by J. Lee Ready
A German invasion of Czecho-Slovakia seemed imminent to everyone, so Hausser’s SS Verfuegungstruppe prepared for battle. However, the French and British, who had created the Czech state, now declared they would defend it. Therefore, everyone began to prepare for a full-scale European war.
Himmler assured Hausser that the SS Verfuegungstruppe would go to war in their existing units and would not be farmed out to the army as individuals. However, what of the remainder of the SS? Despite the fact that Himmler claimed they were all essential workers indispensable to the Reich, in the spring of 1938 several were called to active duty by the German Army, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe. When some Allgemeine SS were ordered to exchange their officer’s uniforms for those of army grenadiers [privates], they became angry and embarrassed. Furthermore, thousands of policemen were called up. Himmler charged his staff with coming up with a final solution to this question, namely how could they beat the system so that military mobilization did not equate to a shrinking of the SS and police?
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The Nazis were quite dismayed by the events at Evian, France in July 1938, where the American President Franklin Roosevelt convened a League of Nations conference attended by delegates from the 32 richest countries with the mission of helping the Jews flee Hitler. The conference resulted in complete inaction, because not one country would accept a major influx of Jewish immigrants. It was especially noteworthy that neither Canada nor Australia nor the USA, nations with plenty of room for new people, were willing to take a large number of Jews, nor would the British nor the French have them, despite the fact that between them these two currently controlled almost all of Africa and huge tracts of Asia, including the Holy Land, i.e. the biblical home of the Jews. This told Hitler that forcing the Jews to emigrate was no longer feasible. He was running out of options for his final solution to the Jewish question.
Still 1938 was a good year for Hitler and he felt strong enough to challenge German public opinion in some quarters by declaring the Confessing Church to be illegal. Its leader Pastor Martin Niemoller was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp.
In August 1938 Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria opened for business. Eventually this camp would spawn forty-nine satellite camps - concentration, labor and prisoner of war, with almost 6,000 guards under the capable direction of Sturmbannfuehrer Franz Ziereis, whose previous job had been army unteroffizier in charge of five men.
There was a new ‘question’ begging for a final solution. Specifically, what to do with prisoners that had been sentenced to life imprisonment and who had become too frail to work. Should the taxpayer support them for the rest of their lives? Himmler’s final solution was to have them transferred to a highly secret extermination center at Hartheim, commanded by Obersturmfuehrer Franz Reichleitner. There they were given ‘special treatment‘.
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Hitler proved to be as adept at diplomacy as he was at running a police state and in October 1938 he convinced the British and French to back off. All he wanted was to liberate the Sudetens, he declared. Taking him at his word, the British and French convinced the Czechs to withdraw their troops from Sudetenland to avert war. On 15 October 1938 the German Army marched into the Sudetenland. Once again the soldiers found flowers strewn at their feet. Alongside the troops marched two of Hausser’s standarte, the SS Deutschland and SS Germania.
Behind the army marched the 2nd SS Brandenburg Totenkopf and 3rd SS Thueringien Totenkopf Standarte. This was Eicke’s first attempt to have his units taken seriously. He had ordered his SS KZL camp kommandants to double guard shifts etc. in order to cover for those guards that had been called to active duty in these two Totenkopf standarte. In some cases reservists of the Allgemeine SS were called to pitch in.
Meanwhile Himmler gave orders to the Sudeten police to round up a list of known undesirables. To assist them he established two temporary incident groups [einsatzgruppe], each divided into temporary incident commands [einsatzkommando]. To man them he borrowed members of the Gestapo, SD, Kripo and Allgemeine SS. He put an SS lawyer Standartenfuehrer Heinz Jost in command of SS Einsatzgruppe Dresden and Standartenfuehrer Franz Stahlecker in charge of SS Einsatzgruppe Wien. They also had another mission: to expel all those Czechs who had come into the Sudetenland over the last nineteen years to steal jobs and homes from the local Sudetens.
Many Sudetens wanted to join their liberators. Twenty-nine year old Willi Brandner entered the SS as an oberfuehrer. Himmler gave him such a high rank after taking into consideration his experience in the Czech Army and his pro-German history. Nineteen year old Franz Grohmann was another recruit, as was seventeen year old Franz Riedel.
Oskar Schindler wondered how he could make a profit now that his Abwehr services were no longer needed.
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Hitler was feeling his oats by now, but his next anti-Semitic move was actually instigated by the Poles who decided to revoke the citizenship of Polish Jews who were living outside Poland effective 1 November 1938. As a result on 28 October 1938 Hitler ordered the arrest of 17,000 Jews of Polish birth currently living in the Third Reich. The police rounded them up and kicked them across the border into Poland before the deadline. By the Third Reich Hitler meant not just all of Germany, but Austria and the Sudetenland too.
Himmler, Heydrich and Eichmann had been planning several events that would force the remaining Jews to emigrate, and on 7 November 1938 they were presented with a golden opportunity. Ernst vom Rath, third secretary in the German Embassy in Paris, was fatally shot by Herschel Grynszpan, the 17-year old German-born son of one of the deported Polish Jews.
In anger at the murder the Nazis throughout the Reich went on a rampage against the Jews. Actually it was very noticeable to the general public that the rioters were all SA and Allgemeine SS and that they had thoughtfully informed the police and fire departments of their intentions before they went on this ‘spontaneous’ rampage. Moreover, it was the fifteenth anniversary of the Munich Putsch.
The result was Reichskristallnacht - Imperial Night of Crystal, the Nazi poetic term for the night of November 9 when the Nazis ran amok smashing up Jewish homes and businesses [the broken glass was the ‘crystal’]. More than 7,500 premises were destroyed. Naturally many Jews tried to defend their property and 20,000 were arrested for this ‘crime’.
Eicke was stunned, because he was the Inspector of Concentration Camps, and it was his job to suddenly find housing for these 20,000. Obviously they had to be crammed into the prison huts like sardines until more camps could be built. In fact Eicke was informed by Obersturmbannfuehrer Karl Koch that his camp at Buchenwald was already full. Eicke passed on Koch’s warning to Himmler that any more overcrowding would cause a disease epidemic. Himmler relented and ordered the release of most Jews over the age of fifty. Koch was only concerned that he would have been blamed for the epidemic. He certainly had no compassion for his prisoners and he would often publicly beat them in one of his drunken rages. His wife Ilse was a guard at the camp and was as brutal as he.
The German government now ordered the Jews to pay for the damage, so that German insurance companies would not lose out.
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The expansion of Germany in 1938 took on a two-fold strategy. On the one hand by counting Austrians and Sudetens another eleven million racial Germans (the old trio of Nordic, Germanic and Alpine Celtic) had been incorporated into the Third Reich. But on the other hand Hitler had gained non-Aryans living in those territories. Therefore the Aryan ‘tribe’ as Hitler called it had to work overtime to continue purging itself of its non-Aryan members. To put it in Hitler’s words, the tribe was cleansing itself as a human body rids itself of parasites in order to become clean and healthy. Thus the pressure on Jews to emigrate.
But as if the race laws were not confusing enough, those Aryans in positions of power that had Jewish spouses chose to put pressure on the Nazis for exemptions for their spouses. The conclusion to this situation was that in 1938 Hitler agreed th
at such Jewish wives and husbands would be left alone if they agreed to raise their children as Aryans. This did not necessarily mean as Christians, for Hitler had established a state religion that was a mish-mash of Christianity, Germanic paganism and pure bull winkle. It gained few converts.
Another lobby that managed to gain exemptions for Jews was the organization of war veterans, who successfully acquired legal protection for those Jews who were decorated war heroes of the German or Austrian armed forces.
All this chopping and changing of the racial restrictions kept the Gestapo on their toes. After all, how could they keep track of Jews, when they were not sure what a Jew was?
There was another ‘parasite’ race in Germany, as far as the Nazis were concerned: the Romany Gypsies. Though there were no more than an estimated 30,000 of them in the Third Reich, the Gestapo had a department handling them. New laws gave the SD the right to imprison Gypsy community/tribal leaders and force the remainder into emigrating. Gypsies married to Aryans and living the Aryan life-style were allowed to remain free for the time being, though they were watched.
The new Nazi laws were also designed to force Negroes to emigrate. The Nazis even banned Jazz and Blues music, because these were Negro creations and thus ‘inferior’.
However, it must be placed into context that at this stage the treatment of Jews, Gypsies and Negroes was no worse in Germany than in many other so-called civilized nations of the time. As for the concentration and labor camps, several nations had those, though only the Soviets had a camp system of a size to rival Hitler’s.
Soon new laws were enacted that affected Mischlings, restricting their promotion prospects and social advancement. Of particular interest to devout Christian Jews and Mischlings was the new ban on their attendance at a church service. This in turn affected the whole congregation if the Jew or Mischling in question happened to be the pastor or priest. Indeed, if anyone bothered to think for a moment, the law banned Jesus from entering a church!
It quickly became obvious to the persecuted that the only way out of this race trap was to emigrate or gain a friend in high places: there were always exemptions to be had if you knew whom to massage. E.g. Goering promoted Luftwaffe colonels Helmut Wilberg and Guenther Sachs to general rank, though he knew they were Mischlings. Most significantly he promoted another Mischling, Erhard Milch, to generalfeldmarschal and gave him one of the top jobs in the Third Reich. Milch even entertained Himmler in his home.
The army retained many Mischlings, including Wilhelm Behrens and Werner the Baron of Maltzahn, both of whom would rise to general rank, and General Karl Zukertort and his two sons, who were junior officers, and his brother General Johannes Zukertort.
The Kriegsmarine [German Navy] was the least Nazi of the armed forces and so continually fought against implementation of anti-Mischling laws, retaining a higher percentage of Mischlings than the other branches, such as Admiral Gunther Lutjens.
Himmler too played the exemption game. When he visited Milch’s home he knew of Milch’s racial background, because one of his senior SS officers, Fritz Hermann, was married to Milch’s sister [who of course was as much Mischling as Milch]. Hence another lie: that wives of SS men had to be racially pure!
There is evidence that the wife and son of Friedrich Jeckeln a high-ranking SS officer were Mischlings. If true, Himmler would have known this, yet when Friedrich’s son Klaus was killed on the Russian Front Himmler hand wrote a touching letter to Friedrich expressing his condolences!
The lie went further. Peter Sommer rose to the rank of Obersturmbannfuehrer in the SS, though Himmler knew he was a Mischling. Himmler knew that SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Vivian Stranders was a Mischling [and possibly fully Jewish]. Curt von Gottberg, who rose to high rank in the SS, put his career on the line by asking Himmler for exemptions for eight of his Mischling relatives. Himmler granted them.
Erich von dem Bach Zelewski was not only a senior SS officer but a friend of Himmler’s, and two of his sisters had married Jews and his wife’s cousin was married to a Jewish financier. Zelewski was on jovial terms with all of them. Zelewski himself was part Kashubian, a Slavic race.
Himmler recruited Odilo Globocnik into the SS as a senior officer. Globocnik was an Austrian citizen whose hometown, Trieste, had been under Italian control since1919. Himmler knew that Globocnik was not racially Austrian [i.e. Nordic, Germanic or Alpine Celtic], but rather was Magyar and Slovene, and thus was racially inferior according to the SS manual.
Moreover Himmler was aware that the German, Austrian and Sudeten police had retained almost all their Mischlings!
But there was one fellow that Himmler may not have known about, the Jew Eleke Sirewiz, who falsified his papers, took another name, Fritz Scherwitz, enlisted into the SS, passed through officer’s school and volunteered for the SS KZL.
However, it is possible that even if Himmler did not know about Scherwitz, Heydrich did and kept quiet for a reason we shall never know. This was after all good blackmail ‘dirt’.
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Himmler took the huff again on 14 December 1938 when Hitler gave Hermann Goering the job of resolving the “Jewish Question.” Soon Goering was demanding that Heydrich and his Sipo speed up the emigration of Jews. But it was getting more difficult, Heydrich countered, for no country wanted them. In turn Heydrich gave his subordinates such as Eichmann more powers to get the job done.
In any case Himmler was busy with other things. This month his SS KZL opened a new concentration camp at Neuengamme near Hamburg, built by a sonderkommando [a special command] of slave laborers brought from Sachsenhausen under the orders of the SS HuB.
Once Neuengamme was built, several sub-camps were constructed that would report to the main camp. Inmates either worked for SS-owned companies or private firms. In time ninety-six such camps would be administered from Neuengamme.
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In 1939 Hitler turned to the final solution of the Czech question. The Czechs still controlled the homes of a half million Volksdeutsch, i.e. people who spoke German in their home and lived a German/Austrian lifestyle. These were left over from the pre-1919 days when this entire region was part of the Austrian Empire, and Hitler declared his new aim was to liberate them. On 15 March he literally bullied Emil Hacha the Czech leader into surrendering his country. German troops marched in immediately. They were not met by flowers, but neither were they met by bullets.
Hitler announced that the Czech homeland would henceforth be a Reich Protectorate. The Slovakian half of the country declared its independence this same day, and Hitler recognized this. The Ruthenian section of the country declared independence this same day. Hitler recognized it. Hungarian and Polish troops also drove in to steal slices of territory on this same day. Within hours the Hungarians had conquered Ruthenia. Those Volksdeutsch of Slovakia that had expected ‘liberation’ by Hitler felt betrayed. Hitler merely asked the new Slovakian government that he be given some latitude in dealing with their Volksdeutsch minority, but he did not demand the annexation of their neighborhoods. This is evidence that the concept of Germanic tribalism preached by Hitler was just so much nonsense. It was a lie, pure and simple.
The British and French were stunned. In just twenty-four hours their Czech ally had been killed, and the Germans, Hungarians and Poles had picked over the carcass like vultures. Only now did they realize that Hitler’s promises had all been lies. Even some Germans began to question the legitimacy of this move, for now Hitler controlled seven million Czechs. The liberation of Volksdeutsch was one thing, but the conquest of Czechs was something else. In a knee-jerk reaction the British government guaranteed the sovereignty of Poland. To many this seemed asinine. Poland was one of the three aggressors, and yet the British now prepared to defend Poland if she was attacked. But the British looked at it this way: currently 640,000 Volksdeutsch lived in Poland in areas that had either been part of the German Empire or the Austrian Empire, but had been conquered by the Poles in the period 1919-23. The British were su
re that Poland was next on Hitler’s shopping list.
Meantime the Sipo and SD moved into the Czech Protectorate at once, while the Orpo sent Polizei Oberst Rudolf Querner to take over the Czech police. Himmler had finally convinced Querner to join the SS reserves. These Germans handed out lists to the Czech police containing names of known anti-Nazis, plus a list of proscribed occupations such as trade union leaders, and also the names of Germans, Austrians and Sudetens who had fled here to escape the Nazis, and they ordered the Czech police to arrest everyone on the list. In case the Czech police would not respond adequately Querner had brought with him temporary companies and battalions of ordinary German policemen, such as Polizei Hauptmann Morawietz’s company of Hamburg cops, and Himmler authorized the recruitment of Sudetens and Czech Volksdeutsch into two new Orpo police regiments for the region: named Boehmen [Bohemia] and Maehren [Moravia]. However, the Czech police obeyed the Nazis like robots!
The use of temporary formations of SS [einsatzkommando and einsatzgruppen] had proven effective in the invasions of Austria and Sudetenland. All had since been disbanded except for Einsatzgruppe Wien. So Himmler raised four new SS einsatzkommando by borrowing personnel from various SS departments, and he placed them under Einsatzgruppe I in the Protectorate at the towns of Prague, Kolin, Pardubitz and Budweis to assist the police. The Prague SS Einsatzkommando was given to forty-seven year old Otto Rasch, one of the most intellectual of the Nazis. A doctor of law as well as political economy, he was also a linguist and businessman, and he had soldiered bravely in the Great War. He was a member of the SD. Stahlecker’s Einsatzgruppe Wien was renamed Einsatzgruppe II and given a headquarter in Bruenn in the Sudetenland, where it would control three einsatzkommando at Bruenn, Olmuetz and Zlin.
Eichmann soon moved into an office in Prague to organize the emigration of Jews from the Protectorate.