Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

Himmler was already beginning to take concrete settlement measures.

On 16 August Himmler informed SS Colonel Guntram Pflaum, the manager of

the ‘Lebensborn’ organization (the ‘Fount of Life’), which dealt with those illegit-

imate babies conceived by SS men with ‘good’ and ‘unmixed’ blood, that his future

operational territory would include ‘the whole of the occupied European areas of

the USSR’, 54 even though at this point Hitler had not made any firm decisions on the ‘Germanization’ of former Soviet areas. 55 In August, the main office of the From Anti-Semitic Terror to Genocide

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Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of the German Nation opened a branch

office in Riga. 56 And at the beginning of September Himmler finally triumphed over Rosenberg57 and Hitler announced that the competences of the Reichskommissar for the Strengthening of the German Nation would now be extended to the

occupied Eastern areas. 58

Himmler’s stubborn attempts to use his policing responsibilities as the basis for

an ethnic ‘reordering’ of the Eastern areas were not limited to settlement and

Germanization measures. The mission that Hitler had given Himmler in October

1939 had not only encompassed the ‘formation of new German settlement areas

via relocation’ but, as a necessary prerequisite for the planned ‘ethnic consolida-

tion’, also entailed ‘excluding the noxious influence of . . . sections of the popula-

tion alien to the Volk’. Himmler had attempted to put this section of his remit into

practice in Poland by initiating mass deportations, but, when measured against his

ambitious overall plan, had more or less failed. The conclusion that Himmler

must have drawn from his experiences here was not to wait until the end of the

war for the ‘ethnic consolidation’ but to start the ‘exclusion’ of ‘sections of the

population alien to the Volk’ before then by making whole areas ‘free of Jews’.

Removing the Jews almost altogether was the first step on the way to a huge

programme of deportation, resettlement, and extermination—one need only

think of the figure of 30 million that the population of the Soviet Union was to

be reduced by, according to the plans for Barbarossa. The Jews were seen by the

Nazi leadership as the pillars of the Communist regime, and thus the one to be

tackled first; by tackling the Jews (rather than those sections of the population

classed as Slavic) Himmler was able to put his policies of ethnic annihilation into

practice as part of his mission to ‘secure [the occupied areas] through police

measures’. He could be certain that any campaign of annihilation targeted directly

at the Jews would receive the assent of the Nazi leadership, since it merely

anticipated what had been planned in any case for the period after the war was

over. Himmler could cite at least three orders from the Führer in support of his

programme: his mission for the strengthening of the German nation, the ‘special

orders from the Führer for the area under political administration’ that he men-

tioned in his instructions of 21 May, and the mission received from Hitler on 17 July.

It was also evident, as will be explained in Chapter 14, that the general radicalization

of German Judenpolitik in August and September 1941, when the regime concen-

trated its propaganda efforts against an international ‘Jewish conspiracy’, started to

mark German Jews with the yellow star and prepared deportation from the Reich,

had a further radicalizing effect on the mass killings in the East. Himmler must have

perceived anti-Jewish measures as a confirmation of his brutal approach.

What has previously been described as an inconsistent transition over the

period between July and September/October 1941 from policies of selective ter-

rorization of the Jews towards policies of ethnic annihilation can therefore be

equated with the systematic implementation of the first stage of Himmler’s ‘living

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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

space conception’. He was acting in this matter as an exponent of the most radical

forces within National Socialism, who wished to implement qualitatively new

policies in the occupied areas even whilst the war itself was continuing.

It is against these general observations that the deployment of the SS Brigades in

July 1941 and the expansion of the killing in the following months should be seen.

According to the initial invasion plans, the SS Brigades were to be deployed no

earlier than ten days after the start of the attack. 59 However, after the war had started, the command staff troops were immediately thrown into a gap in the

front, on Hitler’s orders, and assigned to an army corps of the Wehrmacht

evidently for the purpose of securing territory. 60 When this task had been declared complete after a few days, the command staff units began preparing for their

future tasks by carrying out simulations and combat exercises. 61

On 10 July Himmler decided that all SS squads deployed in the areas under

Higher SS and Police Commanders would not only be economically responsible to

them, as before, but also tactically: ‘it has to be stressed to the Wehrmacht that in

the Rear Area the Higher SS and Police Commander will make decisions on all

matters that are the responsibility of the Reichsführer SS. . . . This also applies to

the SD.’62 On the same day, during his visit to Bialystok, Himmler discussed with Bach-Zelewski the planned deployment of the SS Cavalry Squads. 63 On 19 and 22

July, immediately after Hitler had given Himmler responsibility for ‘securing the

newly occupied Eastern areas through police measures’ and had enhanced the

position of the Higher SS and Police Commanders, the two SS Cavalry Regiments

that had been merged into a single SS Cavalry Brigade at the beginning of August

were subordinated to Bach-Zelewski, while the 1st Brigade was placed under the

command of Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Commander for Russia South. 64

On 21 July Himmler met the chief of the Army Rear Area South, Karl von Roques,

presumably in order to discuss the deployment of the 1st SS Brigade under Jeckeln

in von Roques’s area of authority. 65

A few days later, after a long journey through Lithuania and Latvia, the officer

in the command staff responsible for intelligence matters, Hauptsturmführer

Rudolf May, who had come from the Home SD, 66 composed a report that contains an important reference to the fact that the attitude to the ‘Jewish

question’ prevalent amongst the Security Police and Wehrmacht forces there

was open to