Heinrich Himmler

addressed a similar audience made up of the commanding officers of the S.S. divisions serving in Russia. To them he spoke of ‘the great fortress of Europe’ they were privileged to defend and increase. ‘It is here in the East that the decision lies; here must the Russian enemy, this people numbering two hundred million Russians, be destroyed on the battlefield, and one by one they must be made to bleed to death … Either they must be deported and used on labour in Germany for Germany, or they will just die in battle.’

Then he referred to the task of extermination which, he said, ‘is exactly the same as de-lousing; getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. We shall soon be de-loused.’ The need of the future was to incorporate all the Nordic peoples into the Germanic Reich. ‘I very soon formed a Germanic S.S. in the various countries’, he said, referring particularly to Flanders and the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark. ‘We very soon got Germanic volunteers from them’, whether the leaders in these countries liked it or not. He asked his officers to tolerate the ignorance of the German language in those of German race whom he incorporated into the S.S.; they must assist the newcomers to learn the language. One day, he forecast, he would bring together the mass of German stock from all over the world, ‘still more of those overseas, in America, whom one day we must fetch here by the million… We have only one task, to stand firm and carry on the racial struggle without mercy.’

At Posen, he also looked into the future; he spoke with the burning tongue of the prophet to men who listened uneasily to dreams in which few of them had any faith and which they regarded as superfluous at this critical stage in the war. They were beginning to realize, after the retreat in North Africa in 1942, the fall of Stalingrad the following January, the collapse of Mussolini and the Allied invasion of Italy that had just begun, that this had developed into a war which would be increasingly difficult to win. But Himmler’s voice went on relentlessly: ‘If the peace is a final one, we shall be able to tackle our great work of the future. We shall colonize. We shall indoctrinate our young men with the laws of the S.S. organization… It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be from this racial superstratum of the Germanic people. In twenty or thirty years we must really be able to present the whole of Europe with its ruling class.’ He had, he said, asked the Fuhrer on behalf of the S.S. for the privilege of holding Germany’s frontier furthest to the East: ‘We shall impose our laws on the East. We will charge ahead and push our way forward little by little to the Urals.’ This would keep the S.S. hard; death would always remain a possibility facing an S.S. man.

‘In this way we will create the necessary conditions for the whole Germanic people and the whole of Europe, controlled, ordered and led by us, the Germanic people. We must be able, in future generations, to stand the test in our battle of destiny against Asia, which will certainly break out again… It would be an evil day if the Germanic people did not survive. It would be the end of beauty and Kultur, of the creative power of this earth… Now let us remember the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, who will create the Germanic Reich and will lead us into the Germanic future.’

Himmler’s determination to win his own peculiar version of the war was never stronger than during this period. He was hardened by many events, the reversals of the war, the death of Heydrich, the great challenge to his authority made by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, the revolt of the students at Munich, and the Communist conspiracy in Germany of the Red Orchestra, the Rote Kapelle.

The Rote Kapelle was the name given to a network of German spies serving the Russians; many of its agents were discovered to be Germans from well-connected families, and many were working in the various Ministries. Their leader, Harold Schulze-Boysen, an unstable man who had been a poet and left-wing revolutionary in the nineteen-twenties, was working during the war in a department of Goring’s Air Ministry which specialized in ‘research’ through telephone-tapping. This was a department which naturally enough had excited Himmler’s suspicion.

Schellenberg was sent in March 1942 to Carinhall, Goring’s luxurious country mansion to which the leader of the Luftwaffe retired increasingly to avoid the consequence of his lost authority. He came to ask Goring to permit this work to be taken over by the S.D. Goring, according to Schellenberg, received him dressed in a toga but carrying his marshal’s baton; fingering jewels in a cut-glass bowl, he went into a trance and managed to avoid reaching any decision likely to satisfy Himmler. The Reichsfuhrer immediately made Goring’s department the subject of an enquiry, which according to one observer was stopped by Hitler in July to avoid a public scandal. Goring hoped to close the matter amicably by giving Himmler honorary flier’s wings in August, but this was the month in which the whole network of the Rote Kapelle came to light through the independent investigations conducted by Admiral Canaris’s Military Intelligence department, the Abwehr, though the actual arrests of over a hundred agents were eventually undertaken by combined units made up of Canaris’s Field Police and the Gestapo. In spite of the fact that the Gestapo was permitted by Hitler to prepare criminal proceedings, Himmler realized that his vast organization had failed to be the first to uncover the Rote Kapelle, the existence of which caused a scandal far exceeding the actual importance of this spying organization. Schellenberg in his Memoirs is careful to take the main credit for uncovering the conspiracy for himself and, as always, presents the story in its most colourful form.

The students’ revolt in the University of Munich followed in February 1943, very soon after the series of trials of the Rote Kapelle agents. The students were led by Hans Scholl, a medical student, and his sister Sophie, and they distributed anti-Nazi propaganda not only in Munich but in universities elsewhere in Germany. A vicious speech made by the Gauleiter of Bavaria, Paul Giesler, in which he insulted the women students by ordering them to produce illegitimate children with the help, if necessary, of his adjutants, led to open demonstrations in the University and in the streets of Munich. But Hans and Sophie Scholl were betrayed and, after being tortured by the Gestapo, they were tried by Roland Freisler, Hitler’s counterpart to the notorious seventeenth-century British Judge Jeffreys, and condemned to death along with others who had supported them. According to Hassell, the former ambassador who became a member of the German resistance movement, Himmler was driven to order a stay of execution in March in order to avoid turning his victims into martyrs, but in fact he hesitated so long in making up his mind that his order arrived too late to save them.

The challenge from the Jews themselves to Himmler’s authority came from the Warsaw Ghetto, an area of some two and a half square miles in the city, containing the medieval Ghetto.⁹ Round this the Nazis had built a high wall, and herded into this besieged and starving community a vast population of some 400,000 Polish Jews. In March 1942 Himmler outlined his initial scheme for the partial resettlement of the Polish Jews in a speech the full text of which does not survive;¹⁰ there had been over three million Jews in Poland when Germany had begun the invasion, and though large numbers had fled east or been killed by the Action Groups, some two million still awaited death, including those in the Warsaw Ghetto.

When the policy of extermination came into full force during the summer of 1942, Himmler ordered the total ‘resettlement’ in concentration camps of the Polish Jews; the result was that between July and October over three-quarters of the Warsaw Ghetto’s inhabitants were transported to camps and asphyxiated, most of them at Treblinka, the death-camp some sixty miles away. This number was as much as the limited transport or inadequate gas-chambers would allow. In October Himmler decided to turn the Ghetto itself, now reduced to some 300,000 square yards with some 60,000 survivors, into a concentration camp, but in January 1943, by which time a million Jews had been killed in six months, he spared the time to make a surprise visit to Warsaw to investigate the black market in Jewish labour which he had learned was now common practice, involving the S.S. and businessmen alike. It was, of course, inevitable that Globocnik himself was involved, the builder’s foreman whom Himmler in 1939 had misguidedly reinstated as Higher S.S. Leader and Chief of Police for the Province of Lublin after his period of disgrace for illegal speculation. Himmler discovered that 24,000 Jews registered as armaments workers were in fact working illegally as tailors and furriers. He was filled with righteous indignation: ‘Once more I set a final term for the resettlement: 15 February’, he ordered.

The first revolt in the Ghetto began on 18 January, four days after Himmler’s visit. The Jews involved in planned resistance had for long been engaged in smuggling arms from the outside world, and combat groups fired on and killed S.S. men and militia in charge of a column of deportees. This moment of resistance was suppressed with heavy casualties, and Himmler determined that the Ghetto must as soon as ever possible be totally destroyed.

In April S.S. Lieutenant-General Stroop, the police chief in Greece, was sent by Himmler to Warsaw to evacuate the 56,000 Jews still congregated in the restricted area of the Ghetto. He entered with armoured cars on