Hitler's Foreign Executioners

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Hitler's Foreign Executioners Page 58

by Christopher Hale


  8 Boog, op. cit., p. 1056.

  9 BA MA RH 53–23/49, War diary of training staff, 19 October 1941.

  10 BA-MA RH 26–7/19, Combat Report on the French Legion, 23 December 1941.

  11 IMT, L–221, xxxviii.

  12 NARA T175, 111/2635480, Berger memorandum, ‘Vermerk v. Staf de Clerq’.

  13 Himmler, Geheinreden, p. 157.

  14 The definite study is in German: I. Heinemann, ’Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut’: Das Rasse- & Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen, Wallstein Verlag, 2003).

  15 The Staatsarchiv, Nürnberg holds Heydrich’s correspondence about Steding’s book.

  16 ‘Jacob Burckhardt: Cold War Liberal?’ in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 74, No 3 (September 2002), pp. 538–57.

  17 Himmler, Die Schutzstaffel … (1937), p. 31.

  18 See Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich (London, 2000), pp. 162–3.

  19 Herzstein (1982), p. 74. Heinze served under SS leader Franz Alfred Six in the Lebensgebietsmäßige Auswertung (Life Space Evaluation Office).

  20 Heinrich Himmler, Geheimreden …, p. 234.

  21 Goldhagen (1997), p. 408

  22 See Christensen et al. (1999), p. 34.

  23 Quoted in Christensen et al. (1999), p. 34.

  24 Harald was arrested on 5 May 1945 and his diary confiscated by his captors. It ended up at the editorial office of Land og folk, a Danish communist paper, which suggests that it was somehow acquired by communist resistance fighters. Here the diary gathered dust for close to half a century. When Land og folk collapsed in 1990, the diary was offered for sale and was bought by the Danish Museum of Freedom.

  25 Diary, p. 27.

  26 Estes (2005), p. 5.

  27 See Boog et al., pp. 1076ff.

  28 See Christensen et al. (1998).

  29 See Friedlander (1995); Burleigh (1994).

  30 Per Sørensen, letter, 6 February 1942, quoted in Christensen et al., p. 33.

  31 Ibid., p. 334.

  32 Ibid., p. 8.

  33 Interview with *Kaj, 2 May 2007, arranged by Christian Barse.

  34 De Jeugd die wij vreisden (Utrecht, 1948).

  35 Estes (2005), Chapter 2, p. 6.

  36 For example, Dr Armand Langermann (veterinarian, Auschwitz), Dr Carl Værnet (SS-Sturmbannführer, SS doctor in Buchenwald) who invented an artificial gland, as a treatment for homosexuality.

  37 Danish National Archives, Rigspolitiet, Centralkartoteket, Bovruparkivet, B.269, cited by Christensen. In March 1947 a British military court tried and sentenced to death a 39-year-old Danish Waffen-SS officer from southern Jutland. This man had commanded the guards at the Wilhelmshaven-Banterweg camp in north-west Germany. In April 1945 he was ordered to evacuate 200 Jewish prisoners to Bergen-Belsen. Transfers of concentration camp prisoners at the end of the war frequently turned into death marches. In this particular case, the majority of prisoners died on the road from exhaustion, malnutrition or gross mistreatment. On arrival at Lüneburg camp, near Bergen-Belsen, the Danish SS man executed the surviving prisoners ‘to avoid spreading typhus’. He personally shot six prisoners. At Wilhelmshaven-Banterweg camp, this particular Danish volunteer had frequently tortured and mistreated inmates.

  38 Christensen, letter collection, No 62, November 1941.

  39 Widely quoted, see Evans (2008), p. 202.

  40 http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/debatt/article2109354.ece; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_deportees_from_Norway_during_World_War_II#List_of_Jewish_individuals_deported_from_Norway

  41 See Kott (2009), pp. 141ff.; and Embling (2009). The influential German race scientist Hans F.K. Günther idealised Norway and Norwegians. He married a Norwegian and spent some time in Skien conducting ‘research’. He argued that Norwegians had conserved their pure Nordic blood because they had been isolated from the rest of Europe. He claimed that Norwegian peasants physically resembled the old German nobility: ‘give them a people to conquer and they soon will show their inborn capacity for domination.’

  42 See R. Klein, ‘Das Polizei-Gebirgsjäger-Regiment 18: Massaker, Deportation, Traditionsplege’, in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 55 (2007).

  9 The Führer’s Son

  1 http://www.gutenberg-e.org/esk01/frames/feskvid.html.

  2 See Kershaw, Nemesis, p. 395ff.

  3 Conway (1993), p. 261. I would like to thank Professor Martin Conway for his advice while I was researching this chapter. Nigel Jones generously wrote an account of his visit to Degrelle in 1999.

  4 See www.radioislam.org.

  5 Guardian, Ian Traynor, 17 September 2007; and by the same journalist http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/09/belgium-flanders-wallonia-french-dutch

  6 Der Spiegel, 19 September 2007.

  7 http://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_pi11qp.htm

  8 See Kramer (2007) for a detailed discussion of the Holocaust of Louvain, pp. 6ff.

  9 See Degrelle’s own self-pitying account (1941).

  10 Letter from Hitler to Mussolini, in Documents on German Policy Series D (1937–1945), Vol. 9, p. 439.

  11 See Halder, War Diaries, 17 May 1940.

  12 See Boog et al., Germany and the Second World War, Vol. 5, pp. 86–8.

  13 Falkenausen had served in Imperial Japan and Ottoman Turkey. He spent most of the 1930s in China, where he was appointed military advisor to Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-Shek.

  14 Gasten (1993), p. 57.

  15 See Mazower (2008), pp. 232–8.

  16 See Die Verlorene Legion, p. 8 and another post-war apologia, La Cohue, pp. 517ff.

  17 NARA, T–501 Reel 94, fr. 541 Report, September 1941.

  18 Derks (2001), pp. 45ff.

  19 Ibid., p. 233.

  20 See Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: a Study of Referat D3 of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940–1943 (New York, 1978).

  21 Goebbels, Die tagebücher, Part 2, iv.178.

  22 See J.H. Brinks, ‘Beyond Anne Frank; Dutch (pre)wartime Collaboration with Nazi Germany and its aftermath’, in Alan Stephens & Raphael Walden (eds), For the Sake of Humanity: Essays in Honour of Clemens Nathan (Martinus Nijhoff, Leiden, Boston, 2006), pp. 47–62. ‘Among the Dutch authorities, especially among the senior staff of police, there were quite a few who already during the interwar years offered their services to the Nazis. They saw Hitler et al. as the most reliable defence against the “Red peril”. The police commissioner of Amsterdam, Broekhoff, for example, personally reported in 1935 to the Gestapo in Berlin that the Dutch Minister of Defence would co-operate in the mutual fight against “kommunistische und marxistische Umtriebe” (communist and Marxist machinations). Under the pen-name of “David” Broekhoff took care of the exchange of information through which 250 German “illegals” who had fled to the Netherlands immediately after the occupation in May 1940 were arrested by the Sicherheitspolizei. Rotterdam’s then chief commissioner of police, Mr. L. Einthoven, too, figured, together with 17 other Dutch police officers considered to be “deutschfreundlich” (pro-German) in a list of names of the Gestapo.’

  23 Quoted in Conway, p. 293.

  24 Degrelle, Discours prononcé à Liége, pp. 9–11. Quoted in Conway, p. 302.

  25 See H. Möller, Das NS-Erbe des Auswärtigen Amtes.

  26 In ‘a Legion Wallonne sur le front russe’, in Robert Aron (ed.), Histoire de Notre Temps (Librairie Plon, Paris, 1968). Charles d’Ydewalle argued that Fernand Rouleau was the real founder of the legion. Amateur historian Eddy de Bruyne proved that it was Rouleau who first approached the Militärverwaltung to propose the formation of a Walloon Legion while Degrelle hobnobbed with Abetz in Paris. Degrelle engineered the dismissal of Rouleau to aggrandise his own power.

  27 Degrelle (1985), p. 10.

  28 BA-MA, RH 24–4/54, 4th Army Corps, War Diary, 20 December 1941.

  29 Quoted in Estes (2007).

  10 The First Eastern SS Legions

  1 K. Berkhoff, Holocaust and Genocide
Studies (spring 2001), pp. 1–32.

  2 Tooze (2007), pp. 479ff.

  3 Solzhenitsen, The Gulag Archipelago, p. 218.

  4 Berkhoff (2004), Chapter 4; C. Streit, ‘Soviet Prisoners of War’, in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Vol. 3 (1990); S.P. Mackenzie, ‘The Treatment of Soviet prisoners of War’, in Journal of Modern History, 66, No 3 (1994).

  5 The ‘Abel mission’ is discussed in letters from Wolfram Sievers, the head of the SS-Ahnenerbe to Himmler, 22.5.43; Josef Grohmann, Zu den anthropologischen Untersuchungen in russischen Gefangenenlagerns (1943); Heinemann, pp. 532ff.; and Kater (1974), pp. 208–11.

  6 Abel’s work in the hellish German POW camps inspired other SS anthropological projects. In 1942, an unsigned letter proposed that the SS-Ahnenerbe begin collecting the skulls of ‘Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars’. The following year, Dr Bruno Beger, with the approval of Adolf Eichmann, travelled to Auschwitz where he carried out measurements of a group of Jewish and ‘Asiatic’ prisoners. The SS transferred the prisoners to another camp near Strasbourg where they were gassed and then dismembered. Their remains ended up in the anatomy department of the University of Strasbourg.

  7 http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/spiegelspecial/d-39863530.html

  8 http://www.antisemitism.org.il/

  9 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/estonia/3965268/Russians-protest-at-Estonia-SS-calendar.html

  10 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/europe/estonia-accused-of-antisemitism-after-memorial-is-erected-to-ss-executioner-564715.html

  11 Information released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (2004): ‘The 658th Eastern battalion under the command of A. Rebane conducted punitive operations against civilians near the town of Kingisepp and the village of Kerstovo (the Leningrad region), committed brutal murders and burnt down the whole villages (Babino, Habalovo, Cigirinka, etc.) to intimidate the partisans. As evidenced by the witnesses and participants in these punitive operations, A. Rebane’s unit caught five or six Soviet partisans in the village of Cigirinka in November 1942. In the course of this operation the village was burnt to the ground and three villagers died (РГВА. Φ.451IΠ. OΠ.5 Д.149. Л.144–145).’

  12 Ezergailis (1996), pp. 194–5.

  13 Birn (2001), pp. 182ff.

  14 Trials of War Criminals, NMT, Green Series, v. 4. Sandberger was mounting a legal case that he was ‘following orders’.

  15 A. Weiss-Wendt (2010), p. xvii.

  16 Ibid., p. 342.

  17 Quoted in Birn, p. 185.

  18 See Gurin-Loov (1994).

  19 Arad (1989), p. 347.

  20 Under German rule, the Omakaitse targeted many different ‘enemies of Estonia’. The list included a rural underclass of farm hands and unskilled workers who had benefitted from Soviet land reform and free schooling and were accused of holding socialist views. They had become, according to popular opinion, ‘hochmuetig und frech’ (arrogant and uppish); Omakaitse squads shot hundreds. Alcoholics, gossips and troublemakers – they too were targeted. Estonian police arrested women who had done the laundry or other domestic chores for the Soviet occupiers and anyone who was heard to speak Russian. Women who had had Russian boyfriends were all dragged in front of ‘Strafprojektierungskommisionen’, Estonian commissions appointed by the Germans, and frequently sentenced to death. Ruth Bettina Birn examined the recommendations for execution held in the archives of the occupation Estonian security police: recommended for execution are petty thieves of ‘no value to the community’; an alcoholic thief who is judged ‘a disadvantage to the community’; a prostitute ‘completely useless to the community’; another prostitute whose ‘descendants will surely be inferior human beings, detrimental to the interests of society, the same as she is.’ Sandberger himself believed that 35 per cent of people arrested by his Estonian colleague were later sentenced to death. Estonian society, dominated as it was by old baronial families, was conservative and reactionary. Under German occupation, Jews had been the first victims; many hundreds of other Estonians judged to be ‘useless’ or ‘detrimental’ followed them to the gallows or execution chamber. Sandberger, who had such good relations with his Estonian colleagues, was preoccupied by pressing ‘rassepolitischen Grundsaetzen’ (racial political considerations). His colleague Heinrich Bergmann, a National Socialist fanatic, advised action ‘devoid of all restraint’ to deal with Estonia’s ‘Roma’. In February 1942, Sandberger ordered his Estonian police to begin treating Roma ‘as if they were Jews’: this Zigeuneraktion was completed by the autumn. In the first phase, the Estonian police arrested gypsies, locked them up in camps and put them to work. By the end of October, many of them had been executed.

  21 BA-MA, RH 19 III/492, Kant to Oberste Heeresleitung, 12.8.41.

  22 BA NS, 19/382, Berger to Rosenberg, 10.10.1941.

  23 BA NS, 19/3522, Jost to Himmler, 7.8.1942 (Estniche SS Legion).

  24 BA NS, 19/3522, Berger to Rosenberg.

  25 Nuremberg Document NO 3301, USMT IV, Case 11, Himmler, 13 January 1943.

  26 NARA, T175, 140/2668141–355.

  27 Himmler, Dienstkalender, pp. 542–4.

  28 Blood (2008), pp. 89–90.

  29 After the war, Valdmanis immigrated to Canada where his career ended in ignominy after a conviction for fraud. He was killed in a highway accident in 1970.

  30 Bassler (2000), pp. 142ff.

  31 BA NS, 19, C.19.2.8, Germanische, fremvolkische und sonstige nicht-deutsche (FW) Verbande: 1506; C.19.2.5.

  32 Facsimile in Silgailis (1986), Appendix 1.

  33 Quoted in Lacis (2006), p. 36.

  34 Bassler, p. 150.

  35 Ezergailis (2005), pp. 60–1.

  36 Silgailis, Appendix 5, p. 217.

  37 Quoted in Bassler, p. 151.

  38 Ibid., p. 153.

  39 See for example Lacis (2006).

  40 This account uses information from R.B. Birn, ‘Zaunkönig an Uhrmacher. Grosse Partisanenaktionen 1942/3 an Beispiel des “Unternehmens Winterzauber”’, in Militärgesschichtliche Zeitschrift 60 (2001), pp. 110ff.

  41 See ibid., pp. 99–118.

  42 Himmler, Geheimreden (ed. Smith/Peterson).

  43 Sutton (2008), pp. 185ff.

  44 BA NS, 19/1446. Minutes on Himmler’s conversation with Hitler, 7 September 1943.

  11 Nazi Jihad

  1 See Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 by Matthias Kuntzel (2007) for an extreme version of this argument.

  2 NA UK, WO 208/3781, ‘Investigation into the Last Days of Adolf Hitler’.

  3 See Avi Jorisch, ‘Al-Manar: Hizbollah TV’, in Middle East Quarterly (winter 2004).

  4 Julius (2009), pp. 95ff.

  5 Matthias Küntzel, From Zeesen to Beirut National Socialism and Islamic antisemitism; Seth Arsenian, ‘Wartime Propaganda in the Middle East’, in The Middle East Journal, Vol. 2 (October 1948); Robert Melka, The Axis and the Arab Middle East 1930–1945 (University of Minnesota, 1966); Heinz Tillmann, Deutschlands Araberpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (East Berlin, 1965).

  6 Quoted in Gensicke (1988), p. 121.

  7 For a clear-sighted and up-to-date analysis of this period and the role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem see E. Karsh (2010), Chapter 1.

  8 There is a substantial literature on the British mandate and the emergence of Arab nationalism. See, for example, J. Marlowe, The Seat of Pilate. An Account of the Palestine Mandate (Cresset Press, London, 1959);. Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate 1920–1948 (Methuen, London, 1950); Y. Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement. Vol. 1: 1918–1929 (Frank Cass, London, 1974) and The Palestinian Arab National Movement. Vol. 2: 1929–1939. From Riots to Rebellion (Frank Cass, London, 1977); B. Wasserstein, The British in Palestine. The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict 1917–1929 (Royal Historical Society, London, 1978); M. Cohen, The Origins and Evolution of the Arab-Zionist Conflict (University of California Press, 1987); Ann Mosely Lesch, Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917–1939.

&nb
sp; 9 H. Cohen, ‘The Anti Jewish Farhud in Baghdad 1941’, in Middle Eastern Studies, 3 (1966), pp. 2–17.

  10 See Hans-Jürgen Döscher, Das Auswärtige Amt in Dritten Reich: Diplomatie im Schatten der Endlösung (Berlin, 1987), p. 168, cited by Herf (2010).

  11 Details from Speer, Inside the Third Reich, pp. 158ff.

  12 Quoted in Gensicke (2007), p. 124. See also DGFP, Set D, Vol. 12, ‘Record of the Conversation between the Führer and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on November 28, 1941 in the presence of the Reich Foreign Minister and Minister Grobba in Berlin’, pp. 881–5.

  13 See Matthias Kuntzel, ‘National Socialism and Anti-Semitism in the Arab World’, in Jewish Political Studies Review (spring 2005).

  14 Quoted in Cüppers & Mallmann, ‘Rede Mufti zur Eröffnung des Islamischen Zentralinstituts’ v. 18.12.1942, PAAA, R 27327; see Matthias Kuntzel, ‘Von Zeesen bis Beirut. Nationalsozialismus und Antisemitismus in der arabischen Welt’, in Doron Rabinovici, Ulrich Speck & Natan Sznaider (eds), Neuer Antisemitismus? Eine globale Debatte (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 271–93.

  15 In a debate in the House of Commons on 2 July 1942, Churchill said: ‘The military misfortunes of the last fortnight in Cyrenaica and Egypt have completely transformed the situation, not only in that theatre, but throughout the Mediterranean. We are at this moment in the presence of a recession of our hopes and prospects in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean unequalled since the fall of France.’

  16 See Klaus-Michael Mallman & Martin Cüppers, “‘Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine”: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942’, in Yad Vashem Studies XXV (available online at http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/studies/vol35/Mallmann-Cuppers2.pdf).

  17 BA-MA, RW 5/690. Quoted in Cüppers & Mallmann (2007).

  18 Quoted op. cit. Niederschrift dess. v. 29.8.1942; ibid., R 27325; see Kriegstagebuch Amt Ausland/Abwehr II v. 13.7.1942, BA-MA, RW 5/498.

  19 Details from Satloff (2006), pp. 44ff.

  20 BA B, NS 19/1775OKW/WFSt/Qu.IV an RFSS v. 8.12.1942; BA-MA, RH 2/600; Oberkommando Heeresgruppe(HGr) Afrika/Ic an OKH/Gen.St.d.H./Op.Abt. v. 19.4.1943, Ordensvorschlag HoSSPF Italien v. 25.2.1945, BAB, R 70 Italien/19. The experience of the Tunisian Jews is also documented in Daniel Carpi, Between Mussolini and Hitler. The Jews and the Italian Authorities in France and Tunisia (Brandeis University Press, Hanover & London, 1994); and Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Harper & Row, New York, 1961), pp. 411–3.

 

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