and Eichmann were responsible and which had led to the construction of the gas-chambers during the following winter. By the spring of 1942 the organized killings were to begin as a routine operation at Auschwitz; Russian prisoners-of-war were used during the test period. ‘The killing… did not cause me much concern at the time’, wrote Hoess. ‘I must even admit that this gassing set my mind at rest.’ Hoess did not relish the violence of the blood-bath caused by other forms of killing, and Himmler had warned him that trainloads of deported Jews would soon be on their way.
It has been suggested that Himmler deliberately chose a camp in Poland as the principal centre for genocide in order that German soil should not be contaminated by the destruction of so much impure flesh.28 Other subsidiary centres of mass extermination were also set up in Poland, such as Treblinka. Auschwitz, however, had the double task of providing forced labour for synthetic coal and rubber plants built in the district by I.G. Farben while at the same time preparing for human mass destruction. Hoess, far more anxious to fulfil his quota of death than to send slave labour to factories at some distance from the camp, went to visit the Commandant of Treblinka: ‘He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas and I did not think his methods were very efficient’, wrote Hoess after the war.
A vast mass of documents — statements by innumerable witnesses, the endless records of the interrogations and the examinations conducted before and during the war crime trials — have become the basis for many studies of the extermination and concentration camps during the peak period of the war. What emerges from these terrible, pitiful stories, which few read except for scholars and research workers, is the sheer muddle in which this carnage was conducted. The administrators such as Eichmann and Hoess were in the end utterly unable to control the grafters and the sadists on whom they had to depend to carry out the work of the camps, the selection and destruction of the victims and the mass cremation of the bodies. The S.S.
From September 1941, Eichmann took full charge of the extermination schedules, drafting orders for Heydrich, controlling the transportation of the Jewish population and organizing a succession of conferences at which the detailed administration of death was determined. But on 27 September Heydrich achieved a major promotion. He was appointed Acting Reich Protector in Czechoslovakia, displacing von Neurath, who was weak and ailing. He was promoted S.S. General, and gained in one step the rank and privileges of a Minister. After the comparative poverty of his position in Germany under Himmler, he could now live in luxury in Prague.
It seems clear that Bormann, Heydrich’s principal ally among Hitler’s close advisers, had encouraged this appointment rather than Himmler who, according to Schellenberg, was ‘not enthusiastic about it’ but decided not to stand in the way because he did not want to offend Bormann. There could be no clearer indication than this of the ascendancy of Bormann at Hitler’s court since Hess’s sudden flight to Scotland the previous May; for Himmler himself was in high favour with the Fuhrer, while Goring, owing to his growing self-indulgence and the failure of the Luftwaffe to maintain its aggressive reputation, was losing his former influence. In many respects Himmler was becoming the most powerful man in Germany under Hitler, though he never made a display of his position in public. Power for him was always a secret force.
His attitude to the new appointment of Heydrich was therefore a mixed one. He was no doubt pleased to have provided the Fuhrer with a distinguished servant, and the affectionate feelings that he always had for his Nordic model were satisfied by his success; at the same time he regretted the measure of independence that Heydrich had now won, and the loss of his daily advice, on which Himmler had come absolutely to rely. Heydrich, however, had no intention of severing himself from his duties in Berlin, for he retained his office as head of R.S.H.A. and he travelled constantly between Prague and Germany. The register of phone-calls between Himmler’s office in Berlin and Heydrich’s in Prague is a further measure of the dependence of the Reichsfuhrer S.S. on his energetic and decisive officer. There is no doubt, too, that Himmler felt some dismay at the progress of a man who he was intelligent enough to recognize was in certain respects his superior. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, he kept in the closest touch, and Heydrich’s departure for Prague was preceded by several conferences with Himmler, mostly about the Eastern Front.
The departure of Heydrich for Prague was the cue for Schellenberg to change his allegiance. Schellenberg both admired and hated Heydrich, who he had reason to believe disliked him. Applying his professional subtlety to his master, he had climbed within seven years from a youthful apprentice attached to the S.S. to become, on the day Russia was invaded, head of
Appointed Acting Head of the S.D. Foreign Intelligence Service on 22 June, the day Russia was invaded, Schellenberg spent the next two months in preparing a memorandum on the Political Secret Service abroad which, when it was completed, apparently impressed the Reichsfuhrer S.S. sufficiently for him to impose it on the leadership of the S.S. and the Party in the form of an order, thus, as Schellenberg puts it, ‘acting as a propagandist for my ideas’. During the next four years Schellenberg was to draw very close to Himmler and, in the guise of his special adviser, try to make him adopt policies and lines of action originating in his own devious brain.
He enjoyed the fruits of office in forms which might even seem exaggerated for a secret agent in an American thriller. He describes with glowing excitement the luxurious carpets in his executive suite, the trolley-table holding his telephones and linking him direct to Hitler’s Chancellery, the microphones concealed at every point of the compass, in the walls and lamps and under the desk, the alarms controlled by photo-electric cells, the big mahogany desk with its built-in automatic guns which could spray the room with bullets. Guards could be summoned at the press of a button to surround the building and block the exits, while his car was equipped with a short-wave transmitter through which he could reach his office and dictate to his secretary. Even his own body was equipped for sudden death; when engaged on missions abroad, he wore an artificial tooth containing enough poison to kill him in thirty seconds.
Since July Himmler had spent a considerable time during the summer at the Russian front. He had set up his headquarters in the Soviet Military Academy at Zhitomir in the Ukraine, a hundred miles north of Hitler’s headquarters known as Werwolf at Winnitsa. From Zhitomir, Himmler kept in touch with the work of the Action Groups and the Police and, to a lesser extent, with the
Heydrich, meanwhile, was dividing his attention between his duties in Berlin and in Prague, where, after initiating a brief, punitive reign of terror against the resistance movement immediately on his arrival in Czechoslovakia, he made it clear to the puppet government under President Hacha that he now expected maximum co-operation with Germany.29 Heydrich’s intentions in Czechoslovakia were in line with Himmler’s policy for Eastern Europe: the extermination of undesirable racial elements and the Germanisation of the rest of the Czechs and their territory; this policy had been determined in 1940, a year before Heydrich’s appointment, and approved by Hitler in full consultation with the Sudeten German Karl Hermann Frank, who was now S.S. commandant for Prague. On 2 October, Heydrich outlined his plans at a secret conference of Nazi administrators in Prague. Bohemia was by right German territory, and was to be re-settled by Germans; the Czech people of good
