Masters of Death (49 page)

Near the end of the exhumations and cremations, when the workers understood that they would be killed and burned in their turn, they managed a daring escape out through the back passages of the Ninth Fort. The workers at Ponary and at Babi Yar, some of them, succeeded in escaping as well—at Babi Yar because one of the workers inexplicably found a key to the lock on the door of their prison block in a pocket of one of the 125,000 corpses they exhumed.

Blobel did not succeed in obliterating Einsatzgruppen massacres in the East. “According to my orders,” he concluded his affidavit, “my duties should have covered the entire area in which the
Einsatzgruppen
were employed. However, owing to the [German] retreat from Russia, I did not totally carry out my orders.” Many killing sites, now mounded over and overgrown with grass, some of them marked with memorial stones, many of them forlorn, have never been exhumed.

Himmler bloomed poisonously in the summer of 1942. One of his biographers, Peter Padfield, finds him “extraordinarily active,” his letters and speeches “full of confidence. . . . It may be that Heydrich’s departure had freed his spirit, it may be that the tasks he had won for himself in the East filled his horizons. He was at full stretch but at full power, and evidently relishing it.” In a meeting at Werwolf in mid-July 1942—Himmler drove down to Vinnitsa from his field headquarters in Zhitomir—Hitler had endorsed the Reichsführer’s detailed plan for clearing out the East and colonizing it with
Wehrbauern,
the
Generalplan Ost.
Felix Kersten got an excited report:

“You won’t understand how happy I am, Herr Kersten.” These were Himmler’s opening words. “The Führer not only listened to me, he even refrained from constant interruptions. . . . No, today he went so far as to approve my proposals, asking questions and drawing attention to important details.... This is the happiest day of my life. Everything I have been considering and planning on a small scale can now be realized. I shall set to at once on a large scale—and with all the vigor I can muster. You know me: once I start anything I see it through to the end, no matter how great the difficulties may be.”

I asked Himmler to lie down so that I could begin the treatment. He did not even listen to me, but continued: “The Germans were once a farming people and must essentially become one again. The East will help to strengthen this agricultural side of the German nation—it will become the everlasting fountain of youth for the life-blood of Germany, from which it will in turn be constantly renewed. These phrases opened my remarks to the Führer and I linked them with the idea of defending Europe’s living space, which I knew lay very close to the Führer’s heart. Villages inhabited by an armed peasantry will form the basis of the settlement in the East—and will simultaneously be its defense; they will be the kernel of Europe’s great defensive wall, which the Führer is to build at the victorious conclusion of the war. Germanic villages inhabited by a military peasantry and filling a belt several hundred miles wide—just imagine, Herr Kersten, what a sublime idea!

“It’s the greatest piece of colonization which the world will ever have seen, linked too with a most noble and essential task, the protection of the Western world against an irruption from Asia. When he has accomplished that, the name of Adolf Hitler will be the greatest in Germanic history—and he has commissioned me to carry out the task. . . .”

Himmler fetched out his papers, maps and plans, on which I saw villages and settlements marked everywhere, small and large farms, forests, but also sites for industry, traversed by a mighty network of streets, which were again linked up with a number of arterial roads stretching across the entire country. He put this before me and explained it in detail. . . . “Cowards are born in towns, [he said], heroes in the country.”

Generalplan Ost
was not a fantasy. It was a grandiose but real and ongoing project. Hitler had participated in its development and given it his approval. Himmler was well along in implementing the “small scale” part of it, which was German settlement in Zamosc and the extermination of the Polish and Eastern Jews. At full scale it projected the migration to the East over a thirty-year period of 4.5 million Germans and
Volkdeutsche,
including German-Americans repatriated from overseas when America was conquered, displacing 31 million “aliens” who would be “deported” to western Siberia. “Of the Polish population,” a Polish historian writes, “80 to 85 percent was to be deported, i.e., from 16 to 20.4 million; 65 percent of the population was to be deported from the ‘West Ukraine’ and 75 percent from Byelorussia.” But first the Jews, estimated to number 5 to 6 million, would be exterminated. Himmler’s order to finish murdering the entire Jewish population of the General Government by the end of 1942 followed his meeting with Hitler. Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were running at full tilt. “The
Reichsführer-SS . . .
has given us so much new work,” Globocnik wrote Karl Wolff, “that with it now all our most secret wishes are to be fulfilled.”

Secure in the Führer’s approval, Himmler allowed himself a private indulgence during an Auschwitz tour on 17–18 July 1942. On the first day of the tour he thoroughly inspected the camp and watched an extermination with Zyklon-B “without comment,” Höss remembered: “He just looked on in total silence.” In Minsk in August 1941 with Bach-Zelewski, the botched killing of two women had panicked Himmler; now he could watch a crowd of people murdered without batting an eye and go on to an evening of
Gemütlichkeit
with Höss, the local Gauleiter and their wives, even allowing himself to smoke a few cigarettes and drink a glass of wine.

On the second day of the Auschwitz tour, however, he requested a demonstration from Höss: “In the women’s camp he wanted to observe the corporal punishment of a woman who was a professional criminal and a prostitute. She had been repeatedly stealing whatever she could lay her hands on. He was mainly interested in the results corporal punishment had on her.” For such beatings the women were required to bare their buttocks. How Himmler responded to watching the naked beating Höss doesn’t say; he does say that the Reichsführer had long before “personally reserved the decision about corporal punishment for women.” But a more elaborate exhibition of sexualized cruelty at Sobibor during an inspection in February 1943 suggests that his subordinates had noticed that Himmler had come to take pleasure in seeing women tortured.

“For this occasion,” Padfield writes, “the
‘Gasmeister,’ SS-Oberscharführer
Erich Bauer, had selected some three hundred young and comely Jewesses; they had been fed and accommodated in the camp overnight. Now they were brought forward, ordered to strip and herded up the
‘Himmelfahrtstrasse’
[the “road to heaven”] from ‘Camp 2’ into the gas chamber at ‘Camp 3.’ The door was closed and they were gassed as a special offering for the
Reichsführer.
” An eyewitness, Sobibor inmate Moshe Bahir, confirms the perverse exhibition: “For Himmler’s visit, several hundred young Jewish women had been brought to Sobibor from Trawniki camp. They were put into the gas chambers, destroyed, and their bodies taken to the crematoria, all in order to demonstrate to Himmler and his entourage the efficiency of the work of destroying Jews at Sobibor camp.”

After the German defeat and surrender at Stalingrad on 2 February 1943, Hitler declared total war and suspended all postwar planning, which permanently stalled
Generalplan Ost.
Himmler retreated into duty. Poles continued to be expelled from Zamosc until July 1943; by then more than one hundred thousand residents had been moved out to make way for German settlers. Jews continued to be murdered in the death camps, at Auschwitz and in the East; by June 1943, Himmler noted, Hitler at Obersalzberg was declaring to him “that the evacuation [i.e., annihilation] of the Jews, regardless of the disturbances it will provoke in the next three to four months, must be ruthlessly implemented and endured to the end.” Murdering the Jews had become more important than winning the war. Murdering the Jews, in Hitler’s eyes, was equivalent to winning the war, even if it brought down ruin on Germany.

The brave Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April and May 1943 (during which Himmler himself at one point took control of the German forces), and uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor in August and October 1943, determined Himmler to exterminate the 45,000 Jews remaining in the slave labor camps around Lublin: Poniatowa,Trawniki, Majdanek. After Stalingrad the Munich resistance group White Rose had distributed a leaflet invoking retribution on the German forces: “In Russia thousands fall daily. It is the time of harvest and the reaper is in full swing among the ripe corn.” Now in Lublin Himmler ordered Operation Erntefest— Operation Harvest Festival—and the SS reapers gathered in the final sheaves of Eastern victims. Police and Waffen-SS conducted the massacres Einsatzgruppen-style, surrounding the camps and shooting the victims into killing pits. A Jewish underground group at Poniatowa resisted, returning the SS’s fire from a barracks, but the SS torched the barracks and burned the resisters alive. By the time of Erntefest Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor had finished their work and were closed and dismantled, the earth turned and forests planted of young trees far less numerous than the dead. Russian patrols approached the old borders of Poland, Latvia and Lithuania; the Red Army was advancing inexorably westward toward the Reich.

Himmler spoke at length to his Gruppenführers in Posen (Poznan) on 4 October 1943, the occasion of the annual SS leadership conference, frankly admitting what he and Hitler elsewhere strove to hide. He talked for three hours, reviewing the course of the war, the partisan war, the psychology of the Slavs as he understood it, the virtues of the SS man and much else. Early on, he acknowledged the privation deaths of Russian prisoners of war:

The Russian army was driven together into great pockets, destroyed, taken prisoner. We did not then value the mass man as we do now, as raw material, as manpower. Which is not a shame in the end, if one thinks in terms of generations, but it is regrettable today due to the loss of manpower: the prisoners died by the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands from exhaustion, from hunger.

He proclaimed German goodheartedness but with eugenic parsimony insisted it stopped at the border:

It is basically wrong for us to project our whole harmless soul and heart, all our good nature, our idealism, onto foreign peoples. . . . For the SS man, one principle must apply absolutely: we must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to no one else. What happens to the Russians, the Czechs, is a matter of total indifference to me. Whatever is available to us in good blood of our type, we will take for ourselves, that is, we will steal their children and bring them up with us, if necessary. Whether other races live well or die of hunger is only of interest to me insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise that doesn’t interest me. Whether ten thousand Russian women collapse from exhaustion in building a tank ditch is of interest to me only insofar as the tank ditches are finished for Germany.

We will never be hard and heartless when it is not necessary; that is clear. We Germans, the only ones in the world with a decent attitude toward animals, will also adopt a decent attitude with regards to these human animals; but it is a sin against our own blood to worry about them and give them ideals, so that our sons and grandchildren will have a harder time with them. When somebody comes to me and says, “I can’t build tank ditches with children or women. That’s inhumane, they’ll die doing it.” Then I must say: “You are a murderer of your own blood, because if the tank ditches aren’t built, then German soldiers will die, and they are the sons of German mothers. That is our blood.” . . . Everything else is froth, a fraud against our own people, and an obstacle to earlier victory in the war.

He expressed his contempt for those among his countrymen who worried about the outcome of the war— “I always grab one out of one hundred of the defeatists . . . and lay his head between his feet; then the others will shut up for a quarter of a year”—but warned that “everyone [in occupied Europe] who is a convinced Communist is automatically against us; every Freemason, every democrat, every convinced Christian is against us.”

Two hours along into his speech, Himmler spoke plainly to his Gruppenführers, as one criminal to another, about the Final Solution:

I want to mention another very difficult matter here before you in complete openness. Among ourselves, this once, it should be spoken of quite openly, but in public we will never speak of it. Just as we did not hesitate on 30 June 1934 to do our duty as ordered, to stand failed comrades up against the wall and shoot them, just as little did we ever speak of it, and we shall never speak of it. It was a discretion which, thank God, is a matter of course for us that counseled us never to discuss it among ourselves, never talk about it. It made everybody shudder; yet everyone was clear that he would do it again if ordered and if it was necessary.

I mean of course the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It’s one of those things that are easy to say. “The Jewish people will be exterminated,” says every Party member, “sure, it’s in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, can do.” And then they all come along, these eighty million good Germans, and every one of them has his decent Jew. Sure, the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew. Of all those who talk this way, not one has seen it happen, not one has been through it. Most of you know what it means when a hundred corpses lie side by side, when five hundred lie there or when a thousand lie there. To have gone through this and— apart from cases of human weakness—to have remained decent, that has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history, never written, which can never be written, but we know how tough we would have made it on ourselves if today, with the bombing raids and the suffering and deprivations of the war, we still had the Jews in every city as secret saboteurs, agitators and provocateurs. We would probably already be in the same situation as 1916 and 1917 if the Jews were still stuck fast to the body of the German Volk.