This was the situation when Heydrich, who was very careless of his personal security, left his castle to be driven to the airport shortly after two o’clock on the afternoon of 27 May. Waiting for him near a sharp turn in the road were two Free Czech agents from Britain, who had been dropped by parachute the previous December to wait for final orders to attempt his assassination; one had a Sten-gun and the other a special grenade. At the crucial moment the Sten-gun jammed, and the second agent flung his grenade at the car. Heydrich, who seemed for the moment uninjured, got out of the car and pursued his assailants, firing his revolver while in their attempt to escape they dodged between two street cars that had drawn up. Then Heydrich suddenly collapsed; he had in fact suffered internal injuries at the base of his spine from the explosion of the grenade. The Czech police arrived and hustled Heydrich, who was in great pain, to hospital. The two agents both escaped at the time, but they died three weeks later resisting arrest.
Both Hitler and Himmler were at their separate headquarters in East Prussia when the news that Heydrich was seriously injured reached them from Frank. According to Wolff, who was with Himmler, the Reichsführer burst into tears, and then drove with Wolff to see Hitler at Rastenburg, some thirty miles distant. They decided at once to send their court physicians by air to Prague in a fervent attempt to keep Heydrich alive. None of them could save Heydrich from the gangrene set up by his wounds, and a week later he died, surrounded by doctors. Gebhardt described the frantic scene at the Doctors’ Trial:
‘I arrived by air too late. The operation had already been carried out by two leading Prague surgeons. All I could do was to supervize the subsequent treatment. In the extraordinary excitement and nervous tension which prevailed, and was not diminished by daily personal telephone calls from Hitler and Himmler asking for information, very many suggestions were naturally made; I was practically ordered to call in… the Führer’s own doctor, Morell, who wanted to intervene in his own fashion with his own remedies… The two gentlemen from Prague had already operated… they had made a first-rate job of the operation and also administered sulphonamide. I consider that if anything endangers a patient it is nervous tension at the bedside and the appearance of too many doctors. I refused, in reply to direct demands, to call in any other doctor, not even Morell… Heydrich died in fourteen days. Then I had to see to his family affairs.’
Meanwhile, a heavy vengeance was being taken on the Czechs by Frank at the order of Himmler. All life and movement was stopped in the city overnight on 27 May, and a million crowns reward was offered for news which would lead to the arrest of the assailants. Hostages were arrested in the tradition already well-established by the Nazis, who used the occasion as an excuse to rid themselves of people they knew to be hostile; hundreds were killed and thousands arrested. Himmler’s teleprinter to Frank read: ‘As the intellectuals are our main enemies shoot a hundred of them tonight.’
On 6 June the first in a succession of funeral ceremonies took place in the presence of Himmler, who was the principal mourner and personally took charge of Heydrich’s two young boys who accompanied him. Frau Heydrich, who was pregnant, remained in her castle. Then the body was taken on a train under guard to Berlin, to lie in state at R.S.H.A. headquarters. At three o‘clock on 8 June, Himmler led Hitler forward to open the obsequies over the coffin at the Chancellery, to which the body had been taken for its final display. Hitler laid a wreath of orchids beside the man he said ‘was one of the greatest defenders of our greater German ideal,… the man with the iron heart’. Afterwards, he touched the heads of the two little boys whom Himmler was holding by the hand. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra played Wagner’s Funeral March, and Himmler delivered the final lengthy oration on Heydrich’s career before the body was taken to the Invaliden Cemetery for burial.
The following night, at the command of Hitler, the special vengeance of the Führer was visited on the Czech people at the village of Lidice, and upon their children. The Chief of the Security Police in Prague wrote the history of Lidice himself in the Gestapo order sent to the Resettlement Office in Lodz on 12 June:
‘By supreme command, owing to the assassination of Gruppenführer Heydrich, the village of Lidice in the Protectorate has been flattened. The entire male population was shot, the women assigned to concentration camp for life. The children were investigated with a view to their suitability for Germanization. Those not suitable are to go to you at Litzmannstadt for distribution in Polish camps. There are 90 children; they will go to Litzmannstadt in a coach attached to the train arriving Saturday 13.6.42 at 21.30. Will you please see to it that the children are met at the station and immediately distributed in suitable camps. The age groups are as follows: 1-2 years, 5; 2-4 years, 6; 4-6 years, 15; 6-8 years, 16; 8-10 years, 12; 10-16 years, 36.
The children to have nothing except what they stand up in. Special care or attention is not required.’
Immediately after the death of Heydrich, Himmler himself, following an agreement with Hitler, took over temporary command of R.S.H.A., announcing this to the senior officers present while Heydrich’s body still lay before them in state. According to Schellenberg, he used the occasion to make a severe criticism of each man in turn, except for Schellenberg himself, whom he referred to as ‘the Benjamin of our leadership corps,’ saying that Schellenberg would in future be required to work more closely with him. Schellenberg admits to blushing at the praise accorded him when the others, so much older than he, were blamed. By assuming Heydrich’s command of the S.D., Himmler ensured that no one but himself had control of the secret safe in which so much damaging evidence existed about the Nazi leadership.
As for Himmler’s attitude to Heydrich, we have his remarks to Kersten that have already been quoted. Perhaps, after all, it was a relief to be rid of so dangerous a man, who had shaken himself free from proper subordination. Two months after Heydrich’s death, Himmler called Schellenberg to his office and stood beside him face-to-face with the death-mask of the dead man. Then he said, in a deeply serious voice, ‘Yes, as the Führer said at the funeral, he was indeed a man with an iron heart. And at the height of his power fate purposefully took him away.’ He nodded his head in approval of his own words and, says Schellenberg, his small, cold eyes glinted behind their pince-nez like the eyes of a basilisk.
V. Final Solution
Whatever doubts there may have been in Himmler’s mind and conscience, there is no sign of them in the meticulous decrees and orders he despatched secretly to his officers. In these he weighed with a fearful exactitude how he might best dispose of the human raw material in his hands. After the Wannsee conference of January 1942, he made the parsimonious Oswald Pohl, who from 1939 had been in charge of the economic administration of the camps, head of a new department of the S.S. which gave him added incentives to develop the slave-labour programme. Pohl was told he must exploit the prisoners to the full as a means not only of helping Germany’s war production, but of making profits for the exclusive benefit of the S.S.
Pohl, who had been a paymaster captain in the Navy, did his best to serve his masters in carrying out the impossible task of forcing efficient work out of dying men and women; indeed, he built himself a staff some 1,500 strong solely for this purpose. In the same month, on 20 February, Himmler issued a directive that ‘special treatment’ should be given to any prisoners who proved themselves undisciplined by refusing to work or by malingering. ‘Special treatment is hanging’, explained Himmler with a frankness unusual in such orders, but he added, ‘It should not take place in the immediate vicinity of the camp. A certain number, however, should attend the special treatment.’
On 15 December 1942, Himmler wrote to Pohl on the problem of feeding the prisoners:
‘Do try, in the New Year, to cope with the feeding of prisoners by acquiring raw vegetables and onions on the largest possible scale. At the appropriate periods give them carrots, cabbage, white turnips, etc., in large measure. And during winter maintain large stocks of vegetables, enoug
h at any rate to provide a sufficiency for each prisoner. That way, I think, we will appreciably improve the state of health. Heil Hitler!’
In January 1943 Himmler issued personally very detailed instructions for executions in the concentration camps.1 These included the following clauses:
‘The execution is not to be photographed or filmed. In exceptional cases my personal permission has to be obtained… After every execution the S.S. men and officials who had anything to do with it are to be addressed by the Camp Commandant or the S.S. leader deputizing for him. The legality of the execution is to be explained to the men, and they are to be influenced in such a way as to suffer no ill effect in their character and mental attitude. The need for rooting out elements such as the delinquent for the common weal is to be stressed. Such explanations are to be given in a truly comradely manner; they might be repeated from time to time at social gatherings.
‘After executions of Polish civilian workers as well as workers from former Soviet territories [Ostarbeiter], their compatriots working in the vicinity are to be led past the gallows with an appropriate lecture on the penalties for disobeying our orders. This is to be done as a regular routine unless there is a counterorder necessitated by special reasons, such as the need to bring in the harvest, or other reasons making it inopportune to encroach on the working time available.
‘Hanging is to be done by prisoners: in the case of foreign workers preferably by their own compatriots. The prisoners are to be issued a fee of three cigarettes for each hanging …
‘The responsible S.S. leaders are to see to it that, while we have to be hard and cannot tolerate softness, no brutality is to be allowed either.’
In June 1944 he was forced to remind his S.S. men of the regulations he had made against taking snapshots of these executions. ‘In time of war’, he added to this reminder, ‘executions are unfortunately necessary. But to take snapshots of them only shows bad taste, apart from being detrimental to the interests of our Fatherland. The enemy might well abuse photographs of this kind in his propaganda.’
Himmler’s concern with his own independence grew. In March he tried to establish munition works in certain camps, but Speer, the new Minister for Armaments, forestalled this; as Speer himself said when giving evidence before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, ‘uncontrolled arms production on the part of the S.S. had to be prevented… It was Himmler’s intention to exercise his influence over these industries and in some way or other he would undoubtedly have succeeded in getting them under his control.’2 Speer was only prepared to make use of prisoners on his own terms, and he saw to it that Hitler rejected Himmler’s schemes. Those prisoners who were eventually used in the armaments works were made to fulfil a sixty-hour week. But the death-rate at the camps was so great and the number available for work diminished so rapidly that on 28 December Himmler was forced to send out another directive: ‘The Reichsführer S.S. has ordered that the death-rate absolutely must be reduced.’3
During the first six months of the following year, Himmler replenished his diminished labour forces by taking into custody some 200,000 foreign conscripts who had committed petty offences, on the grounds that as a result they came properly under his jurisdiction. He was in a position to kidnap this large force of slave-workers from Speer as the result of a hard-fought agreement with Otto Thierack, Hitler’s recently-appointed Minister of Justice, following a discussion between them at Himmler’s Field Headquarters at Zhitomir on 18 September.
Thierack, a judge of the Nazi People’s Court, had been made Reich Minister of Justice at the suggestion of Goebbels, and his instructions had been to create a system of law favourable to the Nazis. Among the points of agreement noted by Thierack’s aide after the meeting with Himmler were:
‘Correction by special treatment at the hands of the police in cases where judicial sentences are not severe enough.
‘The delivery of anti-social elements from the execution of their sentence to the Reichsführer S.S. to be worked to death.’
(These ‘anti-social elements’ included persons under protective arrest — Jews, gypsies, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles with more than three-year sentences, Czechs and Germans with more than eight-year sentences.)
‘It is agreed that, in consideration of the intended aims of the Government for the cleaning up of the Eastern problem, in future Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians and Ukrainians are no longer to be judged by the ordinary courts, so far as punishable offences are concerned, but are to be dealt with by the Reichsführer himself.’4
As conditions in the camps became less and less controlled, the opportunities for private, in the place of public, looting increased. For example, by special orders from Himmler, the first dated as early as 23 September 1940, gold teeth were to be removed from the bodies of prisoners who had died, while the living had the dental gold taken from their mouths if it seemed ‘incapable of repair’. The gold was supposed to be deposited along with all other confiscated valuables in the Reichsbank in favour of an account held by the S.S. under the cover-name of Max Heiliger; the Reichsbank during the middle years of the war endeavoured to pawn the piles of unwanted valuables for hard cash.5 Speaking of this macabre treasure-trove in the course of a speech made in October 1943, Himmler said: ‘We have taken from them what wealth they had. I have issued strict orders which S.S. General Pohl has carried out, that this wealth should, as a matter of course, be handed over to the Reich without reserve. We have taken none of it for ourselves.’ He added that S.S. men who stole would be shot. It soon became apparent, however, that this macabre treasure-trove was receiving only a proportion of its rightful booty and that unscrupulous men in every rank at the camps were stealing. Globocnik, for example, amassed a fortune in Lublin during 1943, and Himmler was forced in the autumn to send an official investigator to enquire into the smuggling of gold, which was rife in Auschwitz. Prisoners were often more valuable for the gold in their teeth than for the labour of their hands.
With the development of his business sense, Himmler realized that another source of money lay in the outright sale of Jewish liberties. At the end of 1942 he was approached with the suggestion that a whole S.S. division could be financed in Hungary by the sale of emigration permits to Jews in Slovakia; Himmler was known to be in favour of compromise with his policy of extermination in certain cases where the financial gain to the Reich far exceeded the disadvantage of the survival of certain Jews. A memorandum written in December 1942 and signed by Himmler reads: ‘I have asked the Führer about the absolving [Loslösung] of Jews against hard currency. He has authorized me to approve such cases, provided they bring in genuinely substantial sums from abroad.’
Eichmann, however, regarded such dealings as a sign of weakness, and opposed them. The attempt to bargain over Jewish life and liberty in this way eventually centred on the so-called Europa Plan, which Eichmann’s representative Wisliceny first negotiated on behalf of the S.S. in the semi-independent state of Hungary, where Jewish refugees were congregating. At Eichmann’s trial, Yoel Brand, a Zionist resident in Budapest, gave evidence of the many meetings he had had, some with Eichmann himself, in which the price of liberty for Jews was discussed. ‘At one of these meetings,’ said Brand, ‘I was told that Himmler was very much in favour of Eichmann’s proposal. Himmler, I was told, was in fact a good man and did not want the extermination of the Jews to continue.’ Little was to come out of these negotiations; like the thirty pieces of silver, they proved in the end the price of betrayal. Only in the final losing stages of the war was Himmler, urged on by Kersten and Schellenberg, to give ground and conduct his own hard bargains with the Jews through their agent Masur.6
The policy from 1942-4 was extermination — extermination through work for those prescribed as medically fit for labour, immediate extermination for those who for reasons of age, ill-health or infirmity were held to be waste material. Himmler was to make his policy implacably clear in a speech he made at a meeting of his S.S. major-generals held at
Posen on 4 October 1943, 7 speaking of the ravages and loss of life in Russia, he said:
‘Thinking in terms of generations, it is not to be regretted; but in terms of here and now it is deplorable by reason of the loss of labour, that prisoners died in tens and hundreds of thousands from exhaustion and hunger… We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood, but to nobody else. What happens to a Russian or to a Czech does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them for slaves for our Kultur; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished… It is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and give them ideals, thus causing our sons and grandsons to have a more difficult time with them. When somebody comes to me and says, “I cannot dig the anti-tank ditch with women and children, it is inhuman because it will kill them”, then I must reply, “You are a murderer of your own blood, because if the anti-tank ditch is not dug, German soldiers will die, and they are the sons of German mothers. They are our own blood.” That is what I want to instill into the S.S. and what I believe I have instilled into them as one of the most sacred laws of the future… I want the S.S. to adopt this attitude to the problem of all foreign, non-Germanic peoples, especially Russians.’
Heinrich Himmler Page 18
