Heydrich’s Special Task Forces would spearhead the assault on the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ stronghold. At regular meetings with his commanders, Heydrich frequently drummed in the bond between Bolshevism and Jewry. In the meantime, Himmler pushed forward plans for the colonisation of the east – plans of staggering ambition that covertly envisaged the physical annihilation of millions.
Since the 1980s the Holocaust has dominated accounts of the Second World War – and rightly so. But in the minds of Hitler and German imperial strategists, mass murder and the forced ‘evacuation’ of millions was a beginning not an end; a ‘cleansing procedure’ that would pave the way for a complete ethnic reordering of the east. Historian Adam Tooze has shown that Operation Barbarossa was a first step towards a ‘long term programme of demographic engineering’, summarised in that ugly word ‘Germanisation’.10 The idea was not an original one. Germanisation already had a long and shabby pedigree. Heinrich von Treitschke, the nineteenth-century advocate of Drang nach Osten (the drive to the east), celebrated the ‘most stupendous and fruitful occurrence of the later Middle Ages – the northward and eastward rush of the German spirit and the formidable activities of our people as conquerors, teachers, discipliners’.11 Now in 1941, the ‘formidable rush’ of Hitler’s war machine and Himmler’s SS militias promised to fulfil that old German dream. Hitler compared his quest for ‘living space’ in the east to the American colonisation of the west: the Volga, he proclaimed, would be Germany’s Mississippi. In 1939, when Germany invaded the then dismembered Poland, Himmler and his racial experts (Ostforschung) had embarked on an ambitious experimental programme to settle German colonists in the new German provinces and deport Polish Jews into the Lublin district in occupied Poland. This fist stab at ‘Germanisation’ proved a dismal failure. More than half a million ethnic German settlers, uprooted from the Baltic and South Tyrol, abandoned their homes only to end up stranded in sordid transit camps. In occupied Poland, the General Governor Hans Frank stymied SS plans to dump millions of Jews in what he regarded as a personal fiefdom. Clearing this ethnic logjam demanded the most radical of solutions: the conquest of the east and the subjugation of its peoples.
Himmler commissioned an ambitious young agronomist SS-Oberführer Dr Konrad Meyer to begin devising a ‘Generalplan Ost’.12 Between May 1941 and the following spring, Meyer toiled away at his office in the upmarket Berlin suburb of Berlin-Dahlem. As German troops penetrated deep into the Soviet Union and Caucasus, Himmler continuously stepped up pressure on Meyer urging him to consider ever more radical solutions. Meyer began by assuming his schemes would take twenty-five years to complete – Himmler wanted that reduced to five. Finally, in May 1942, Meyer delivered his ‘Legal, Economic and Spatial Foundations for Development in the East’. The Generalplan Ost was the high point of a succession of toxic German occupation plans devised after the destruction of Poland. The ‘Hunger Plan’, developed not by the SS but German army planners, proposed diverting Russian agricultural supplies to Germany, condemning to certain death by starvation 30 million people in Belorussia, northern Russia and the major Soviet cities. German military reversals in the winter of 1941 forced the partial abandonment of this wicked scheme, although the German army chiefs used planned famine as a weapon of war during the 900-day siege of Leningrad and other Soviet cities. After February 1942, the Germans focused more intently on the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’ promulgated at the Wannsee Conference.13 Many historians have claimed that the German occupation of the east was chaotic and unplanned. In fact, no other imperial project has generated more occupation plans.
It is also widely assumed that German racial experts believed that the east was occupied by a homogeneous mass of ‘Slavs’. Hitler certainly held this opinion, as his ‘table talk’ frequently demonstrates. But German race science was by no means monolithic and underwent a number of conceptual upheavals, which intensified after 1941 when German anthropologists seized the opportunity to study Russian prisoners of war. For now, we need simply to understand that German race experts increasingly recognised the diversity of eastern peoples – and that Himmler acknowledged this in his grandiose plans for the east. As early as 24 May 1940 Himmler presented Hitler with a short paper: ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Foreign Peoples in the East’.14 He begins by arguing that ‘we must endeavour to recognize and foster as many individual groups as possible’; he lists Ukrainians, White Russians, Gorales, Lemkes and Kashubians. From a purely strategic point of view, he argues, it makes sense to ‘divide them up into as many parts and splinters as possible’. In other words, divide and rule. By ‘dissolving’ these ethnic groups ‘into countless little splinter groups and particles’, any sense of ‘unity and greatness’,‘national consciousness and national culture’ would be eliminated. Himmler then goes on: ‘we will of course use the members of these ethnic groups … as policemen and mayors.’ The planned outcome would be the ‘dissolution of this ethnic mishmash [in the east]’ so that the most ‘racially valuable’ people could be ‘fished out’ and then ‘assimilated’ in Germany. Himmler then turns to education. Schools for the non-German eastern population would teach the majority only basic maths ‘up to 500’ and how to ‘sign one’s name’. All would be taught that ‘it is God’s commandment to be obedient to the Germans’. But – and here is the crucial point – more ambitious parents could apply to SS authorities to have their children educated to a higher level. On condition that the candidate was ‘racially first class’, successful applicants would be removed from their families and placed in a German school ‘indefinitely’. Himmler assumed that such parental zeal signified the possession of ‘good blood’. Himmler then appears to realise that Germanisation could not depend on parental whim alone, however praiseworthy. German teachers would be required to constantly sift their six to ten charges to winnow out ‘valuable blood’.
Himmler used the very same metaphors when he discussed recruiting Germanic volunteers for the Waffen-SS: ‘I really have the intention to gather Germanic blood from all over the world, to plunder and steal it where I can.’ It was a short step, in other words, from the classroom to the parade ground. Although the Generalplan Ost proposed the extinction of at least 80 per cent of indigenous peoples, Himmler also recognised the level and complexity of ethnic diversity in the east and proposed exploiting certain racial ‘splinters’, as he put it, as ‘mayors and policemen’. Recruitment of non-German volunteers thus formed part of a grossly ambitious imperial plan that depended on the physical liquidation of many millions of ‘surplus’ people.
Between the spring and summer of 1941, occupation experience in the Balkans and close involvement with the Romanian ‘National Legionary State’ had taught Himmler and his SS planners valuable lessons. In Croatia and Romania two thorny problems had become all too evident. Now they would have to be solved. First, factions like the Hlinka Guard, the Ustasha and the Iron Guard could not be relied upon to perform the task of mass murder in an orderly manner. They had a tendency to run amok or lacked ‘staying power’. Their energies needed to be disciplined. That was the German way: a matter of proper organisation and proper training. Surgeons not butchers! The second problem – nationalism – would prove much less tractable.
The birth of nationalism in the old empires in the nineteenth century was from the start wedded to extreme ethnic chauvinism directed mainly at Jews. This union was if anything deepened as new nations stumbled on to the stage of history. When the old empires collapsed at the end of the First World War, a new bout of nation building bonded nationalism ever tighter to chauvinism. Most, if not all, ultranationalist ideologues believed that Jews, either as the agents of international capital or as Bolsheviks intent on spreading a revolutionary message, menaced the fragile new nation states that emerged from beneath the wreckage of the old empires.
Why was this a problem for the Nazi imperial strategists? The reason is simple: anti-Semitism and nationalism came as a package. The Germans wished to exploit the one witho
ut satisfying the other. Hitler was no nation builder. In Western Europe and Scandinavia, Nazi administrators, whether military or civilian, soon found to their cost that failed ultranationalist demagogues like Vidkun Quisling in Norway, Anton Mussert in the Netherlands and Léon Degrelle in Belgium assumed that German occupation would provide the fast track to power. This was a delusion: for Hitler, collaboration was a one-way street. Power could flow in one direction only. Hitler ultimately planned to rebuild the Holy Roman Empire, the First Reich, by extending the western borders of Germany as far as the Pyrenees. That was bad news for the conquered peoples of Europe. On 9 April 1940, he proclaimed that ‘the Greater German Reich will arise today’: Danes, Norwegians, Dutch and Flemings would join together in a new community defined by its racial purity and dominated by Germany. In this ‘Germania magna’ the old national borders would be dissolved away. In the end, Hitler failed to rebuild the old Reich, but because he expected to he had no interest in promoting nationalists.
In the east, the Germans would encounter the same difficulty, but in an altogether different form. At the end of the First World War, a number of brand new nations had emerged kicking and screaming from the wreckage of Europe’s old empires. For two short decades, the peoples of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania tasted the joys of sovereignty. Then in 1939 Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler and snatched it away. Soviet armies and the hated agents of the Soviet security service, the NKVD, occupied the Baltic States and eastern Poland. A year later, Hitler’s armies drove out the Soviet occupiers. Many greeted the German invaders as liberators – and nationalists looked forward to the revival of their sovereign rights. They had no idea that for Hitler military conquest would mean the extinction of these insolent ‘little states’. The only winners would be the minority deemed suitable for ‘Germanisation’.
Nazi ideologue and head of the ‘Ministry of the Occupied East’ (Omi) Alfred Rosenberg flirted with the idea of granting some kind of suzerainty status to a few privileged eastern peoples like the Estonians. Rosenberg, who took the most ‘liberal’ approach to Eastern European nationalist aspirations, had no doubt that in the long term anything resembling a nation state would be completely digested by the ‘Greater German Reich’.
Hitler’s contempt for Slavic nationalism was profound. But in the German political tradition, his views were by no means original. Michael Burleigh argues in his essay ‘The Knights, Nationalists and Historians’ that the idea of Drang nach Osten, expansion to the east, was a leitmotif winding through German foreign policy – from Otto the Great through to Frederick the Great, to Bismarck and the Wilhelmine Empire and on to Hindenburg and then Hitler. The nineteenth-century apostle of eastward expansion, von Treitschke, denounced the ‘anarchic crudity of the Slavs’ which made them incapable of state formation. Only the Germans could be masters, teachers, discipliners and the bringers of civilisation to their crude eastern neighbours.‘In the unhappy clash between races,’ Treitschke argued, ‘a quick war of annihilation’ would sort out ‘the brute beasts of the East’.15
How then might nationalist eastern collaborators be rewarded if German imperialism demanded the destruction of their nation states? That circle could never be squared. But in the euphoric aftermath of conquest, Himmler would offer nationalist factions an alluring reward: the chance to seek revenge on the Jews they blamed for the ‘Bolshevik’ occupation of their nation states.
Evidence of this murderous skulduggery can be found in the Einsatzgruppen reports, a huge collection of German documents discovered in RSHA headquarters in Berlin at the end of the war by American lawyer Benjamin Ferencz. In cold, detached language they document how Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen executed 2 million Eastern European Jews in forest clearings and excavated pits between 22 June 1941 and 21 May 1943. The entire document collection weighed 200 tonnes – testimony to German managerial and reporting zeal. It comprises 195 ‘Morning Reports USSR’ and 55 longer ‘Weekly Reports’. When the four Special Task Forces crossed the Soviet border in June 1941 they brought with them back-up teams: secretaries and clerks, teletype operators and wireless operators equipped with the most up to date equipment. The duty of these men and women was to send detailed accounts of the previous day’s activity to local Task Force headquarters (for example in Tilsit on the Lithuanian border) by wireless or courier. Heydrich’s officers filed reports every morning until May 1942, when the ‘Reinhard’ murder camps and Auschwitz-Birkenau began to take on a bigger role in the genocide. After May, reports had to be filed weekly. This raw data flow from the front line listed execution sites, numbers killed and, crucially for our purposes,‘the mood of the general population’. At the Special Task Force HQ, higher ranked officers collated the raw information and compiled ‘meta reports’ and dispatched them to Heydrich’s offices in Prinz Albrecht Strasse in Berlin. The Einsatzgruppe reports documented the mass murder in chilling, voluminous and meticulous detail. Heydrich distributed the final reports to high-ranking Wehrmacht, police and SS officers, to members of the German Foreign Office, and to Göring and the German industrial magnates.
Himmler and Heydrich both studied the ‘Morning Reports’ closely and radioed fresh instructions to Task Force officers in the field, invariably urging them to show greater ‘harshness’. Each Task Force commander was subordinate to the three Higher SS and Police Leaders (Höhere Schutz Staffel-und Polizeiführer, HSSPF) in charge of different regions of the occupied Soviet Union. These SS officers became the managers of genocide on a day-to-day basis – ‘little Himmlers’ who co-ordinated the work of the Special Task Forces with Order Police battalions and the 20,000-strong Waffen-SS brigades. We will hear a great deal about these men in the chapters that follow.
The charge of the Special Task Forces would be ‘carrying out fundamental special measures against the Jews’.16 Heydrich, it must be emphasised, set out a strict Sprachregelung (language rules) to camouflage German plans. The methodical large-scale execution of Jews and ‘Soviet Commissars’ was referred to using a blizzard of code words: action, special action, large-scale action, reprisal action, pacification action, radical action, cleaning up action, overhauling, cleared or cleared of Jews, freeing the area of Jews, special treatment or measures, rendered harmless, handled according to orders, severe measures, treating according to the previous procedure … 17 It was not considered necessary to provide a crib. As well as the standard kind of Einsatzgruppe report, Ferencz discovered three ‘authored’ Einsatzgruppe reports that have special significance. Two bear the signature of the commander of Special Task Force A, Franz Walther Stahlecker. The third was written by the Swiss-born leader of Einsatzkommando 3, Karl Jäger (in his own words, a ‘person with a heightened sense of duty’).18 These chilling documents tells us a great deal about the management of mass murder in Lithuania and the other Baltic States.
The 40-year-old Stahlecker was a dedicated and proficient génocidaire. He fervently believed that ‘the East belonged to the SS’. Colleagues noted that Stahlecker was often ‘jumpy and unpredictable … obsessed that they [his superiors] would realise in Berlin that he was absolutely obedient concerning this [Heydrich’s] order: not just obedient, but had a special mission to carry it out’.19 Stahlecker would consider only those recruits who could ‘tolerate hardships and burdens of the soul’. In this respect, he himself provided the model. In his second, shorter report, Stahlecker attached a map of the Baltic region and Belorussia on which he or his assistants had inscribed numerous graphic coffins which enumerated how many Jews had been killed in particular regions or places. The third special report was filed by Stahlecker’s subordinate, Karl Jäger (b. 1888), who became the commander of the Security Police and SD for Lithuania.20 Jäger lists with remorseless thoroughness the murder of precisely 137,346 Jews and communists. Jäger documents over a hundred ‘special operations’ in seventy-one separate locations (he made return visits to the same village if he discovered from informers that Jews had survived). The report demonstrates that the Einsatzkomma
ndo could move very fast: in the course of a single day in September, the SD men performed their ‘racial duties’ in four different villages. Roland Headland notes that ‘in no other surviving document do we get as detailed a picture of the steady accumulation of victims’.21
There are a number of studies of the SD Einsatzgruppen, both in German and English. Here I will focus on a somewhat neglected aspect of the reports. One of the tasks of the Special Task Force commanders was to provide information about the ‘Mood and general Conduct’ of civilians and the ‘value’ of local activists. Most of the reports contain paragraphs that provide very revealing insights into the thinking of both the Einsatzgruppe men and the ‘activists’ they encounter. One report, for example, makes the following observation: ‘All experiences confirm the assertion made before that the Soviet state was a state of Jews of the first order.’ For this reason, the report continues: ‘the Jewish problem has become a burning problem [sic] for the Ukrainian people.’ The SD men and many non-Jewish Eastern Europeans shared the same perception that the agents of Soviet rule were Jews – and that the entire edifice of Bolshevism was a ‘Jewish conspiracy’. It was this mythology of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ that would sustain the mass recruitment of non-Germans in the service of the Reich. The chimera of the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ forged a shared ideological language and practice that allowed the Germans to continuously refer to mass murder as ‘spontaneous actions’. In a letter to Special Task Force commanders, Heydrich emphasised that:
Hitler's Foreign Executioners Page 16
