Gestapo (18 page)

“At that time we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it today, as raw material, as labor. What, after all, thinking in terms of generations, is not to be regretted, but is now deplorable by reason of the loss of labor, is that the prisoners died in tens and hundreds of thousands of exhaustion and hunger.”

But, though matter of fact, he was perpetually dominated by his vision of Germanism, and the S.S. as the elite of Germanism:

“It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be from this racial super-stratum of the Germanic people. In twenty to thirty years we must really be able to present the whole of Europe with its leading class. If the S.S., together with the farmers … then run the colony in the East on a grand scale without any restraint, without any question about any kind of tradition, but with nerve and revolutionary impetus, we shall in twenty years push the national boundary five hundred kilometers eastwards.”

This was the vision behind his statement that it would be highly desirable if some thirty million Russians should die, by whatever means; it was the logical expression of Hitler's craving for
Lebensraum
.

And yet this complicated figure, full of dreams, full of
regrets at the necessity for hardness, could also lapse into destructive hysteria. When things were going badly for Germany, in September, 1943, Himmler sent a secret instruction to the S.S. and the S.D. to ensure its collaboration with the soldiers in the total destruction and depopulation of the parts of the Ukraine which would have to be evacuated:

“The aim to be achieved is that when areas in the Ukraine are evacuated, not a human being, not a single head of cattle, not a hundredweight of cereals, and not a railway line remains behind; that not a house remains standing, not a mine exists which is not ruined for years to come, that there is no well left unpoisoned. The enemy must really find a land completely burned and destroyed.”

This was the general background against which the Security Police and the S.D. set about their tasks in the East. They were supported by men like Keitel, who declared for the most ruthless measures and explained to the Army that human life in the Eastern territories counted for nothing. They were supported by men like Ribbentrop, who spoke of the whole countryside going up in flames. They were supported by men like Frank, Governor of Poland, who recorded with satisfaction in 1943 that there had been three and a half million Jews in Poland when he had taken over, and now there were not more than one hundred thousand, all at forced labor. They were supported all down the line by Nazi officialdom, and often by the soldiers too. They existed and had their being in a climate of terror and murder which enabled them to carry out their work unreflectingly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. They were exalted by Himmler and driven by Heydrich and Mueller and the strange intellectuals and semi-intellectuals of Heydrich's S.D. In the East, as already observed, their main task was extermination; in the West, the spreading of terror.

Who were they to resist? In the early days of the Polish war, before Heydrich had achieved his monopoly of murder, and when the troops of the Wehrmacht and the S.S. were indulging in indiscriminate slaughter instead of leaving it to the Security Police and the S.D. following close behind,
there was an incident in which the Wehrmacht itself, in the person of the Quartermaster General's Office, gave its blessing to the sort of procedure for which the Army was later to criticize the Gestapo and S.D. A Field Court Martial of the Kempf Armored Division had innocently sentenced an S.S. artilleryman to three years' imprisonment and a sergeant-major of the Military Police to nine years' penal servitude for killing fifty Jews.

“After about fifty Jews, who had been used during the day to repair a bridge, had finished their work in the evening, these two men drove them all into a synagogue and shot them without any reason. The sentence is submitted to the Commander of the 3rd Army for confirmation.”

The matter went up to Berlin. The nine-year sentence was changed to three, and in fact both sentences were rendered void by an amnesty. But what indicates the atmosphere is the paragraph on extenuating circumstances giving reasons for the revision of the sentence:

“S.S. Sturmmann Ernst is granted extenuating circumstances because he was asked to participate in the shooting by a corporal handing him a rifle. He was in a state of exasperation owing to numerous atrocities committed by Poles against persons of German race. As an S.S. man, particularly sensitive to the sight of Jews and to the hostile attitude of Jewry to the Germans, he therefore acted quite thoughtlessly, in youthful rashness.”

This was signed by
Oberkriegsgerichtrath
(Military Judge of the third rank) Lipski. And, of course, the whole matter was soon put on a regular footing by Keitel, who forbade commanders to punish their men for killing Russians and Jews.

We have seen that the first tasks of the
Einsatzgruppen
was the murder of Jews. As originally conceived by Heydrich, in 1938, they were not equipped or trained for mass murder, but simply for the spreading of terror and
the liquidation of recalcitrant individuals. They were used for this, too, and, in Russia, a great deal of stress was laid on the shooting of Commissars—or, more accurately, active Communist officials; but in fact this was almost a sideline. We have the detailed figures of the murders carried out by
Einsatzgruppe
A, working in the Baltic Provinces and North-west Russia, for the first four months of the war with the Soviet Union (June to October, 1941). And this record, signed by the Group Commander, S.S. Major General Stahlecker, claims one hundred thirty-five thousand five hundred sixty-seven murdered Jews, four thousand Communists, and seven hundred forty-eight lunatics. Before going into the question of how the Jews were murdered we must go back a little.

It was desirable in earlier chapters to dwell on the general history of Nazidom and to recapitulate familiar facts in order to show the parallel development of the Gestapo and S.D. But it is not in the least necessary to work through the processes whereby Jewry under German rule was outlawed, because this had nothing to do with the Gestapo, which enters the picture effectively only when things had reached such a stage that direct physical action against the Jews as a body was called for. This moment was reached after the passing of that long series of decrees, called collectively the Nuremberg laws, at about the time of Munich in 1938. But there was a conflict about what to do.

Heydrich, in his single-minded manner, was for deportation—and he began in October by dumping some thousands of Polish Jews, whom Poland refused to take, in the fields near the Polish border. Schacht, however, was for controlled emigration: he wanted to make the most of Jewish capital and assets, whereas Heydrich was interested only in what ransom money he could get. For a few weeks in the winter of 1938 the Schacht plan was tried. But in January, 1939, Heydrich won. Goering, who had favored Schacht, was compelled by Hitler to hand over full powers in the Jewish question to the Gestapo. Through Frick, still Reichs Minister of the Interior and thus theoretically Himmler's superior, he instructed Heydrich to set up a Central Emigration Office for Jews “to solve the Jewish question by emigration and evacuation in a way that is
most favorable under the conditions prevailing.” Heydrich was happy with this. He had not at all liked the decorum of the Schacht plan and desired only to force the issue.

His own views on the Jewish question had been made plain on the night of November 9th, when, in order to exploit the wrath of the Germans against the pointless assassination of Ernst von Rath in Paris by the son of one of Heydrich's deportees, the notorious pogrom was organized. It was a police action disguised as a popular riot. Heydrich provided himself with an alibi and expressed surprise and ignorance when a nearby synagogue went up in flames while he was dining; but he had already personally warned the Gestapo of what was to happen and instructed the police throughout the Reich on what they were to do: damage to German property had to be avoided; shops and flats might be burned but not looted; synagogues were not to be burned if there was danger to adjoining property. And Mueller carried these instructions a stage farther by instructing the Gestapo throughout Germany that he wanted twenty to thirty thousand arrests of Jews, preferably well-to-do ones. In fact, according to Heydrich's report to Goering on November 11th, twenty thousand Jews were arrested, one hundred ninety-one synagogues and one hundred seventy-one apartment houses burned down, and eight hundred fifteen shops smashed and looted—a figure altered next day to seven thousand five hundred. Thirty-six Jews had been killed.

Heydrich had already had some experience of deporting Jews from Austria after the
Anschluss;
but his first properly organized action was against the Jews of Czechoslovakia, after Hitler's bloodless invasion in March, 1939. It is in Vienna that we first meet S.S. Captain Eichmann, as he then was; but it was in Prague that, at the head of a branch establishment of the Central Emigration Office, he created the prototype of what was to become R.S.H.A. IVA 4b, working in close collaboration with the Jewish Community Council, which was made to detail the Jews who were to be deported just as, ever afterwards, local Jewish Councils all over Europe were to be made to register and deliver their fellow Jews marked first for deportation, then for execution—and, in the end, to follow them to the death pits or the gas chamber. But it was not
until the invasion of Poland that IVA 4b, in its own building at 46 Kurfuerstenstrasse, got really under way, and the “final solution” was first mentioned.

Three weeks after the invasion had begun Heydrich held a secret conference. The minutes have not been preserved. But in a covering letter to the Chiefs of the
Einsatzgruppen
(the embryo
Einsatzgruppen
, not the final model that appeared in Russia), Heydrich wrote as follows:

“With reference to the conference which took place today in Berlin I should like to point out once more-that the total measures planned (i.e., the final solution) are to be kept strictly secret. A distinction is to be made between: (1) the final solution (which will take some time), and (2) stages in the carrying out of that solution (which can be achieved within a short space of time). The measures planned require the most thorough preparation from both the technical and the economic point of view. It goes without saying that the tasks in this connection cannot be laid down in detail.”

He then went on to say that the first necessity for the attainment of the final solution was the concentration of Jews living in rural areas in large towns.

“As few ‘concentration points' as possible are to be established, in order to facilitate later measures. Care must be taken that only such towns be chosen as concentration camps as are either railway junctions or at least lie on a railway.…”

In the light of later knowledge it is possible to read too much into those words. Nobody can say for certain what Heydrich had in mind. But it is highly unlikely that he was then concerned with gathering Jews at strategic points to facilitate their mass execution. It is far more likely that he was concerned with establishing large concentrations in ghettos so that the Jews might be more easily supervised and moved when required from one place to another. Be that as it may, the first concern of Eichmann's office for some time to come was not murder but the deportation of Reich Jews into Poland, the deportation of Polish Jews inside the annexed territories into the General Government, and a wholesale reshuffle of Jews inside the General Government—a process which brought Heydrich into sharp
conflict with no less a person than the Governor, Hans Frank, who was interested only in exploiting the resources of the General Government in the interests of the German economy by starving the masses, killing the natural leaders, and collecting slave labor. Frank, not unnaturally, objected to having hordes of the poorest Jews in Europe dumped by Eichmann on his territory. But he had to put up with it. And it was not until March, 1941, when Hitler was giving preliminary orders for the invasion of Russia, that the formal decision was taken to embark upon a policy of extermination.

This decision was not taken lightly. As we have seen, Hitler could be impressed by the weight of outside opinion. Once he was at grips with Russia he could afford to throw off all pretenses, for what went on in Russia, he was sure, the outside world would never hear. But there was still America to be considered. Mr. Reitlinger has suggested that had there been no Pearl Harbor Hitler would have cared too much for American opinion to launch his policy of total extermination outside Russia. And he has pointed out that it was not until nine days after Pearl Harbor that Hans Frank made his celebrated remark to his Cabinet about what to do with the Jews in Poland: “Do you think they will be settled in villages in the Ostland? … Liquidate them yourselves.” And it was not until six weeks later that Heydrich gave to a larger audience at a conference at Gross-Wannsee an outline of what it was proposed to do.

Otto ohlendorf, who at thirty-three became an S.S. Major General, and at forty was condemned to death at Nuremberg, was to many the image of what a good German should be. This is not the view of a prejudiced non-German: it was the view of those women spectators at his trial who sent flowers to his cell, so moved were they by his appearance and bearing. They did this in the knowledge that two years earlier, also at Nuremberg, where he was a witness for the prosecution of the S.D., he had confessed
to the murder of over ninety thousand men, women, and children.

We have mentioned Ohlendorf's killings before; but it should not be thought that he was a unique figure. He was simply for a period the commander of Action Group D, one of Heydrich's four Action Groups operating in Russia, which, in the words of the Nuremberg prosecutor, “totaling not more than three thousand men, killed at least one million human beings in approximately two years' time.” To understand the operations of the Gestapo and the S.D. it is necessary to explore the activities of their Action Groups, and Ohlendorf was the only commander of one of these organizations who was brought to trial at Nuremberg. Group A, which operated in the Baltic Provinces and the Leningrad Front, was commanded by Franz Stah-lecker, who had been head of Section VIA of the R.S.H.A. (S.D. foreign intelligence) before Schellenberg, and who was killed by Estonian partisans. Group B, which operated in White Russia and behind the Moscow front, was commanded by Artur Nebe, the friend of Gisevius, the intriguer against Diels in the early days of the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, the idealist, who vanished, supposedly shot by Kalten-brunner's men after the attempt on Hitler on July 20th, 1944. Group C, which operated in the Ukraine, was commanded by Otto Rasch, formerly Inspector of Security Police (IdS) for Koenigsberg, who, suffering from Parkinson's disease, was declared unfit to plead at Nuremberg.