Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts

by Bill Yenne

  As Himmler, Walther Darré, and all the racial demographers knew, the Aryans were also to be found in Finland, the Netherlands, and in Flanders, that Nordic sliver of the North Sea coast that had been grafted onto Francophone Wallonia to create the hybrid kingdom of Belgium. There were even Aryans in Wallonia, as well. Himmler also saw them in the Baltic republics—after all, even Alfred Rosenberg, the arbiter of the line between “us” and “them,” was Estonian. Himmler saw Völksdeutsche Ukrainians and Russians as Aryan stock—after all, Rosenberg’s own original passport was issued by the Russian tsar.

  Himmler imagined his multiethnic SS to be the enforcer and ruling class in a united Europe, an authoritarian precursor to the modern European Union. As with that modern institution, Himmler conceived of a continent of individual states using a single currency, united by a trade and a unified legal system, and having a central authority emanating from a centralized location—not Brussels, as in the twenty-first century, but Berlin. He once told Felix Kersten:

  [This] European empire would form a confederation of free states, among which would be Greater Germany, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, Holland, Flanders, Wallonia, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. These countries were to govern themselves. They would have in common a European currency, certain areas of the administration, including the police, foreign policy, and the army, in which the various nations would be represented by national formations. Trade relations would be governed by special treaties, a sphere in which Germany as the economically strongest country would hold back in order to favor the development of the weaker ones. Free towns were also envisaged, having special functions of their own, among them the task of representing a nation’s culture.

  What form postwar Europe would have taken if Germany had won is uncertain. Beyond the fact that it would have been ruled with an iron hand from Berlin, Hitler himself had probably not worked out all the nuances. Himmler’s vision, as articulated to Kersten, was more fully defined.

  Hitler and Himmler did not agree on the idea of Aryan purity. Hitler’s view was from a nationalistic perspective and was, therefore, a much narrower take on German citizenship than that of the Reichsführer. Himmler’s view was broader and more purely racial. Like Guido von List and all of the Ariosophists who had come in the intervening doctrinal generations, he looked beyond the Reich to the purity of the greater Aryan race. Heinz Höhne writes in The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS:

  Hitler’s ideas and those of the SS were not invariably identical. The next area in which differences began to appear was the treatment of the so-called “Germanic” peoples; though both Hitler and the SS used the phraseology of Nazi dogma, the two were in fact working on different principles. In spite of all the Germanic claptrap, Hitler was still the German nationalist of the Imperial era, who regarded any supra-national institution as a betrayal of Germany; the SS leaders, on the other hand, were genuinely striving for a Great German Reich which, in a vague sort of way, they hoped and believed would produce a new epoch of international brotherhood transcending national boundaries—though under German leadership, of course.

  Hitler looked at the political geography of Europe and saw a Greater Reich, with Lebensraum on the steppes to the east. Heinrich Himmler looked at the racial map and saw a pan-European Aryan oligarchy ruled by an aristocracy of racially homogenous, though transnational, Black Knights.

  Paul Kluke, a prewar agricultural theorist and professor at the Institut für Agrarwesen und Agrarpolitik der Berliner Universität, and who later helped Himmler plan the mass evacuation of Slavic people from the Soviet Union, said that in contrast to Hitler’s nationalistic scheme, Himmler favored “a policy conceived in quite different terms: one of greater autonomy.” Kluke called Himmler “far more prepared to remove the Nordic elements from the non-German races, in other words, to carry out those biological fishing expeditions [searching for Aryans] among other peoples which Hitler himself found so dubious.”

  Himmler had no qualms about recruiting non-Germans into the Waffen SS. Indeed, the idea excited him, as though it supported the theory, dating back to the early twentieth century, that Aryan blood was transcendent. He looked for what he called “Nordic-Germanic” blood, not prewar German passports.

  Having interviewed Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner in 1966, Heinz Höhne reported, “In one of his moments of enthusiasm, Himmler said that he could quite well imagine that the next Reichsführer SS might not be a German; Hitler, on the other hand, would ridicule Himmler’s passion for Germanic experimentation; in his view, unless he had been ideologically brainwashed, every non-German SS volunteer must ‘feel himself a traitor to his people.’”

  Though Hitler may have ridiculed Himmler, he acquiesced to the Reichsführer’s scheme for non-German volunteer, or Freiwilligen, units. However, for the most part, the non-German divisions would be designated as “Division der SS,” instead of “SS Division.” Not all of these new units were permitted to wear the lightning-bolt SS insignia on their uniforms.

  The most famous of the “foreign” Waffen SS units was the Wiking (pronounced “Viking,” as W in German is pronounced as V in English) Division. The name implies embracing a pan-Nordic warrior theme. Officially known as the Number 5 SS Panzer Division Wiking, it originated as a mechanized infantry division, but soon progressed to a panzer unit. It was created at the end of 1940, after the remarkable success of the German forces during the year resulted in a tide of volunteers who wanted to be part of the victorious German juggernaut. Initially designated as Number 5 Nordische Division, it was composed of a cadre of Waffen SS veterans mixed with a few Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, and Flemish volunteers. As the division was forming during early 1941, it gradually transitioned into a multinational unit, although the officer corps was predominantly German. Given the name “Wiking,” the division went into combat during Operation Barbarossa, under the command of then-Brigadeführer Felix Steiner, and remained in combat throughout World War II.

  As the Wiking Division was proving itself on the eastern front in 1941 and 1942, Hitler agreed to Himmler’s desire to create even more multinational Waffen SS units to absorb the continuing influx of Scandinavian, Finnish, and Dutch volunteers, as well as Latvians and Estonians from the Baltic and Bosnians and Coats from the Balkans—all of whom were keen to fight the communists.

  In 1943, a Scandinavian panzergrenadier regiment within the Wiking Division, known as Nordland, was detached and used as the basis of a new division designated as the Number 11 SS Panzergrenadier Division Nordland. In addition to its core of Scandinavian troops, Nordland’s ranks were also filled by volunteers from such diverse countries as Estonia, France, Hungary, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, and even the United Kingdom.

  Heinrich Himmler in full Reichsführer regalia. He imagined a unified postwar Europe ruled by an SS comprised of Aryans from many nations, unified by Aryan blood that transcended national boundaries. U.S. National Archive

  Sometimes, it was political pressure that led to the formation of some Freiwilligen divisions. The lobbying efforts of the Dutch Nazis of the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging led in 1941 to the creation of an all-Dutch battalion, which evolved over time into the Number 23 Freiwilligen Panzergrenadier Division Nederland. Another Dutch Waffen SS division was the Number 34 SS Freiwilligen Grenadier Division Landstorm Nederland. It had evolved out of the Landwacht Niederlande, a paramilitary police force consisting of Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging goons, created under German auspices after the Netherlands were occupied in 1940. Unlike the Number 23 Freiwilligen Panzergrenadier Division Nederland, which fought alongside German forces on the eastern front and in the Balkans, Landstorm Nederland fought at home, ironically, defending the German occupation from the British armies that came at the end of 1944 to liberate the Netherlands. They entered combat at the end of September during the Operation Market Garden airborne operation that sought an Allied bridgehead across the Rhine at Arnhem in the Netherlands. The worst of
the irony was that attached to the British army for this operation was a Dutch brigade whose objective was to liberate their country. The Dutchmen of Landstorm Nederland found themselves facing off against their cousins in the Koninklijke Nederlandse (Royal Dutch) brigade Prinses Irene. After the liberation, those who had remained loyal to their “fellow Aryans” in the SS during the war faced criminal prosecution for treason. They were not treated kindly by their countrymen.

  In Flanders, where there had been strong Nazi sympathies before World War II, the Waffen SS found fertile ground for recruits. The Flemings hoped for a postwar Flanders independent of French-dominated Belgium. The Number 27 SS Freiwilligen Division Langemarck, consisting of Flemish volunteers, evolved out of the SS Freiwilligen Verband Flandern (later SS Freiwilligen Sturmbrigade Langemarck) and served widely on the eastern front.

  Meanwhile, however, the French-speaking Belgians in the Wallonia region also rated a Waffen SS division. As in the Netherlands and in Flanders, the back story in Wallonia began with a prewar fascist movement that would align itself closely with the Nazis. Christus Rex, also referred to as the Parti Rexiste (Rexist Party), was a fundamentalist political party created in Wallonia 1930 by a journalist named Léon Degrelle. In fact, the party actually did well in regional elections during the 1930s. From the Parti Rexiste evolved the paramilitary Légion Wallonie, which liked to think of itself as a Wallonian analog of Himmler’s SS. After Germany occupied Belgium in 1940, the SS wannabes of the Légion Wallonie signed up to fight Bolshevism and became the Number 5 SS Freiwilligen Sturmbrigade Wallonien. They saw action on the eastern front, and the unit was enlarged and redesignated as the Number 28 SS Freiwilligen Grenadierdivision Wallonien in September 1944. After the war, the Belgian government convicted Degrelle of treason in absentia and condemned him to death, but he had escaped to Spain, where he lived until his death in 1994.

  France also had its Waffen SS division, the Number 33 Waffengrenadierdivision der SS Charlemagne, which evolved out of the French anti-communist Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme, which had been incorporated into the Wehrmacht after 1940. Number 33 “Charlemagne” was created in 1944 as an umbrella for fascist French units that had been serving on the eastern front with various German units, both Wehrmacht and SS, as well as volunteers from Vichy France.

  Perhaps the most surprising of the Waffen SS Freiwilligen were units comprised of Muslims from Central Asia. The incorporation of the blonde, blue-eyed Nordic men from the Netherlands or Scandinavia fits the paradigm that one would expect from Himmler’s strict Sippenbuch. However, among the millions of Soviet prisoners of war captured by the German armies were sizable numbers from the Central Asia republics, now independent, but then part of the Soviet Union. These people, like the French and Scandinavians, wanted to fight the communists. Tens of thousands of mainly Muslim Azeri, Chechen, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Uzbek troops switched sides to join the Wehrmacht. These troops were then organized into units such as the Kaukasisch Mohammedan (Caucasian Muslim) Legion, or the Wolgatatarische (Volga Tatar) Legion, also known as the Ostturkische Waffenverband. In 1944, the SS reportedly also formed the its Ostmuselmanische (East Muslim) SS Regiment, comprised of Central Asian men.

  Himmler’s central focus with his multinational SS concept was Europe, although he also often spoke of his concept of a postwar Weltreich, or World Reich, encompassing the former Soviet Union. Indeed, defeat of the Soviet Union and communism was always the key prerequisite for all of Himmler’s dreams of the future. He often said, usually to Kersten as he was relaxing during a massage, that he imagined his utopian, pan-European Reich coming into being as soon as the communists had been eliminated from the Soviet Union. Then even Russia would have its own day in the glow of a Nazi sun.

  “When Bolshevism had been extirpated in Russia, the Western Territories would come under German administration modeled on the Marches which Charlemagne had instituted in the east of his empire,” Himmler pontificated, as Kersten rubbed the angst from the Reichsführer’s shoulders and eased his chronic stomach pain. “The methods followed would be those by which England had evolved her colonies into dominions. When peace and economic health were fully restored, these territories would be handed back to the Russian people, who would live there in complete freedom, and a 25-year peace and commercial treaty would be concluded with their new government.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Evil Science

  THE CRUELEST COROLLARY to the villainy institutionalized by Heinrich Himmler and SS Totenkopfverbände during World War II was probably the use of concentration-camp inmates in the furtherance of what the SS and its Ahnenerbe had the audacity to describe as “science.”

  Again, their line of thinking stretched back into the nineteenth century to the Social Darwinists and their pseudoscientific belief in a racial hierarchy. When the Social Darwinists wrote of natural selection in human society, advocating the sidelining those in society who were considered inferior, they opened the door to those who considered the inferior human races to be not human at all. The same pseudoscience that gave the Nazis their excuse to eradicate the untermenschen like head lice gave the Nazis permission to use the untermenschen as lab rats.

  The use of people from concentration camps for gruesome medical experiments was widespread, although it was not centrally directed, as the “ancestral research” conducted under the Ahnenerbe was. The SS functioned as a sort of medical foundation of the dark side, facilitating various projects with infrastructure, personnel, and, of course, human guinea pigs. Much of the funding and encouragement was filtered through the Institut für Wehrwissenschaftliche Zweckforschung (Institute for Military Scientific Research), which was set up within the Ahnenerbe and headed directly by Wolfram Sievers.

  One of the most notorious of the SS doctors was Dr. Eduard Wirths, the primary physician at Auschwitz. Having become a member of the NSDAP while a medical student at Würzburg, he joined the Waffen SS in 1939. After suffering a heart attack on the Eastern Front in 1942, he was transferred to concentration-camp duty, first at Dachau and then at Auschwitz. It was at the latter that numerous medical experiments were conducted by SS doctors that were under Wirths’s direct command. He was particularly interested in experiments around the spread of typhus and in a large-scale project involving the removal of reproductive organs from live women, which were then sent to various institutes in Germany for study. Most of the subjects involved in both projects died as a result.

  While Wirths supervised actual doctors, including those providing medical care to the übermensch SS personnel, he also had a number of doctors on his staff whose principal, or only, function at Aushwitz was “research” using human—or rather “subhuman”—subjects.

  Conducting experiments on female subjects under Wirths at Auschwitz was Dr. Carl Clauberg, a prewar professor for gynecology at the University of Königsberg turned SS Gruppenführer. When it became established policy under the Final Solution to prevent the untermenschen from breeding, Clauberg approached Himmler personally with a proposal to conduct experiments to find a practical method of mass sterilization. All he needed, implored Clauberg, was experimental subjects. Himmler sent Clauberg to Aushwitz in December 1942. There Clauberg experimented on both Jewish and Gypsy subjects, using drugs, acid, and radiation—almost always without anesthetic.

  Also under Wirths at Aushwitz in 1943 and 1944 was Dr. Joseph Mengele, an SS doctor whose name would later become synonymous with savagery conducted by the Nazis in the name of science. Like Wirths, he had started World War II in the Waffen SS, but had been declared unfit for front-line duty for medical reasons. While at the Universität München (University of Munich), Himmler’s alma mater, Mengele studied both medicine and anthropology, and he attracted the attention of the Nazis because of his thesis on racial morphology. He was also interested in genetics and the study of human twins. At Auschwitz, he found himself with access to an almost endless supply of human subjects. Indeed, he conducted experiments on well ove
r a thousand sets of twins and perhaps as many as three times that number. They were mainly children, and most of them died as a result of his experiments. His camp nickname, “Angel of Death,” was well deserved. His experiments ranged from attempts to change eye color with dyes to sewing children together to create artificial conjoined (“Siamese”) twins.

  The Eduard Wirths of Dachau was Dr. Sigmund Rascher. Actually, he was Wirths, Clauberg, and Mengele all rolled into one ambitious package. He had joined the NSDAP in around 1933, while still a medical student, and became a member of the SS in 1939. Through his girlfriend (later wife), Karoline “Nini” Diehl, a singer who knew Heinrich Himmler as he frequented the nightclub circuit, Rascher got close to the Reichsführer. Himmler took a liking to the doctor, who was sent to a cancer-research project—using live subjects, of course—at Dachau.

  When World War II began, Rascher joined the Luftwaffe. He started out in aviation medicine, but ended up at Dachau again, doing experiments on high-altitude flying, studying the effects of both low temperature and low pressure. The poor subjects, which included Jews, as well as Soviet and Polish prisoners of war, were put into altitude chambers. They were taken up as high as a simulated 70,000 feet, both with and without oxygen. Others were mistreated so that Rascher could study the effects of hypothermia. Some were thrown into icy water, and others were forced to sit naked in freezing conditions for hours.

  Ernst Schäfer, in a postwar interrogation, said that he and Ernst Krause, the Tibet expedition filmographer, were asked by Rascher to film some experiments. According to Schäfer, they pretended to have had an equipment malfunction. Nevertheless, film footage does exist of Rascher’s terrible sessions.