Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was a fanatical Nazi shackled to a Polish surname. Soon after June 1941, Himmler appointed him HSSPF Central Russia, later promoting him Chef der Bandenkampfeverbände (head of the war on bandits). Wherever Himmler posted Bach-Zelewski, death and destruction followed. He commented in his war diary that when he flew over burning villages ‘his trigger finger itched’.8 In 1945, the Allied prosecutors possessed only fragmentary information about Bach-Zelewski’s activities in the east and called him as a witness for the prosecution in return for immunity. Hermann Göring famously called him a Schweinhund. Bach-Zelewski later claimed that it was he who had provided the former Reichsmarschall with a cyanide capsule to cheat the Allied hangman. But in 1960, German investigators prosecuted Bach-Zelewski for ‘multiple illegal killings’ committed in Warsaw in 1944. Thanks to these zealous prosecutors, we know a great deal about Bach-Zelewski’s career in the SS and his activities as a dedicated génocidaire.9

  As a Higher SS and Police Leader, HSSPF Bach-Zelewski wielded enormous power. He and his fellow HSSPF, like Friedrich Jeckeln, were often referred to as ‘little Himmlers’. As Hitler’s forces crushed Poland then occupied much of Western Europe and Scandinavia, Himmler sent forth his loyal SS emissaries. After 1941, the HSSPFs would become the bureaucratic backbone of SS strategy in the east. In their respective domains, they had a free hand to do Himmler’s bidding and the authority to call on all the SS and police agencies, including Heydrich’s Special Task Forces and Daluege’s Order Police, as well as the specialised SS brigades and Waffen-SS battalions. Every HSSPF was also an SS-Gruppenführer (General). The KSRFSS was the SS equivalent of the Wehrmacht general staff, and it provided Himmler with a means to promote competitive initiative and reward the best performers. Men like Bach-Zelewski and Jeckeln would become the front-line managers of genocide.

  The power invested in the HSSPF also reflected Himmler’s constant fear of ambitious rivals. In Berlin, he could just about control, as both Reichsführer-SS and chief of the German police, the fast expanding SS Main Offices (Hauptämter) and the sprawling police apparatus. But as the SS empire bloated, Himmler needed loyal placemen on whom he could rely to do his bidding. The HSSPF would be, as it were, ‘family’ – steadfast members of the SS ‘Sippenorden’ (kinship order). Bach-Zelewski testified after the war that a few weeks before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler brought his SS-Gruppenführers together at the SS ‘Order Castle’ at Wewelsburg, near Paderborn. Here Bach-Zelewski, Friedrich Jeckeln and SS notables gathered together in a gloomy, subterranean crypt decorated with Teutonic insignia. In his address, Himmler solemnly revealed that Germany was on the threshold of greatness or the edge of destruction. Hitler had demanded a solution to the problem of living space, and to ‘make room’, it would be necessary to remove all the Jews of Europe and diminish the Slavic population by up to 30 million people.10 These monumental tasks demanded resolute harshness. Two years later, in his infamous speech to SS officers at Posen, he reiterated the same creed:

  Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1000. And to have seen this through, and – with the exception of human weaknesses – to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.11

  These Wewelsburg pep talks were just one way that Himmler groomed his top brass. He understood the value of men conditioned (we would say brutalised) by past combat experience. Bach-Zelewski and most of the other higher SS commanders had been profoundly shaped by their experience of the First World War ‘Storm of Steel’. This was the SS esprit de corps.

  In 1939, a German ‘racial geographer’ described the Pripet Marshes as ‘one of the least developed and primeval areas of Europe’, inhabited by people ‘vegetating in hopeless apathy’. In the main city Pinsk, sometimes called the ‘Jerusalem of the Marshes’, lived (this geographer reported) ‘greasy unkempt [Jewish] women whose forms ooze with fat’ and who dangled their adolescent brats over street ditches ‘to do their morning business’. Jews, the geographer went on, were ‘parasites’, ‘alien to the landscape’ ‘foreign bodies’, ‘beneficiaries of work done by others’. Like swamp water, the Jews of the marshes would need to be drained away. Himmler was determined to master this watery gateway to the east; he too viewed the Pripet as a miasmic breeding ground for people ‘hostile to the German Reich in heart and soul’.12

  On 27 July, Kommandostab chief Knoblauch sent Himmler’s first set of orders concerning the deployment of the SS cavalry brigade to HSSPF Bach-Zelewski and commander of the 1st Cavalry Regiment, ‘Florian Geyer’, Hermann Fegelein. The plump SS general and the dashing cavalry officer met in Baranowicze in the Brest province, where Bach-Zelewski had set up mobile headquarters, to plan how to implement Himmler’s order for ‘Scouring the Marshes by Cavalry’. Most of the time, Himmler relied on word-of-mouth instructions and avoided sending any orders by radio – hence his frequent journeys by train or aircraft across the rear areas of the German front line. ‘Scouring the Marshes …’ is a rare document that makes no explicit reference to Jews. That would have been superfluous; Himmler assumed that Bach-Zelewski would ‘read between the lines’. His language was distinctly quaint:

  If the local population is hostile, or racially inferior or even, as it seems to be the case quite often in marsh areas, made up of criminals, those suspected of providing support to partisans must be executed. Women and children must be removed, cattle and food seized and taken into security.

  He ended: ‘Either the [local villagers] beat to death any partisan or marauder by themselves and let us know about it – or they will cease to exist.’13

  As Himmler intended, such vague instructions forced both Bach-Zelewski and Fegelein to issue plainer orders to the Reitende Abteilung (mounted troops) of the ‘Florian Geyer’. Fegelein added a few details about ‘Soviet marauders’, but sharpened the racial implications of Himmler’s instructions: Jews had to be treated ‘for the most part as plunderers’. This meant they would be shot on sight.

  As Bach-Zelewski and Fegelein prepared their assault on the Pripet Marshes, HSSPF Jeckeln and the 1st SS Brigade began another ‘cleansing action’ to the south. According to his office diary, Himmler busily sped back and forth behind the German front line, usually in a Junkers 88, co-ordinating the deployment of his SS brigades and meeting with German army commanders to make sure they would raise no objection to his ‘security measures’. Few ever did. In Riga, he met HSSPF Hans-Adolf Prützmann, who later informed a subordinate that he had been instructed to ‘resettle Jews’. ‘Where to?’ Prützmann replied: ‘in the next world.’14 From Riga, Himmler flew on to SS headquarters in Baranowicze, where the SS cavalry brigade had mustered, to meet HSSPF Bach-Zelewski and Fegelein. Soon afterwards, Fegelein issued another clarification to his commanders:

  The Reichsführer has ordered me to remind [you] that only unyielding harshness, fierce determination and obedience to the Führer’s vision will prevail against the Bolsheviks. It is up to the leadership to compensate for all those irrelevant personal weaknesses shown by individuals. The Reichsführer-SS will no longer accept any excuses in this matter and will make the harshest decisions regarding those who break ranks.15

  In the case of the SS cavalry brigade, Himmler had reason to be concerned that they might let him down. The SS cavalrymen who rode into the Pripet Marshes were a multinational military unit, recruited from every corner of the German diaspora: from Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Tyrol.16 Most had yet to be tested in combat, but all had been heavily indoctrinated with SS ideology.

  On 30 July 1941 the two SS cavalry regiments rode pell-mell into the Pripet Marshes. Fegelein had appointed a 46-year-old former car salesman Gustav Lombard to lead the 1st Regiment along a northerly route in the direction of Pinsk. Franz Magill, a professional riding instructor with a drink problem, led the second. In this mysterious new world, the air was stifling and humid. Legions
of mosquitoes rose up to assault the SS riders as they blundered through entangling low brush and copses of beech and pine. The horizon stretched away beneath a hot, white dome of sky. Horses and men sweated and cursed as they battled through sucking, swampy ground. The Pripet was a labyrinth of islands, separated by marsh and streams. During the next weeks, the SS men would have to ford no less than thirty-five rivers and streams to reach their prey.17

  Magill and Gustav Lombard had written orders to make wireless reports three times daily so that Himmler could assess the progress of the operation; he insisted that they list murdered Jews as ‘looters’ or ‘partisans’.18 Magill was a well-known drunk. From the start of the Pripet action, he appeared to be underperforming and recorded just a handful of kills. His reports exasperated Himmler; he rebuked Magill for being ‘soft’ and Fegelein dispatched another message: ‘explicit orders of Reichsführer: all Jews must be shot. Drive Jewish women into the marshes.’ Magill’s counterpart Lombard was ‘on message’. Soon after receiving Fegelein’s message, he ordered his men: ‘Not one male Jew is to remain alive, not one remnant family in the villages.’ That phrase ‘not one remnant family’ (keine Restfamilie) was a death warrant for women and children as well as male Jews.19 Still Magill had difficulties. Fegelein nagged him to perform. Magill responded with this macabre information: ‘The driving of women and children into the marshes did not have the expected success, because the marshes were not so deep that one could sink. After a depth of about a metre there was in most cases solid ground (probably sand) preventing complete sinking.’20 This pedantry grated on Himmler. Lombard had few problems executing instructions. He efficiently drowned women and children by simply using the deeper village ponds.

  Magill had another chance to impress Himmler when he reached the first large towns. On 5 August, SS-Hauptsturmführer Walther Dunsch led the leading squadrons of Magill’s 2nd SS Brigade along the Brest–Pinsk road into Janów. Dunsch ordered all Jewish males to assemble in the marketplace for ‘labour assignments’. As the SS men fanned out through the town, local villagers helpfully pointed out the streets and houses where Jewish families lived. Magill reported:

  The Ukrainian clergy were very cooperative and made themselves available for every Aktion. It was also conspicuous that, in general, the population was on good terms with the Jewish sector of the population. Nevertheless they helped energetically in rounding up the Jews. The locally recruited guards, who consisted in part of Polish police and former Polish soldiers, made a good impression. They operated energetically and took part in the fight against looters.21

  At the end of the afternoon, the SS marched Jewish men a few miles out of the town and into a wooded area. Here they were all executed. When the SS men left, villagers descended on the execution site and took clothes and shoes. Magill’s SS brigade now turned their attention to the towns and villages strung out along the Pinsk Road. Himmler was finally getting the numbers he demanded.

  From the mid-sixteenth century, Pinsk had been a vibrant Jewish religious and cultural centre. Like any city with a large Jewish population, Pinsk had suffered a succession of pogroms, but in 1941 20,000 Jews lived there and 10,000 more, fleeing the German advance, had taken shelter. On 4 July, a month before Magill’s men arrived, the Wehrmacht and an SD squad had entered Pinsk. They harassed the Jews, murdered some and ordered them to form a Judenrat (Jewish council). The Wehrmacht troops then moved east, leaving behind SD Chief Hermann Worthoff to keep order. Magill, shamed by Himmler’s rebukes, realised Pinsk, with its large captive Jewish community, would offer him a fresh opportunity to please the SS chief.22 He sent SS-Hauptsturmführer Stefan Charwat to confer with Worthoff – and together they began planning a large-scale ‘Action’. On 5 August, Charwat ordered Jewish men between 16 and 60 to assemble at Pinsk station for a three-day ‘work assignment’. That night, SS men began assaulting Jews to persuade the ‘Judenrat’ to do as it was told. The following morning, several thousand men reported ‘for work’ at the station. Many carried parcels of food. In the meantime, SS men again led a sweep, assisted by Poles and Ukrainians, searching for any Jews who had managed to avoid the round-up. By midday, some 8,000 men and young boys stood waiting in searing temperatures at the station; SS men walked through the crowd, separating out any doctors and craftsmen. They then confiscated identification papers and valuables like wristwatches from the majority of assembled Jews who had been left behind. The SS cavalrymen herded their captives into columns and marched them out of Pinsk in the direction of a neighbouring village. The Germans shot anyone who tried to escape or fell exhausted by the road. Then a halt was called close to a break of birches and alders. The Jews of Pinsk had, in fact, reached their final destination. In the soft sandy ground between the trees, a Polish work brigade had already dug pits. The SS men and their Polish accomplices organised the Jews into groups of twenty and ordered them to remove their clothes and shoes, and to wait in line. The SS men then executed them using their carbines. At 1.21 p.m., Magill reported to Bach-Zelewski that 2,461 ‘bandits’ had been shot so far. Soon afterwards, Bach-Zelewski himself arrived at the killing site and, after hearing Magill’s report, congratulated him and returned to his headquarters ‘satisfied’. By 6 p.m., Magill reported by radio, another 2,300 Jewish men had been executed. As the sun began to set, Charwat, faced with more than a thousand Jews who still remained alive, panicked, and ordered his men to start firing at will. His victims prayed and sang. Magill chose not to report these messier executions – but it is believed that by the end of that first day, Magill’s men murdered 6,500 Jewish men in the woods on the edge of Pinsk.

  It was Lombard, however, who won the lion’s share of praise from Himmler. On 14 August, he was invited to a high-level lunch with Fegelein, Bach-Zelewski, Prützmann and Himmler. He was promoted shortly afterwards. Himmler’s fleet of black Mercedes then raced on towards Minsk. An SS man who overheard some of the conversation between the SS top brass commented, ‘Now things are getting going, the Jews really are going to have their arses torn out.’23 This casual remark provides a chilling glimpse of the racial triumph that percolated through SS ranks in the weeks and months after the German attack on the Soviet Union. The SS brigades, managed by Himmler’s Kommandostab and comprising both Germans and foreign volunteers, had proved to be proficient mass murderers. By the end of 1941, Himmler’s ‘private army’ may have killed at least 100,000 Jews, as well anyone else judged to have ‘abetted the Soviet system’. Equally as savage as the SS cavalry was the 1st SS Brigade, commanded by HSSPF Friedrich Jeckeln.

  Like Bach-Zelewski, Jeckeln was a decorated war veteran. He had joined the NSDAP in 1929 and rapidly climbed the slippery ladder of SS promotion and became police chief in Brunswick. His hatred of Jews was both personal and extreme. Immediately after the war, Jeckeln had married Charlotte Hirsch whose father was a wealthy landowner. His son-in-law administered the estates. The couple had three children but Friedrich’s overbearing manner and occasional violence led to protracted divorce proceedings. In the aftermath, Charlotte’s father made sure her former husband coughed up his substantial alimony payments on time. Hirsch was not Jewish, but Jeckeln developed a consuming hatred of him because of his ‘typically Jewish characteristics’. This grotesque personal vendetta would inspire some of the very worst German pogroms of the Second World War.24

  On 22 July, the brigade passed through L’viv, then began ‘purification’ operations in northern Ukraine on the southern rim of the Pripet Marshes. These tasks were characterised as ‘encircling and annihilating the enemy’ and ‘encircling and annihilating bands in the forests’. What this really meant becomes evident from Jeckeln’s report that ‘the Brigade faced no resistance … and the Brigade suffered no losses’. In other words, his men were murdering not bandits but unarmed civilians. This is confirmed by another more explicit report sent by Jeckeln informing Himmler that his SS brigade men had killed ‘around 800 Jews and Jewesses between the age of 16 and 60’ close to Novohrad-Volynsky. Evident
ly authorisation to murder women and children as well as male Jews was seeping down through the various SS murder squads. But Himmler was not impressed; he complained to Jeckeln that the SS brigade was not ‘active enough’.25 Nevertheless, for a short period, he allocated the 1st SS Brigade to Field Marshall Walther von Reichenau’s 6th Army to help pacify rear areas; according to reports‘The Jews who abetted the bands [of partisans] were executed’ and ‘The territory is pacified: there are no Jews or Bolsheviks there’.26 Evidently, the German army top brass endorsed the SS doctrine that ‘Jews’ and ‘bandits’ were one and the same.

  Then on 26 August, Jeckeln flew to the Ukrainian town of Kamianets-Podilsky, located in western Ukraine near the old Soviet-Polish border and now under German army administration. At the end of July, many thousands of Jews had fled here, the majority of them expelled by the anti-Semitic Hungarian Horthy regime from the Marmaros district in disputed Carpatho-Ukraine. The German administrators, both civil and military, warned Berlin that unless the Hungarians took the Jewish refugees back, they would be forced to deal with the problem in more radical ways. Since the SD Special Task Force C had already moved further east, Himmler assigned Jeckeln to the task of dealing with the Hungarian Jews. Neither he nor Himmler nor the German army administrators believed for a moment that the Hungarians would ever change their minds concerning these ‘undesirable’ Jews.27