Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  Later in the speech he made a statement which was to be the most open expression of his determination to eliminate the European Jews who lay in his power that he was ever to make at a formal conference. The ambiguous terminology of genocide — the ‘final solution’, the ‘special treatment’, the ‘night and fog’ symbolism8 — were for once set aside, and the fanatic exterminator was revealed through Himmler’s own words:

  ‘Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly — but we will never speak of it publicly — just as we did not hesitate on 30 June 1934 to do the duty we were told to do and stand comrades who had lapsed up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of this… I mean cleaning out the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It is one of those things it’s easy to talk about — “The Jewish race is being exterminated… it’s our programme, and we’re doing it.” And then they come, eighty million worthy Germans, and each one of them has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this particular Jew is a first-rate man… Most of you must know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time (apart from exceptions caused by human weakness) to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us so hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and will never be written.

  ‘We are a product of the law of selection. We have made our choice from a cross-section of our people. This people came into being aeons ago, through generations and centuries…

  ‘Alien peoples have swept over this people and left their heritage behind them,… but it has… still has the strength in the very essence of its blood to win through. This whole people is… held together by Nordic-Phalian-Germanic blood… The moment we forget the law which is the foundation of our race, and the law of selection and austerity towards ourselves, we shall have the germ of death in us… We must remember our principle: blood, selection, austerity.’

  At another conference that took place earlier the same year, in April at the University of Khahov, Himmler addressed a similar audience made up of the commanding officers of the S.S. divisions serving in Russia. To them he spoke of ‘the great fortress of Europe’ they were privileged to defend and increase. ‘It is here in the East that the decision lies; here must the Russian enemy, this people numbering two hundred million Russians, be destroyed on the battlefield, and one by one they must be made to bleed to death … Either they must be deported and used on labour in Germany for Germany, or they will just die in battle.’

  Then he referred to the task of extermination which, he said, ‘is exactly the same as de-lousing; getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. We shall soon be de-loused.’ The need of the future was to incorporate all the Nordic peoples into the Germanic Reich. ‘I very soon formed a Germanic S.S. in the various countries’, he said, referring particularly to Flanders and the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark. ‘We very soon got Germanic volunteers from them’, whether the leaders in these countries liked it or not. He asked his officers to tolerate the ignorance of the German language in those of German race whom he incorporated into the S.S.; they must assist the newcomers to learn the language. One day, he forecast, he would bring together the mass of German stock from all over the world, ‘still more of those overseas, in America, whom one day we must fetch here by the million… We have only one task, to stand firm and carry on the racial struggle without mercy.’

  At Posen, he also looked into the future; he spoke with the burning tongue of the prophet to men who listened uneasily to dreams in which few of them had any faith and which they regarded as superfluous at this critical stage in the war. They were beginning to realize, after the retreat in North Africa in 1942, the fall of Stalingrad the following January, the collapse of Mussolini and the Allied invasion of Italy that had just begun, that this had developed into a war which would be increasingly difficult to win. But Himmler’s voice went on relentlessly: ‘If the peace is a final one, we shall be able to tackle our great work of the future. We shall colonize. We shall indoctrinate our young men with the laws of the S.S. organization… It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be from this racial superstratum of the Germanic people. In twenty or thirty years we must really be able to present the whole of Europe with its ruling class.’ He had, he said, asked the Führer on behalf of the S.S. for the privilege of holding Germany’s frontier furthest to the East: ‘We shall impose our laws on the East. We will charge ahead and push our way forward little by little to the Urals.’ This would keep the S.S. hard; death would always remain a possibility facing an S.S. man.

  ‘In this way we will create the necessary conditions for the whole Germanic people and the whole of Europe, controlled, ordered and led by us, the Germanic people. We must be able, in future generations, to stand the test in our battle of destiny against Asia, which will certainly break out again… It would be an evil day if the Germanic people did not survive. It would be the end of beauty and Kultur, of the creative power of this earth… Now let us remember the Führer, Adolf Hitler, who will create the Germanic Reich and will lead us into the Germanic future.’

  Himmler’s determination to win his own peculiar version of the war was never stronger than during this period. He was hardened by many events, the reversals of the war, the death of Heydrich, the great challenge to his authority made by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, the revolt of the students at Munich, and the Communist conspiracy in Germany of the Red Orchestra, the Rote Kapelle.

  The Rote Kapelle was the name given to a network of German spies serving the Russians; many of its agents were discovered to be Germans from well-connected families, and many were working in the various Ministries. Their leader, Harold Schulze-Boysen, an unstable man who had been a poet and left-wing revolutionary in the nineteen-twenties, was working during the war in a department of Göring’s Air Ministry which specialized in ‘research’ through telephone-tapping. This was a department which naturally enough had excited Himmler’s suspicion.

  Schellenberg was sent in March 1942 to Carinhall, Goring’s luxurious country mansion to which the leader of the Luftwaffe retired increasingly to avoid the consequence of his lost authority. He came to ask Goring to permit this work to be taken over by the S.D. Goring, according to Schellenberg, received him dressed in a toga but carrying his marshal’s baton; fingering jewels in a cut-glass bowl, he went into a trance and managed to avoid reaching any decision likely to satisfy Himmler. The Reichsführer immediately made Göring’s department the subject of an enquiry, which according to one observer was stopped by Hitler in July to avoid a public scandal. Goring hoped to close the matter amicably by giving Himmler honorary flier’s wings in August, but this was the month in which the whole network of the Rote Kapelle came to light through the independent investigations conducted by Admiral Canaris’s Military Intelligence department, the Abwehr, though the actual arrests of over a hundred agents were eventually undertaken by combined units made up of Canaris’s Field Police and the Gestapo. In spite of the fact that the Gestapo was permitted by Hitler to prepare criminal proceedings, Himmler realized that his vast organization had failed to be the first to uncover the Rote Kapelle, the existence of which caused a scandal far exceeding the actual importance of this spying organization. Schellenberg in his Memoirs is careful to take the main credit for uncovering the conspiracy for himself and, as always, presents the story in its most colourful form.

  The students’ revolt in the University of Munich followed in February 1943, very soon after the series of trials of the Rote Kapelle agents. The students were led by Hans Scholl, a medical student, and his sister Sophie, and they distributed anti-Nazi propaganda not only in Munich but in universities elsewhere in Germany. A vicious speech made by the Gauleiter of Bavaria, Paul Giesler, in which he insulted the women students by ordering them to produce illegitimate children with the help, if necessary, of h
is adjutants, led to open demonstrations in the University and in the streets of Munich. But Hans and Sophie Scholl were betrayed and, after being tortured by the Gestapo, they were tried by Roland Freisler, Hitler’s counterpart to the notorious seventeenth-century British Judge Jeffreys, and condemned to death along with others who had supported them. According to Hassell, the former ambassador who became a member of the German resistance movement, Himmler was driven to order a stay of execution in March in order to avoid turning his victims into martyrs, but in fact he hesitated so long in making up his mind that his order arrived too late to save them.

  The challenge from the Jews themselves to Himmler’s authority came from the Warsaw Ghetto, an area of some two and a half square miles in the city, containing the medieval Ghetto.9 Round this the Nazis had built a high wall, and herded into this besieged and starving community a vast population of some 400,000 Polish Jews. In March 1942 Himmler outlined his initial scheme for the partial resettlement of the Polish Jews in a speech the full text of which does not survive;10 there had been over three million Jews in Poland when Germany had begun the invasion, and though large numbers had fled east or been killed by the Action Groups, some two million still awaited death, including those in the Warsaw Ghetto.

  When the policy of extermination came into full force during the summer of 1942, Himmler ordered the total ‘resettlement’ in concentration camps of the Polish Jews; the result was that between July and October over three-quarters of the Warsaw Ghetto’s inhabitants were transported to camps and asphyxiated, most of them at Treblinka, the death-camp some sixty miles away. This number was as much as the limited transport or inadequate gas-chambers would allow. In October Himmler decided to turn the Ghetto itself, now reduced to some 300,000 square yards with some 60,000 survivors, into a concentration camp, but in January 1943, by which time a million Jews had been killed in six months, he spared the time to make a surprise visit to Warsaw to investigate the black market in Jewish labour which he had learned was now common practice, involving the S.S. and businessmen alike. It was, of course, inevitable that Globocnik himself was involved, the builder’s foreman whom Himmler in 1939 had misguidedly reinstated as Higher S.S. Leader and Chief of Police for the Province of Lublin after his period of disgrace for illegal speculation. Himmler discovered that 24,000 Jews registered as armaments workers were in fact working illegally as tailors and furriers. He was filled with righteous indignation: ‘Once more I set a final term for the resettlement: 15 February’, he ordered.

  The first revolt in the Ghetto began on 18 January, four days after Himmler’s visit. The Jews involved in planned resistance had for long been engaged in smuggling arms from the outside world, and combat groups fired on and killed S.S. men and militia in charge of a column of deportees. This moment of resistance was suppressed with heavy casualties, and Himmler determined that the Ghetto must as soon as ever possible be totally destroyed.

  In April S.S. Lieutenant-General Stroop, the police chief in Greece, was sent by Himmler to Warsaw to evacuate the 56,000 Jews still congregated in the restricted area of the Ghetto. He entered with armoured cars on 19 April, and to his utter surprise he found that the Jews were able to put up a resistance that lasted for thirty-three days. To oppose the Jewish combat units Stroop had a very mixed force of some 2,000 men, many untrained as soldiers, and made up of Poles and Lithuanians as well as two training battalions of the Waffen S.S. Himmler, angered once more by these open signs of resistance, ordered that the Ghetto be treated as partisan territory and combed out ‘with ruthless tenacity’.

  Gradually the Jews, both armed and unarmed, were rounded up; section by section the area was taken and the buildings destroyed. Refugees and partisans were either flooded or smoked out of the sewers, and the Jews not already killed or needed for immediate work were sent to Treblinka to be gassed. The Ghetto area became a stretch of charred and burning debris in which the last victims strove to hide. By 16 May Stroop regarded the action as completed, and the ostentatious report he prepared for Himmler entitled The Warsaw Ghetto is no More, still survives; it is typed on paper of the finest quality and, accompanied by many photographs, bound in leather for preservation. Himmler’s response was to order the destruction of all ghettoes; the debris of the Warsaw Ghetto was to be levelled to the earth and the area turned into a park. It was not until September 1944 that the action against the other Polish ghettoes was finally completed.

  Himmler described the action in the Warsaw Ghetto in a speech made shortly afterwards.11

  ‘I decided to destroy the entire Jewish residential area by setting every block on fire, including the blocks of residential buildings near the armament works. One block after the other was systematically evacuated and subsequently destroyed by fire. The Jews then emerged from their hiding places and dug-outs in almost every case. Not infrequently, the Jews stayed in the burning buildings until, because of the heat and the fear of being burned alive, they preferred to jump down from the upper stories after having thrown mattresses and other upholstered articles into the street. With their bones broken, they still tried to crawl across the street into blocks of buildings which had not yet been set on fire or were only partly in flames. Some of the Jews changed their hiding places during the night, by moving into the ruins of burnt-out buildings, taking refuge there until they were found by our patrols. Their stay in the sewers also ceased to be pleasant after the first week. Frequently we could hear from the street loud voices coming through the sewer shafts. Then the men of the Waffen S.S., the Police or Wehrmacht Engineers courageously climbed down the shafts to bring out the Jews and not infrequently they stumbled over Jews already dead, or were shot at. It was always necessary to use smoke candles to drive out the Jews. Thus one day we opened 183 sewer entrance holes and at a fixed time lowered candles into them, with the result that the bandits fled from what they believed to be gas to the centre of the former Ghetto, where they could then be pulled out of the sewer holes. A great number of Jews, who could not be counted, were exterminated by blowing up sewers and dug-outs.’

  On 23 March 1943, Dr Korherr, who acted as the statistician of Jewish resettlement for Himmler, presented him with a report entitled The Final Solution of the Jewish Question, which contained the figures up to the end of 1942. According to Korherr, omitting Russia and Serbia, 1,873,549 European Jews had by then either died, emigrated or been deported, including the victims of Himmler’s ‘special treatment’. Himmler expressed his satisfaction with the report, ordered the omission of any reference to ‘special treatment’, and added that he regarded the report as ‘extremely good as camouflage’, though ‘at present it must neither be published nor communicated to anyone’.12

  Himmler’s need to rid himself of the Jews became an obsession. The ghosts of those still living haunted him more than the ghosts of those now dead; there were Jews everywhere around him, in the north, in the west, in the south, in the areas where his power to reach them was at its weakest. Only in the east was he strong, where his gas chambers were strained to their limits and his ovens choked with the dead. On a visit paid by Himmler in October 1941 to Ohlendorf’s Action Group headquarters in Nikolaeiev he was accompanied by Quisling’s Chief of Police from Norway, and he made use of this visit to reprimand Ohlendorf for sparing the Jews of the local agricultural areas; he was also very concerned about the number of Jews who escaped from the region of Odessa and infiltrated themselves among the Rumanian Jews, many of whom were deported by the Rumanians themselves to a small Jewish reserve in the Transdniestra region in former Russian territory, which by agreement with Germany had been allocated to her Rumanian allies. Many of these Jews managed to survive the war, and German relations with Rumania were in any case to be the cause of dispute between Himmler and Ribbentrop.13

  Rumania’s Jewish population was one of the largest in Europe, amounting before her territory was readjusted to 750,000, and the record of her treatment of them before and during the period of political unrest and civil war precedi
ng the German intervention in the country is as terrible as that of the Nazis themselves, whose Action Groups took over where the Rumanians themselves left off in the areas of Bukovina and Bessarabia, which were in 1940 ceded back to Rumania by Russia. But the small population of Jews in their pocket of Transdniestrian territory became the subject of a fearful bargaining which went on throughout the rest of the war, and involved in the end the World Jewish Congress, the Swiss Red Cross, the British (as the chilly custodians of Palestine) and the obstructive American State Department. All became involved in the greed of Antonescu and the tactics of Eichmann, who disapproved of the whole tenor of such proceedings, which in his view only compromised the ‘cleanliness’ of the ‘final solution’.

  In Bulgaria Himmler was also thwarted; the Jews, though persecuted and deprived of their property, were never deported, and even in Slovakia, after a period of large-scale deportations, the puppet government managed to halt them between July 1942 and September 1944, when the Germans themselves briefly resumed the exodus. During this period, as we have seen, the negotiations for the sale of Jews by Wisliceny and Himmler were still being conducted not only for this territory but for Hungary as well, where Eichmann was to emerge in 1944 from his shell of anonymity and live a high life in Budapest with his horses and his mistress, while supervising the deportation of some 380,000 Jews under the code name Action Hoess. Reitlinger estimates Hoess gassed over 250,000 Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz during the summer of 1944, though Hoess himself boasted the number was 400,000.