Army of Evil: A History of the SS (37 page)

It seems that this Madagascar plan was seriously considered at the highest levels of the National Socialist establishment as a potential solution to the “Jewish question.” And Hitler was still discussing it as late as February 1941 in conversation with Dr. Robert Ley, the chief of the National Socialist Labour Front.
⁹
However, it was only ever viable
for a very brief period during the war. In June and July 1940, the assumption throughout Europe was that Great Britain would soon be forced to negotiate a peace settlement with Germany. After all, the German Army was massed on the Channel coast and the Luftwaffe seemed certain to win air superiority before too much longer. Once a peace agreement was signed, Britain’s naval blockade against Germany would be lifted, and the evacuation fleet could set sail for East Africa. However, as we now know, Winston Churchill did not sue for peace; and it was the RAF rather than the Luftwaffe that gained command of the skies in the Battle of Britain. Consequently, the naval blockade remained in place and the Madagascar plan evaporated as a practical proposition.

The plan is significant because it strongly suggests that a resettlement solution to the “Jewish question” was still being considered just a year before the extermination of the Jews began in earnest. Some historians have taken this to indicate that Hitler never really planned the extermination of the Jewish people; rather, that it came about because he was left with no other option. However, Daniel Goldhagen is dismissive of this argument, suggesting that the plan was “a phantom of a solution,”
¹⁰
and would merely have been an interim step towards extermination. Madagascar would simply have been an island prison, housing Jews until they died or were killed. In effect, it would have been a replica of the Polish ghettoes off the coast of East Africa.

There can be no doubt that the welfare of the Jews was not a factor in Eichmann’s planning for Madagascar, but at this stage it seems clear that the aim was to get the Jews as far away from Germany as possible, rather than to eliminate them. What we cannot now be sure about is whether the plan represented a preferred non-lethal “final solution” or simply that those responsible for the Holocaust had yet to persuade themselves that extermination was a practical possibility.

The uncertainty created by the plan stalled the programme of mass deportations, which precipitated a return to the ghettoisation inaugurated by Heydrich’s instructions to the special task groups in September
1939. The authorities walled off the Warsaw ghetto in October 1940 and the Jewish district of Cracow in March 1941. Ghettoes were also created in Radom, Lublin, Csestochowa and Kielce the following month.
¹¹
All of these were established to isolate the Jewish population both physically and economically. Inside them, authority was held by Jewish councils set up by the Sipo (but subsequently placed under the control of the civil administration), in a bid to restrict the ghettoes’ contact with the outside world.
*
These councils organised the distribution of the meagre food supplies, allocated accommodation and provided whatever medical care and other public services could be arranged, as well as maintaining security through their own police forces. The external cordons around the ghettoes were secured by units of the Order Police and the Polish Police Force, often supplemented with a physical barrier: Warsaw’s ghetto, for example, was encircled by a large brick wall, with twenty-eight manned gates where permitted individuals could enter and exit; Lodz’s was surrounded by barbed wire. The Lublin ghetto could not be physically sealed off, but Jews still had to show permits to pass through its outer limits.
¹²

At first, the German civil authorities viewed the ghettoes with anything from indifference to outright hostility, fuelled by the erroneous belief that they had adequate reserves of wealth and food to survive but were choosing not to use them. When it became clear that this assumption was wrong, two camps emerged with contrasting opinions of what to do with the ghettoes. Some believed that they had to become productive contributors to the Reich so that they did not become a drain on scarce resources. Others had a more drastic “solution”: the Jews should be left to starve to death. Eventually, after much discussion, the first group won the argument.
¹³
This was not a humanitarian decision: it was taken simply because the civil administrations of late
1940 could not countenance letting hundreds of thousands of prisoners die through hunger and disease.

The result was that the ghettoes were steadily industrialised. Machinery that had been expropriated from Jewish businesses was returned to them, and before long the ghettoes were producing a wide range of goods, from footwear to furniture, under contract to German businesses. Of course, the desperate workers were paid rock-bottom wages. Oskar Schindler’s German Enamel Works was established near the Cracow ghetto in order to utilise its vast pool of skilled, cheap labour. Meanwhile, in Lodz, five thousand workers were manufacturing textiles and clothing in the ghetto in October 1940; by the spring of 1943, the number was eighty thousand.
¹⁴

Nevertheless, the ghettoes still could not pay their way. The Jewish councils had no comeback when suppliers failed to fulfil orders or delivered insufficient or substandard goods; and many of the National Socialist authorities robbed and expropriated anything they wanted. Regional Leader Greiser of the Warthegau imposed a 65 per cent tax on Jewish workers’ wages, which was paid directly into the coffers of the NSDAP. By contrast, in Warsaw, confiscations were stopped to encourage free enterprise and this appeared to bear fruit. By the summer of 1942—the point at which the population of the ghetto started to be liquidated—they were producing significant quantities of revenue-earning “exports.”
¹⁵

Irrespective of the contribution they were making to the German war economy, conditions within the ghettoes remained dire. Starvation was rife and with that came increased susceptibility to infectious diseases, exacerbated by the absence of medical supplies, decent sanitation and fuel for heating and cooking. The original plan had been for the Jews to purchase foodstuffs collectively through the councils, but their resources were quickly used up, so then there was much debate over whether to supply the ghettoes with food. It was finally decided that the inhabitants of the Lodz ghetto, for example, would receive “prison fare,”
¹⁶
as long as this did not adversely affect the food
supply outside. Such rations were never enough: the death rate in the Warsaw ghetto in the summer of 1941 reached over 5,500 per month, and conditions were similar in the others. Hilberg estimates that more than 600,000 people—most of them Jews
*
—died in the ghettoes from privation and disease.
¹⁷

None of this was centrally planned. The ghettoes were established as brutal but temporary transit camps for the Jews. They became death traps only when the National Socialists proved incapable of working out where to send their inhabitants.

*
This was a goal that harked all the way back to Himmler’s time as a member of the Artamanen Society.

*
The rebranding was partly a result of a simple reorganisation of the RSHA, but it also reflected the fact that the section was now an operational unit, rather than an information clearinghouse. It was officially an office of the Gestapo, so Eichmann reported directly to Heinrich Müller.

*
In reality, this was a somewhat futile hope. Hilberg, in
The Destruction of the European Jews
, notes that some 53,000 people held passes to enter or leave the Warsaw ghetto at one stage.

*
Some gypsies were also confined in the ghettoes.

U
ntil the conclusion of the Polish campaign, the armed SS was a curiosity. Much attention had been lavished on it by Hitler, Himmler and others, but it remained an odd mixture of the political and the military, and it had achieved only moderate results. Its main problem was its size: it was too small to have a decisive impact on any of the operations in which it was involved; yet it was sufficiently large to prove burdensome to the regular armed forces. The experience of the Polish campaign should have convinced the National Socialist leaders to scale down the armed SS units. Then they could have continued to perform their core function—preserving the security of the regime—without causing any more trouble for the army. Instead, the opposite happened. Partly this was due to the efforts of one man: Gottlob Berger—in many respects, the “father” of the Waffen-SS.

Berger proposed a clever scheme that would more than double the strength of the armed SS without infringing the recruiting rules laid down by the OKW. Hitler’s decree of 17 August 1938 had allowed the SS to use members of the Death’s Head units and police reinforcements to bring the Special Purpose Troops up to strength; and a further
decree of 18 May 1939 had authorised Himmler to increase the strength of the Death’s Head units to between forty and fifty thousand as “police reinforcements” in wartime. Berger’s suggestion was to transfer sufficient members of the existing Death’s Head units and police formations into the Special Purpose Troops to create two new infantry divisions, and then to replenish the “reinforcement” formations with army-trained members of the General-SS (then some 240,000 strong) and the Order Police. Hitler approved the plan, and by the end of November 1939, more or less at the stroke of a pen, the armed SS formations had grown from four infantry regiments, a few support battalions and a motley collection of concentration camp guard units into a force of three infantry divisions (two of which were motorised), a heavy motorised infantry brigade and a pool of some fifty thousand trained reinforcements/replacements. These three new divisions were the SS-Special Purpose Division, the SS-Death’s Head Division and the SS-Police Division. The Death’s Head Division was a motorised infantry formation with a nucleus of 6,500 former concentration camp guards. They were largely equipped with Czech heavy weapons and were commanded by Theodor Eicke, the brutal and irascible Inspector of Concentration Camps. The Police Division was a horse-drawn infantry division manned by 15,800 members of the Order Police, commanded by Karl von Pfeffer-Wildenbruch.

It was at this time that Berger first coined the phrase “Waffen-SS” (literally “Weapons-SS”) to describe the armed military formations of the SS.
¹
He did so in a bid to end the friction between the Special Purpose Troops and the Death’s Head units. The former viewed themselves primarily as soldiers—indeed, as a military elite—whereas Eicke’s men regarded themselves as members of the (political) General-SS. The Death’s Head units had always been obliged to undertake military training, but under Eicke—whose own army career had been spent behind a desk—this fell well short of the required standard. Therefore, they were now on a steep learning curve. The designation “Waffen-SS” was designed to smooth over this distinction between the
two organisations to create a single armed branch of the SS. After the war, several former Special Purpose Troops commanders claimed that the new set-up had been “an insult to any soldier,”
²
but there is no evidence of them raising any objections to it at the time.

The Waffen-SS established its reputation—both bad and good—during the invasion of the Low Countries and France in the spring of 1940. The Police Division spent most of the early part of this campaign in reserve before being deployed across the River Aisne and the Ardennes Canal on 9–10 June, and then moving into the Argonne Forest, fighting a series of engagements against French rearguard troops along the way. By contrast, the
Leibstandarte
and the Special Purpose Division were engaged from the early stages of the campaign.

The
Leibstandarte
formed part of Mobile Group North for the attack on the Netherlands. Its initial role was to thrust forwards from Gronau towards the River Yssel when the attack was launched on 10 May. Dutch resistance was so light that elements of the
Leibstandarte
had penetrated more than forty-five kilometres beyond the river by that evening. Following this, they were attached to the 9th Panzer Division and moved west to link up with German parachute units that had seized key bridges on the southern approaches to Rotterdam. On the afternoon of 14 May, a Luftwaffe airstrike on Rotterdam levelled much of the city centre, killing nearly a thousand civilians, and the town’s garrison commander surrendered. The
Leibstandarte
was ordered to move through the city and head on towards the Hague, but en route they encountered a group of armed Dutch soldiers (who were probably heading towards a POW collection point) and engaged them with machine-gun fire. This would have been reckless and irresponsible even if they had not hit and severely wounded General Kurt Student, commander of the German 7 Luftdivision parachute unit, as he stood at the window of his command post. Almost simultaneously with this, the Dutch High Command ordered a cease-fire.