Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

  Throughout 1941 diplomatic talks between Ludin and high-ranking representatives of the Slovakian government, particularly Tiso and Tuka, intensified. On 4 December, Ludin finally reported to Berlin that the Slovakian government ‘agrees in principle with the deportation of Jews of Slovak citizenship from within the Reich to ghettos in the east’.51 Soon after the notorious Wannsee Conference held in Berlin on 20 January 1942, the raids on and deportations of the Slovakian Jews began. In late February 1942 the Slovakian government agreed – although the details of the agreement are still not entirely clear – to start deportations of its Jews to German-occupied Poland, where they would allegedly be employed as forced labourers. These deportations were partly overseen by Hlinka guards, in cooperation with the Carpathian-German Freiwilliger Selbstschutz (FS), later known as the Freiwillige Schutzstaffel.52 The Slovakian government agreed to pay the German Reich 5,000 crowns (500 reichsmark) per Jew for its ‘professional retraining’ of the population, and in return the Germans let the Slovaks freely ransack Jewish properties.53 Germans and Slovaks worked hand in hand in these efforts, as a statement by Ludin from April 1942 illustrates: ‘In the absence of any German pressure, the Slovak government has agreed to deport all Jews from Slovakia. Even the president has personally agreed to the deportation, in spite of an intervention by the Slovak episcopate.’54

  Between April and October of 1942 at least 58,000 Slovakian Jews were deported and by far the majority of them killed in German-occupied Poland, either by mistreatment, starvation, excessive slave labour, or outright execution. Most of these deaths took place in the death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek.55 Contrary to post-war testimonies, Ludin neither criticized these deportations nor was unaware of their ultimate purpose. On 26 June 1942 he reported to Berlin that while ‘the deportations of the Jews from Slovakia’ had come ‘to a dead end’, he recommended a ‘100 per cent solution to the Jewish question’.56 Confronted with protests from the Vatican and growing unease within the Slovakian population, Tiso finally stopped the transports in late 1942. By this time rumours had already spread throughout Slovakia that those deported would be ‘boiled to soap’.57 A second wave of deportations started only with the German occupation of Slovakia in September 1944, this time organized and carried out by SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner, who had succeeded the ‘Jew Councillor’, SS-Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny, after the latter was transferred to German-occupied Hungary.58 Ludin’s involvement in the deportations of 1944 is clear from his personnel file at the Foreign Office. A cable from the Foreign Office alludes to a meeting arranged for late July or early August in Budapest between Ludin and SS Brigade General Edmund Veesenmayer, since March the Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary, to officially ‘discuss the handling of the Jewish question [Behandlung Judenfrage]’.59 Overall, current estimates of the total number of Jews deported from Slovakia are at least 70,000, with the number of those murdered estimated as 65,000 (or 110,000, if the Slovak-occupied territories of Hungary are included).60

  An important ‘connecting link’ between the German officials and the Slovakian government was the engineer, journalist, and politician Franz Karmasin, nicknamed the ‘Slovak Henlein’, the founder and leader of the Carpathian German Party61 and since 1935 also State Secretary for German Affairs in the Slovak regional government.62 In the early 1940s, Karmasin called himself Führer der Deutschen Volksgruppe in der Slowakei, or Leader of the Ethnic Germans in Slovakia. He was also the commander of the FS, the successor of the Slovakian faction of the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps, which in 1938 had so decisively contributed to the dismantling of Czechoslovakia (see chapter 6). The FS was modelled after the German SA and SS, and only Slovakia’s status as an independent state prevented this organization from being officially included in the SA, as its counterparts in the Protectorate of Böhmen und Mähren and the Memelland had been. However, in the propaganda book Sudeten SA in Polen both terms were used nearly interchangeably, and they seem to have operated along the same lines.63 Karmasin was promoted to the honorary positions of SA-Oberführer on 17 May 1939, SA-Brigadeführer on 30 January 1941, and SA-Gruppenführer on 9 November 1944.64 In short, he became an honorary SA general in an Axis state where – for political reasons – the stormtroopers only existed in the form of the FS.

  On the German side, Wisliceny, Brunner, and Karmasin were the central figures urging Tiso to take ever more extreme action against the Jewish population.65 The terror they encouraged, however, also targeted some ethnic Germans, as a letter from Karmasin to Himmler dated 29 July 1942 makes plain. In this letter, Karmasin thanked Himmler for his ‘once again generous help by allowing us to resettle asocial elements’. This ‘help’ referred to the deportation of nearly 700 members of the German community – in Karmasin’s words, ‘drunkards’ and ‘imbeciles’ – to nearby Austria, now called the Ostmark of the Greater German Reich. In the following days and weeks the large majority of these deportees were ‘euthanized’, that is, murdered. According to Karmasin, the Carpathian Germans praised this initiative as valuable ‘social aid’, and the German Embassy strongly supported it.66 Envoy Ludin was on an intimate footing with Karmasin, and, according to the latter’s post-war testimony, ‘both men discussed all relevant political questions’. They seem to have established a kind of division of responsibilities: Karmasin, in line with the SS, put pressure on the leading figures within the Slovakian government, while Ludin’s task was to urge Tiso on the diplomatic level to comply with Hitler’s demands.67 There is no evidence that the ‘Jewish question’ was handled any differently. A verbal note from Ludin to the Slovakian Ministry of the Interior from 1 May 1942 explicitly assured the Slovakian government that, as a matter of principle, the German Reich would not send back those Slovakian Jews that had so far been deported to German-occupied territory.68 By that time both sides knew exactly what this meant in practice. Karmasin’s driver, who had accompanied his boss on a visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp in July 1942, put it bluntly after the war: ‘It was a matter of common knowledge that the people in Auschwitz were killed.’69

  Deadly Varieties of a Pattern

  The negotiations between the SA diplomats and the national governments of Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary proceeded in many ways along a path similar to that taken in Slovakia, but they resulted in quite different outcomes. Of lasting influence in these negotiations was the German envoy to the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or NDH), Siegfried Kasche (Plate 29). Backed by Hitler, who shared Kasche’s sympathy for the Croatian nationalists, the German ambassador to Zagreb played an important role in Croatian politics between 1941 and 1945, both in influencing the Ustaša regime to fall in line with German war aims and in speeding up the imprisonment, deportation, and execution of the Croatian Jews. The historian Alexander Korb has characterized Kasche as an ‘effective champion of German interests on difficult terrain’.70 Kasche maintained close and personal contact with the leading figures of the Ustaša regime and proved to be a strong and lasting supporter of Croatian home rule, a position that between 1942 and 1944 proved ever more problematic and finally earned him the sarcastic nickname of the ‘Don Quixote of German diplomacy in Zagreb’.71

  The Ustaša regime, immediately after it assumed power, introduced antisemitic legislation and started a programme of internment of the Jewish population. Because of the devastating conditions in these camps, more than half of the Jewish population in Croatia died in the first twelve months of the NDH’s existence, avoiding the direct intervention of the German ambassador or the SS ‘Jew experts’.72 The deportation and murder of the Jews of Croatia was part of a larger project of resettlement and ethnic cleansing that primarily targeted Serbs and Slovenians but also extended to the much smaller minorities of the Roma and the Jews.73 German and Croatian authorities discussed the framework for this policy in a meeting held at the German Embassy in Zagreb on 4 June 1941, less than three months after Kasche had arrived.74 Most deportations of Jews to Croatian
concentration camps took place in the autumn of that year, after Croatian authorities had formally requested the permission to subsequently deport the country’s Jews to the German Reich.75 The Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), however, opposed this solution, either because the practical details of ‘solving’ the Jewish question in its entirety had not yet been fully decided or because the death toll in the Croatian camps had become so high that costly deportations were deemed unnecessary for the time being.76

  The situation changed in 1942 when the Italians openly provided protection for 4,000 to 5,000 Jews who had fled to the cities of Mostar and Dubrovnik.77 In response, Kasche, in close cooperation with the SS and the Foreign Office in Berlin, pushed for the deportation of Jews from Croatian territory in its entirety, regardless of possible conflicts with the Italians. Between August 1942 and May 1943, Germans and Croats in a joint undertaking deported thousands of Jews from Croatian territory to Auschwitz.78 In October 1942 the Croats agreed to pay the Germans 30 reichsmark per deported Jew, a much cheaper rate than that granted to the Slovaks. The local authorities passed on at least part of the costs to the Jewish communities, while simultaneously profiting from the looting and robbing of their properties.79 With the Italian capitulation in September 1943, those Jews in Croatia who had formerly been protected were included in the deportations. In April 1944, Kasche informed the Foreign Office that Croatia had been entirely ‘cleansed’ of Jews, with only a few exceptions.80 According to current estimates, up to 30,000 Jews in Croatia fell victim to the Holocaust, half of whom were killed in Jasenovac, in other camps, or shot on the spot, and the other half in Auschwitz.81

  In contrast to Ludin’s and Kasche’s impact on their respective countries, Beckerle’s and von Killinger’s influence on Bulgarian and Romanian politics respectively remained limited. Von Killinger arrived in Bucharest on 24 January 1941, with clear instructions from Hitler to prevent any further tensions between the Third Reich and Marshal Ion Antonescu’s regime.82 Just days earlier, Antonescu had violently cracked down on the highly antisemitic Legionary Movement, known as the ‘Iron Guard’, which had attempted to overthrow the government. Because the legionaries enjoyed the support of the SS and the SD, the new ambassador was from the start greeted with distrust and caution.83 Von Killinger encountered a complicated political framework in Romania that he failed to navigate adequately in the following years, as both his Romanian counterparts and the German Foreign Office quickly realized. Personally, von Killinger never warmed to his new surroundings. He publicly called Romania a Scheißland, a ‘fucking country’, and in October 1941 complained that the best thing one could do for the Romanian capital, which was in his eyes an ‘absolute shambles’ (einziger Saustall), would be to set it on fire.84 He preferred to escape to the Carpathian Mountains some 150 kilometres north of the capital, where he ranged the woods for days or even weeks at a time hunting brown bears, armed with his rifle and a bottle of cognac.85 At least with regard to the Holocaust, however, it is doubtful whether a more qualified diplomat would have been able to meet a larger number of German demands. In Romania, as in the neighbouring southeastern European states allied with Germany, the handling of the ‘Jewish question’ was a complicated affair that involved foreign, internal, economic, and moral policies, as well as, above all, the course of the war.

  In von Killinger’s first year in Bucharest, things still went relatively smoothly – at least from his perspective. Unfamiliar with diplomatic habits and also unwilling to fully accept them, he took Antonescu’s statements at face value until August 1944, when King Michael sacked the marshal and the new Romanian government changed sides to support the Allies.86 One of von Killinger’s main fields of activity was the ‘Jewish question’. In June 1940 – several months before he was formerly appointed envoy – von Killinger visited Romania for the first time and met with General Mihail Moruzov, who was then head of the Romanian state security police force. The men discussed the ‘Jewish problem’, and von Killinger suggested that Moruzov invite qualified German experts to Romania to consult its leaders on the matter.87 Half a year later, in April 1941, SS-Hauptsturmführer Gustav Richter, a legal expert from Himmler’s Reich Security Main Office, arrived in Bucharest. In the following years Richter officially operated as ‘counsellor for Jewish affairs at the Bucharest legation’. As had occurred in Slovakia, Richter negotiated with a ‘government plenipotentiary for Jewish affairs’, a position filled in Romania by Radu Lecca.88 Von Killinger was regularly informed of the progress of these negotiations, as his reports to Berlin illustrate. On 13 November 1941 he wrote to the German Foreign Office that the Romanians had agreed to the deportation of Jews with Romanian citizenship who lived in Germany or German-occupied territory.89

  Initially, the Romanian government was also willing to sacrifice those ‘non-Romanian’ Jews who were living in territories that had only recently become part of the state. In June 1940, Romania had annexed the northern Bukovina region, and a year later, in July 1941, it also retook Bessarabia with the support of German troops from the Soviet Union. The Romanian authorities regarded the Jews living in these two regions as national traitors who had sold out Romanian interests to the Soviets.90 With the aim of creating an ethnically homogeneous ‘Greater Romania’, both Romanian and German official units and local militia either murdered the Jews in these areas on the spot or deported them to Transnistria, a small strip of land on the River Dniester in southern Ukraine. Between the summer of 1941 and March 1944, 130,000 to 150,000 Jews were deported to this region, the majority of whom were shot in mass killings, died of illnesses such as typhus, or starved to death.91 By December 1943 only 50,000 of these Jews were still alive. Estimates of the total number of Jews killed in Romania and Transnistria during the Second World War range from 250,000 to 410,000.92

  Over the course of 1942 the German authorities urged the Romanian government to agree to an extensive deportation programme for the country’s Jews but were only partially successful. On 28 August 1942 von Killinger informed the Foreign Office that no definite agreement had yet been reached,93 and the situation did not change in the following months. Antonescu was clearly playing for time – continuing the talks and assuring the Germans of his agreement with their position – but taking few concrete steps toward a general implementation of the Holocaust.94 When in 1942–3 the Antonescu regime attempted to ‘sell’ up to 80,000 of its remaining Jews in Transnistria to Syria and Palestine, the German Foreign Office urged von Killinger to intervene, as these plans ‘represented a partial resolution unacceptable within the framework of the fundamental lines followed by the German government for a European solution to the Jewish problem’95 – in short, the ‘Final Solution’.96 However, Antonescu in the autumn of 1942 had decided ‘not to carry out antisemitic reforms for the Germans and under the doctrine of Dr Rosenberg [. . .] We must make our antisemitic reform a creative reform, not a demagogic one.’97 Because of Romania’s strategic importance to the German war effort, putting more pressure on the Antonescu regime was not advisable, and consequently von Killinger’s attempts to press for further deportations gradually halted over the course of 1943.98

  Like von Killinger in Romania, Beckerle in Bulgaria also had only limited ‘success’ in his attempt to bring about a complete annihilation of the Jews, despite the fact that he portrayed himself as a strongman from the start of his diplomatic mission. In his diary he frankly admitted that his initial task when appointed was to ‘end the national independence of Bulgaria’.99 In a first private meeting on 26 July 1941 the ‘new tough German ambassador’ urged the Bulgarian king to take resolute action against Serbian partisans operating in Bulgaria. Such ‘hordes’ should be ‘eliminated once and for all’, claimed Beckerle.100 Several weeks later the German envoy requested severe reprisals against the perpetrators of a partisan attack on a German guard in Bulgaria – specifically, the shooting of 100 Bulgarian Jews. This excessive demand caused widespread indignation among the Bulgarian authorities and was refused.101


  With regard to the full implementation of the Holocaust, Beckerle’s task was complicated by the fact that antisemitism had not been an important element in Bulgarian politics prior to the beginning of the Second World War. However, between 1940 and 1942 the Bulgarian government under Prime Minister Bogdan Filov increasingly made concessions to German demands in return for territorial gains and a close military and political alliance with the Axis powers.102 In 1941, Bulgaria introduced antisemitic legislation, including the imposition of forced labour for male Jews, and at the same time started confiscating Jewish assets.103 Like the Slovakian government half a year earlier, the Bulgarian government finally agreed to the deportation of its Jews from Germany and German-occupied territory in July 1942.104 Over the autumn of 1942 the German Foreign Office intensified its efforts to deport the 50,000 Jews living on Bulgarian soil, who amounted to roughly 1 per cent of the country’s overall population. Beckerle received instructions on this matter from Undersecretary Luther in a three-hour meeting in Berlin on 9 October 1942. After his return to Sofia, Beckerle discussed the issue with Filov, who in principle agreed to the German initiative but argued that 10,000 Jewish forced labourers were needed for construction work in Bulgaria. He also informed Beckerle that his government considered the price the Germans had demanded for the deportations – 250 reichsmark per Jew – to be ‘extremely high’.105

  Despite pending questions the Germans in late 1942 thought that the ground had been prepared for mass deportations.106 Consequently, in January 1943, SS-Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker of the Reich Security Main Office arrived in Sofia with instructions from his superior, SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, to deport as many Jews from Bulgaria as possible.107 He succeeded in this effort only in part: the Bulgarians allowed the deportation of 11,343 Jews from Macedonia and Thrace (regions that since 1941 had been part of Bulgaria) between 2 and 29 March 1943,108 but prevented the deportation of those Jews living in the Bulgarian heartland.109 The reason for this compromise was threefold. First, as in Slovakia and Romania, details of the Holocaust became widely known in Bulgaria beginning in 1942, alarming the government and drawing protests from the Bulgarian population. Second, the Bulgarian government rightly interpreted the ultimate German defeat in Stalingrad in early February 1943 as a turning point of the war. They therefore thought it advisable to consider other options and not compromise their position with a record of war crimes. The third reason was purely economic: the deportations would have ended all Bulgarian chances of further exploiting and robbing ‘their’ Jews.