Pragmatic German army generals viewed and treated their foreign recruits simply as mercenaries. They took no interest at all in their ethnic origin and blithely rejected any kind of cultural sensitivity. They had no respect for their recruits’ political convictions, if they had any, and despised them as opportunists, adventurers or simply men who liked ‘to be looked after’.6 Instinctively, the German recruiters recognised that an entire generation had been psychologically blighted by the First World War and its aftermath. This lost generation was ripe for exploitation. The new campaign proved a modest success. By the end of 1941, 24,000 Frenchmen, Croats, Spaniards and Walloonian Belgians had signed up to join the Wehrmacht. Less than half that number of ‘Germanic volunteers of non-German nationality’ had joined the Waffen-SS: 2,399 Danes, 1,180 Finns, 1,571 Flemings, 4,814 Dutchmen, 1,883 Norwegians, 39 Swedes, 135 Swiss and Liechtensteiners, as well as 6,200 ethnic Germans from Alsace, Romania, Serbia and Hungary.7 It is tempting to interpret the division of human spoils as Himmler’s last word on racial types he regarded as suitable Waffen-SS material. But we should bear in mind that the SS was already recruiting Schuma battalions in the east; and as we will shortly discover, German race scientists were about to embark on a fundamental rethinking of the geographical extent of ‘Germanic’ ethnicity.
The national elites that sanctioned German recruitment expected rewards for their sacrifice. They bargained honour for power. The men they offered to the Reich would become, they hoped, the currency of influence in Hitler’s New Order. The largest foreign Wehrmacht unit was the Spanish División Azul (Blue Division). On the day German forces crossed the Soviet borders, the anti-communist Spanish Foreign Minister Ramón Serrano Súñer persuaded Francisco Franco to permit the formation of Falange volunteer units to join Hitler’s crusade against Bolshevism. Serrano Súñer had made the offer to the German ambassador Eberhard von Storrer some weeks before invasion began. Hitler had eagerly agreed. Relations between the German dictator and the ‘Caudillo’ Franco had been soured by Spain’s refusal to take part in a proposed joint attack on Gibraltar, but Foreign Minister Ribbentrop still hoped to bind the hesitant Franco closer to the Axis. For his part, the Spanish dictator assumed that he could placate Hitler and avoid joining the German war in the east by offering up a Spanish volunteer division. At the same time, he could rid Spain of a few thousand discontented radical Falangists who, conversely, hoped that service in Hitler’s ‘Grand Armée’ would give them political leverage when they returned victorious to Spain. Many thousands of Spanish Falangist volunteers enlisted. By the beginning of September 1941 the Azul men were fighting and dying near Minsk in Belorussia. German officers despised these ‘gypsy’ Spanish soldiers. They disparaged them as lazy and naturally undisciplined. Although Hitler often belittled the Azul, calling it a ‘dilapidated’ division, he had to acknowledge that they fought ‘pluckily’.8
Likewise, French far-right ideologues like Jacques Doriot and Marcel Déat saw the crusade against Bolshevism as an opportunity to press for closer relations with Nazi Germany. Said Doriot: ‘If there is a war to which I am sympathetic, it is this.’ He urged Frenchmen to join a volunteer legion to fight Bolshevism – and found an ally in the Francophile German ambassador Otto Abetz, who saw one of his diplomatic tasks as bolstering pro-German cliques in occupied France. But the Wehrmacht rejected French overtures, as well as an appeal from the Belgian demagogue, the Walloonian Léon Degrelle. According to German race science, the French and the Francophone Walloons were not Germanic peoples like the Dutch or Flemish. Hitler had more pragmatic reasons for spurning Doriot’s proposal: he feared that the Vichy puppet government would exploit a ‘French division’ to elevate its status as a German ally. Abetz realised that Hitler’s objection did not apply to occupied France. He also firmly believed that the ‘nation of the Franks’ had deep historical ties to Germany through the medieval empire of Charlemagne. He sympathised with Doriot and his followers, who believed that active collaboration could restore France to its former glory, albeit as a German satellite. It helped that both parties spoke the language of Jew hatred. Since the Dreyfus Affair, the French right had represented Jews as Bolshevik enemies of France and blamed them for the catastrophe of 1940. For Doriot, the German attack on the Soviet Union was a God-given opportunity to extinguish the Jewish threat once and for all so that France might once again become the ‘most Christian Kingdom of Europe’. Ambassador Abetz made a direct appeal on Doriot’s behalf to his friend Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, and on 5 July the Wehrmacht finally agreed to form a French volunteer unit. They insisted that French Vichy government support was ‘not wanted’.
When Abetz got the green light from Berlin, he appointed Déat and Doriot to organise a recruitment campaign. He set them up in an office at the German Embassy in Paris, and they issued an appeal for volunteers on 8 July. Only Frenchmen of proven Aryan descent would be accepted. On 27 August 1941 a call-up ceremony for the ‘Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolshevisme’ (LVF) was staged at the Borgnis-Desborde barracks in Versailles. On the podium, reviewing the rather disappointing turn out, stood the main actors of collaboration: Prime Minister Pierre Laval, Wehrmacht liaison officer Marquis Fernand de Brinon and, of course, Déat and Doriot. German officers noted that a number of dark-skinned French North African troops, as well as elderly White Russians domiciled in France, had somehow slipped into the ranks. As the ceremony reached a climax, one of the volunteers began firing at the assembled dignitaries, wounding both Laval and Déat. The shooter turned out to be a dissident pro-German. The LVF was a fractious coalition of bigots and fantasists. As they began the long journey to the Eastern Front, LVF commander Colonel Roger Labonne rallied the troops; he compared himself to French crusader Godfrey de Bouillon, excoriated Stalin as ‘Attila, the scourge of God’ and urged his men to fight for a new, healthy France ‘free from the yoke of the ghettoes, the lodges, Bolshevism, and British gold’.9 Their campaign would be less than glorious. As soon as the exhausted French recruits reached Radom in the General Government, German officers purged the ranks of ‘coloured troops’, former Foreign Legionaries and those Russian émigrés. In November, as Hitler launched Operation Typhoon and all along the Eastern Front temperatures dropped below zero, the Germans sent 2452 LVF (638th Infantry Regiment) men into action on the isthmus of Kubinka, located just 85 miles from Moscow. According to the German report,‘Some [French] units have still not arrived. During moving off, more signs of disintegration became apparent … the men are inadequately trained.’ Only a few hundred French volunteers returned alive. In the spring of 1942, the relics of the LVF joined anti-partisan forces in Belorussia.10
Many prominent collaborators like Anton Mussert in Holland, Frits Clausen in Denmark, Vidkun Quisling in Norway and Staf de Clerq in Flemish Belgium all hoped, even assumed, that offering up their followers as cannon fodder would open the door to political power. They were wrong. In 1941, Hitler and German administrators in occupied Europe could afford to be discriminating. Foreign volunteers, however ‘Germanic’, would never be true ‘brothers in arms’. When a Vichy newspaper referred to the war on the Soviet Union as a European campaign, Hitler dismissed the description as insolence.11 His contempt seeped downwards through the ranks. German soldiers called Spanish Azul volunteers ‘gypsies’ whilst the French generally lacked ‘German thoroughness’. In the spring of 1942, the Flemish SS leader Staf de Clerq complained to Berger that German officers habitually insulted his Flemish comrades by calling them ‘filthy people’ and a ‘nation of idiots’.12 For the Germans, this crusade could never be regarded as a coalition of equals.
For Wehrmacht recruiters, patriotic sentiments threatened to undermine battlefield effectiveness. Himmler’s position was even more radical. As we have seen, SD commanders like Franz Stahlecker resisted any attempt to form ‘national militia’. In Western Europe, by the same token, a foreign legion must take up arms for the Reich, not any kind of ‘national state interpretation’. Himmler’s racial d
octrines insisted that blood, not nation, would be the foundation of recruitment. Blood kin not national allies would wage war on the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ enemy. In a lecture delivered in June 1942, he discussed deploying ‘Germanic’ Waffen-SS as a defensive wall along the new eastern frontier of the Reich. As soon as the conquest of the east had been completed, the Waffen-SS would be ‘rehabilitated’ and absorbed by the ‘General SS’; victory would permit the ‘bringing home and fusion of the Germanic nations with us’. It was imperative, he went on, not to stop at the creation of a ‘Greater Germanic Reich’; the ‘road upwards’ led to a ‘Gothic-Frankish-Carolingian Empire’.13 In other words, foreign recruitment would become the foundation of a vast SS empire that far exceeded even Hitler’s ambitions.
As ‘Germanic’ SS recruitment at last gathered pace, Himmler relied on two powerful SS agencies. The most significant was the Race and Settlement Office or RuSHA, which had been set up to begin with as the SS Race Office in 1931 under Richard Darré.14 Its task was to promote ideological indoctrination and screen German SS recruits and their spouses. The Family Office (Sippenamt) meticulously checked the medical history, religious and political affiliations and, above all, the family background of every applicant. As Himmler’s racial gatekeepers, the handful of RuSHA experts acquired enormous power. Now ten years later, their expertise would be applied to sift the new ‘Germanic’ volunteers. The RuSHA allocated SS-Eignungsprüfer (racial acceptability checkers) to SS recruitment offices. In Belgium, for example, Flemish but not Francophone Walloonian volunteers were channelled through the Ergänzungsstelle Flanden. To entice volunteers in greater numbers, a second SS agency, the ‘Germanische Leitstelle’ (GL), launched a Europe-wide propaganda campaign to convince suitable individuals to join Hitler’s crusade. The GL had separate offices in each of the nominated ‘Germanic’ capitals, like Oslo and The Hague, but worked closely with the RuSHA experts. Their main task was writing and publishing Germanische Leithefte (Germanic guides) in Flemish, Dutch, Danish and Norwegian. RuSHA experts wrote many of these booklets – and their work was co-ordinated by Dr Rudolf Jacobsen, an ardent anti-Semite, with a small staff of specialists and translators.
Berger took a close interest in the Germanic propaganda that poured from Jacobsen’s little empire. He published his own collection of essays, Auf dem Wege zum Germanischen Reich (The Road to the Germanic Reich), which presented the Reich as the saviour of the ‘Germanic ideal’. ‘The north of Europe was the homeland of the Nordic race,’ he wrote. ‘The Germans have their roots in the Nordic race.’ In the Middle Ages, Berger went on, the Holy Roman Empire (the First Reich) had defended the west from the menace of ‘Asiatic’ tyrants. Now Hitler’s new Reich had taken on the same tremendous task. The wicked Anglo-Saxon English had betrayed the ‘Germanic family of nations’ but thanks to the SS, mainland European peoples could properly fulfil their obligations as members of the Nordic family. Berger’s thinking owed much to a German cultural historian called Christoph Steding (1903–38). A rising star in German academia, Steding had won a grant from the American Rockefeller Foundation which he used to study humanities and social sciences in witzerland, Holland, Denmark and Sweden. His encounters with the ‘tepid democrats’ and ‘mercenary capitalists’ of the ‘old Europe’ convinced him that only the new Germany ‘forged by Bismarck and Hitler’ had the answer to the decomposition (Zersetzung) of the old Nordic values. He railed against ‘wild, demonic, ruthless, bestially savage primordial forces’ that allowed Jews, the vanguard of Bolshevism, to manipulate the destiny of the European community. Everywhere he travelled, Steding noted the infiltration of ‘inner Semitization’ (Verjudung) – ‘thus the enemy stands right at the heart of Europe’. By the time Steding returned to the beloved Fatherland, he had completed a magnum opus that advocated German hegemony as the only answer to this European sickness: ‘Europas Krankheit’.
Steding succumbed to an aggressive kidney infection soon after he returned to Germany and Das Reich und die Krankheit der Europäischen Kultur (The Reich and the Sickness of European Culture) was published posthumously. (The edition in the State Library in Berlin displays Steding’s rugged features as frontispiece and his handwritten inscription of 10 May 1936 ‘Alles für das Reich’.) Despite its daunting length and ponderous style, Steding’s tome soon won over some powerful admirers. One was SD Chief Reinhard Heydrich, who sent a synopsis to Himmler.15 Although Steding’s posthumous tome never acquired the iconic notoriety of Hitler’s Mein Kampf or Rosenberg’s Myth of the 20th Century, thanks to Heydrich’s backing, Steding’s ideas became common pseudo-intellectual currency in SS circles and, a decade later, had a powerful impact on the German founders of the modern European Economic Community.16
Steding had tried to explain why other Europeans appeared to begrudge ‘natural’ German ascendancy. Why did the rest of Europe not do as the virtuous Germans did? The cultural price paid for spurning German hegemony, he argued, had been calamitous: Europe was dominated either by the Roman Church or by its antithesis, Bolshevism. European civilisation had become rootless and cosmopolitan – in other words, ‘dominated by Jews’. European institutions, like the League of Nations and the World Court, had become impotent and corrupt. The only way forward, Steding concluded, was that the new Reich sweep aside liberal, decadent Europe and replace it with a Prussian, Protestant empire. After 1941, Steding’s book was adopted as the bible of the SS ‘Germanische Leitstelle’. SS propagandists seized on Steding’s favourite metaphor (which was hardly original) to proclaim that the new Germany would restore decadent European civilisation to rude health. A new Europe would arise defended by a new ‘European army’ – a proposal that echoed Himmler’s idea of a ‘Germanic’ Waffen-SS, which would become, as he put it, ‘a National Socialist order of soldiers infused with a Nordic sensibility, into a distant future’.17
The German Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer, in his study of the Language of the Third Reich, pointed out that this National Socialist European Union embodied tactical concepts of attack and retreat. Betrayed by the ‘English’, squeezed between the United States and the Soviet Union, the task of the new Germany would be to defend ‘Festung Europa’.18 The idea was powerful and pervasive. A Dutch SS volunteer wrote to his mother, ‘Our great leader Adolf Hitler will construct a new Europe and will lead us towards freedom. Our gracious lord will let Germany be victorious, and I am proud to have marched with the German comrades on the path towards freedom.’ But what kind of freedom? Hitler had no doubts that German hegemony would be absolute. Europe would no longer exist as a patchwork of sovereign states. Himmler developed even more radical plans, which he kept secret for obvious reasons. His future ‘SS Europa’ would be one dominated by Germany, but in the singular shape of the SS. Belgium and Norway, for example, would become SS Gaue (provinces), ruled from SS Main Offices in Copenhagen and Oslo. In Himmler’s vision of a New European Order, there was no room for a national party, not even the NSDAP – or, for that matter, its leader Adolf Hitler. Heresy, to be sure – and one that Himmler would certainly have publicly disowned. But it was a high-ranking SS officer who dared imagine this future without Hitler. In a discussion document,‘On the Leadership and Administration of a German European Empire’ (‘Über Führung und Verwaltung des europäischen Reiches der Deutschen’), SS Bewerber Wolfram Heinze set out a vision of a ‘Greater German Reich of the Germanic Nation’ that Hitler would not have recognised. The attempt to weld party and state, Heinze argued, had failed. Hitler tolerated a wasteful profusion of offices and rival competitors for power. Heinze proposed instead that the SS Main Offices replace both party and state offices, not just in Germany but right across the Greater German Reich. Holland and Flanders, for example, would as a first step become Reichlands, ruled by an SS ‘regent’. Heinze’s proposal applied to the Reich as a whole, including Western Europe, the administrative structures already imposed on Eastern Europe – the Reich Commissariats that welded, for example, the Baltic nations and Belorussia into a single terr
itorial entity, the Ostland. Although Berlin would continue to have a pivotal governing role, daily administrative tasks would be devolved to this cadre of SS regents, so that the SS alone would bind together the entire Reich. Heinze’s paper was never officially published; it was quietly circulated among like-minded SS men.19
Himmler understood this future SS hegemony in racial terms. In 1943 he lectured Waffen-SS officers:
The result, the end of this war will be this: that the Reich, the Greater German Reich of the Germanic Reich of the German nation [sic], will with just title find confirmation of its evolution, that we will have an outlet and a way open to us in the East and that centuries later a Germanic World Empire will be formed.20
From his European GL offices, Dr Jakobsen energetically promoted this mythic ideal tricked out as a ‘European crusade’ with a flood of pamphlets and periodicals like Der Aufbruch (The Uprising) and Die Germanische Gemeinschaft (The Germanic Community). Translated into every European language (except Yiddish), these SS pamphlets sold hundreds of thousands of copies. From very early on, the GL emphasised that the task of the Germanic people, including Waffen-SS recruits, was to safeguard Europe. According to one widely read pamphlet, that provided raw material for an eight-week training module: ‘Germany will never abandon the task of racially and politically defending Europe. The most valuable races of Europe shall never again be spoiled by alien blood and ideologies of alien races.’ The Waffen-SS was an ‘assault force for the new Europe’ that would claim the east for the west. The task of the SS was to ensure that only people of Germanic blood could occupy the Reich. Himmler’s ‘European Union’ was a kind of blood reservoir whose contents would be poured into the vast expanses of Eurasia, from the Pyrenees to the Urals.
Hitler's Foreign Executioners Page 28
