Heinrich Himmler : A Life (106 page)

Apart from the two sources of recruitment already referred to that the Waffen-SS had utilized outside Germany—ethnic Germans and ‘Germanic volunteers’—in 1941 Himmler focused on another small group: volunteers from occupied or allied countries who were to be organized in national ‘legions’. Hitler agreed to this project on 29 July 1941.
⁴

Following negotiations with the Wehrmacht, it was agreed that the Waffen-SS would recruit legions from Norwegians, the Dutch, Swedes, Danes, and Flemings and retain the Finnish volunteer battalion that had already been set up at the start of 1941, while the Wehrmacht would form Croatian, Spanish, and French units. Although the majority of the Waffen-SS legionnaires came from ‘Germanic’ countries, they were carefully differentiated from the true ‘Germanic’ volunteers from these countries. They were not considered members of the SS, and so were not subject to the SS’s racial criteria for selection or to the Marriage Order; they were foreign legionnaires in the service of Germany. These legions were intended to signify, in an explicitly nationalist manner, the participation of the countries
concerned in the common ‘crusade’ against Bolshevism, while the idea of the ‘Germanic’ volunteers implied an integrative purpose.

There were, however, considerable teething troubles involved in setting up the legions; the Swedish one did not even get going.
⁵
In Denmark, where recruitment was in the hands of the Danish Nazis, the SS began to establish a so-called Free Corps ‘Denmark’ in July 1941, and by the end of the month was able to send 600 volunteers to Germany for training.
⁶
In July 1941 Dutchmen and Flemings were withdrawn from the Standarte ‘North-West’ established in April to form the core units for the ‘Flanders’ and ‘The Netherlands’ legions
⁷
, and at the end of July the SS Leadership Office ordered the creation of the ‘Norway’ legion.
⁸
However, by the time the men had finished their training at the end of 1941 none of the legions had achieved regimental strength
⁹
—by then they had been able to recruit a total of only 5,816 men.
¹⁰

In the directives that Himmler issued for the new force he emphasized that the legionnaires were not members of the SS; thus, they did not wear SS runes on their uniform, but instead badges symbolizing their ‘membership of their nation’. They had to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler, and received the same wages and family support as all other members of the Waffen-SS.
¹¹

The first military engagement of the Flemish and Netherlands legions, which occurred in January 1942 and was designed to block a Soviet counter-attack in the Leningrad area, proved extremely costly. The Norwegian legion also took part in military operations in the Leningrad area in February 1942; the Danish legion had been fighting on the eastern front since 1941 as part of the ‘Death’s Head’ division.
¹²
The military engagement of the Finnish legion was considerably delayed. In January 1942 Aaltonen, the chief of the Finnish state police, told a colleague of Berger’s in no uncertain terms that the volunteers were so discontented, above all with the arrogance of the German officers and their rough treatment, that ‘Finnish volunteers [ . . . ] going into action for the first time would shoot their German SS officers’.
¹³
It was only after a number of serious abuses had been dealt with that the Finnish authorities permitted the battalion to leave for the front. From January 1942 onwards it fought for several months as part of the ‘Viking’ division.
¹⁴

The complaints made by the Finns—discriminatory treatment, failure to keep the promises with which they had been recruited, failure to take account of the military experience and ranks that they had acquired in
their own army—were also made by the members of other nations. Berger warned Himmler in February 1942 that ‘the recruitment of volunteers from the Germanic and ethnic German areas is becoming more and more difficult and will cease altogether if fundamental changes are not made’.
¹⁵

In response, on 6 March 1942 Himmler transferred to Berger responsibility for the ‘recruitment of the Waffen-SS legions, police units, and guard battalions’, the ‘military supervision of all the Germanic volunteers’, and the ‘establishment, leadership, and training of the Germanic SS in the individual countries’,
¹⁶
and introduced a series of concrete measures to meet the legionnaires’ complaints. The men whose period of enlistment had come to an end were in fact discharged; foreigners were also now allowed to be trained as officers at the SS officer-training college at Bad Tölz; and from now on German personnel who were transferred to the legions had to go through an orientation course. Himmler also reserved the right to appoint officers to the foreign units of the Waffen-SS himself.
¹⁷

Since little changed as far as the poor treatment of foreigners was concerned, and the war soon began to take a turn for the worse, during 1942 the number of volunteers decreased. The legions’ losses could no longer be covered, so that they could no longer be deployed in their existing form.
¹⁸
As a result, the legions had a poor reputation with the leadership of the regime. In April 1942, during one of his table talks, Hitler was already expressing scepticism about ‘all the foreign legions on the eastern front’: as the legionnaire was not ‘inspired by ethnic membership of the Germanic Reich he must consider himself a traitor to his nation’.
¹⁹

In view of the lack of new recruits, at the end of 1942 the decision was taken to reorganize the legions; as part of this reorganization the term ‘legionnaire’ was replaced by ‘SS volunteer’. German members of the SS and ‘Germanic volunteers’ were now deployed to reinforce the Danish, Dutch, and Norwegian legions, and the legions were transformed into the ‘Denmark’, ‘Netherlands’, and ‘Norway’ regiments. This provided the basis for the future SS Volunteer Panzer Grenadier division ‘Nordland’ (‘North-land’).
²⁰
The complicated name clearly indicates the difference between it and the proper Waffen-SS divisions, which were composed only of Reich Germans and ‘Teutons’.

A year later the ‘Netherlands’ regiment was removed from the ‘Nord-land’ division. The new autonomous brigade finally became the 23rd SS Volunteer Panzer Grenadier ‘Netherlands’ Division. A new Flemish legion was established with the name ‘Langemarck’ and later transformed into the
27th SS Volunteer Grenadier Division. The Wehrmacht transferred its French and Wallonian volunteer units to the SS, which deployed each of them as a division within the Waffen-SS, even though their numbers were below those normally required for a Waffen-SS division.
²¹

The Finnish government, however, recalled its battalion in May 1943 following the wrangles referred to above.
²²
Himmler issued an emotional order of the day to the departing Finns: ‘During these recent most difficult and testing times we have been linked by a fraternal bond, which can never be broken by any outward separation.’
²³

The recruitment of ‘Germanic’ volunteers was much more successful. Although, like the German SS members, these volunteers had to undergo racial screening
²⁴
and submit to the obligations of the Engagement and Marriage Order,
²⁵
according to a (possibly too generous) estimate, during the Second World War the Waffen-SS was able to recruit over 100,000 men from northern and western Europe. However, about half of these joined during the last year of the war, in other words, in circumstances under which the ‘volunteers’ had few alternatives. According to this calculation there were 50,000 Dutch, 40,000 Belgians (with equal numbers from Flanders and Wallonia), and 6,000 each from Denmark and Norway, as well as a further 1,200 volunteers from other countries, above all Switzerland, Sweden, and Luxembourg, and about 1,000 Finns.
²⁶

On 12 August 1942 Hitler declared that the Reichsführer-SS was responsible for ‘dealing with all the ethnic German groups in Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands [ . . . ] on behalf of the NSDAP, its formations, and affiliated organizations’.
²⁷
Six months later he extended this monopoly of responsibility to the civilian administrations in the occupied territories, so that they were now obliged to consult Himmler if they wished to contact the ‘ethnic German’ elements in the various countries concerned.
²⁸
As a result, Himmler had not only strengthened his position vis-à-vis the recruitment of ‘Germanic’ volunteers in north-west Europe, but above all had had his ‘Greater Germanic’ policy confirmed. Ever since the occupation of these countries in 1940 he had been endeavouring to establish relations with indigenous fascist movements so that they could help him not only to recruit for his Waffen-SS but also provide the political basis
for a future amalgamation with the Reich as part of the ‘Greater Germanic’ concept. However, by the time Hitler sanctioned this policy in August 1942 it had already basically failed.

In Denmark the SS had initially worked with the Danish Nazis, and in particular used their organization to recruit volunteers. However, through this cooperation the Danmarks Nationalsocialistiske Arbejderparti (DNSAP) had discredited itself in the eyes of the majority of its fellow countrymen. When elections were due in 1943 the DNSAP was to gain representation in parliament only through massive electoral support from the German minority. As a result the SS had to seek a new partner. In 1943 it broke with the DNSAP, and instead the SS established a quasi-militia, the Schalburg Corps, named after the leader of the ‘Denmark’ Free Corps, Christian Frederik von Schalburg, who had been killed in Russia. Fritz Clausen, the head of the DNSAP and formerly Himmler’s most important partner in Denmark, volunteered for front-line duty and eventually, following his increasing abuse of alcohol, was confined to a mental hospital by Himmler.
²⁹

In Norway Himmler had relied on Vidkun Quisling and his party, Nasjonal Samling. Quisling, however, who had been appointed Prime Minister by the occupation authorities in February 1942, was completely isolated among his own population. His attempts to extract commitments concerning the future of his country from the German leadership were stalled.
³⁰

In the Netherlands Himmler’s attempts to recruit volunteers met with resistance from Anton Mussert, the very man whom the occupation authorities regarded as their main ally in the country. The ‘Leider’ of the fascist Nationaal-Socialistische movement, the only party that had been permitted to exist in the Netherlands since the summer of 1941, was pursuing his own policy. He hoped to achieve a ‘Greater Netherlands’ through amalgamation with Germanic Flanders. Right from the start he regarded SS attempts at recruitment as an affront to Dutch sovereignty. Although Himmler succeeded in neutralizing Mussert’s resistance to Waffen-SS recruitment and in forcing through the establishment of a ‘Germanic’ General SS in the Netherlands, in doing so he had aroused Mussert’s mistrust. He feared that the ‘Greater German Reich’ propagated by Himmler would simply result in the annexation of the Netherlands. Although Himmler was often provoked by Mussert,
³¹
he could not avoid supporting him in public for the simple reason that there was no alternative.
³²
The person who was originally
his closest ally, Rost van Tonningen, leader of the radical wing of the Dutch Nazis, had been rejected as a volunteer by the SS-Standarte ‘Westland’ because he could not prove his Aryan identity and thus was not a feasible candidate for such a function.
³³
Rost van Tonningen had been born in Indonesia, a fact that was used by his opponents to cast doubt on his racial ‘purity’. Instead, in April 1941 he took over as head of the Dutch national bank and became state secretary in the Finance Ministry. From then on he focused his attention on currency matters.
³⁴

Himmler’s interest in Belgium was initially concentrated on Flanders, which after the war he intended to incorporate into the Reich as ‘Reich Gau Flanders’. The head of the SS Main Office, Gottlob Berger, who regarded himself as an expert on Flanders and devoted a considerable amount of effort to the Germanization of this area, initially attempted to infiltrate the fascist Vlaamisch Nationaal Verbond (VNV) and persuade it to adopt a Greater Germanic policy, an attempt which, however, failed. It supported a policy of seeking a Greater Flanders through the incorporation of the Netherlands. In 1941 Berger, therefore, turned to the Deutssch-Vlamisch Arbeitsgemeinschaft (DeVlag) (German-Flemish Working Group) in order, with Himmler’s full support, to build it up as a counterweight to the VNV. The result was that the Flemish forces who were prepared to collaborate were now working against each other.
³⁵

Himmler’s attempts to create a basis for his ‘Greater Germanic’ fantasies through cooperation with fascist mass movements in north European countries had led nowhere. The fact that he utilized these organizations for the attempt to recruit for the Waffen-SS damaged their reputation in the eyes of the indigenous population, which saw them not as the avant-garde of a better political future but as collaborators and traitors. And from the point of view of the fascist movements those volunteers recruited by the SS now left a gap as political activists in the countries concerned.

Given this limited progress, and at the same time the Waffen-SS’s urgent need for recruits, Himmler began to consider whether the concept of ‘Germanic volunteers’ could not be extended. For example, in the French-speaking Wallonian part of Belgium, which Nazi racial experts generally regarded as ‘Roman’, there was the fascist Rexist movement under the leadership of Léon Degrelle. Since the beginning of 1943 he had been deputy commander of the SS Storm Brigade ‘Wallonia’, a unit of Belgian volunteers that had been transferred by the Wehrmacht to the Waffen-SS. Himmler supported Degrelle, if only for the simple reason
that he was able to recruit more volunteers for the SS in Wallonia than was possible in the ‘Germanic’ Flemish part of Belgium.
³⁶
Moreover, Himmler approved of the way in which Degrelle was prepared to adapt his original policy of a ‘Greater Belgium’ to the SS’s vague ‘Germanic’ ideas. For Degrelle utilized the transfer of his men to the Waffen-SS to proclaim, in a major speech, that the Walloons were members of the ‘Germanic race’.
³⁷
Hitler was delighted (and evidently surprised) by this move, and noted in January 1943 that it was ‘extremely interesting that the Walloons were now suddenly deciding to be Teutons’.
³⁸