Masters of Death (2 page)

As a group leader I was sent supplementary documentation. By far the most valuable was a slim little book, part of a limited, numbered edition, which I never let out of my sight. The typeface was tiny, I remember, and the paper was extra thin, in order to pack the most information into the smallest possible space. . . . It consisted of a series of lists, including the names of every active member of the Communist party in the Caucasus, all the nonparty intelligentsia, and listings of scholars, teachers, writers and journalists, priests, public officials, upwardly mobile peasants, and the most prominent industrialists and bankers. [It contained] addresses and telephone numbers. . . . And that wasn’t all. There were additional listings of relatives and friends, in case any subversive scum tried to hide, plus physical descriptions, and in some cases photographs. You can imagine what the size of that book would have been if it had been printed normally.

All these categories of people in Poland, and the Polish nobility as well, were marked for murder. During the first weeks after the invasion, while the Wehrmacht still controlled the occupied areas, a historian of the Polish experience summarizes, “531 towns and villages were burned; the provinces of Lodz and Warsaw suffered the heaviest losses. Various branches of the army and police [i.e., Himmler’s legions] carried out 714 [mass] executions, which took the lives of 16,376 people, most of whom were Polish Christians. The Wehrmacht committed approximately 60 percent of these crimes, with the police responsible for the remainder.” The historian cites an Englishwoman’s eyewitness account of executions in the Polish town of Bydgoszcz:

The first victims of the campaign were a number of Boy Scouts, from twelve to sixteen years of age, who were set up in the marketplace against a wall and shot. No reason was given. A devoted priest who rushed to administer the Last Sacrament was shot too. He received five wounds. A Pole said afterwards that the sight of those children lying dead was the most piteous of all the horrors he saw. That week the murders continued. Thirty-four of the leading tradespeople and merchants of the town were shot, and many other leading citizens. The square was surrounded by troops with machine-guns.

Three weeks after invading Poland, the Wehrmacht washed its hands of further responsibility for the decapitation, leaving the field to the specialists of the SS. Heydrich met with Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner to agree on an SS “cleanup once and for all” of “Jews, intelligentsia, clergy, nobility.” Heydrich then wrote the Einsatzgruppen commanders specifically concerning the “Jewish question in the occupied territory.” Cautioning strict secrecy, he distinguished between “the ultimate aim (which will take some time [to accomplish]),” and “interim measures (which can be carried out within a shorter period of time).” In the short term, Jews living in territories in western Poland scheduled to be annexed to Germany were to be “cleared” by shipping them eastward; Jews in the remainder of Poland were to be concentrated into ghettos in towns with good railroad connections. Heydrich’s letter did not specify what measures the “ultimate aim” would require. Long after the war, when Adolf Eichmann saw this 1939 document, he concluded that it embodied the “basic conception” of “the order concerning the physical extermination of the Jews” of the occupied territories. Large numbers of Polish Jews were murdered in any case, because they were politically suspect for reasons other than their religion; at this early point in time, Heydrich was basically assigning his Einsatzgruppen the transitional task of bringing the Jewish population of Poland under SS control.

An incident in the town of Wloclawek during the last week of September was unusual only in its conflict between authorities. A Totenkopf unit had arrested eight hundred Jewish men. Some of them had been “auf der Flucht erschossen”—“shot while trying to escape”— a standard euphemism for extrajudicial killing in the concentration camps guarded by Totenkopf regiments. The SS unit leader had planned to arrest every Jewish male in town, but the local Wehrmacht commander had overruled him. “They will all be shot in any case,” the SS leader had countered. In his innocence the commander had responded, “The Führer can hardly intend us to shoot all the Jews!” Warsaw fell on 28 September 1939, and the day before, Heydrich could already report that “of the Polish leadership, there remained in the occupied area at most 3 percent.”

SS brutality in Poland descended to unadorned slaughter in October, when Himmler extended executions to the mentally and physically disabled. The so-called euthanasia program was just beginning in Germany, to be directed initially against children, but the first SS killings preceded any euthanasia murders. The SS’s victims were German, removed from hospitals and nursing homes in the Prussian province of Pomerania and transported by train across the border into occupied Poland. The euthanasia program in Germany had to proceed by stealth, but occupied territory was no-man’s-land, beyond German law and public scrutiny. Just as it would be easier to murder Jews in the subjugated lands east of Germany, so it was easier to murder the disabled there, including German citizens.

A large SS regiment had been resident in the Free City of Danzig before the war, commanded by SS Sturmbannführer
⁵
Kurt Eimann. Eimann recruited several thousand members of the regiment into an auxiliary police unit that bore his name. Late in October 1939, the Pomeranian disabled were crowded into cattle cars and shipped into occupied Poland. The Eimann Battalion met the train at the railroad station in the town of Neustadt. In a nearby forest, Polish political prisoners labored to dig killing pits to serve as mass graves. Trucks delivered the disabled to the forest. The first victim was a woman about fifty years old; Eimann personally dispatched her with a
Genickschuss,
a shot in the neck from behind at the point where the spinal cord enters the skull. Historian Henry Friedlander quotes from postwar trial testimony: “In front of the pit [Eimann] shot the woman through the base of the skull. The woman, who had walked in front of him without suspecting anything, was instantaneously killed and fell into the pit.” During November 1939, further victims were transported from Danzig, filling the Neustadt pits with some 3,500 bodies. To eliminate witnesses, Eimann had the political prisoners who dug the pits murdered and the pits covered with dirt.

Friedlander found that essentially all the disabled in the Polish districts annexed to the Third Reich were shot into mass graves: 1,172 psychiatric patients in Tiegenhof beginning on 7 December 1939, for example; 420 psychiatric patients from the hospital in Chelm, near Lublin, on 12 January 1940. A Sonderkommando
⁶
formed of German security police from Posen and Lodz by an Einsatzgruppe leader, Herbert Lange, used moving vans fitted with tanks of pure carbon monoxide to murder patients throughout a former Polish province that was annexed to Germany as Wartheland. “After killing handicapped patients in 1940,” Friedlander adds, “the [Lange commando] possibly also killed Jews in the small villages of the Wartheland with these early gas vans.” “Little by little we were taught all these things,” Eichmann would explain without apology. “We grew into them.”

A secret annex to Germany’s nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union had divided Poland between the two powers. To claim Russia’s share of the spoils, the Red Army had invaded Poland from the east on 17 September 1939. Hitler assigned Himmler the work of expelling eastward more than eight million non-Germans from what had been western Poland and moving ethnic Germans westward out of the Soviet-occupied Baltic states to settle in their place. To launch the grandiose winnowing, Himmler ordered Eichmann to organize transportation for a half million Jews and another half million Gentile Poles. “I had to set up guidelines for implementation,” Eichmann recalled, “because those were the
Reichsführer
’s orders. For instance, he said, ‘No one is to take any more with him than the Germans who were driven out by the French.’ After the First World War, he meant, from Alsace-Lorraine, or later from the Rhineland and the Ruhr. I had to find out; at that time, fifty kilos of luggage were allowed [per person].” Himmler issued his expulsion order on 30 October 1939, setting February 1940 as a deadline. After 15 November 1939, the entire railway network of the area of occupied Poland that the Germans had named the General Government— central and southern Poland—was reserved for resettlement transports. Trainloads of Jewish and Gentile Poles began moving east in December. The victims were dumped in the General Government in the middle of Polish winter with no provision for food or shelter. An uncounted number died of exposure or starved, results that led the newly appointed and histrionic head of the General Government, Hans Frank, formerly Hitler’s personal lawyer, to declare in a public speech, “What a pleasure, finally to be able to tackle the Jewish race physically. The more that die, the better.” Himmler himself alluded to the devastating consequences of resettlement in a speech the following autumn to one of his battalions, bragging that Poland had been the place where, in a temperature forty degrees below zero, we had to drag away thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands—where we had to have the hardness—you should listen to this, but forget it again at once—to shoot thousands of leading Poles, where we had to have the hardness, otherwise it would have rebounded on us later. In many cases it is much easier to go into battle with a company of infantry than it is to suppress an obstructive population of low culture or to carry out executions or drag people away.

“It’s enough to make your hair stand up,” the Nazi propagandist Hans Fritzsche would remark after the war, “the childish way these philosophic dilettantes played around with populations as if they were playing checkers.”

The transfer of populations foundered as the demands of war production exposed the recklessness of deporting useful manpower, but mass executions of Poles and Jews continued in the General Government; more than one hundred such executions were carried out in the last months of 1939, accounting for at least six thousand lives.

Although the Wehrmacht had conducted mass executions while it was still fighting to subdue Poland, before the fall of Warsaw, those slaughters in its eyes had been disciplined and justified. In contrast, the army leadership was disturbed by the excesses of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland. It was not the victims’ suffering that disturbed the military leaders; they were hardly concerned with the victims. Rather, they were concerned with arousing Polish resistance and with the effect of the killings on the character and morale not only of Wehrmacht soldiers but even of the German nation. The most detailed assessment that survives, a memorandum by Eastern Territories Commander Johannes Blaskowitz, is bluntly prophetic:

It is wholly misguided to slaughter a few ten thousand Jews and Poles as is happening at the moment; for this will neither destroy the idea of a Polish state in the eyes of the mass of the population, nor do away with the Jews. On the contrary, the way in which the slaughter is being carried out is extremely damaging, complicates the problems and makes them much more dangerous than they would have been if premeditated and purposeful action were taken. . . .

It is hard to imagine there can be more effective material in the entire world than that which is being delivered into the hands of enemy propaganda. . . .

The effects on the Wehrmacht hardly need to be mentioned. It is forced passively to stand by and watch these crimes being committed. . . .

The worst damage affecting Germans which has developed as a result of the present conditions, however, is the tremendous brutalization and moral depravity which is spreading rapidly among precious German manpower like an epidemic.

If high officials of the SS and the police demand and openly praise acts of violence and brutality, then before long only the brutal will rule. It is surprising how quickly such people join forces with those of weak character in order, as is currently happening in Poland, to give rein to their bestial and pathological instincts. . . . They clearly feel they are being given official authorization and that they are thus justified to commit any kind of cruel act.

Descriptions of cruel deportations and drunken massacres were couriered back to Berlin and compiled into a dossier of accusations against the SS, and on 24 January 1940 Himmler took tea with Walther von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief East, to negotiate a truce.

No record of the meeting survives, but the excuses Himmler offered von Brauchitsch probably crept into a speech he gave a few weeks later:

Obviously it is possible in the east with the trains—but not only the evacuation trains—that a train freezes up and the people freeze. That is possible, that happens unfortunately with Germans as well. You simply cannot do anything to prevent it if they travel from Lodz to Warsaw and the train remains standing ten hours on the track. You cannot blame the train or anyone. That is just the climate. It is regrettable for Germans, it is regrettable for Poles, if you like it is even regrettable for Jews—if anyone wants to pity them. But it is neither intended, nor is it preventable. I consider it wrong to make a great Lamento about it.

To those who said it was cruel to march Poles off from their houses with little notice, Himmler went on, “may I kindly remind them that in 1919 our Germans were driven on a punishment trek across the bridges with thirty kilograms of luggage. . . . We have really no need to be crueller [than the French occupation forces were]; however, we do not need either to play the great, wild, dumb German here. Therefore we do not need to get excited about it.”

Discipline was the issue, Himmler agreed, not excess:

I will in no way deny that in the East—it is very well known to me— this or that excess occurred, where there was boozing, where people were shot drunkenly, people who would perhaps have been among those shot in any case, who however should not have been shot by people boozing—where looting occurred in the whole East, at times in a way, I must say, such as I had not imagined possible, by every possible office, by all possible people in all possible uniforms. But one does not excite oneself unnecessarily over that. In my view one has to grasp the nettle. . . . The question is merely whether you shoulder the load or you don’t shoulder the load.