Heinrich Himmler : A Life (94 page)

On the afternoon of 31 July Himmler flew from Riga to Baranowicze, where he gave the final order for the creation of the Cavalry Brigade led by Hermann Fegelein from the two regiments. He then discussed with von dem Bach-Zelewski the SS cavalrymen’s continuing ‘pacification’ campaign.
⁷⁸
For this deployment Himmler had already issued the brigade with special ‘Guidelines for Cavalry Units Combing Marshlands’: ‘As, nationally speaking, the population is hostile, racially and humanly inferior, or even, as is often the case in marsh areas, composed of criminals who have settled there, all those who are under suspicion of helping the partisans are to be shot, women and children are to be deported, livestock and food are to be confiscated. The villages are to be burnt to the ground.’
⁷⁹

On his visit to Baranowicze on 31 July Himmler radicalized this order, as can be inferred from a radio message of 1 August from the 2nd Cavalry Regiment: ‘Express command of the RFSS. All Jews must be shot. Jewish women to be herded into the marshes.’
⁸⁰
The equivalent order delivered by
the commander of the cavalry battalion of the 1st Cavalry Regiment on 1 August was equally brutal: ‘No Jewish male to remain alive, no remnant of any family in the villages.’
⁸¹

If the wording of these orders is a guide, Himmler had obviously instructed that all Jewish men were to be shot and also that the women were to be subjected to violence, though not explicitly that the latter should be murdered. The same pattern is followed repeatedly: the gradual inclusion of new groups of victims of the shootings was not the response to a single and absolutely unequivocal order from Himmler, but rather there was a longer process in which the unit leaders were progressively accustomed to their own atrocities, indeed positively educated into being mass murderers.

Future developments show also that Himmler’s order was understood in very different ways. The 1st Cavalry Regiment had been murdering thousands of Jewish men, women, and children indiscriminately since 3 August in Chomsk, Motol, Telechany, Swieta Wola, Hancewicze, and other places.
⁸²
On 11 August the cavalry detachment of the regiment reported 6,504 victims; in fact the number was most probably closer to 11,000.
⁸³
By contrast, the cavalry battalion of the 2nd SS Cavalry Regiment shot almost exclusively Jewish men: according to information given by the regiment, between 5 and 11 August a total of 6,526, in fact presumably around 14,000.
⁸⁴
Apart from this the regiment reported: ‘Herding woman and children into the marshes was not as successful as it should have been, for the marshes were not so deep that people sank into them.’
⁸⁵
Was that an attempt deliberately to misinterpret Himmler’s command?

In the weeks to come the Cavalry Brigade continued its ‘cleansing operation’ almost continuously and murdered thousands of Jews, and from the beginning of September onwards even the members of the 2nd Regiment began shooting women and children.
⁸⁶
In fact, in August the Cavalry Brigade had most probably already murdered more than 25,000 Jews.
⁸⁷
This then triggered the spread of the mass murders to the whole Jewish population in the rear area of the Army Group Centre, in which von dem Bach-Zelewski as HSSPF had control.

In the meantime Himmler had long since returned from the occupied eastern territories: on 3 August he had flown to Berlin and on 5 August had set off for his headquarters in Rastenburg, where a series of meetings took place in the following days.
⁸⁸
From Rastenburg Himmler observed above all the development of the mass murders committed against the Soviet civilian population in the area of HSSPF Russia South, Jeckeln, whom he had put in
command of the 1st SS Infantry Brigade for this purpose. Jeckeln and his brigade were supposed to play the same central role on the southern section of the front assumed by von dem Bach-Zelewski with the help of the Cavalry Brigade further north. The 1st Infantry Brigade began as early as the end of July also to shoot Jewish women, doing so as part of a ‘cleansing operation’ that took place between 27 and 30 July in the Zwiahel area.
⁸⁹
The brigade reported that as a result of this ‘operation’ it had executed 800 people, ‘Jews and Jewesses aged 16 to 60’.
⁹⁰
After this mass murder brigade units carried out further ‘operations’, in the course of which they murdered an estimated 7,000 Jewish men, women, and children.
⁹¹
Himmler was not satisfied. He ordered Jeckeln to his headquarters on 12 August and appeared ‘indignant’ about the latter’s activity, which still left something to be desired,
⁹²
whereupon Jeckeln increased the number of murders.
⁹³

At the end of August the series of mass murders organized by Jeckeln reached its peak. In a hitherto unprecedented massacre, 23,600 people,
⁹⁴
the vast majority Jews who had been deported across the border by the Hungarian authorities in July–August as ‘troublesome foreigners’,
⁹⁵
were murdered within three days in Kamenets-Podolsk. Massacres followed in Berdychiv
⁹⁶
and Shitomir;
⁹⁷
Jeckeln also played a leading role in the massacre of the Kiev Jews at Babi Yar, in which 33,771 Jews were reportedly executed at the end of September.
⁹⁸
This wave of mass murders gave the decisive impetus that led to commandos under Jeckeln’s jurisdiction (Einsatzgruppe C and several police battalions that had in part already participated in Jeckeln’s ‘operations’) also beginning a blanket extermination of the Jewish population in the summer.
⁹⁹

By the beginning of October 1941 Einsatzkommando 6 belonging to Einsatzgruppe C was the only one that had not yet executed any Jewish women. That was to change after Himmler paid a visit to the unit on 3 October in Krivoy Rog, whereupon members of Einsatzkommando 6 shot the Jewish women there also, the city being reported on 20 October as being ‘free of Jews’.
¹⁰⁰

On 14 October Himmler set off again for Baranowicze, this time with a large entourage. Flying with him were, amongst others, Wolff, Prützmann, and also the Reich theatre designer Benno von Arent, who had the rank of SS-Oberführer, the ‘Führer’s cameraman’, Lieutenant Walter Frentz (who was received into the SS during this journey), and a further SS photo reporter. The reason why they were there was to become clear in the days that followed. On arriving in Baranowicze, where von dem
Bach-Zelewski apprised Himmler of the results to date of the ‘cleansing operation’, the party of notables proceeded the same day to Minsk and took up residence in the Lenin House.
¹⁰¹

The next morning an execution was on Himmler’s itinerary—‘partisans and Jews’, as his work diary noted. The mass shooting took place outside Minsk: squads of eight to ten order or security policemen, members of Einsatzkommando 8, took turns to shoot the victims, who included women. There are strong indications that Frentz filmed the execution; an entry for 19 November in Himmler’s diary reads: ‘Dined on the train. Newsreel and film of Minsk.’
¹⁰²

Watching the execution, Himmler seems to have assumed the pose of a neutral and businesslike observer. A lieutenant of the criminal police in charge of one of the execution squads gave the following testimony after the war: ‘After the first salvo Himmler came right up to me and looked personally into the ditch, remarking that there was still someone alive. He said to me, “Lieutenant, shoot that one!”’ The man obeyed. ‘Himmler stood beside me while I did it [ . . . ] For Himmler and his entourage the whole thing was simply a spectacle.’
¹⁰³

Afterwards Himmler made a speech to the members of the firing-squads, in which he said that although the shootings were a heavy burden for the marksmen they were nevertheless necessary in ‘the war of ideologies’. On this occasion, according to the testimony of Otto Bradfisch, the leader of Einsatzkommando 8, Himmler stated that the Führer had issued a command concerning the shooting of all Jews that must be obeyed at all costs.
¹⁰⁴
There is nothing to corroborate this statement. If it is indeed accurate then it took several weeks more for the new order to reach all the murder squads, a fact that makes it unlikely that Himmler, above and beyond his comment to Bradfisch at Minsk, was already announcing openly that all Jews were to be murdered, as was asserted in post-war testimonies.
¹⁰⁵

Before lunch at the Lenin House the party visited a prisoner-of-war camp, and in the afternoon, after a drive through the ghetto, Novinki hospital, a psychiatric institution north-west of Minsk. Five weeks later a German police commando murdered 120 patients by gassing them. Everything points to Himmler, still under the immediate impression of the execution, having given instructions for this murder when he inspected the institution on 15 August, apparently as part of the search for a less bloody method of murder.
¹⁰⁶

The next day, culture, or properly speaking cultural looting, was on Himmler’s itinerary. On the occasion of a visit to a Minsk museum he gave Arent the task of sifting the city’s art collections for possible exhibits to be sent back to Germany. On the morning of 16 August Himmler flew back to Rastenburg. That evening he met the former administrative head of Lebensborn, Standartenführer Guntrum Pflaum, whom he had given authority on 11 July ‘to receive ethnic German children of good and unmixed blood’ in the Volga German republic. Himmler now extended this task ‘to the entire occupied territories of the European Soviet Union.’
¹⁰⁷
In August the Main Office of the Reich Commissariat for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation set up a branch office in Riga which was to take care of unresolved questions relating to the property of ethnic Germans.
¹⁰⁸
In July Himmler had already had the Sonderkommando R (Russia) set up under Brigadeführer Horst Hoffmeyer to seek out ethnic Germans still living in the Soviet Union.
¹⁰⁹

Himmler was therefore continuing his efforts to extend his sphere of influence as Settlement Commissar to the occupied Soviet territories. His order, discussed above, to Globocnik to pursue an independent settlement policy in the east, and his attempt to make Lublin the base for it, were projects that also belong in this context. For Himmler regarded the mass murders of Jews, to which he devoted so much attention during these weeks, as an integral part of a much more broadly based policy of ethnic reordering.

On 17 August Himmler had lunch with Hitler. In the weeks following he remained almost without a break in his own headquarters in East Prussia, where he had numerous meetings with Hitler and also had discussions with Ribbentrop, Lammers, Göring, Heydrich, Daluege, and others.
¹¹⁰
By the beginning of September he had finally got his way over a decisive matter: Hitler declared that the scope of the responsibilities of the Reich Settlement Commissar should now include the occupied eastern territories.
¹¹¹
Yet the Reichsführer-SS was still not satisfied: on 18 September Heydrich sent a draft decree to Lammers which provided for more powers to be given to the SS and police, as well as to Himmler in his capacity as Settlement Commissar both in the General Government and the Protectorate as well as in the territories controlled by the heads of the civil administration (in other words, in Lorraine, Alsace, Luxembourg, Carinthia–Carniola, Lower Styria, the occupied Netherlands, and Norway). The SS and police were now to be responsible for ‘control of security’ in ‘internal political’ matters,
and no longer only for ‘police’ matters in these occupied territories. In addition, Himmler wanted authority over the Minister for the East, Rosenberg. Lammers was to indicate to Himmler several weeks later, however, that such formal extension of his competency was not possible for the time being.
¹¹²

At a meeting on 4 October 1941 representatives of the Ministry for the East, led by Gauleiter Meyer, attempted to gain acceptance for the view that the responsibilities Hitler had just confirmed as being Himmler’s related only to the ‘implementation’ of settlement policy, while planning fell properly to the Ministry for the East. Heydrich rejected this interpretation, however, and instead suggested that the central offices and the institutions subordinated to them on various levels in the occupied eastern territories should coordinate their activities better.
¹¹³

On the same day that Heydrich sent Lammers his extensive demands, Himmler himself set about enlarging his role as Settlement Commissar by issuing instructions on the spot. On 18 September he embarked on further ‘travels in the Ostland’, accompanied by Heydrich, Wolff, and others: he flew to Riga, went on the following day to Mitau (Jelgava) and Reval (Tallinn), then to Dorpat and Pleskau (Pskov), returning to Rastenburg on 21 September. He used this opportunity to issue various instructions about the deportation of Russians from Estonia, and gave his HSSPF in Riga, Prützmann, the task of examining whether those children whose parents had been deported by the Soviets in 1940–1 were ‘capable of Germanization’.
¹¹⁴

On 24 September Himmler took part in a discussion at the Führer’s headquarters at which Hitler appointed Heydrich Deputy Reich Protector in Prague, and thereby created the precondition for a more radical policy towards the Jews in the weeks to follow.
¹¹⁵
On 30 September he set off on yet another tour of inspection, this time to the Ukraine. On 2 October, only two days after the Babi Yar massacre, he met Jeckeln in Kiev and then spent three days in Krivoy Rog. There he visited Einsatzkommando 6, which, as described above, began immediately afterwards also to shoot Jewish women.
¹¹⁶

At the request of the Wehrmacht, Himmler decided on 4 October—he was still in Krivoy Rog—that Sonderkommando Lange, which since 1940 had been murdering Jews by means of gassing vehicles, should be brought by plane to Novgorod in order to kill the patients in three psychiatric hospitals there, because the accommodation was urgently needed for troops.
¹¹⁷
On the
same day Himmler paid a visit to Nicolajev, where Einsatzgruppe D was based, and apparently also to Cherson, as a note indicates.
¹¹⁸