by J. Lee Ready
And there was another lie. For public consumption the SS claimed that all its members were fanatic volunteers, yet the SS had to cajole many members of the Gestapo and Kripo into joining up. This was not conscription, but neither was it volunteering. Indeed some Gestapo and Kripo personnel never did join the SS, but their abilities were so valuable that the SS recruiters backed down.
And yet another lie. Supposedly the SS was racially pure, not even accepting Alpine Celtics. Yet those members of the Kripo and Gestapo who agreed to join the SS did not have to meet the racial requirements. In fact some were first- and second-degree Mischlings: i.e. half-Jews and quarter-Jews!
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So Himmler the would-be cop was now satisfied, but Himmler the would-be general was not. In July 1936 Hitler involved Germany in the Spanish Civil War. He sent just enough air and ground troops to experiment with new tactics and equipment. They were known as the Condor Legion. He refused to let Himmler’s SS Verfuegungstruppe take part. Himmler took the huff.
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By 1937 Heydrich had taken an interest in his file clerk, the young Adolf Eichmann, because he had proven loyalty, had grown up in Linz, Hitler’s home town, and had even been taught by some of the same schoolteachers, and he had once worked for a Jewish company and had Jewish friends. Heydrich commissioned Eichmann to officer rank and assigned him responsibility for finding a “solution to the Jewish question”, because he understood ‘those people’. Emigration was still the preferred solution, so armed with his new responsibility Eichmann visited Palestine and Egypt [both under British control] and conferred with leading Arabs and Jews. He found indigenous Jews living happily enough among the Arabs, but immigrant Jews in Palestine had to go around armed to protect themselves. The Arabs did not mind Palestinian Jews, who spoke Arabic, but they saw the new immigrants not as Jews, but as ‘Europeans’, people who spoke Polish, Russian, German or Yiddish. Like any ethnic group facing mass immigration by foreigners they feared for the permanent loss of their land. Indeed the British were involved in a low-key guerilla war with those Arabs who refused to accept even a small influx of immigrant Jews to Palestine. The British decided that Eichmann was rocking the boat so they ordered him to leave. Of course Eichmann was simply on a reconnaissance and had no authority, but if he had succeeded in convincing the Arabs and British to allow major Jewish immigration, indeed to the creation of a small independent Jewish state, an Israel, then today the name Adolf Eichmann would be lauded among the Jews as a Righteous Gentile!
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While the ordinary German people spoke about the concentration camps only among trusted friends and even then only in whispers, they did applaud one move. In March 1937 the Kripo arrested over 2,000 habitual criminals in a lightning strike and without trial sentenced them to life imprisonment in concentration camps. At one fell swoop Germany was rid of gang leaders, mobsters and racketeers. Within the camps the more thuggish of these criminals were given control over other inmates as kapos or block leaders. Often they were more brutal than the guards.
Nazi Germany sits in history as an example of homicidal mania, yet it certainly did not start out this way. Otherwise, these habitual criminals would simply have been gunned down. Instead the Nazi state agreed to house and feed them for the rest of their lives!
By 1937 in addition to scores of small labor camps and concentration camps there were five large camps: Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg and the new Lichtenburg. All female prisoners were transferred to the latter. For administrative purposes Eicke made the kommandants of these big camps responsible for the smaller satellite camps. This structure applied to the guard units too. Each large camp was the headquarters of a wachtstandarte [guard regiment], which was divided into several wachtsturmbann [guard battalions]. Thus an SS KZL guard assigned to the Sachsenhausen Wachtstandarte might be physically based at a camp thirty miles from there. Eventually one hundred and seventy-four camps of some description would report to Buchenwald - concentration, labor, POW and transit. Dachau would ultimately be the head camp for one hundred and twenty-three sub-camps. Sachsenhausen would at one point in time lord it over forty-four camps including Oranienburg.
By this date Eicke had felt a need to visibly differentiate between the types of prisoners, so he made them recognizable by badges on their blue and white striped uniforms: a red triangle badge stood for a political prisoner; a green triangle was for an habitual criminal; a yellow one denoted a Jew; whereas a pink triangle identified a male homosexual; a black one signified a work-shy vagrant; and a purple triangle was for members of the Jehovah’s Witness Church, which was declared to be a criminal entity. Thus e.g. a racially Jewish homosexual Jehovah’s Witness vagrant would wear four triangles: yellow, pink, purple and black.
Male homosexuals were rounded up and imprisoned, but oddly enough not female homosexuals. Indeed in the nightclubs of the larger German cities these ladies paraded their sexuality. In Britain and the USA at this date all male and female homosexuals were imprisoned if discovered. In Germany lesbians were often harassed by the police, but no more so than before the Nazi takeover. Himmler’s thoughts were that a lesbian could be made to conceive a child, i.e. she could be raped, but a male homosexual could not be forced to sire a child. In other words male homosexuals were imprisoned by Himmler not because of their sexual deviance [as the British and Americans looked upon it], but because they were denying their seed to the tribe. It was as if Himmler looked upon human breeding in the same way as cattle breeding. A bull that would not copulate with a cow was useless.
Himmler declared that people of anti-social behavior could be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp fir reeducation, and in so doing he effectively gave the Gestapo the power of life and death over every ordinary German, for who was to say what constituted anti-social behavior? There were no trials or lawyers involved in this process. Many of these so-called anti-socials were incarcerated in the new concentration camp at Flossenburg east of Nuremberg, which would eventually become the headquarters of ninety-four sub-camps.
In 1937 Himmler had also gained control of TeNo, the government emergency repair organization that responded to storms, large fires and floods etc. He placed it under the Orpo. Within a few months he would also commandeer the national Fire Department including its own police force that protected firemen and investigated arson. He placed both under Orpo. Thus Himmler finished the year in an upbeat mood
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Chapter Six
ON THE MARCH
By 1938 Hitler was feeling very sure of himself. He had regained the Saar, remilitarized the Rhineland, thrown off the shackles of Versailles, rebuilt his armed forces and was even waging war in Spain, and no foreign power had dared challenge him. He now ordered his top people to concentrate on the Endloesung [Final Solution] to the Austrian question.
As part of this final solution Hitler had bullied the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schussnigg unmercifully, forcing him to appoint an Austrian Nazi, Artur Seyss-Inquart, to the position of Minister of the Interior and thus head of the Austrian police. However, Schussnigg believed the Austrian people would stand up to Hitler, so he ordered a vote to see if they wanted to be absorbed into Hitler’s Reich or to remain Austrian and free.
That did it. The Fuehrer could not afford a defeat at the polls. He secretly told Seyss-Inquart to invite the German Army into Austria. The lackey did as he was told and on the night of March 11, 1938, the German Army crossed the border into Austria, prepared for battle. But instead of bullets they met flowers thrown at their feet by rural right-wing Austrian civilians. The soldiers called it the ‘Battle of Flowers’.
Himmler had convinced Hitler to allow him to send two standarte of his SS Verfuegungstruppe across the border alongside the army, Dietrich’s SS LAH and Brigadefuehrer Walter Krueger’s SS Germania. By coincidence at this time the SS was issued a new uniform, which was gray in color: not the same shade of gray as the Army, but very close.1 From now on
SS men would wear their black uniforms only for parades and ceremonial guard duty.
German Army officers were angered at the sight of SS men looking like soldiers, because as far as they were concerned the SS Verfuegungstruppe were not soldiers but members of a civilian organization, and they thought Himmler was simply playing at ‘general’ with his ‘toy soldiers’.
The morning after the invasion Himmler became impatient and he flew to Vienna, the Austrian capital. Met by Seyss-Inquart he set up several regional SS headquarters in the country each with its own Sipo and SD, while Hitler and his army were still being feted at the border! In preparation for the invasion Himmler had created temporary companies of police consisting of ordinary city policemen drawn from all over Germany, and these companies entered Austria behind the army in case the Austrian police refused to obey Himmler. But ironically they were not needed because the Austrian police obeyed his orders without question.
In the German language Austria is Oestreich – Eastern Empire. Hitler now renamed it Ostmark [i.e. Eastern Border]. The Anschluss [unification of Germany and Austria] did more than just change Austria’s name. The unification opened up a whole new world for Himmler. Over the years he had already recruited several Austrians into an Austrian SS, and now he formally made the Austrian SS part of the German SS. He gave Brigadefuehrer Ernst Kaltenbrunner the job of running the SS in Austria. Another Austrian recruit was Franz Stangl, who had been a policeman in Linz. Himmler put him in the Gestapo, where he used his local knowledge to good effect. Standartenfuehrer Franz Stahlecker was made inspector of Sipo and SD in Austria. He had been born in Austria, but had been a resident of Germany for years. He was ex-Freikorps. Hitler appointed an SS engineer Odilo Globocnik to Gauleiter [District Leader] of Vienna. Another Austrian that quickly came to the notice of Himmler was Franz Reichleitner. However, Himmler brought Wilhelm Harster with him to head the police in Innsbruck. This SS man, only recently promoted to officer rank, soon outshone his peers and was promoted again within months!
Hitler agreed to allow Schussnigg’s vote to take place as scheduled, and not surprisingly the Nazis won. After all they counted the ballots.
The Austrian police now came under the orders of the Orpo, with Oberfuehrer August von Meyszner as inspector of the Orpo, and fellow Austrian Standartenfuehrer Josef Fitzhum as his deputy. This certainly must have been satisfying for Meyszner, who had retired from the Austrian police, only to be run out of his country for his Nazi sympathies. However, to Himmler’s disgust, Hitler appointed an Austrian police official, Walter Schimana, to be chief of the Vienna city Orpo. Schimana had served in the Austrian Army during the Great War, but his hometown had been conquered by the Poles following that war. Since then he had served in Austria as a policeman and had joined the Austrian SA. Soon after his promotion by Hitler Himmler made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, with the result that Schimana joined the SS as a reservist.
Ironically the German invasion also placed Interpol at Himmler’s disposal. This international police association was primarily an information-gathering center, and by its own rules whoever led the Austrian police led Interpol. Himmler, who had become de facto head of the Austrian police named Heydrich as chief of Interpol. The headquarters was soon moved from Vienna to Berlin. This did not stop foreign police forces from using Interpol. Indeed only after the Nazi takeover did J. Edgar Hoover of the American FBI convince the US government to join Interpol. He became the main liaison officer with the head of Interpol, i.e. Heydrich.
A few Austrian policemen resigned rather than serve the Nazis, and of course all known Jews and outspoken anti-Nazis were dismissed from the force. The remaining Austrian policemen willingly provided their new bosses with addresses of Communists, politicians, trade union stewards, Jewish community leaders, liberal writers and journalists, and all anti-Nazi Germans who had fled to Austria in the past five years. Himmler ordered all of these people arrested, and to aid the Austrian police in these roundups, he put Standartenfuehrer Franz Six in command of an SS einsatzkommando [temporary incident command], manning it with personnel drawn from various branches of the SS. Despite being a university professor and a high ranking Allgemeine SS officer, Six was only twenty-nine years old.
Heydrich placed Adolf Eichmann in charge of Jewish affairs in Austria with an office in Vienna. He was told to encourage the nation’s 200,000 Jews to emigrate. One of the first to leave was Sigmund Freud.
In order to house the vast number of Austrians that the Nazis planned to arrest Himmler personally established Mauthausen concentration camp at a stone quarry near Linz, and his SS HuB brought in slave labor from Germany to build it, and Eicke’s SS KZL prepared to guard it. Eicke took advantage of this to raise a fourth standarte for his SS Totenkopfverbaende from Austrian volunteers, naming it the 4th SS Ostmark Totenkopf, which would be barracked at Mauthausen. His other standarte were the 1st SS Oberbayern Totenkopf based at Dachau, the 2nd SS Brandenburg Totenkopf housed at Oranienburg and the 3rd SS Thueringien Totenkopf based at Buchenwald. This was confusing, and purposely so. Each member of these Totenkopf standarte was a reservist, and his full-time job was outer perimeter guard in one of the wachtstandarte. But not every member of a wachtstandarte was a member of a Totenkopf standarte.
The Allgemeine SS began recruiting Austrians at once to establish the 18th SS Cavalry Standarte and 11th SS Otto Planetta Fuss Standarte [Infantry Regiment]. Again these were reservists, except for a few select personnel.
Himmler also authorized Hausser to recruit a new SS Verfuegungstruppe standarte to be raised in Austria by Obersturmbannfuehrer Georg Keppler. Himmler named it SS Der Fuehrer, no doubt to ingratiate himself with Hitler. One of the first Austrians to join it was a thirty year-old civil engineer named Otto Skorzeny, who had the distinction of being one of the tallest members of the SS, an imposing figure with dueling scars on his cheeks. Another was twenty-seven year-old Ludwig Kepplinger. Each joined as a sturmmann. Obersturmfuehrer Willi Bittrich was brought to Austria to serve in the SS Der Fuehrer.
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During the invasion of Austria the SS Verfuegungstruppe had obeyed army orders like good little soldiers, and as a result, and with a nod from Hitler, Himmler had no trouble in getting the Army generals to begrudgingly accept the SS Verfuegungstruppe as a bona fide fourth branch of the armed forces. This was a major coup. From now on no member of the SS Verfuegungstruppe could be called to active duty by the German Army, Kriegsmarine or Luftwaffe, because members of this force now had equal status to those soldiers, sailors and airmen. That is, they were already on active duty. The army could no more draft an SS Verfuegungstruppe soldier than it could one of Goering’s Luftwaffe airmen. Furthermore, a nineteen-year old conscript could ask to be sent to the SS Verfuegungstruppe instead of the Kriegsmarine, Army or Luftwaffe, and he would have his wish granted if there were sufficient nineteen-year olds to fill the needs of these other branches. But, to guarantee them a place, it behooved those young men who wished to serve in the SS Verfuegungstruppe to volunteer at age eighteen before they could be conscripted by the others.
There was a private little reason for Himmler’s happiness, too. To whit, he learned another Nazi rival had been put in his place. The SA leader Viktor Lutze had recently created a fighting regiment of his own, the SA Feldernhalle Standarte. Moreover, he had honored Goering [an honorary SA member] with the title of colonel of that unit. It was obvious to everyone that Lutze hoped to place Goering in a subservient role. Reichsmarschall Goering played this Machiavellian game very well though, and wearing his colonel of the standarte hat he thanked Lutze for the promotion, but once he got back to his office he put on his Reichsmarschall of the Luftwaffe hat and he conscripted every member of the SA Feldernhalle Standarte into the Luftwaffe. He trained the best of them as paratroopers and offered the rest to the army, who put them into the infantry! Thus Lutze was completely outfoxed and instead of gaining a reichsmarschall he had lost a standarte! Hitler had of course watched this inside battle of wil
ls intently. Himmler breathed a sigh of relief that his SS Verfuegungstruppe could not be conscripted, now that it was equal to the Luftwaffe.
Himmler did not get all that he had asked for. He was refused permission to conscript. He had to rely strictly on volunteers, whilst the German Army, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe were able to call up any able-bodied civilian man aged 19-45. The generals and admirals wanted to keep Himmler’s SS Verfuegungstruppe as small as possible in case they had to fight it someday.
Nonetheless, this recognition coupled with Hausser’s brilliant training program began to instill a mindset within the SS Verfuegungstruppe soldiers that they were better than the other branches of the armed forces. There were myths galore about Hausser’s training methods, such as ‘always training with live ammunition’, ‘blowing up a grenade on one’s head’ and so on. Hausser allowed these ridiculous stories to flourish, hoping that any future enemy might be too scared to fight his ‘boys’.
Indeed as time went on these SS soldiers also began to think of themselves as better than the other departments of the SS. For one thing the personnel of the other SS departments were still civilians, even the so-called ‘soldiers’ of the Allgemeine SS and Eicke’s private army [the SS Totenkopfverbaende] despite having organized themselves into infantry and cavalry units. The SS Verfuegungstruppe were willing to risk their lives in battle for the cause. Were the others?
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Hitler had his eye on the liberation of the three million Sudetens and the destruction of Czecho-Slovakia. As part of this maneuver, the SD had picked some Sudeten Nazis led by Karl Frank to organize a low-key guerilla war in the Sudetenland against the Czech police.
German military intelligence, the Abwehr, also got into the act recruiting Sudeten Nazis. These included a businessman Oskar Schindler.