with false information about the Polish Government in exile in London, and then sat back to count the days until the erroneous reports arrived on Ribbentrop’s desk and were duly forwarded to the Fuhrer. Such tactics were hardly calculated to bring Ribbentrop and Himmler closer in their personal relations.
In January 1941, Himmler made an effort to extend his power and that of Heydrich over the German Courts of Justice by asking Hitler to hand over their control from the Ministry of Justice to Frick’s Ministry of the Interior, where the Secretary of State, Wilhelm Stuckart, was a member of the S.S. and under Himmler’s influence. Hitler, wary as ever when asked to dispose of power, failed to respond, and the courts themselves remained outside the control of the Gestapo until the end of the war.
Himmler’s control of criminals and political police affairs was, however, complete. Each
More complicated by now were his relations with Heydrich, who, when he had left his desk in May 1940 to fly with the Luftwaffe over the stricken people of France, had only himself two years left to live. Of these the first fifteen months were to be spent in preparing the Action Groups for the war against Russia in the summer of 1941 and in perfecting the extermination system in the camps set aside for that purpose by Himmler, while the last nine months were spent in his duties as Reich Protector in Czechoslovakia, where he was to be assassinated in May 1942. During this time it is plain that he considered himself Hitler’s favourite, ear-marked for promotion to a ministerial level, outflanking Himmler in the movement to the top of the hierarchy. Meanwhile Himmler was treated as an ally by his most powerful subordinate, and they worked closely together on the plans to take control of Russia.
On 13 March 1941 Hitler issued a directive signed by Keitel concerning the coming campaign in the East. This directive disturbed the High Command; it stated that ‘in the area of operations the Reichsfuhrer S.S. is entrusted, on behalf of the Fuhrer, with special tasks for the preparation of the political administration, tasks which result from the struggle which has to be carried out between two opposing political systems. Within the scope of these tasks, the Reichsfuhrer S.S. shall act independently and under his own responsibility.’19 Not content with giving Himmlerthe task of purging Communism from Russia, and Goring, as plenipotentiary of the Four Year Economic Plan, responsibility for stripping individual territories of food and other products valuable to Germany, Hitler the following month suddenly salvaged Alfred Rosenberg, the old-time Party intellectual, and appointed him Minister for the future occupied territories of the East, an appointment so ludicrous that it can only be explained as a formal attempt to counter the combined and growing power of Himmler and Heydrich or the potential greed of Goring’s agents.
During the period of intense preparations for the invasion of Russia, which were developed at the same time as those for the mass extermination of the unwanted peoples, Himmler and Heydrich had to establish plans for the Action Groups which would be acceptable on the one hand to the Army and, nominally at least, to Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg constantly tried to intervene in the plans that Heydrich was preparing, though Himmler contemptuously ignored his existence. These differences brought Heydrich and Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful aide, closer together, for Bormann disapproved of Rosenberg, who had wild ideas of playing the part of a Baltic- German liberator of the Russian people from Soviet tyranny. As for the Army, Schellenberg was required in June to use his legal diplomacy in order to negotiate suitable terms with General Wagner, representing the High Command; the plan he devised and which was finally signed released the Security Police and the S.D. from Army control outside the immediate fighting area, leaving them free to conduct the campaign in their own way. The Army, in fact, was expected to assist them in carrying out their atrocities.
When the invasion, after much postponement, finally came on 22 June 1941, Heydrich once more disappeared in order to fly with the Luftwaffe, and his plane on one occasion was seriously damaged by Russian flak. He managed to bring the aircraft back near the German lines, and landed it, crawling to safety with his leg injured. This exploit won him the Iron Cross, First Class, from Hitler, but Himmler must have been distraught at the news of the danger he had been in. While Heydrich flew on his missions over Soviet territory, his Action Groups began their fearful massacres, shooting, hanging and terrorizing prisoners, Communist officials and partisans, as well as whole Jewish and gypsy communities.
After the war, Otto Ohlendorf, one of Himmler’s intellectuals and an officer in charge of an Action Group, made a sworn statement which reveals in terrible detail how these commando security squadrons went to work:
‘In June 1941 I was appointed by Himmler to lead one of the special action groups which were then being formed to accompany the German armies in the Russian campaign… Himmler stated that an important part of our task consisted in the extermination of Jews — women, men and children — and of communist functionaries. I was informed of the attack on Russia about four weeks in advance… When the German army invaded Russia, I was leader of the Action Group D in the Southern Sector;… it liquidated approximately 90,000 men, women and children… in the implementation of this extermination programme… The unit selected… would enter a village or city and order the prominent Jewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of resettlement. They were requested to hand over their valuables … and shortly before execution to surrender their outer clothing. The men, women and children were led to a place of execution which in most cases was located next to a more deeply excavated anti-tank ditch. Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, and the corpses thrown into the ditch… In the spring of 1942 we received gas vehicles from the Chief of the Security Police and the S.D. in Berlin… We had received orders to use the vans for the killing of women and children. Whenever a unit had collected a sufficient number of victims, a van was sent for their liquidation.’20
Later in his statement, Ohlendorf said that he was prepared to confirm the affidavit given by another Action Group commander that he had been responsible for the deaths of 135,000 Jews and Communists during ‘the first four months of the programme’.
The ferocity with which Hitler, Goring and Himmler planned their assault on Russia is unique in history. Goring, in a directive to his agents dated 23 May 1941, the first of the series that were to make up the notorious Green File on the economic exploitation of Russia, spoke of ‘the famine which undoubtedly will take place’, and accepted as inevitable that ‘many tens of millions of people in this area will become redundant’. So enthusiastic was Himmler to equip his men for Russia that as early as February he had made a special journey to Norway, where he travelled to the northern areas to visit his police units and to survey the needs for campaigning during the Russian winter. When he came back, he ordered Pohl to obtain the currency to buy stoves and furs in Norway for his men.
In March, the following month, Himmler summoned Heydrich, Daluege, Berger and a number of senior officers to his retreat at Wewelsburg. Wolff was also present, and so was Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, an expert on partisan warfare who was later to be called as a witness for the prosecution before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. According to Bach-Zelewski, Himmler declared at this secret conference that one of the aims of the Russian campaign was ‘to decimate the Slav population by thirty millions’.21 Wolff prefers to remember this statement in another form, namely that Himmler considered war with Russia would result in millions of dead.
The decision to adopt genocide as an active and fully organized policy in the purification of Europe for the ‘Aryan’ race was undoubtedly reached in 1941. There is a fundamental distinction between the practice of genocide and the callous and deliberate cruelties that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of unwanted people from the time of the occupation of Poland and the exchanges of population that followed. Wolff declares that Himmler was deeply oppressed by the decision that he was to be ultimately responsible for this crime, the greatest that any one man has ever committed in recorded history against his fellows. Kersten confirms this.22 The decision in favour of genocide was preceded by a vaguely conceived ‘final solution’ in the form of despatching millions of the European ‘sub-humans’ to Madagascar, following an enforced agreement with the French to use the island for this purpose; this idea had sprung from the early policy of encouraging Jewish emigration from Germany during the middle ’thirties. The Madagascar project, first discussed openly in 1938, was kept alive (in theory, at least) until the end of 1940, since during that year Eichmann himself was detailed to prepare a plan to set up an
