Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  more radical. These massacres enabled the Higher SS and Police Commanders

  once and for all to seize the initiative and take over the leading role in the process

  of annihilation.

  The deployment of the SS Brigades in the East had been planned since spring,

  and it was clear that the brigades were to be used as a third team after the

  Einsatzgruppen and police battalions. The starting signal for their deployment

  was given at a meeting with Goering, Lammers, Rosenberg, and Keitel on 16 July

  in which Hitler had set out some of the principles for the future occupation of the

  Eastern territories and revealed his far-reaching plans for annexation and the

  brutality with which he intended to deal with the indigenous population. 43

  According to Hitler, ‘the fundamental need is to divide up the huge cake man-

  ageably so that we can, first, control it, second, administer it, and third, exploit it’.

  The partisan war that the enemy had launched had its advantages, he said: ‘it gives

  us the chance to exterminate what stands in our way.’ He went on: ‘this huge area

  must be returned to peace as soon as possible, of course, and this can best happen

  if you shoot dead anyone who so much as blinks at you.’

  The Führer’s decree on the Administration of the Newly Occupied Eastern

  Areas established that, after the end of the military campaign, the administration

  would be transferred into civilian hands. The basic structure of the occupation

  administration was also set out, with Reichskommissars at its head under the

  command of a newly appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Terri-

  tories, Alfred Rosenberg. 44 Rosenberg, however, had to take account of the special competences of other agencies, and these included, in particular, Himmler’s

  special responsibilities, which Hitler had set out in his second decree, also signed

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  on 17 July, on Securing and Policing the Newly Occupied Eastern Areas. 45 This decree determined that ‘securing and policing the newly occupied Eastern areas is

  the responsibility of the Reichsführer SS and the Head of the German Police’. He

  was authorized to give the Reichskommissars instructions for carrying out these

  tasks, and, in the case of ‘instructions of a general nature or of fundamental

  political importance’, Rosenberg was to be involved. In order to ensure that these

  areas were ‘effectively secured by police measures’ each Reichskommissar was

  assigned a Higher SS and Police Commander, who was to be under his ‘direct and

  personal’ command; similarly, the other commissars were also assigned SS and

  Police Commanders. This decree conferred responsibility for the ‘police’ solution

  of the ‘Jewish question’ in the occupied Eastern areas on Himmler. 46

  The ‘major campaigns’ that were to be undertaken by the Higher SS and Police

  Commanders in the weeks that followed (which will be described later in this

  chapter) show how Himmler understood his responsibility to ‘secure through

  police measures’ these areas. He saw his mission as gradually making large areas

  ‘free of Jews’, or in other words as extending the shootings on the one hand and

  concentrating the surviving Jewish population in ghettos on the other. The

  conduct of the SS and Police formations in the following weeks and months

  does not allow us to infer without doubt that an order to murder all the Soviet

  Jews was given to the Reichsführer SS in mid-July. Given the expectation of the

  National Socialist leadership to end the war in a short time, and in any case not

  later than the start of the winter, fulfilling such an order would hardly have been

  possible with the forces they had at their disposal. Instead, we have to assume that

  mass shootings and ghettoization were seen at that point as measures anticipating

  the ‘Final Solution’ planned for after the end of the war—the deportation of the

  Jews into a single area that would not be able to support them.

  Settling the spheres of competence and responsibility in Himmler’s favour on

  16–17 July corresponded to what had for months been the direction of planning for

  the administration of the occupied Eastern territories. Hitler had by no means

  been carried away by victory-induced euphoria to make the decision during the

  discussions of 16 July for Himmler to be given far-reaching instructions to deploy

  large-scale murder squads; 47 this deployment had long been planned and was merely set in motion on 16–17 July. Himmler’s decree of 21 May had already

  mentioned the Higher SS and Police Commanders earmarked ‘to carry out the

  special orders given to me by the Führer in respect of the area under political

  administration’, 48 and a discussion amongst the Reichsführer SS’s Command Staff on 8 July suggests that the units under the Command Staff would mainly be

  deployed in the area under political administration. 49 Only after the basic structural principles of the political administration had been determined by Hitler,

  after the first Reichskommissars had been named and the priority of ‘securing and

  policing the occupied Eastern areas’ had been established could the time come for

  Himmler to deploy the third of his teams of police and SS forces, the SS Brigades.

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  Himmler had one very significant political motive in making his mission to

  ‘secure through police measures’ the Eastern areas as radical as possible and in

  extending it in the direction of a war of ethnic annihilation: intensifying the mass

  murder of the Jews in the East was a key component of his attempts to extend his

  competence as Reichskommissar for the Strengthening of the German Nation as

  soon as possible to the Eastern areas in order to bring them under the control of

  the SS via a violent ethnic ‘reordering’ of the newly conquered ‘living space’. 50

  Already in June, before the war had begun, Himmler had suggested to Lammers

  that he should be entrusted with ‘politically securing and policing’ the occupied

  East European areas and given the responsibility for ‘pacifying and consolidating

  the political situation’, whereby he should ‘take into particular account the need to

  fight Bolshevism and his task as the Reichskommissar for the Strengthening of the

  German Nation’. 51 But these desires on Himmler’s part had met with resistance from Rosenberg and had not been taken into account by Hitler when areas of

  responsibility were settled on 16 and 17 July: Hitler had specifically restricted

  Himmler’s powers to ‘securing through police measures’, albeit after a long

  debate. However, Himmler had not been distracted by this setback to his leader-

  ship ambitions in the East, but had simply begun to take practical measures to

  ‘reorder’ the Eastern areas even before the war had ended. To this end, only two

  days after the outbreak of war he told his head of planning, Konrad Meyer, to

  present a draft of an extended version of the ‘Overall Eastern Plan’ (Generalplan

  Ost) within three weeks and ensure that it covered the areas that were to be

  conquered. 52 This draft was completed by 15 July before Himmler had to accept the division of responsibility in the East with Rosenberg, Goering, and the Reichskommissars after the decisions taken by Hitler on 16 and 17 of
that month. But

  Himmler continued to work on the basis that the responsibility he had been given

  in October 1939 for ‘the strengthening of the German nation’ was valid in the

  occupied zones, too.

  On 11 July Himmler had told the ‘Ethnic Germans’ Office’, which answered to

  him, to gather details of ‘ethnic Germans’ in the occupied Soviet Union, an activity

  that was to run hand in hand with the work of the Einsatzgruppen. 53 On 17 July, the same day that he was formally charged with ‘securing through police measures’ these areas, he ordered the SS and Police Commander in the district of

  Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, to establish a network of police and SS bases in the newly

  occupied areas centred on Lublin. In other words, under the banner of ‘Police/SS’

  Himmler was already beginning to take concrete settlement measures.

  On 16 August Himmler informed SS Colonel Guntram Pflaum, the manager of

  the ‘Lebensborn’ organization (the ‘Fount of Life’), which dealt with those illegit-

  imate babies conceived by SS men with ‘good’ and ‘unmixed’ blood, that his future

  operational territory would include ‘the whole of the occupied European areas of

  the USSR’, 54 even though at this point Hitler had not made any firm decisions on the ‘Germanization’ of former Soviet areas. 55 In August, the main office of the From Anti-Semitic Terror to Genocide

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  Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of the German Nation opened a branch

  office in Riga. 56 And at the beginning of September Himmler finally triumphed over Rosenberg57 and Hitler announced that the competences of the Reichskommissar for the Strengthening of the German Nation would now be extended to the

  occupied Eastern areas. 58

  Himmler’s stubborn attempts to use his policing responsibilities as the basis for

  an ethnic ‘reordering’ of the Eastern areas were not limited to settlement and

  Germanization measures. The mission that Hitler had given Himmler in October

  1939 had not only encompassed the ‘formation of new German settlement areas

  via relocation’ but, as a necessary prerequisite for the planned ‘ethnic consolida-

  tion’, also entailed ‘excluding the noxious influence of . . . sections of the popula-

  tion alien to the Volk’. Himmler had attempted to put this section of his remit into

  practice in Poland by initiating mass deportations, but, when measured against his

  ambitious overall plan, had more or less failed. The conclusion that Himmler

  must have drawn from his experiences here was not to wait until the end of the

  war for the ‘ethnic consolidation’ but to start the ‘exclusion’ of ‘sections of the

  population alien to the Volk’ before then by making whole areas ‘free of Jews’.

  Removing the Jews almost altogether was the first step on the way to a huge

  programme of deportation, resettlement, and extermination—one need only

  think of the figure of 30 million that the population of the Soviet Union was to

  be reduced by, according to the plans for Barbarossa. The Jews were seen by the

  Nazi leadership as the pillars of the Communist regime, and thus the one to be

  tackled first; by tackling the Jews (rather than those sections of the population

  classed as Slavic) Himmler was able to put his policies of ethnic annihilation into

  practice as part of his mission to ‘secure [the occupied areas] through police

  measures’. He could be certain that any campaign of annihilation targeted directly

  at the Jews would receive the assent of the Nazi leadership, since it merely

  anticipated what had been planned in any case for the period after the war was

  over. Himmler could cite at least three orders from the Führer in support of his

  programme: his mission for the strengthening of the German nation, the ‘special

  orders from the Führer for the area under political administration’ that he men-

  tioned in his instructions of 21 May, and the mission received from Hitler on 17 July.

  It was also evident, as will be explained in Chapter 14, that the general radicalization

  of German Judenpolitik in August and September 1941, when the regime concen-

  trated its propaganda efforts against an international ‘Jewish conspiracy’, started to

  mark German Jews with the yellow star and prepared deportation from the Reich,

  had a further radicalizing effect on the mass killings in the East. Himmler must have

  perceived anti-Jewish measures as a confirmation of his brutal approach.

  What has previously been described as an inconsistent transition over the

  period between July and September/October 1941 from policies of selective ter-

  rorization of the Jews towards policies of ethnic annihilation can therefore be

  equated with the systematic implementation of the first stage of Himmler’s ‘living

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  space conception’. He was acting in this matter as an exponent of the most radical

  forces within National Socialism, who wished to implement qualitatively new

  policies in the occupied areas even whilst the war itself was continuing.

  It is against these general observations that the deployment of the SS Brigades in

  July 1941 and the expansion of the killing in the following months should be seen.

  According to the initial invasion plans, the SS Brigades were to be deployed no

  earlier than ten days after the start of the attack. 59 However, after the war had started, the command staff troops were immediately thrown into a gap in the

  front, on Hitler’s orders, and assigned to an army corps of the Wehrmacht

  evidently for the purpose of securing territory. 60 When this task had been declared complete after a few days, the command staff units began preparing for their

  future tasks by carrying out simulations and combat exercises. 61

  On 10 July Himmler decided that all SS squads deployed in the areas under

  Higher SS and Police Commanders would not only be economically responsible to

  them, as before, but also tactically: ‘it has to be stressed to the Wehrmacht that in

  the Rear Area the Higher SS and Police Commander will make decisions on all

  matters that are the responsibility of the Reichsführer SS. . . . This also applies to

  the SD.’62 On the same day, during his visit to Bialystok, Himmler discussed with Bach-Zelewski the planned deployment of the SS Cavalry Squads. 63 On 19 and 22

  July, immediately after Hitler had given Himmler responsibility for ‘securing the

  newly occupied Eastern areas through police measures’ and had enhanced the

  position of the Higher SS and Police Commanders, the two SS Cavalry Regiments

  that had been merged into a single SS Cavalry Brigade at the beginning of August

  were subordinated to Bach-Zelewski, while the 1st Brigade was placed under the

  command of Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia South. 64

  On 21 July Himmler met the chief of the Army Rear Area South, Karl von Roques,

  presumably in order to discuss the deployment of the 1st SS Brigade under Jeckeln

  in von Roques’s area of authority. 65

  A few days later, after a long journey through Lithuania and Latvia, the officer

  in the command staff responsible for intelligence matters, Hauptsturmführer

  Rudolf May, who had come from the Home SD, 66 composed a report that contains an important reference to the fact that the attitude to the ‘Jewish

  question’ prevalent amongst the Security Police and
Wehrmacht forces there

  was open to much more radical measures: ‘Lithuanians and Latvians are taking

  the law into their own hands against the large number of Jews in the Baltic states.

  Their measures are tolerated by the offices of the Wehrmacht and the Security

  Police there. Whether the Jewish problem can be solved once and for all only by

  shooting male Jews in large numbers is doubted by those involved.’67 A few days later still, two68 of the three SS Brigades under the command staff were to demonstrate how Himmler and his command staff envisaged ‘solving the Jewish

  problem once and for all’.

  chapter 13

  ENFORCING THE ANNIHILATION POLICY:

  EXTENDING THE SHOOTINGS TO THE

  WHOLE JEWISH POPULATION

  Himmler’s decision to subordinate two of the three SS Brigades under his com-

  mand staff to Higher SS and Police Commanders Jeckeln and Bach-Zelewski and

  deploy them directly for the execution of Jews in the occupied Eastern areas meant

  that the murder of the Jewish civilian population acquired a new dimension after

  the end of July 1941. All police and SS units were now extending the range of those

  shot to include women and children. This escalation was again inconsistent and

  did not occur in parallel in all areas, but was introduced gradually. Nonetheless, in

  all cases it followed a fundamental underlying pattern.

  Higher SS and Police Commander Russia

  Centre and Einsatzgruppe B

  In the area behind the mid-section of the front the SS Cavalry Brigade was

  responsible for bringing the murder campaign to a completely new level. 1 This brigade, composed of two former cavalry regiments, carried out an initial ‘cleansing operation’ in the Pripet Marshes between 29 July and 12 August under the

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  leadership of Higher SS and Police Commander Russia Centre, Erich von dem

  Bach-Zelewski. For this operation the brigade received special ‘guidelines for

  combing marsh areas using mounted units’ that had been signed by Himmler

  himself: ‘If the population as a whole is hostile, sub-standard in racial and human

  terms, or even, as is very often the case in marsh areas, made up of criminals who