Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  These decisions foreshadowed the catastrophe that would soon engulf the former Polish territories and the coveted east. By the end of the year, the SS had set in place the most important instruments of occupation strategy. With the connivance of the Wehrmacht, Hitler had redefined warfare not merely as blitzkrieg but as the means of achieving racial dominance: the Polish nation had been destroyed and its elites liquidated. The ‘Jewish Problem’ was now a matter of open discussion – and many thousands of Jews had been forced into the Soviet domain. Himmler had also begun the process of Germanisation by resettling ethnic Germans ‘imported’ from the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The first efforts had been made to exploit the chauvinist emotions of non-German nationalists – in this case, the Ukrainian OUN, whose militia had participated in the campaign. The Nazi elite had begun to think in practical terms about the vexed questions of empire, race and nation – and Himmler’s new appointment as Reichs Commissar for the Consolidation of German Nationhood (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, RKFDV), made in October, meant that the SS would now control the process of deportation and resettlement in occupied territories, beginning with Poland, ‘to purge and secure the new German territories’. Hitler expressed nothing but contempt for the conquered Poles – as he explained to Nazi ‘party philosopher’, Alfred Rosenberg, he had ‘learnt a lot’ in Poland. The Jews were ‘the most appalling people one can imagine’. The Poles, he went on, exhibited ‘a thin Germanic layer underneath frightful material’.36 Himmler saw matters differently. Occupation was an opportunity: ‘It is therefore absolute national political necessity to screen the incorporated territories … for such persons of Teutonic blood in order to make this lost German blood available again to our own people.’37 For Himmler, the successful conclusion of the Polish campaign offered an opportunity to consolidate his ideological vision.

  At the end of October, Himmler published an ‘SS Order’, which set out the fundamental principles of the SS, and its strategy for the future.38 He begins by citing a favourite maxim: ‘Every war is a bloodletting of the best blood.’ Throughout Himmler’s lectures and speeches, ‘blood’ is repeated like a Wagnerian leitmotif. Racial strength, Himmler asserts, depends on the shedding of blood – and its replacement by fecund SS men. ‘He can die at peace who knows that … all he and his ancestors demanded and fought for is continued in his children.’ Himmler further developed his blood obsession in a second speech given to the new Gauleiters, who now ruled the former Polish lands. He began with a typical assertion: ‘I believe that our blood, Nordic blood, is the best blood on this earth … Over all others, we are superior.’ He points out that over many centuries, bearers of Nordic blood had become the rulers, experts, members of cultural elites when settled among lesser races. Inevitably, they had mixed with their inferior hosts and polluted the Nordic bloodline. This was dangerous, for Nordic blood conferred tremendous power even when it was diluted. He noted that in the recent war, the gallant defender of Warsaw had been General Juliusz Rommél – evidently from Teutonic stock. If Germanic or Nordic blood was so threatening in the wrong veins, as it was, what was to be done? One solution was simply to liquidate the elites and subtract their contaminated bloodline from the national stock. But mass murder was just one possible solution. ‘While we are strong,’ Himmler proclaimed ‘we must do our utmost to recall all our blood, and we must take care that none of our blood is ever lost again. [my italics]’39 For Hitler, racial admixture or miscegenation was an irreversible catastrophe. Himmler took a strikingly different view: lost Germanic blood might somehow be recovered.

  Himmler went on to explain what he meant by ‘recalling our blood’. He assumed that, with the exception of Jews, race was not fixed – it was to some degree fluid. The execution of unarmed civilians is a cowardly act. But according to Himmler ruthlessness or ‘hardness’ was character forming: ‘An execution must always be the hardest task for our men … but they must do it with “a stiff upper lip”’, he once said. Since good character was an expression of racial inheritance, it followed that the cultivation of ‘hardness’ through voluntary participation in violent actions offered individuals with some measure of Germanic blood the chance to ascend the rungs of the racial ladder. Soldiers, of course, not only kill – they get killed. For Himmler, sacrifice was another means by which an ethnic group could elevate its racial status. Recruits who laid down their lives as SS warriors guaranteed the racial values of their comrades. Borrowing from a garbled version of Lamarckian inheritance, Himmler asserted that these racial characteristics acquired through violent action and sacrifice would be inherited by future generations that would be progressively ‘Germanised’. Himmler was not troubled by the abundant contradictions of this twisted, semi-mystical rationale for mass slaughter. Instead he looked forward to building a ‘Germanic blood wall’ to guard ‘Germanic, blond provinces’.

  This was the first preliminary sketch of an evolving master plan – and its depraved sophistication fundamentally contradicted Hitler’s petty-minded bigotry. The problem, naturally, was implementation. How was the German or Nordic blood to ‘be recalled’ in practice? By the beginning of 1940, Himmler had at least the rough outline of a solution. His police battalions and armed SS units would offer ‘Germanic’ recruits the chance to ‘top up’ their racial qualifications through blood sacrifice. Himmler’s next task would be to refashion the new Waffen-SS as a receptacle of reclaimed Germanic blood, ‘wherever it might be found’.

  In the aftermath of the Polish campaign, Himmler energetically impressed on Hitler the heroic part played by the SS ‘Leibstandarte’. Realising that the Wehrmacht remained squeamish about fully embracing a ‘war of annihilation’, Hitler agreed to expand the ‘armed SS’ from one to three combat divisions: the Totenkopfdivision, the SS-VT and the SS Polizei Division. By now, Hitler and his generals had begun planning Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), the invasion of Western Europe and Himmler faced an unexpected dilemma. In the short term, he had no idea how to acquire the manpower to fill these new divisions. Army recruitment had drained the well close to the bottom, and the Wehrmacht high command, thoroughly rattled by SS aggression, would do whatever it could to cut off supplies of men and materials to the SS. The new ‘armed SS’ made only an insignificant contribution to the attack on Western Europe.

  Nevertheless, on 19 July 1940 Hitler stood once again in the Kroll Opera House to announce the successful completion of the latest blitzkrieg. ‘The German armoured corps,’ he proclaimed, ‘has inscribed for itself a place in the history of the world. The men of the Waffen-SS have a share in this honour.’ He then acknowledged a beaming Himmler: ‘Party comrade Himmler, who organised the entire security system of our Reich as well as the units of the Waffen-SS.’40 By that summer, Waffen-SS combat units could muster some 100,000 men. The manpower problem had been solved, for the time being at least, by one of Himmler’s most forceful henchmen. While Himmler waffled about Germanic empires and Nordic bloodlines, Gottlob Berger, a bluntly spoken wedge of man with a talent for making enemies, got on with the job. That summer, as SS administrators tightened their grip on Hitler’s European empire, Berger embarked on a new campaign to streamline his command organisation and channel fresh recruits into SS divisions. Although the term ‘Waffen-SS’ had been officially in use since March, Himmler bound his private army even closer to the ‘general SS’ by setting up the Kommando der Waffen-SS inside the SS Main Office. Like any Reich agency, the SS was a battleground of aggressive egos and empire builders. Ambitious military types despised the ‘schoolmasterly’ Himmler and made the dangerous mistake of thinking he could be bullied. Ambitious generals like Theodor Eicke and ‘Sepp’ Dietrich had, with Hitler’s tacit approval, treated their SS divisions, the ‘Leibstandarte’ and Totenkopfdivisions, as personal fiefdoms. Himmler and Berger would use the new Kommando to tame these malcontents and promote their own tame placemen. Himmler was determined that the armed SS – the Waffen-SS and its kin the police – would take a vanguard role in th
e renewed assault on the east. He knew that this could not be put off for much longer. His destiny was the conquest of the east.

  As Himmler streamlined the SS, Hitler was becoming preoccupied with Britain’s refusal to ‘knuckle under’ (accept defeat) and with the ‘Russian problem’. The two issues were closely connected. Hitler assumed that the British were convinced that his fickle ally Stalin would eventually join the war – against Germany. This may have been a rationalisation on Hitler’s part designed to appease his nervous generals, since his principal war aim was ultimately the destruction of the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ enemy in Moscow and the German resettlement of the east – an ambition fully endorsed by the impatient Himmler. According to Goebbels, Hitler saw the coming war with Russia in completely Manichean terms: Bolshevism was ‘enemy number one’.41

  On 31 July, Hitler called his senior military advisors to the Berghof, and informed them that he had made a ‘final decision’ to ‘finish off Russia’ in the spring of 1941.42 Hitler rationalised this by arguing that ‘England is counting on Russia … if Russia is beaten, there is no more hope for England’. As his plans matured, Hitler would abandon this kind of rationalisation, even when he discussed strategy with the Wehrmacht generals. SS Chief Himmler understood completely the implications of renewing the National Socialist ‘war of annihilation’ that Hitler characterised as ‘deliberately racial’. As his eastern plans took shape in the winter of 1940/41, Hitler openly combined strategy with ideology. This meant that the Wehrmacht must ‘fight an ideological war alongside the SS’. Instead of merely taking on ‘special tasks’, SS values would shape German invasion strategy. This meant that the Waffen-SS would need to acquire a lot more clout – and that meant recruiting.

  For Himmler, the planned attack on the Soviet Union, initially codenamed ‘Otto’, presented both another opportunity to reinforce the status of the SS and a fearsome challenge. In 1940, Berger still depended on a pool of native German citizens for recruitment. The German army, represented by the OKW, still controlled the flow of military-age manpower to both the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. The army did everything in its power to starve the Waffen-SS. On 7 September, in a speech to the officers of the SS ‘Leibstandarte’, Himmler announced that he had a solution to the manpower problem. ‘We must,’ he declared, ‘attract all the Nordic blood in the world to us, depriving our enemies of it.’43 His proposal was expedient – but fitted perfectly with his developing pseudo-biological philosophy.

  And the SS recruiters would begin by tapping the German diaspora.44

  It was estimated that some 13 million Volksdeutsche lived outside the Reich, mainly in Hungary, Romania and Russia – a number comparable, as Valdis Lumans points out, to the population of medium-sized state.45 The lost Germans had fascinated Himmler for some time and he knew that the key to exploiting this tantalising human reservoir was the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Office, VoMI), a Nazi Party organisation founded in 1935 to look after the interests of ethnic Germans living outside the Reich and, of course, promote National Socialist ideology. By controlling VoMI, Himmler could influence the Volksdeutsche leadership. In 1937, Himmler engineered the appointment of SS-Obergruppenführer, Werner Lorenz, as VoMI chief. As an NSDAP agency, VoMI officially came under the aegis of deputy party leader Rudolf Hess and the NSDAP treasurer. But in 1938, Hitler granted VoMI state authority as well – meaning that it was no longer simply a party organisation but a kind of hybrid. In theory, Hitler’s decision should have made the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop an equal partner with Hess, but Himmler swiftly exploited VoMI’s ‘mixed’ status and ordered Lorenz to saturate its staff with SS placemen. By 1940, the SS dominated VoMI, and through its hundreds of offices wove a web of connections to German minorities scattered across the Balkans, Poland, the Baltic States, France, Belgium, Denmark, Austria, the former Czech republic and the Netherlands.

  Himmler’s plan to exploit German Volksdeutsche communities as a recruitment reservoir was not as straightforward as it might appear. German anthropologists like Hans F.K. Günther, the so-called Rassenpapst (Race Pope) argued that ethnic Germans had become excessively contaminated by intermixing with their Slavic neighbours. Günther’s many books were widely read – and although Nazi propaganda often celebrated the typical Volksdeutscher as a heroic Aryan paragon, many Germans regarded them as second-or third-rate, ‘not quite’ Germans. The Austrian-born Hitler, arguably a Volksdeutscher himself, thoroughly despised most ethnic Germans as ‘degenerates’. There were in any case, according to specialists, different Volksdeutsche ‘species’. Some ethnic Germans inhabited territories that had been separated from the Reich as recently as 1919. Others, like the Sudeten and Carpathian Germans of Czechoslovakia, had once been subjects of the German-speaking Austro-Hungarian Empire. Other Volksdeutsche, the relics of medieval Germanic empires, had much older roots. Germans first immigrated to Hungary in the tenth century; 200 years later, the Teutonic Order and Hanseatic merchants colonised the Baltic region. German migrants tended to form business or cultural elites: the oldest of all German universities was founded in Prague in 1348. The so-called ‘Volga Germans’ had originally come to Russia in the mid-eighteenth century at the invitation of the German-born Catherine the Great. After the Russian Revolution, Lenin declared the Volga region the ‘Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic’, with its capital at Engels – commemorating another notable German exile.46

  Whatever their history and origins, these Volksdeutsche communities aggressively celebrated their German roots and identity. Ethnic Germans rarely displaced indigenous, usually Slavic peoples; they tended to become state officials, academics and landowners. Like the British ruling class in India, ethnic Germans proscribed fraternisation and sheltered inside what they called Sprachinseln (language islands). This isolationism encouraged disdain for both Slavs and Jews. After the First World War, with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this long-cultivated aloofness underwent a poisonous and reactionary transformation, and many ethnic Germans would prove themselves the most fervent Nazi ideologues. In 1939, when Hitler charged Himmler with a massive resettlement programme, he would turn to these islands of German speakers to fill the new Gaue carved form the vanquished Polish lands.

  Naturally, human nature being what it is, many Volksdeutsche could not resist the temptations of their Slavic or Jewish neighbours, however zealously ethnic German communities protected their ethnic boundaries. Gene flow is unstoppable. This meant that in the new Reich, Aryan status could not be conferred automatically on every Volksdeutschen. So when the German resettlement programme got underway, every ethnic German applicant had to be rigorously screened by the Oberste Prüfungshof (Highest Court of Examination) and then classified in the Volksliste: an exacting hierarchy that descended from Category 1 (‘pure and politically clean specimens’) to Category 4 (‘renegades’ with ‘alien blood’). German ‘proofing’ officials were shocked by the ‘racial quality’ of the Volksdeutsche they examined. They complained frequently that many ethnic Germans behaved just like Poles and Ukrainians; they lacked the proper German values. Worse, they confessed to sleeping with Polish and Ukrainian women. As Doris L. Bergen succinctly puts it, the ‘Volksdeutsche notion was always tenuous’.47

  Although Himmler’s fastidious race experts might question the right of some ethnic Germans to join the Nordic club, the average Volksdeutscher, for his or her part, shared the xenophobic prejudices of the ‘Master Race’. During the Weimar period, scores of German support organisations had sprung up to promote the interests of the Volksdeutsche, especially those regarded as ‘victims of Versailles’. After 1933, these contacts deepened. Hitler’s frequently renewed promises that he would ‘roll back Versailles’ ignited the aspirations of a new ethnic German generation. Across the German diaspora, Nazi agitation cells proliferated, especially in southern Russia and eastern Poland where ethnic German communities had long been riddled with the most virulent anti-Semitism. According to Valdis Lum
ans: ‘National Socialism was even more attractive to the average Volksdeutscher than to his Reich counterpart.’ In his book about the German occupation of Greece, Mark Mazower confirms that ethnic Germans eagerly rallied to the cause of ethnic destruction. Following the German occupation of Greece in 1941, SS-Standartenführer Dr Walther Blume recruited middle-aged Volksdeutsche as concentration camp guards – and they soon became feared for their extreme cruelty. These men had been recruited in Hungary and Romania and had few illusions about their less than exalted place in Hitler’s New Order; they understood well enough that Germans from the ‘old Reich’ despised them and their kind. This sense of exclusion fuelled their merciless treatment of camp inmates, especially Greek Jews. Camp commandant Sturmbannführer Paul Radomski, an ethnic German recruit, was described by his superiors as ‘energetic and made of iron’. He was in fact a murderous brute.48

  Himmler eyed these millions of German exiles greedily. Since race rather than citizenship qualified someone to join the Waffen-SS, Himmler pressured the VoMI to begin recruiting ethnic Germans. In Germany, VoMI officials arranged physical training programmes and athletic visits for young ethnic Germans from abroad – and, once they were on Reich soil, pressurised them to volunteer for service in the Waffen-SS. Guided by the SS, VoMI became a recruitment agency. Friedrich Umbrich (b. 1925) recalled his first encounter with emissaries of Himmler’s SS in a memoir called Balkan Nightmare. Umbrich was an ethnic German, born in Transylvania he grew up in the little village of Belleschdorf – today Idiciu in modern Romania.49 Saxons had lived in this lush, green valley between the Carpathians and Transylvanian Alps for six centuries. In the aftermath of the First World War, after the signing of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, the Transylvanian Saxons woke up to find they had become Romanians. This sparked feelings of profound anxiety and resentment. Umbrich admits that after 1933, the Romanian-Saxon community was caught up in the ‘hysteria sweeping Europe’; in other words, National Socialism. VoMI officers soon arrived in Transylvania, bringing rousing songs and propaganda films extolling the virtues of the new Germany with its Tüchtigkeit und Einigkeit (efficiency and unity). Saxons had a long tradition of making do and compromising with their neighbours. All the Umbrichs spoke fluent Hungarian. They tolerated the few Jews who lived in the village – including a childless couple who would vanish ‘unexpectedly’ in 1940. But the men from VoMI promised a bright new future as part of a greater Germany.