Jeckeln’s task was daunting, and the ghastly events that took place in Kanianets-Podilsky at the end of August 1941 marked another step change in SS methodology. Jeckeln had at his immediate disposal a small personal staff and a few inexperienced German police. He desperately needed reinforcements and called in Order Police Battalion 320 – which had been bolstered with ethnic Germans transferred from the Baltic region. Jeckeln next turned to the Hungarian military authorities, who agreed to provide army and Field Police units. But Jeckeln still needed to find a way to maximise the efforts of this relatively modest force. After the First World War, before he joined the Nazi Party and the SS, Jeckeln had trained as an engineer. Now he devised a technical solution to the demands of mass murder that he called ‘Sardine Packing’; this would revolutionise SS strategy in the east. Sardine packing was, in crude terms, a means of ramping up the productivity of the execution squad. Tens of thousands of defenceless people could be extinguished in the most gruesome and debasing manner. The key innovation in Jeckeln’s system was the systematic excavation of deep, vertical-sided pits. These simple receptacles permitted successive waves of mass executions and then the layering or ‘packing’ of victims in their tens of thousands inside the pit. Jeckeln’s other improvement was to set up a kind of production line using auxiliary policemen who would progressively strip their victims of their possessions and clothes as they moved in stages to the hidden edge of the pit where the shooters waited. The only tools required for this diabolical system were spades and rifles. The result was mass murder on an industrial scale.
The first new method execution pit was dug a short distance from Kanianets Podilsky. Jeckeln stood on a nearby elevation, with German army observers, to watch his new system in action. There could be no doubting its terrible efficacy: on the second day alone, SS execution squads ‘processed’ more than 11,000 victims. When the shooting was finally halted, an exultant Jeckeln radioed SS headquarters in Berlin to report that 23,600 Polish and Hungarian Jews (14,000 from Carpatho-Ukraine) had been liquidated so that, Jeckeln proclaimed, ‘we Germans can survive’. In almost every case, the smooth running of this killing spree depended on close co-operation between the SS, the German Wehrmacht and local Ukrainian auxiliaries. The ideological imperative was the same for every executioner: the eradication of Jews as the ‘bacteriological carriers’ of Bolshevism. To ram this mythology home, Jeckeln forced a Jew to wave a red flag over the execution pit before shooting him dead.28
On 5 November 1941 Himmler transferred HSSPF Friedrich Jeckeln to Riga, the capital city of Latvia. Now Himmler ordered him ‘on the express wish of the Führer’ to liquidate the Riga ghetto. To accomplish this, Jeckeln would turn to one of Hitler’s most notorious foreign executioners.
7
The Blue Buses
… after exerting appropriate influence on the Latvian Auxiliary Police, it was possible to initiate a Jewish pogrom in Riga.
Franz Stahlecker, Consolidated Report
With Germans it is thus: if they get hold of your finger, then the whole of you is lost, because soon enough one is forced to do things that one would never do if one could get out of it.
Viktors Arājs, Commander Arājs Commando
On 20 November 1941, HSSPF and SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln ordered Ernst Hemicker, a German construction expert, to begin designing execution pits at a place called Rumbula a few miles outside Riga.1 When he was informed of the numbers of Latvian citizens that would need to be dispatched on what the Germans liked to call the ‘road to heaven’, an astonished Hemicker decided to construct six pits, each one the size of small house. A day or so later, a Latvian auxiliary police ‘commando’, led by a hard-drinking young man called Viktors Arājs, drove 300 Russian POWs to Rumbula in blue buses leased from the Riga transit authority to begin excavation. These blue buses were already feared in many parts of Latvia. In towns and small villages, their arrival, crammed with armed and intoxicated Latvian auxiliary policemen, heralded the beginning of mass executions of Jews and other ‘hostile elements’ like gypsies and the mentally handicapped. Their fate had been sealed not in Riga but in faraway Berlin.
Heinrich Himmler’s Dienstkalender (office diary) 1941/42 reveals a great deal about the SS chief’s hectic schedule during that scorching summer of 1941.2 As German army groups smashed demoralised Soviet defences and pushed into the Baltic and Ukraine, Himmler refined his master plan to dominate the east. In the jungle of Hitler’s court, he knew that he would need to quash fierce competition from Alfred Rosenberg and the Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, both of whom hoped to become Hitler’s most influential eastern potentates. At 12.30 p.m. on 24 June (postponed from noon), the SS chief met SS-Standartenführer Professor Dr Konrad Meyer at his headquarters on Prinz Albrecht Strasse to discuss the ‘General Plan East’. As he leafed through Meyer’s first draft, Himmler was bitterly disappointed. The plan was timid and lacklustre. With German and SS troops penetrating deep into the lair of the Bolshevik enemy, Meyer’s ideas had been rendered obsolete. Himmler lifted the phone and cancelled his regular appointment with his masseur Felix Kersten, the Baltic German crank who treated the SS chief for persistent excruciating stomach pains. Like a frustrated schoolmaster, Himmler took his pen and stabbed and scratched at the offending document. Meyer rushed back to his splendid offices in Berlin-Dahlem to start, as Himmler instructed, ‘thinking bigger’.
At 11.30 a.m. the following day, Himmler’s special train Heinrich steamed out of the Lehrter Bahnhof in Berlin. His destination was Hitler’s military headquarters near Rastenburg – the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair). Here Todt Organisation engineers had constructed, in a mosquito infested swamp, a vast concrete city of camouflaged bunkers and huts. From inside Security Zone One, Hitler directed his ‘war of annihilation’. Himmler’s train halted close to the lake at Angerburg, a short drive from the Wolf’s Lair. It was from here that he would supervise the escalating slaughter in the east over the coming months. On board the Heinrich, sophisticated equipment sucked in the daily reports from the Special Task Force commanders and the SS brigades – as well as Waffen-SS divisions in action on the front line. Assisted by his loyal adjutants Joachim Peiper and Werner Grothmann, Himmler kept in close touch with his Higher SS and police officers Hans-Adolf Prützmann, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski and Friedrich Jeckeln – the front-line managers of mass murder.
On Monday 30 June, the Heinrich sped east toward the old Polish border with Lithuania. In Grodno, he met RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich. As they toured Grodno, a famous centre of Jewish culture, it was apparent that Special Task Force A had somehow neglected to deal with the city’s Jewish district. An embarrassed Heydrich made an urgent call to the SD operational office in Tilsit; a few days later SD and security police units arrived to mop up in Grodno and neighbouring towns like Augustowo.3 After this regrettable operational lapse, Himmler began to make unscheduled visits to Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga and Minsk to cajole SD commanders into stepping up their efforts. He insisted that no mercy could be shown. ‘Hardness’ was all: the mark of a true SS warrior.
On the evening of 15 August, Himmler, accompanied by his adjutant Karl Wolff, flew into Minsk, the main city of Belorussia. At the splendid old Leninhaus, they met the hatchet-faced commander of Special Task Force B, Arthur Nebe, with the ubiquitous HSSPF Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski and arranged to observe the execution of a number of ‘Partisanen und Juden’.4 Wolff revered Himmler as an ‘unparalleled man’ of ‘extraordinary qualities’, but he was positive that Himmler had never before seen a man shot. A party of German police drove the two men from their hotel in the centre of Minsk to an athletics field, where two pits had already been dug. Himmler’s little party did not have long to wait. A big Mercedes truck rumbled into the field, and SD men threw open the tailgate and hauled out their catch of ‘Jewish spies and saboteurs’. They pushed and shoved these terrified, weeping men to the edge of the pit. Some begged for mercy. Wolff noted that the Jewish ‘saboteurs’ had been stripped of th
eir clothes, but wore ‘rags’ to spare the Reichsführer-SS the sight of completely naked ‘sub-humans’. The SD executioners forced their victims to lie face down and began loading their weapons. At this point, Himmler moved to a higher vantage point directly overlooking the execution pits. A nod from Himmler and the SD officer gave the order to fire. Instantly, there was an eruption of blood and brain matter. The SD ‘shooters’ had taken up positions much too close to their victims. Wolff glanced at his boss. Brain matter was visibly smeared across Himmler’s jacket. The SS chief was sweating profusely, his face turning a distinct shade of green. A second volley – Himmler swayed. Wolff caught his arm. Himmler turned away and vomited.
As the SD men began covering the corpses, Wolff took his shaky boss back to Minsk to recover. In an interview conducted after the war, Bach-Zelewski claimed that he had taken advantage of Himmler’s reaction to admonish him about what his men had to endure. According to Wolff, Himmler merely used his usual catechism that they must all be ‘hard’, without mercy. They were all burdened by a tremendous responsibility to clean up the east. After a short lunch, taken in the Leninhaus, Himmler recovered sufficiently to enjoy a tour of the Minsk ghetto and a hospital for the ‘retarded’ at Novinki.5 The sight of these human vermin, ‘lives not worthy of life’, no doubt reassured him that his great mission was right.
Hitler liked to describe the Soviet Union as possessing a ‘Slavic-Tartar body’ and ‘Jewish head’. In his mind, decapitation was essential – and in July, as Hitler’s armies pushed back the Soviet armies along a 1,000-mile front line and gobbled up vast new territories, anything seemed possible. On 3 July, Colonel General Franz Halder wrote in his diary that it was no overstatement to say that ‘the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks’.6 Halder rejoiced prematurely; but inside the Wolf’s Lair, an exultant Hitler proclaimed that a new German empire would soon reach out as far as the Ural Mountains: an iron wall to hold back the Slavic ‘rabbit family’ (Kaninchenfamilie). Every big Soviet city would be levelled. German soldier-farmers would be trained to govern the Slavic helot class, and industrious German peasants would till the rich, black soils of the new Germania. Hitler imagined prosperous Teutonic families taking tours of their vast new domain, speeding along grand autobahns in brand new ‘Folk Cars’ (Volkswagens) and soaking up the sun on the Caucasus Riviera. And of course, any Jewish ‘bacilli’ that might have spoilt this idyll would have been banished long before. In human history, Hitler concluded ‘there’s always killing’.
It was with this vision in mind that Hitler called his paladins to Rastenburg on 16 July to plan a glorious future for the conquered east. There was a new world to be won. Unlike the French or British empires, which had evolved gradually and piecemeal, this new German Reich would be thrown together in months not centuries.7 Himmler would miss the conference: Stalin’s son Yakov had been captured near Smolensk and, as we learn from his diary, the SS chief hurriedly left Rastenburg to gaze on this trophy captive. But Himmler could afford to be relaxed: only Alfred Rosenberg posed any possible threat to SS dominance of the east. Hitler had appointed him ‘Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories’, complete with a new ministry – the ‘Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete’, or RMfdbO. Himmler could rely on Hermann Göring to slap down any attempt by the new minister to impose his feeble will. He could meet young Yakov Stalin with a light heart.
Inside the main conference room at Rastenburg, Hitler began speaking at 3 p.m. and the meeting dragged on late into the evening, with a single break for coffee. It was, as everyone understood, Hitler’s show. Hitler forbade what he called Schaukelpolitik (indecisive ‘back and forth’ strategy). He conjured up a vision of the east as a ‘Garden of Eden’, a tabula rasa to be planted with purely German stock. When Rosenberg dared suggest that the Ukrainian lands, whose people had endured famine under Stalin’s rule and hated the Soviets, might be granted limited independence, Hitler unhesitatingly rejected the idea. He forbade any deal-making with hopeful nationalists; he would not tolerate recruiting foreign militias: ‘We must never permit anybody but the Germans to carry arms! Only the German may carry arms; not the Slav, not the Czech, not the Cossack, not the Ukrainians!’8
The day after the Rastenburg conference, Party Chancellery head Martin Bormann forwarded minutes to Himmler. He noted that Hitler had reiterated the plan to exploit anti-German partisan attacks to mask the mass murder of civilians; because the Russians ‘have now given out the order for a partisan war behind our front’, ‘it gives us the possibility of exterminating anything opposing us’. In a nutshell, this was SS military doctrine. But on one vital matter, the ‘loyal Heinrich’ chose to ignore Hitler’s orders. He understood that the task of ‘cleansing’ the east would require enormous human resources that could not be supplied by Germany alone. This meant that non-Germans must be armed. At the very moment that Hitler proscribed arming non-Germans, SD commanders had begun recruiting Lithuanians and Latvians and other eastern peoples to do the dirty work of ethnic cleansing. On 25 July Himmler authorised the recruitment of auxiliary police units in the occupied east – from ‘suitable elements’ in the local population. These Schutzmannschaft or Schuma battalions would soon become a vital instrument of genocide, killing at least 150,000 so-called ‘superfluous eaters’ (mainly Jews) between July and December 1941 alone.9
In almost every other respect Hitler strengthened Himmler’s hand. The day after the Rastenburg conference, on 17 July, he issued ‘An Order of the Führer on the Administration of the New Territories in the East’. This specified that where the army had crushed enemy resistance, German military administrators would hand over power to civilian bodies formed ostensibly under the aegis of Reichsminister Rosenberg. The Führer Order set out a rudimentary organisational structure: the conquered territories would be broken up into Reichskommissariate, each headed by a Reichskommissar, subordinate, in theory, to the Reichsminister. Later on the same day, Hitler published a supplementary order establishing the two first Reichskommissariate: Reichskommissariat Ostland – which comprised Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belorussia – and Reichskommissariat Ukraine, which would become the fiefdom of Gau Leader Erich Koch who had no intention of kowtowing to Alfred Rosenberg. Not content with unleashing Koch on German-occupied Ukraine, Hitler issued a third order on 17 July that stripped Rosenberg’s ministry (the RMfdbO) of any security powers and handed them lock, stock and barrel to Himmler and the SS. All matters concerning the policing of the eastern Reich Commissariats would be handled by the SS – and through directives issued by Himmler to the Reich Commissars. The HSSPF like Bach-Zelewski and Jeckeln, the so-called ‘little Himmlers’, took their orders from the Reich Commissars, but only in theory. In practice, all directives passed through SS channels. But Himmler did not win outright. Hitler’s topsy-turvy distribution of powers, giving with the one hand and taking away with the other, guaranteed that the SS and Reich Commissar Koch would now wage a succession of brutal turf wars.10
In the Baltic, which was absorbed into the Ostland Commissariat, Rosenberg had, to begin with, the upper hand. He had been born in Reval (now Tallinn) in Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire. He had been educated in Riga and Moscow where he witnessed Bolshevik Revolution at first hand. A rabid anti-Bolshevist and professed Jew hater, Rosenberg had escaped to the west bringing with him the anti-Semitic ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ – a poisonous tome that he introduced to Hitler and his circle. As a Baltic German, Rosenberg had an obsessive interest in restoring the old Teutonic Order in the Baltic. The man he appointed as commissar, Hinrich Lohse, shared his vision. A fanatical Nazi consumed by the same venal obsessions as other Nazi potentates Hans Frank and Erich Koch, the ‘gross, vain and silly’ Lohse boasted that he would reclaim the lost lands of the medieval Teutonic Knights and Hansa merchants. He was, he claimed, ‘treading the fateful path of the great political legacy from West to East’ to ‘replace chaos with a system of European order, and in place of destructi
on reconstruction and culture’. His subordinates called him ‘Duke Lohse’ after he insisted that he was ‘working for my own good’ but so that ‘my newly born son will be able to place the crown of “Herzog” [duke] onto his head’.11
Regardless of their grandiose ambitions, Rosenberg and Lohse faced fierce competition. By August 1941 three cutthroat and competitive Reich agencies had turned the Baltic states into rival fiefdoms. Black-clad SD men led by Special Task Force commander Franz Stahlecker had been the first to arrive, followed by Wehrmacht administrators and finally, months later, by Rosenberg’s ‘Eastern Ministry’ men in their yellow, hand-me-down so-called ‘pheasant’ uniforms. ‘To the objective observer,’ Stahlecker complained in his Consolidated Report, ‘a picture of disunity emerges, where guidelines are totally absent and where German administrative offices and their staff greatly lack preparation for their duties.’ This was disingenuous. From the moment German troops entered the Baltic, it was the SD, Himmler’s giant security force, that called the shots. Stahlecker explained: ‘the security police was well ahead of everyone else … it was the only office that established a certain stability.’ The SD took its orders not from Commissar Lohse but the regional HSSPF, Hans Prützmann – and thus directly from Himmler in Berlin.12
This jostling for power should not be taken to imply that there was any fundamental doctrinal divergence among Hitler’s paladins. In a letter, written shortly after the 16 July meeting at Rastenburg, Rosenberg set out his own version of National Socialist occupation strategy: ‘The aim of the Commissars for [Ostland] must be to establish a protectorate of the Reich, and then by winning over the racially valuable elements and by a policy of resettlement measures this region must be made one with the German Reich.’ He then explained that in the Baltic region, these ‘racially valuable elements’ were hierarchically distributed in a gradient running north-east to south-west. At the ‘top’, in Estonia, Rosenberg argued, 50 per cent of the population had been strongly ‘Germanised’ through infusions of German and Swedish blood. Estonians, he concluded, were ‘people akin to us’. Lithuanians, however, occupied a position at the ‘low’ end of the scale because they had been so thoroughly ‘Polonised’. Latvians fell somewhere between these poles. Himmler concurred with Rosenberg’s analysis. This Baltic racial gradient would have a powerful impact on German occupation policy and SS recruitment of non-German Schuma battalions and Waffen-SS divisions.
Hitler's Foreign Executioners Page 24
