeat the Red Army and to execute known Communist leaders including the political commissars assigned to every Red Army unit. However, Himmler had another mission in mind. This may have been his own idea, but more likely Hitler had verbally given him an ‘extra secret’ order. Himmler wanted to create a new SS unit which would kill ‘bad cells’ when they were encountered. In real terms this meant scouring the Soviet Union for Jews, Gypsies, mentally ill, extremely physically handicapped and Communists - and killing them.
Himmler calculated that about 3,000 killers would be needed for this unit, and he planned to divide it into four SS einsatzgruppe, each of which would command several smaller SS einsatzkommando. Initially he assumed that he could simply assign 3,000 SS men to the job, in the same manner that he had established temporary einsatzkommando in the past.
However, here he hit a stumbling block. The shooting of enemies of the state was one thing. After all every soldier of every nation did that in battle. And under German law the arrest and execution of innocent civilians in retaliation for an attack by guerillas was also lawful. But lawful is one thing. Morally right is another. Furthermore it was an entirely different matter to arrest someone in their home on one’s own initiative with no evidence of any ‘criminal’ activity on their part and simply shoot them and their children. This butchery might seem immoral to almost everyone, but under US military law during World War Two the shooting of innocent civilians in retaliation for someone else’s ‘crime’ was legal. As recently as 1939 British troops had taken innocent civilian hostages and used them as human shields [in the Palestine Arab Revolt 1936-1939]. In early 1940 the French Army had executed political prisoners.
Himmler, despite his service in World War One and the Freikorps, had never been in combat [unless one counts the few minutes of the Munich Putsch in 1923 or standing in an air raid shelter in the current war]. He had never been a warrior and he had never been an executioner, and moreover he never understood the difference. As a result he was surprised to find that he would have to recruit his killers by setting up a screening process of his current SS membership, but with a reversed morality. In a normal military interview applicants would be thrown out if they exhibited a pathological hatred of any particular group or if they appeared asocial without a conscience. Himmler organized interviews to include these misfits rather than exclude them. He told his interviewers to hire everyone who fit this bill, without actually telling them what the duty would be, and the rejects would be returned to their normal SS jobs none the wiser. This was a process originally devised by Eicke.
Himmler was soon embarrassed that even after combing the entire SS of almost 200,000 personnel, including the SD, Gestapo, Kripo, SS KZL, SS Wv, SS HuB, SS RuSHA, SS VOMI, Allgemeine SS and Waffen SS, he could still not come up with 3,000 killers. In desperation he ordered his recruiters to interview ordinary German policemen, of which there were a quarter million by now [including the Police Reserve]. This effort finally found sufficient killers, though to reach his manpower goal he even had to recruit females.
Here again we see a fusion of the SS and police. We also see evidence of two lies: that the SS were such hardened men as to obey all orders without question; and that the police had nothing to do with the Holocaust.
The result was that each SS ein
satzgruppe had mixed personnel: e.g. SS Einsatzgruppe A would eventually consist of about a thousand personnel: 517 temporarily drawn from the Gestapo, SD, Kripo and SS KZL, 340 on loan from the Waffen SS [predominantly SS Totenkopfverbaende], and 133 drawn from the Orpo [ordinary police], plus a few female aufseherinen from the Allgemeine SS, SS Wv and SS KZL, and some policewomen. The women would serve as clerks, radio operators, drivers and interpreters. If one counts the Gestapo and Kripo members as policemen, then about a quarter of this unit was ‘police’. This disregards the technicality that all SS were auxiliary policemen.
Many of the einsatzgruppe officers were lawyers, such as Sturmbannfuehrer Horst Barth, Sturmbannfuehrer Alexander Landgraf, Sturmbannfuehrer Otto Bradfisch, Brigadefuehrer Otto Rasch and Brigadefuehrer Franz Stahlecker. And a high proportion were medical doctors, in keeping with their ‘medical’ mission. There were also a few economists, and at least one opera singer!
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Hitler’s diplomatic corps had been busy, for Hitler knew that in order to keep the British Empire at bay while at the same time preparing to invade the Soviet Union he needed partners. Mussolini and Hitler had together created the Rome-Berlin Axis, and their troops had fought alongside each other in Spain, but Mussolini had refused to help Germany fight off the British and French. In 1939 Hitler had gained Slovakia as a partner, and Slovak troops helped him crush Poland. Though the Soviet Union had also helped him destroy the Poles, the Soviets never formally joined the Axis. Italy did however declare war on France and Britain in June 1940, thus becoming Hitler’s partner again. Mussolini had hoped the French and British would collapse before he actually had to fight them. He was wrong about the British. France became a de facto partner of Germany when the British turned on the French in July 1940. Then in the latter half of 1940 Hitler collected Japan, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland as Axis partners, though none of them declared war on Britain. To complicate matters Italy invaded Greece in October 1940, and the British aided the Greeks, but Hitler did not join this new war. At Athens airport swastika covered German commercial aircraft shared the same runway as British bombers! In truth the Axis was never a military alliance, but merely a social club.
On 25 March 1941 Yugoslavia signed up for the Axis. This nation was an artificial creation that should have been called the Serb Empire, for it had been established by the British and French in 1919 to award the Serbs at the expense of a huge number of people from various ethnicities including hundreds of thousands of Austrians, who in Nazi terms were known as Yugoslavian Volksdeutsch.
So wooing the Yugoslavian [Serb] government into the axis and therefore away from an alliance with Britain was a diplomatic coup, but Hitler and his diplomats did not have time to congratulate themselves, for there was an immediate revolution by the Serb people and they threw out their government and repudiated the treaty with Germany.
Hitler went berserk. It made him look like a fool, and he was determined to teach the Serbs a lesson. He told his generals to invade the country in one week’s time! As if this was not enough of a shock to his generals, he told them to implement a long-standing plan to invade Greece as well.
The Greek campaign was not going well for Mussolini, so Hitler intended to help his Fascist colleague out of his quandary by knocking off the Greeks as he went past on his way to Yugoslavia.
Following a tremendous feat of logistics the invasion began on schedule. On 6 April 1941 the axis forces of Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria invaded Yugoslavia. Gruppenfuehrer Paul Hausser, commanding the SS Verfuegungstruppe Division ordered his men forward. Hausser had recently renamed this division the SS Das Reich [The Reich] Motorized Division, and he wanted his ‘boys’ to reach the Yugoslavian capital Belgrade before any army unit, thus gaining prestige for the Waffen SS. Oberfuehrer Willi Bittrich commanding the division’s SS Deutschland Regiment had not seen action since Poland and probably he intended to be the one to take Belgrade. Perhaps Brigadefuehrer Georg Keppler expected his SS Der Fuehrer Regiment to get their first. Hausser encouraged the competition.
In addition to the SS Das Reich, the Waffen SS would be represented by Dietrich’s SS LAH, which was now a motorized infantry brigade with its own engineers and artillery, but on this first day Dietrich was ordered to wait at the border. The new guys in the unit, such as Bernhard Krause, were hoping they would perform well in battle and not let the ‘old ones’ down. However, during this first day Yugoslav aircraft strafed and bombed the SS LAH’s stationary column. Fortunately the unit had its own flak guns (anti-aircraft), otherwise the raid might have been more damaging than it was. One of the casualties was Obersturmbannfuehrer Wilhelm Mohnke, whose foot was blown off. One of the SS LAH flak gunners was J. Hendrik Feldmeijer, the founder of the Dutch SS. Everyone realized the presence of this Dutchman was more political than patriotic.
On day two Dietrich was finally given orders to advance, and no sooner had his SS LAH entered Yugoslavia than he swerved southwards towards Greece, and after three days his men entered Greece on the 10th through the mountainous Klidi Pass. Sturmbannfuehrer Kurt Meyer, who by now sported a thin Douglas Fairbanks style moustache, commanded the SS LAH’s reconnaissance unit, and he pushed ahead dangerously when he saw that Greek opposition was minimal, and he continued despite his column being strafed by British planes. He continued until he ran into British armored cars. The fight was short. He won.
Meanwhile Sturmbannfuehrer Fritz Witt’s infantry battalion of the SS LAH climbed some cliffs under fire until they were able to pour fire down upon defending Australian troops, forcing them to retreat. One of Witt’s companies, that of Obersturmfuehrer Gerd Pleiss, received great praise for this maneuver. Witt was ecstatic that his battalion had been victorious, but he was soon in grief at the news that he had suffered one hundred casualties, especially as one of the fallen was his brother Franz Witt.
Following this excellent maneuver Dietrich’s SS LAH advanced through the high Klissura Pass against the Greek 21st Division, and by the morning of the 12th they had busted through and taken over a thousand prisoners.
That afternoon the SS LAH attacked again after having softened up the Greeks with an artillery barrage and a raid by Stuka dive-bombers. They overwhelmed the Greek rearguard. Late in the day Meyer advanced with some armored cars into Kastoria, where he captured thousands of Greeks, who seem to have been totally paralyzed by the speed of the German advance.
Back in Yugoslavia on the 11th, the sixth day of the offensive, the SS Das Reich reached the Danube River. Hauptsturmfuehrer Fritz Klingenberg with his Hollywood smile and jovial nature decided to attack with just nine other men riding on five motorcycles with sidecars. They crossed the wide river in a boat barely big enough for all of them, and then the ten men drove on to enter the ruins of the heavily bombed city of Belgrade. Here Klingenberg and his nine man ‘army’ bluffed the mayor into surrendering the city. Hausser was overjoyed when he heard the news. Even the army generals had to admit that taking the capital of Yugoslavia with just ten men was an outstanding feat.
The British refused to believe this and put out the lie that an entire German army had really taken the city and only after a huge and costly battle, but that Hitler had allowed Himmler to have the glory by faking the motorcycle incident!
In Greece on 21 April Sepp Dietrich accepted the surrender of no fewer than sixteen Greek divisions, which were in fact already retreating from an Italian advance. Given a choice of capitulating to Germans or Italians, the Greeks chose the former as one last insult to the Italians. There is much evidence that the soldiers of the SS LAH behaved quite humanely towards the tens of thousands of captured Greeks, Aussies and Brits.
One week later, Yugoslavia surrendered. Generally speaking of the 300,000 Yugoslav soldiers only the ethnic Serbs had offered any kind of resistance.
Meanwhile Dietrich’s SS LAH went crashing headlong into part of the Australian 6th Division, and with the liberal use of artillery and the Luftwaffe’s Stuka dive-bombers, the SS breache
d the defenses. As the Australians retreated, a British armored brigade counterattacked, but the SS LAH performed impressively and drove off the British tanks, though they had none of their own. Bernhard Krause eagerly led his men forward after the British, hoping to catch them before they evacuated by ship. Some of the SS LAH troops even advanced in railroad trains. They took many prisoners, but failed to catch the bulk of the British, New Zealanders and Australians, for they had sailed away in a vast armada of ships.
Meyer’s blood was up, though, so he commandeered two fishing boats and went chasing after them! He ferried his men a few at a time across the Gulf of Corinth. Once he had assembled his unit he and his people set off in stolen cars and buses, but they failed in this school boyish attempt to apprehend the bulk of the Allied forces.
The British government had a lot of explaining to do. How could they tell their people that two nations with a half million soldiers between them, plus a major British Commonwealth expeditionary force, had been destroyed in just two weeks. They had to admit the truth, but they tweaked it by claiming that the conquest had cost the Germans hundreds of thousands of casualties. Furthermore they denied the Italians any share in the glory. [British loathing of Italians colored their press.]
The German people were astonished and euphoric. They were especially elated that German casualties since 6 April were only in the hundreds. Actually the news was even better than the Nazis admitted, because when the SS LAH drove northwards back to Germany after the campaign they crossed Romania [with Romanian government permission], and they recruited about 600 Romanian Volksdeutsch into their ranks [without Romanian government permission]. Thus in terms of manpower the brigade actually made a net profit in this campaign!
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