The Himmler's SS (17 page)

1.
to assist in sustaining large racially valuable families

2.
to look after pregnant women of good race

3.
to care for the children of racially suitable unions

Maternity homes were quickly set up at Hohehorst, Klosterheide, Polzin, Steinhöring and Wienerwald, and Himmler took an intense personal interest in them. Every detail fascinated him, from the shapes of the noses of newly born infants to the volume of milk produced by nursing mothers, the most prolific of whom received Mothers' Crosses and other special recognitions. Any babies appearing with mental or physical handicaps were smothered at birth and, so far as the mothers were concerned, were said to be ‘still-born'. Despite the contemporary salacious rumours about brothels and ‘SS stud farms', only a small percentage of children appearing from the Society's homes in peacetime were illegitimate. The establishment of the Lebensborn homes was a genuine attempt by Himmler to provide free but high-quality maternity care for the poorer SS families.

The outbreak of war in 1939 stimulated the Reichsführer to remind all members of the SS that it was now their most urgent duty to become fathers. On 28 November, he issued the following instruction:

Order to the SS and Police
.

Every war involves a shedding of the purest blood. A multitude of victories will mean a great loss of it, but the death of our best men will not in itself be the ultimate consequence. What will be worse will be the absence of children who have not been procreated by the living during the war, and who most certainly cannot be procreated by the dead after the war. Regardless of the civil law and normal bourgeois customs, it must now be the duty of all German women and girls of good blood to become mothers of the children of SS soldiers going to the front. Official guardians will take over the wardship of all legitimate and illegitimate children of good blood whose fathers have fallen in the war, and the Chief of the RuSHA and his staff will observe discretion in the keeping of docu-mentation relating to the parentage of illegitimate children. SS men must see clearly that, in complying with this order, they will perform an act of great importance. Mockery, disdain and noncomprehension will not affect us, for the future belongs to us!

H. H
IMMLER

It was the same concern to ensure the future of the race which was behind Himmler's subsequent ‘Special Order' of 15 August, 1942. It indicated that when an SS family had only one son left, and he was of military age, he would be withdrawn from the battlefield and sent home for anything up to a year, or at least long enough to find a mate and make her pregnant, so as to ‘preserve his lineage'. Therefore, no justification could exist for SS men to fall short of their biological duty. In fact, failure to carry it out hampered their careers. By virtue of a Himmler memorandum issued in February 1944, all recommendations for the promotion of married SS officers had henceforth to include details of their date of marriage, age of wife, number of children and date of birth of the last child. Where the last child was born more than two years previously, and where the wife was not over forty years of age, an explanation had to be added as to why no more children had been conceived. If there was no sufficient explanation, the application for promotion would be rejected. In a similar vein, a forty-four-year-old bachelor, SS-Hauptsturmführer Franz Schwarz, was threatened in 1943 that if he had not married within the year, he would be dismissed from the SS!

The Lebensborn Society continued to operate until the end of the war, and new SS maternity homes were opened up in Oslo, Schwarzwald, Schloss Wegimont in Belgium, and Taunus. Suitable foreign children, usually war orphans and even infants who had been torn from their Polish, Czech or Russian families by VOMI officials because they were recognised as being of Nordic descent, were accepted into Lebensborn homes to be adopted by childless SS couples. Ultimately, more than 80,000 non-German children were thus ‘Germanised' by the SS.

As SS racial policies expanded and developed, so too did the departments charged with their administration. Darré's Race and Settlement Office achieved Hauptamt status on 30 January 1935, as the SS Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt or RuSHA, the SS Race and Settlement Department. It was therefore one of the three oldest Hauptämter in the Reichsführung-SS, and by 1937 consisted of the following seven ämter:

In the general reorganisation of the SS administration which took place in 1940, RuSHA, like the SS Hauptamt, lost some of its functions and retained only the Rassenamt, Sippen- und Heiratsamt, Siedlungsamt and Verwaltungsamt. It was thus stripped down to the bare essentials for continuing the work indicated by its title. Nevertheless, in spite of this restriction in its field of activity, the volume of work undertaken by RuSHA necessarily increased with the progress of the war. That was due partly to the physical expansion of the SS, and partly to the repatriation of racial Germans from Russia and the Balkans and their resettlement in Germany and the occupied areas of Poland.

The main duty of RuSHA was to translate into practice the general racial theories of SS ideology. To assist in the execution of its policy it had a special officer (Führer im Rasse- und Siedlungswesen) on the staff of each Oberabschnitt, and Family Welfare Offices (Sippenpflegestellen) set up in the larger towns of Germany and the occupied territories. With the racial laws of the SS as a basis, it was the task of RuSHA and its agencies to supervise the selection and breeding of SS men and to foster the general well-being of the SS in accordance with its code of ‘tribal solidarity'. RuSHA was the only competent authority for checking the racial and genealogical records of SS recruits. In peacetime, and in wartime so far as the Allgemeine-SS was concerned, these checking procedures were strictly adhered to. With the rapid expansion of the Waffen-SS after 1940, however, the racial rules became something of a dead letter for its 750,000 rank and file. During the war, the hard-pressed RuSHA authorities were content to accept a signed declaration of Aryan descent from enlisted German and west European Waffen-SS men, which could be investigated later when the opportunity presented itself. RuSHA was also responsible for issuing one-year marriage permits, or Heiratserlaubnis, on behalf of the Reichsführer-SS, granting his approval for SS personnel to wed. Another of its functions was to keep the Sippenbuch, or Family Book of SS members, and it compiled a register of all SS men willing and suited to become colonists in the occupied territories. In addition, RuSHA was responsible for SS and police welfare, particularly the maintenance of orphans and widows of SS and police men killed in the war, and the care of families and dependants of SS men serving in the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in all cases of distress, hardship or private difficulty. By 1944, RuSHA had absorbed the Hauptfürsorge und Versorgungsamt der Waffen-SS und Polizei (HFVA), the Waffen-SS and Police Welfare und Pensions Department. The rehabilitation and retraining for civil or administrative posts of war-disabled SS men formed a further part of the work of RuSHA, and for that purpose it controlled two training schools at Schleissheim and Mittweida and a craft school at Bernau near Berlin. Moreover, there was a very close cooperation between RuSHA and Lebensborn in view of the overlapping nature of their work and, while Lebensborn was technically subordinated to the Hauptamt Persönlicher Stab RfSS, RuSHA was the normal channel through which it received its instructions from Himmler.

Darré headed RuSHA until February 1938, when he quarrelled with Himmler and left to concentrate on his government career as Minister of Agriculture. He was succeeded by Obergruppenführer Günther Pancke, later HSSPf in Denmark, and in July 1940 by Obergruppenführer Otto Hofmann, subsequently HSSPf in Oberabschnitt Südwest. The last chief of the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt was Obergruppenführer Richard Hildebrandt, who took over in April 1943. Although Hildebrandt had an active appointment abroad as HSSPf Black Sea during 1943–4, he did not relinquish his post as Chef RuSHA. His deputy, SS-Gruppenführer Dr Harald Turner, covered for him during his absence in Russia.

A cornerstone of SS racial policy was the desire to reunite the Volksdeutsche with their German relations. When the Nazis came to power, millions of these Volksdeutsche, or ethnic Germans, were living in central and eastern Europe. Ever since the Middle Ages, their ancestors had moved eastwards from their original German territories to find new lands and livelihoods. Settling in an enormous region stretching from the Baltic states in the north to the Volga and the Caucasus in the south, these migrants formed closely knit communities that remained independent of their neighbours and retained strong ties of kinship with the old ‘Heimat'. They had their own association, the League for Germans Abroad, or Volksbund für das Deutschtum in Ausland (VDA), which was taken over by the NSDAP in 1930 and put under the direction of Werner Lorenz, a former First World War pilot who owned a vast estate near Danzig and had the reputation of being something of a
bon vivant
. Lorenz joined the SS in 1931, and his sophisticated lifestyle, combined with his unique ability to be equally at ease with diplomats and peasant farmers alike, soon brought him to Himmler's attention.

From the outset, the Nazis were counting on ethnic Germans to augment their new Reich's depleted population and help in its ultimate expansion eastwards. Himmler in particular vowed to take German blood from wherever it could be found in the world, and to ‘rob and steal it' whenever he could. To that end, an agency of the NSDAP known as the Büro von Kursell was formed in March 1936 to co-ordinate attempts to encourage the return of the Volksdeutsche to Germany. In 1937 it was renamed the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle or VOMI, the Department for the Repatriation of Racial Germans, and put under the direction of Lorenz, now an SS-Obergruppenführer. Under Lorenz, VOMI performed so efficiently that in July 1938 Hitler increased its power by allowing it to absorb the VDA and similar agencies, bring together rival factions in the ethnic German communities, and generate money to build recreational facilities and hospitals and spread Nazi propaganda. As an SS-inspired aside, VOMI also investigated the politics of individual ethnic Germans, and began compiling files on those suspected of opposition to the Führer. Although VOMI was not formally incorporated into the Allgemeine-SS structure until 1941, Himmler very quickly made it his own instrument. He infiltrated SS men into the department from its earliest days, and persuaded its existing staff to join the SS. The Reichsführer also installed as Lorenz's deputy an SS colleague, Gruppenführer Dr Hermann Behrends of the SD, by which means Heydrich was soon using VOMI to plant SD officials in far-flung communities of ethnic Germans in eastern Europe.

Himmler first exercised his new-found authority in foreign affairs in Czechoslovakia. Created after the old Austro-Hungarian empire was carved up in 1919, Czechoslovakia was home to more than 3 million people of German descent. Most of these Volksdeutsche lived in the country's western part, the Sudetenland, and their presence became a wedge by which Hitler began to splinter the Czech republic in 1938. He used VOMI and the SS to continuously penetrate Sudeten communities. SD
agents provocateurs
played upon the grievances of the Sudeten Germans, who had been hard hit by the depression and felt mistreated by the Czech government, and SS funds subsidised the pro-Nazi Sudeten German Party under Dr Konrad Henlein. Heydrich won the allegiance of Henlein's deputy, Karl Hermann Frank, and VOMI helped form a secret fifth column to subvert the Czech government in the event of a German invasion. However, the mere threat of armed conflict was sufficient for the Czechs to cede the Sudetenland to Germany as of 1 October 1938. Henlein became Gauleiter of the area, and both he and Frank were rewarded by Himmler with the rank of SS-Gruppenführer.

The emergence of the SS as a force in foreign policy had relegated von Ribbentrop's diplomats to a back seat during the Sudeten crisis, and Hitler again looked to VOMI and the SS as he plotted to take over the rest of Czechoslovakia. Late in January 1939, the Führer assigned Heydrich and other leading members of the SD key roles in the final dismemberment of the country. Hitler's plan hinged upon provoking trouble in the eastern provinces of Slovakia, where nationalist feelings had been stirred by the events in the Sudetenland. A team of SS men led by Gruppenführer Wilhelm Keppler set off bombs in Bratislava and put the blame on the Slovaks. VOMI organised street demonstrations and SD groups led by Heydrich's troubleshooter, Alfred Naujocks, carried out further acts of provocation. On 15 March, rather than risk war, the Czechoslovakian President agreed to German ‘protection' of the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, while Slovakia became a German puppet state and Hungary grabbed the easternmost and last remaining province, Ruthenia. Late in August 1939, Hitler turned to the SS once more to provide his excuse for invading Poland. Heydrich dreamed up scores of incidents which could be attributed to Polish extremists and thus justify a German attack. These were played out by a dozen teams of SD men and police officers under the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Müller. The most important of the bogus raids, codenamed ‘Operation Himmler', was launched by Alfred Naujocks against a German radio station at the border town of Gleiwitz on 31 August. The following day, citing the Gleiwitz incident as the reason for his actions, Hitler declared war on Poland.