Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  We can now return to September 1939; to the moment when Himmler’s SS would be ‘blooded’ in the first act of Hitler’s ‘war of annihilation’.

  For Himmler’s SS, planning for Case White, the invasion of Poland, began as early as May 1939. All the major offices of the Reich participated and protracted negotiations concerning the deployment of SS paramilitary police and the embryonic Waffen-SS, the SS-VT regiments (Verfügungstruppe), were convened between representatives of the Gestapo, the OKH (the Army High Command), and the office of military intelligence, the Abwehr. True to form, Himmler’s number two, Heydrich, secured a leading part in these preparations, and reported directly to Hitler. At SD headquarters, Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8 in central Berlin, he set up a new office to direct Operation Tannenberg: the ‘Zentralstelle II P’, the P referring, of course, to Poland. He appointed Franz Six, considered to be an expert on ‘Jewish matters’, to head the new department. SD bureaucrats under SS-Oberführer Heinz Jost began compiling target lists (Sonderfahndungsliste) that named some 61,000 Polish Christians and Jews, broadly categorised as ‘anti-German elements’ – meaning those ‘elements hostile to the Reich and to Germany in enemy territory behind the troops engaged in combat’.10 These diligently compiled file cards would provide the blueprint for mass murder.11

  Heydrich later confided to Daluege that Hitler had given him an ‘extraordinarily radical order’ for the ‘liquidation of the various circles of the Polish leadership’, meaning clergy, nobility, Jews and the mentally ill.12 Hitler’s criminal order prefigured the notorious Commissar Order (Kommissarbefehl) and the Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlaß issued before Operation Barbarossa two years later, which sanctioned illegal summary mass executions. In 1939, however, nothing was put in writing – and Hitler demanded an operational smokescreen that referred to ‘elements hostile to the Reich’. This obfuscation filtered down through the ranks. The main instrument of mass murder – though not as we shall see the only one – would be the Einsatzgruppen. These ‘Special Task Forces’ or ‘death squads’ had already been deployed during the Anschluss with Austria, and later in the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia. At the beginning of July, Heydrich appointed SS-Brigadeführer Werner Best, a 36-year-old lawyer, to begin the selection of appropriate staff that would soon be sent into action in Poland. They would be recruited from every branch of Himmler’s police forces and become the main agents of the Nazi genocide – and later, the first recruiters of non-German auxiliaries. Most of these dedicated killers were German law graduates in their early 30s.13

  In mid-August, Heydrich met his Task Force commanders and informed them that Hitler had personally tasked him with combating Polish ‘resistance’: ‘everything was allowed, including shootings and arrests,’ he revealed.14 The target lists already compiled by Jost made perfectly clear what ‘resistance’ meant: the word was merely window dressing for the decapitation of Polish civil society. But Heydrich refused to specify how these ‘radical’ instructions should be carried out; that was down to individual commanders in the field. Much would depend on the intuition and initiative of young German men. These Special Task Forces would be backed by ethnic German ‘Self-Defence Corps’ (Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz), recruited from the German minority in Poland which was saturated with fanatical National Socialists, eager to take revenge on their Polish fellow citizens.15

  German troops began to move east towards the Polish border as early as June. Against a background of frantic diplomatic manoeuvring, Hitler ordered Heydrich to provide a suitable casus belli to launch his war. He claimed that ethnic Germans in Poland had been persecuted with ‘bloody terror’ – now he needed some evidence. Heydrich hatched up Operation Himmler. At the end of August a cadre of SS and SD men secretly assembled at the police school in Bernau where they were issued with Polish army uniforms and papers. Since the Poles had refused to provoke a war, the SS would do it for them. Heydrich assigned these ‘provocation’ teams a series of targets on the Polish border, including a radio station at Gleiwitz. Here they waited for Heydrich’s coded signal ‘grandmother has died’. Led by SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks (the author of a post-war autobiography, The Man who Started the War), the first unit of provocateurs attacked the radio station, inadvertently killing a German policeman, and broadcast in German accented Polish that ‘The hour of freedom has struck!’ to the accompaniment of pistol shots. Another sham Polish team attacked the German customs post at Hochlinden, where they deposited six corpses dressed in Polish uniforms, referred to as Konserve or ‘preserved meat’. These human props had been provided by Heydrich’s rival SS General Theodor Eicke, the man who had shot Ernst Röhm in 1934 and become head of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate and commander of the SS Death’s Head division. Eicke had selected and poisoned the unfortunate Konserven for Operation Himmler at Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin. Military intelligence, the Abwehr, supplied their uniforms. Yet another SD team struck a German forestry station at Pitschen, daubing its walls with ox blood. For the benefit of the press, astonished that Poland had attacked Germany, Heydrich had ordered a model of the border which featured flashing red lights where Polish attacks had taken place. The message conveyed by these macabre theatrics was obvious: Polish forces had violated the borders of the Reich. Germany was under attack!

  These staged provocations resembled a grotesque comic opera. This truly was gangster diplomacy. In the early hours of 1 September, at 4.45 a.m., Hitler broadcast to German troops massed on the Polish border: force would be met by force. An hour later, the German training ship Schleswig-Holstein, anchored in Danzig harbour, turned its guns on the Polish garrison and opened fire. A total of 1,500 German aircraft roared into the air and crossed swiftly into Polish airspace. Five German armies, made up of sixty divisions, comprising more than 1.5 million men swept across Polish borders, led by five panzer tank divisions. As German forces pounded the Polish armies from air, land and sea, Hitler was driven to the Kroll Opera House, which had temporarily replaced the Reichstag. Wearing his Iron Cross and dressed in a field grey uniform, Hitler slandered the Poles as warmongers and reassured the governments of France and Great Britain that he merely wished to settle the status of the Pomeranian Corridor and Danzig. It was sheer mendacity. The Germans intended to obliterate the Polish nation.

  Case White delivered a powerful straight punch combined with swift, ruthless encirclement. From the north, the 4th Army drove through the Polish Corridor between Pomerania and East Prussia towards Warsaw. From East Prussia, the 3rd Army pushed south towards the Bug River, cutting behind helplessly confused Polish divisions. From Silesia, German armies struck north-east.16 These hammer blows took full advantage of new borders created after the destruction of Czechoslovakia. In return for a promise of 300 square miles of Poland, puppet dictator Joseph Tiso granted the German 8th, 10th and 14th Armies permission to cross the Slovakian border with Poland, alongside German-trained Slovakian troops, to slice into Polish forces from the south.17 With relentless momentum, the German forces penetrated deep inside Poland. In less than twenty-four hours, the Luftwaffe Stuka bombers had eliminated 75 per cent of the dilapidated Polish air force.

  In August, Hitler’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had signed a non-aggression pact with his Soviet opposite number in Moscow. Its secret protocols guaranteed the division of Poland and Eastern Europe between the two dictatorships. On 11 September, Stalin had withdrawn his ambassador from Warsaw – but as Hitler’s armies crushed the Poles, the Soviets prevaricated, hoping the Germans would perform much of the hard labour of conquest. On 17 September, when German victory and thus the destruction of Poland as a nation was certain, the Soviets finally struck from the east, finally snuffing out any chance that the Poles could continue to resist.

  Barely noticed by the outside world, on 15 August a few hundred Ukrainians had arrived in Slovakia, a client state of the Reich, to begin training as a Bergbauernhilfe (BBH). Although Hitler was hostile to Ukrainian political demands, Abwehr head Admiral Wilhelm Canar
is had been cultivating the Ukrainian nationalist faction (the OUN), and its anti-Semitic leader Andriy Melnyk since the mid-1930s. Although the Nazi-Soviet Pact, signed in August, complicated German relations with the Ukrainians, Canaris pushed ahead with a special training programme, appointing Colonel R. Sushko, a prominent OUN man, to lead the Bergbauernhilfe into action against the Poles. But when the Soviets began their occupation of eastern Poland, Canaris was forced to abandon his plans. Hitler’s Bolshevik allies in Moscow naturally opposed the arming of any anti-Soviet nationalists. The BBH was reclassified as a police unit and took ‘self-defence’ actions against Polish troops as they fled towards the Romanian border. In other words, they murdered them. These Ukrainian recruits were the first of Hitler’s foreign executioners.18

  The Polish government, vainly hoping for French and British support, had delayed mobilisation – but in any case, their armed forces, despite putting up tremendous resistance, proved pathetically inadequate in the face of the German blitzkrieg. The astonishingly swift and co-ordinated air and ground attack had shredded Polish communications. Lines of command disintegrated. In just twelve days, German forces overran the western half of Poland, and the Polish government fled Warsaw, as the German armies threw a ring of steel and fire around the city defences.

  Hitler followed the Polish campaign with rapt attention. On 3 September, his special headquarters train began steaming east from Berlin’s Stettiner Bahnof. He frequently called for halts so that he and his doting entourage could tour the rapidly advancing front line in motor vehicles. In Danzig, jubilant crowds of ethnic Germans greeted Hitler and his exultant entourage. Then his train steamed on towards the beleaguered Polish capital which was ringed by 175,000 German troops. On 25 September, waves of Luftwaffe bombers and transport planes rained down fire and destruction backed by massive barrages launched from rail-mounted artillery. Exhilarated by this fiery Armageddon, Hitler insisted that the Polish government must surrender unconditionally. On 27 September, Polish forces defending the city capitulated. Hitler’s blitzkrieg had killed 70,000 Polish troops and wounded 130,000. Nearly half a million had been taken prisoner. Tens of thousands of others had fled into Romania and Hungary. Poland had ceased to exist; its territory was occupied by totalitarian forces who would install two destructive but distinct reigns of terror: one animated by race, the other by class.

  On 5 October, Hitler boarded a Junkers Ju 52 to fly over Warsaw’s empty and smouldering streets and gloat over the smoking ruins of the hated Polish capital. Five years later, a multinational SS army would finish off the job. Hitler’s war against Poland and its peoples did not end with the destruction of the Polish armed forces. As Wehrmacht divisions smashed the Polish armies, an undeclared shadow war had begun. This shadow war would be waged by Himmler’s paramilitary police, Heydrich’s Special Task Forces and the armed SS-VT. Himmler’s spectacular success in Poland meant that the SS would eventually secure the right to manage the occupation of conquered territory – and to set in motion monstrous plans for the Germanisation of the east. These plans would soon draw in non-German collaborators who would become Hitler’s foreign executioners.

  When it came to waging war on the enemies of the Reich, Himmler exploited a strategy that already had a long tradition in German military practice, but would now become the defining principle of SS warfare. In German, Bandenbekämpfung literally means the ‘combating of bandits’.19 Although the term predated the Hitler period, Bandenbekämpfung provided a strategic rationale for the systemic slaughter of any group of people deemed to be banditen (members of criminal gangs). As we will see, this might include unarmed civilians and Jews and genuine partisan fighters, and their alleged supporters. The term may first have been used during the Thirty Years War but it officially became part of strategic doctrine after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, when German auxiliary troops, later called Etappen (from the French word étape, meaning stages), fought French resistance fighters known as francs-tireurs. But Bandenbekämpfung could embrace a multitude of sins, for it was also used to justify armed responses to acts of civil disobedience, as opposed to attacks by francs-tireurs. In the period after 1871, Bandenbekämpfung would be used to justify attacking rebellious African tribes people in the German colony of Namibia during the Herero Wars and later German communists on the streets of Berlin. It was this slippery classification of the enemy as bandits that appealed so powerfully to Himmler. The Bandenbekämpfung concept permitted the targeting of a broad cast of ethnic and ideological enemies – from armed partisans to unarmed civilians.

  In September 1939 the German army was equipped to launch a sledgehammer blow against the Poles. But the Wehrmacht planners had little time to build up Etappen units in significant numbers. This neglect was Himmler’s opening – and he seized it ruthlessly. On 3 September, Hitler formally appointed his SS chief to take charge of ‘law and order matters’ behind the front line, the so-called ‘Army Rear Area’. We can be certain that Himmler was expecting to receive such an order, for on the very same day, SD Chief Heydrich issued a policy document, ‘Basic principles for Maintaining Internal Security during the War’, which listed potential targets to be eliminated ‘through ruthless action’.20 Himmler issued secret orders to Special Task Force commanders, sanctioning execution of insurgents ‘on the spot’, and the taking of civilian hostages. This order signalled that SS security forces would fight according to the doctrines of Bandenbekämpfung, which would have a profound and deadly impact on both Wehrmacht and SS tactics.21 Anti-bandit ‘actions’ legitimated the murder of targeted non-combatants by both Wehrmacht soldiers and SS police. While it is, of course, true that Polish franc-tireurs harassed German forces throughout the Polish campaign, they were not the main targets of Himmler’s Bandenbekämpfung. Instead, the SS exploited internal security needs to liquidate Polish leadership cadres like the intelligentsia, aristocracy and clergy, as well as communist officials and Polish Jews.

  In the first weeks of the war, some of the worst atrocities took place in the town of Bydgoszcz (German Bromberg) in the Polish Corridor.22 This region of Poland was ethnically very mixed, and in Bydgoszcz a local ethnic German militia clashed with retreating Polish troops. Attacks on ethnic Germans invariably provided an excuse for indiscriminate reprisals – backed by anti-Polish campaigns in the German press that referred to ‘Bromberg Bloody Sunday’ and grossly inflated ethnic German casualties. Once Brigadier General Eccard Freiherr von Gablenz had formally occupied the city on 5 September, SS police arrived and began rounding up thousands of Poles, mainly teachers, civil servants, lawyers and other members of the city’s professional elite. Hundreds were executed in artillery barracks and in the old market square. When SS officer Lothar Beutel reported to Berlin that more attacks on ethnic Germans had taken place, an enraged Hitler demanded full-scale reprisals. Between 9 and 10 September, Einsatzgruppe IV and SS police (6th Motorised Police Battalion) carried out sweeps, aided by ethnic German informers, in the Schwedenhöhe district where Polish units had made their last stand. The commander of ‘Aktion Schwedenhöhe’, Helmut Bischoff, demanded that his police show that ‘they were men’; they must be ‘tough and harsh’. Most complied. Even unarmed Poles who ‘looked suspicious’ were shot dead. By the end of Aktion Schwedenhöhe, SS police and German soldiers killed at least 1,000 Poles,‘priests, teachers, civil servants, rail operators, postal officers, and small business owners’, as well fifty students attending the Copernicus Gymnasium. Himmler and the SS consistently referred to victims as Banditen – opportunist killers who, as ‘criminals’, deserved no mercy. The victims of Aktion Schwedenhöhe were nothing of the sort. The figure of the bandit would provide the mendacious rationale for the genocidal murder of targeted ethnic elites.

  In 1939 the main target was the Polish elite, but the SS police battalions rarely hesitated to humiliate and attack Polish Jews. In many towns, SS commanders set up sentry posts outside synagogues to terrorise Jewish neighbourhoods. The SS men humiliated and dishonoured Jews by cu
tting their hair and shaving their beards; they forced them to clean streets and sidewalks with toothbrushes. These SS ‘ordinary men’ relished such tasks; they gloated about meting out rough justice to ‘Jewish vermin’. These humiliations proved, naturally, to be a prelude to murder. In Bydgoszcz, for example, the SS had liquidated the entire Jewish population of the city by November. Walther von Keudell, a former district president of Königsberg, commended the SS police for the ‘energetic use of their weapons’, their ‘courage and common sense’.

  The bloody climax of the SS police campaign in Poland engulfed the town of Ostrów Mazowiecka on 11 November. Two days earlier, precisely one year after Kristallnacht, a fire broke out in the centre of town – and ‘Jewish arsonists’ were blamed. As punishment, the local Nazi leader (Kreisleiter) ordered a group of Jews to operate a water pump and enlisted German soldiers to beat the Jews as they worked. The following day Police Battalion 11 gathered all the Jews of the town together and officers convened a kangaroo ‘police court’.23 In the meantime, SS police reinforcements arrived from Warsaw. The court pronounced the Jews guilty of arson – and on the morning of 11 November, PB 11 escorted all the Jews of Ostrów Mazowiecka to an execution site in a nearby wood; ditches had been dug the day before. As they herded the men, women and children in groups of ten to the edges of the ditch, officers from the Warsaw police battalions ordered their men to open fire. To begin with, a few hesitated. But a kind of terrible momentum quickly built up, and SS men began firing spontaneously; no further orders needed to be given. A few SS men baulked when they saw Jewish children being led to the execution pit. But one of the officers shouted that Jews had tried to assassinate Hitler a few days earlier in Munich; after this, shooting resumed. In Ostrów Mazowiecka, SS policemen slaughtered 156 Jewish men and 208 women and children.