SS und Polizei: Myths and Lies of Hitler's SS and Police

by J. Lee Ready

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  In December 1942 the trains stopped coming to Belzec. Sturmbannfuehrer Christian Wirth and his staff were told to await further orders. So far they had exterminated an estimated 600,000 human beings. Then the word came - dismantle the camp, plough the ground and landscape it. The Nazis wanted no memorial to their ‘victory’ here.

  Just as Wirth thought his job at Belzec was done, Himmler ordered him to dig up the 600,000 corpses he had created and burn them. Wirth complied, though of course it was the prisoners of his Sonderkommando that did the work, and Ukrainian guards oversaw this, often staying drunk in order to survive the stench, not to mention the sight. Only when this monumental task was done could the camp then be closed and dismantled. Following this the last members of the Sonderkommando were shipped off to Sobibor to enjoy that camp’s version of ‘special treatment’.

  Majdanek was still in operation, but here too the staff was ordered to dig up and burn corpses. So they brought in a civilian construction firm to build a crematorium to burn corpses, both unearthed ones and newly executed arrivals. The firm was happy to get the business.

  Himmler ordered Hoess to build more crematoriums at Birkenau, because Hitler had ordered Himmler to start sending Gypsies to Birkenau for ‘special treatment’. Some of these hapless victims were wives and children of German soldiers!

  Hitler also ordered the Gestapo to arrest all Mischling children in state orphanages and ship them off to the T-4 center at Hadamar for ‘special treatment’. These orders came through the SS RSHA, which was now under the direction of Eichmann’s friend Gruppenfuehrer Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

  So far the SS einsatzgruppe had eliminated approximately one million souls. By summer 1943 SS Einsatzgruppe A was under the command of Oberfuehrer Humbert Achamer-Piffrader; B was controlled by Oberfuehrer Erich Naumann, a lawyer; C by Brigadefuehrer Max Thomas; and D by Oberfuehrer Walter Bierkamp, who still insisted on calling his formation SS Battlegroup Bierkamp.

  Near Nordhausen in central Germany the SS WVHA established an underground slave labor camp named Dora-Mittelbau [Dora Central Site] by ordering thousands of prisoners to dig into existing caves in the Harz Mountains. Once done they established underground armaments factories here, and some of the earliest rocket [guided missile] facilities were placed here, including the laboratory of Dr. Werner von Braun. The reason the Germans were going underground was that their entire country was by now within range of Anglo-American aircraft. Allied bombers were striking someplace in Germany every day and every night. Dora was in fact thirty-one camps. Conditions inside Dora were horrific even for the SS KZL guards, let alone for the poor unfortunate slaves tossed into this gigantic grave. The slaves worked, ate and slept underground. Perhaps as many as a third of the slaves died of overwork, poor food and the overall unhealthy atmosphere.

  After an inspection tour Speer recommended to SS Oberfuehrer Hans Kammler that the Dora slaves be housed above ground so that they could breathe clean air when off duty. This was done for some, and it reduced the mortality rate.

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  In early 1943 Oberfuehrer von Sammern-Frankenegg the SSPF for Warsaw was informed by his superiors that the budding resistance movement inside the Warsaw ghetto was of no consequence as it had been decided at senior level that the ghetto was to be completely liquidated by transportation to Birkenau.

  In response on 18 January 1943 von Sammern-Frankenegg sent 800 Latvian and Lithuanian schumas, 200 German Gendarmerie [rural policemen] and a few SD men into the ghetto to begin the round up. No sooner had they begun than shots rang out. Suddenly a home-made hand grenade blew up. Realizing that they were under fire, the schumas, police and SD fled the ghetto!

  The following day these ‘heroes’ cautiously reentered the ghetto reinforced by 600 Germans and Polish Volksdeutsch of the 25th Police Regiment. They took no chances and sprayed every window with bullets. Over the next three days they managed to drag 6,000 people out of the buildings. Those who refused to walk were shot on the spot.

  But on the 22nd the Nazis did not return. The surviving Jews of the ghetto wondered what this all meant.

  In January the sonderkommando prisoners at Treblinka extermination camp took advantage of the confusion that the arrival of a trainload of Jewish victims caused and they revolted. Their intention was to rush the fence and escape. The Ukrainian guards were dumbstruck, but within seconds they recovered and began shooting with rifles and machine guns, killing about a thousand prisoners, and because their firing was so indiscriminate they also accidentally shot several guards. A few prisoners managed to escape.

  In February the Nazis decided to liquidate the Cracow ghetto, so Obersturmfuehrer Amon Goeth was given a team of SD, Kripo and Gestapo to arrest the visible Jews and then go back in and comb the ghetto for the invisible Jews, i.e. those in hiding. It is possible that Goeth was aided by members of the 23rd Police Regiment.

  They found people including small children hiding in closets, sewers and pipes. Of those arrested some were deemed able to work and were sent to nearby Plaszow labor camp, which Goeth would now command [reporting to Majdanek]. Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist turned humanitarian, managed to gain work permits for even small children, thus saving their lives, but life inside Plaszow was no sanctuary, because Goeth proved to be a psychopathic killer who shot prisoners for sport when he was bored. Schindler tried to keep him entertained. [One of Goeth’s mistresses supported his extermination of Jews, and post-war she legally changed her name to Goeth.]

  Himmler was so pleased with Goeth’s efficiency, he sent him and his team to liquidate smaller ghettoes at Tarnow and Bochnia.

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  In late February 1943 Himmler blurred the distinction between police and SS even more, by declaring that all German police regiments would henceforth have the designation ‘SS’ and that it would behoove their senior officers to enlist into the SS if they were not already members. Yet even now not all did so, and few of the ordinary ‘cops’ in the regiments joined the SS.

  The staff of Army Group Center was complaining again that their active anti-partisan forces were insufficient, for guerilla attacks were increasing. Currently they had several units hunting partisans including a bicycle regiment, a horse cavalry regiment, a tank battalion, three security divisions and the Versuchs Brigade (RNNA). On passive duty, i.e. to help protect army supply lines, they were using the Russian-manned Ordnungsdienst [i.e. militia not local police] and German Police Regiment Center and the 2nd Police Regiment. The latter, now redesignated 2nd SS Police Regiment, contained three infantry battalions and three artillery batteries. In response to the army’s complaints Hitler ordered five army training divisions to move into the ‘east’. This was a stopgap measure to say the least. These young recruits should have been spending all their time training, but would now spend some of their time hunting partisans. As recruits who had been in the army only a few weeks they were nearly useless.

  In response to SS liaison officers who claimed the army was too soft on partisans, Himmler informed his SS and police that none would be court martialed for an offence against the public while on an anti-partisan operation.

  The first major anti-partisan operation in the east in 1943 under these new rules was Operation February, a campaign heavily influenced by Obergruppenfuehrer von dem Bach Zelewski in which the BNS and some German units with plenty of hiwis blocked the exits from the Pripet Marsh in Byelorussia, while German army assault units went in. However, the Germans, hiwis and Byelorussians could not block all the exits and many partisans escaped. By 26 February the Axis units had lost twenty-nine killed and thirty-eight wounded [of whom two killed and twelve wounded were Germans]. However, under the brutal orders of Zelewski these troops killed in battle or executed 2,219 partisans. And they executed 7,378 villagers suspected of aiding the partisans and they imprisoned thousands of others. Ten villages were burned to the ground and all cattle and foodstuffs were confiscated. In addition they found 3,300 Jews in hidin
g and shot them. Von dem Bach Zelewski was well pleased with this. However, he was not so pleased when he discovered that among these 13,000 enemy dead only fourteen pistols and one hundred and seventy-two rifles had been found. Even if one took into consideration the facts that partisan recruits were not issued weapons for their first battle, that even veteran partisans might be short of weapons, and that any escaping partisan would take as many weapons with him as possible, it was still obvious that the vast majority of the victims were unarmed.

  On 22 February Third Panzer Army launched an anti-partisan operation relying heavily on Cossack and Tatar hiwis in the Veliz-Vitebsk region of Byelorussia, but as the army generals refused to permit Zelewski to have any input here the troops did not leave a senseless trail of death and destruction behind them.

  In Operation Winter Magic Latvian and Ukrainian schumas swept Latvia for partisans.

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  In February 1943 Kaltenbrunner passed on the order to the Gestapo inside Germany to begin arresting Jews who were married to Aryans. There was an immediate public outcry with demonstrations in several German cities and a mass meeting in Berlin. The Gestapo backed off and set the Jewish spouses free!

  Literally at the same time that Himmler was loosening the racial restrictions for SS membership, Hitler was tightening his restrictions on who should live and who should die. In October 1942 Hitler had insisted that all 1st degree Mischlings should be dismissed from the police. The order was enforced haphazardly. Then Hitler told Himmler that all 1st degree Mischlings would eventually be sent for ‘special treatment’ as part of the final solution. Dr Bruno Kurt Schultz an SS RuSHA officer suggested that 2nd degree Mischlings should go the same way if they looked Jewish. Not to be outdone Himmler put forth the suggestion that all children of 2nd degree Mischlings should be sterilized, just to make sure that no Jewish blood would be introduced into the Aryan gene pool in the future. None of these arguments made any sense - neither biologically, socially, culturally, politically, economically, militarily nor morally.

  The insanity of all this is evident because of its inconsistency. Kulmhof extermination camp was shut down in April 1943, but the buildings were left intact. At the same time Himmler authorized the creation of a new transit camp in Germany to be known as Bergen-Belsen with Hauptsturmfuehrer Adolf Haas as kommandant. Its purpose would be to hold Jews in survivable comfort until they could be exchanged with the Allies for German civilians held by them. Surely the SS KZL guards tasked with looking after these people must have thought this was an odd idea, for if all Jews were enemies of the German Volk and therefore had to be killed, how could releasing them to the Allies be justified?

  This was yet another example of the lie. Himmler did not believe the nonsense about Jews being the enemy. All he saw was a way to gain some form of personal advantage from them. He even put out the word that he would sell Jews to the Allies for money. The Soviets could care less what was happening to Jews and indeed refused to publicly acknowledge that the Nazis were picking on Jews. The British and Americans were consistent in that they always refused to accept Jewish immigrants in great numbers. Furthermore anti-Semitism was rife in Britain and the USA. The British in Palestine were at war with Jewish guerillas – primarily the Stern Gang and the Irgun Zwei Leume. When Prime Minister Churchill thought it would be a good public relations move to create an all Jewish brigade in the British Army, his generals responded favorably, because it gave them the opportunity to rid the army of Jews by transferring them to the brigade. When US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau raised money to buy Himmler’s Jews, Cordell Hull the US Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs prohibited the deal. Morgenthau was a Jew. Hull was not. Roosevelt, the US president, supported Hull, knowing that the American people, 98% Christian, would never part with money merely to save Jews, especially if the money was going to the enemy.

  Therefore, Bergen-Belsen continued to fill up with far more inmates than it was built for, and overcrowding became farcical with two, three and sometimes four prisoners sharing the same bunk.

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  The resistance movement inside the Warsaw ghetto obtained more firearms, not just from black market gangsters, but also from the Polish Christian and Communist resistance movements. The Poles had initially not wanted to provide Jews with guns, because they did not think they would use them. But once the few armed Jews did start shooting back, the Poles began to supply them. In February 1943 members of the ghetto resistance movement killed five Jewish members of the Gestapo.

  In March 1943 Oberfuehrer Scherner organized a round up in Cracow ghetto. His SD, Gestapo, 23rd SS Police Regiment and the Cracow Polish Police had no trouble in dragging out the last Jews from the city’s ghetto. This left only two significant depositories of Jews in Poland: Warsaw ghetto and Lodz ghetto.

  In Bialystok Jewish workers attacked their SS guards, killing eight before they were stopped and caught. Refusing to budge, they were gunned down by Ukrainian hiwis.

  At Treblinka a young Jewess, realizing she was going to be executed, grabbed a rifle from a Ukrainian hiwi and shot him dead. She then shot dead another hiwi and wounded a third. Other hiwis overpowered her and tortured her to death.

  On 13 March in the Warsaw ghetto Jewish workers refused to accompany their Ukrainian Werkschutz to their place of employment. Armed members of the resistance movement heard the commotion and rushed to intervene. They shot two Ukrainians, killing one. The other guards fled. Later in the day a Gestapo team entered the ghetto to arrest someone, but they were ambushed by armed men, and two Gestapo members were killed.

  In response von Sammern-Frankenegg sent hundreds of German and Polish policemen and Latvian and Lithuanian schumas into the ghetto with orders to indiscriminately shoot people on the street until they scattered indoors.

  Himmler was frustrated by this show of opposition in the Warsaw ghetto, so he sent someone to aid von Sammern-Frankenegg in liquidating the ghetto. The man he chose was Brigadefuehrer Juergen Stroop. Following Stroop’s front line service with the SS Totenkopf Division he had been HSSPF for the Caucasus. Fleeing the Soviet advance, he then became SSPF for Lwow. Himmler now gave him orders to launch a combat operation against these Jewish ‘partisans’.

  Stroop dove into this role with gusto. While fighting the Soviets the highest combat rank he had achieved was platoon commander, in charge of thirty or so, but now he would command several hundred troops in this engagement. He began on 19 April 1943 by sending Polish policemen to seal off the Warsaw ghetto, and then his assault team attacked with 234 German policemen mostly of the 22nd SS Police Regiment, plus 375 Ukrainian hiwis fresh from the Trawniki school and 830 eager eighteen-year old Waffen SS recruits, in addition to some SD and Gestapo. The Waffen SS recruits, mostly en route to the SS Totenkopf and Florian Geyer Divisions, were told they were going up against Communist partisans. One wonders why Stroop had to lie to these boys if he was not ashamed of the deportations of helpless Jewish men, women and children.

  At first the hiwis used Jewish policemen as human shields, but the Jewish guerillas fired back anyway. After all they hated the Jewish policemen as much as they did the German policemen, if not more so. Stroop and his men managed to round up hundreds of people, but they took casualties on every street corner. German police reinforcements arrived with a light tank and two armored cars, but the Jewish urban guerillas threw Molotov cocktails out of upstairs windows in the narrow streets and set fire to the vehicles. By day’s end twenty-five of Stroop’s men had been wounded [two German policemen, two Polish policemen, six Ukrainian hiwis and fifteen SS recruits, one of the latter mortally].

  Next day Stroop attacked again. He was better organized this time and his men managed to arrest thousands of people. Stroop was particularly angered when he found that German civilian employers in the ghetto had been hiding upwards of 5,000 Jews in their factories. Learning that Jews were hiding in the sewers, he ordered chlorine gas pumped into them to kill them or flush them out. However, h
is men were under fire all day, and two were killed and ten wounded.

  The following day Stroop’s assault team advanced this time with flamethrower troops borrowed from the Waffen SS and flak detachments borrowed from the Luftwaffe anti-aircraft defenses. The Luftwaffe gunners were astonished to be ordered to fire pointblank into apartment blocks! Stroop announced he intended to burn and explode the partisans out of their bunkers. ‘What bunkers,’ some veterans must have asked?

  Day after day the battle continued. The Jews lost a thousand or more every day either killed or taken away for ‘special treatment’. Stroop’s losses were three killed and twenty wounded in the week 21-27 April, two killed and fourteen wounded in the following week, five killed and thirteen wounded in the third week, and two killed and eleven wounded in the fourth week. Finally on May 16 Stroop declared the battle won and that Warsaw was ‘cleansed’ of its Jews. Yet even now he requested a battalion of the German 23rd SS Police Regiment so that he could comb the rubble for die-hards. These policemen found clearing Warsaw of Jews to be different than their previous mission of clearing Cracow, for here they reportedly took fire for the next three weeks!

  In sum for about 120 casualties Stroop had killed or arrested 55,000 Jews in the two-month operation. Proud of himself he presented a book of the battle to his superiors as if it had been the Battle of Stalingrad.

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  In May 1943 Hauptsturmfuehrer Josef Mengele arrived at Auschwitz and presented his credentials to Hoess. He was a medical doctor who had served in the SS Wiking’s medical unit for three years until wounded. Declared unfit for military service he had transferred from the Waffen SS to the SS KZL, and he now had carte blanche from Himmler to do what he liked. At the main concentration camp at Auschwitz he soon delighted in performing increasingly bizarre medical experiments on prisoners, especially children, whom he liberally dosed with candy and kind words. Usually his test subjects died.