SS und Polizei: Myths and Lies of Hitler's SS and Police

by J. Lee Ready

  There was another guerilla army, the Cetniks raised from ethnic Serbs from all over Yugoslavia. However, their leader, Draza Milhailovich, was horrified by the retaliation killings of innocent people, and he finally called off all attacks against the occupiers, but when his attempt to unify with the Titoists went sour, fighting broke out between Cetnik and Titoist - a war within a war.

  There was a third conflict here too. The Croats [who were Roman Catholic] had turned hundreds of thousands of Serbs [who were Orthodox Christian] out of their homes in a campaign of ethnic/religious cleansing. As a result local Cetniks began attacks on the Croatians.

  The Croats also expelled Moslems, who quickly formed their own militia - a fourth conflict.

  Furthermore the Croats butchered Jews and Gypsies. In fact German Army officers continually complained about Croat brutality.

  In yet another war within a war the Cetniks hunted down Moslems. Indeed the German administrators had trouble keeping up with who was killing whom.

  Within the Banat district immediately north of Belgrade there were several Volksdeutsch villages. The German Army assured these people that their newly established Heimwehr part-time militia would protect them, but SS recruiters convinced many a young man here that the Heimwehr was insufficiently trained, and they talked them into joining the SS Einsatzstaffeln, a new full-time militia that would protect these villages from partisans.

  The German Army could not conscript these Volksdeutsch as they were legally Serb citizens, but they could ask for volunteers, and they quickly filled three infantry battalions and a rail security battalion.

  In January 1942 Tito’s forces launched a major attack into Serbia, which was resisted by the Serbs [police, border guards and soldiers]. Naturally the Serbs screamed for German reinforcements. German General Paul Baader responded by counterattacking the Titoists in freezing snow-covered mountains with his 342nd Infantry and 718th Security Divisions, while three Bulgarian divisions were moved up to protect his rear. The Germans and Serbs succeeded in driving the Titoists into Montenegro, where Tito’s forces were immediately assaulted by Cetnik partisans, Moslem militia, Italian infantry, and Italian and German warplanes.

  Meanwhile Himmler took note of the ‘good blood’ in the Volksdeutsch areas of Yugoslavia and he sent his recruiters there to raise a new formation for the Waffen SS, the SS Prinz Eugen [Prince Eugene] Mountain Division, which would be commanded by Brigadefuehrer Arthur Phleps. Himmler expected the unit to fight in Russia, but with the Titoists still on the prowl he knew they might have to fight on their own turf first before being available for duty in Russia. Supposedly these men were racially acceptable to the SS, though they were Serb or Croat citizens. However, in order to make up the numbers the SS recruiters were quite lax in their racial selection, taking in many who were barely Volksdeutsch in appearance and some who could not even speak German. So much for the spirit of the racially ‘superior’ SS. Another lie.

  The German 64th Police and 322nd Police Battalions were also sent to Serbia to help keep partisan raids to a minimum. Many members of the 322nd did not like this new duty, because, unlike the helpless Jewish civilians in Byelorussia they had been murdering, the partisans shot back!

  Yet Himmler was not getting sufficient volunteers, so he told his recruiters to get tougher, which at times appeared more like forcible conscription than a request for volunteers. Even then not enough men could be induced to serve. Therefore, to fill the ranks Himmler confiscated the Banat SS Einsatzstaffeln. Naturally these militiamen reminded the SS that they had only volunteered to defend their own villages. Their complaints were ignored and they were ordered to report to the SS Prinz Eugen. So much for the claim that the Waffen SS was an all volunteer force. Another lie.

  In January 1942 the Serb Police began rounding up Jews and handing them to the SS KZL, who set up an extermination camp at Zemun. Within months they would kill 15,000.

  __________

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE FINAL SOLUTION TO THE JEWISH QUESTION

  Hitler had agreed with Himmler, Goering and Heydrich that the Endloesung [final solution] to the Jewish question could only be the physical extermination of that race. However, there is no known date that this occurred. Himmler had raised the SS einsatzgruppe in spring 1941, but had only unleashed them in June 1941 and then only within the German-occupied portions of the Soviet Union. In Poland a few officers of the SS RSHA had started executions of Jews on a small scale. Within the Axis the Romanians and Croats were killing off their own Jews without input from the Nazis. The Hungarians were openly anti-Semitic, but they at least allowed their Jews the right to live, and indeed had placed many able-bodied male Jews in unarmed military labor battalions. The French were only arresting immigrant Jews and as yet were incarcerating them not killing them. The Slovakians, Bulgarians, Spaniards and Finns had so far refused to inaugurate anti-Semitic legislation. At Hitler’s urging Italy had introduced some anti-Semitic measures. E.g. Mussolini was no longer sleeping with his Jewish mistress Margherita Sarfatti.

  It does appear that the decision arriving at the final solution was made before June 1941. The shipment of German Jews to the operational zones of the SS einsatzgruppe does seem to have been a deliberate act.

  Ultimately the SS leadership came to the conclusion that the methods of the SS einsatzgruppe were inadequate as they caused undue suffering among the German personnel, so a more ‘humane’ form of killing was sought. Furthermore it was dangerous to operate along partisan infected roads, so stationary extermination centers were required, so that the victims could be taken to the killers, not the other way around. But they had to be built in a safe area – outside the range of Soviet partisans and outside the range of British bombers. Moreover the area had to have a good rail network so that the Jews could be taken to the killers [opposite of what was currently happening]. Poland was the obvious choice, and by coincidence this region [Wartheland and General Government] had a large Jewish population.

  Furthermore as these extermination centers were set up in German-occupied Poland rather than in the western fringes of the German-occupied Soviet Union it does seem that Himmler expected future victims of these camps to come by rail from Poland and from the nations to the south and west of Poland, but not from the east and north, because the Soviet rail system used a different gauge than the Polish rail network. Passengers crossing this border by train had to disembark and change trains. This would cause a bottleneck if the passengers were prisoners on their way to a death camp. In any case there would be no need for transportations from the Soviet Union because the einsatzgruppe were already taking care of the Jews in that vast terrain. In other words the very location of the new death camps was proof that the killers intended to murder the Jews of Western and Southern Europe.

  In December 1941 in occupied Poland at Kulmhof [Chelmno] near Lodz an extermination camp began operations under the overall control of the HSSPF of the Wartheland. The camp was to be provided with victims by the Jewish Police of Lodz ghetto. Led by Chaim Rumkowsky, these policemen made sure that recently arrived Jews from countries other than Poland were the first to be put aboard the trains for Kulmhof. A new rail line and platform had been built inside the camp and the inner perimeter guards of the SS KZL met each train. The train’s guards, also members of the SS KZL, had ridden in passenger cars, but the Jews had been packed into freight cars so tightly that many had died of suffocation but had not fallen. When each train arrived the inner perimeter guards ordered black-uniformed Ukrainian hiwis to unlock the doors on the freight cars, and as they did so the Jews tumbled out. The few Germans on the scene then informed the prisoners they had a short van ride ahead of them. This was true. A few at a time boarded the van, which drove them to a burial site. By the time the van arrived the passengers were dead, having been killed by carbon monoxide from the engine exhaust, which was fed into the sealed rear compartment. This van had been brought from the T-4 extermination center at Soldau. At the burial site a sonderkomm
ando [temporary special command] of concentration camp inmates including Jews opened the vans, aired them out and then dragged out the corpses. Then they began to salvage anything that could be sold by stripping the dead of their money, clothing, jewelry, gold teeth and ladies’ long hair, and in some cases cutting out a nice tattoo, following which they dumped the bodies into a large pit. Kulmhof, like other such camps, was run on a shoestring budget and the resale of clothing, jewelry, watches, gold teeth, spectacles and hair would help offset the budget expenditure. Meanwhile the van was already on its way back for another load.

  Kulmhof’s vans killed thousands of Jews and also many German political prisoners and about 5,000 German Gypsies. In its first four months of operation Rumkowsky’s Jewish Police alone provided the camp with 55,000 victims.

  Kulmhof’s Ukrainian hiwis came from two sources. The SS KZL had offered inducements for hiwis to leave the SS einsatzgruppen and come work for them. One of the inducements was that the hiwis would no longer have to travel through partisan infected country. The SS KZL also chose to hire their own hiwis, and Sturmbannfuehrer Karl Streibel set up an SS KZL hiwi school at Trawniki labor camp. Here the SS KZL trained Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Byelorussians and Poles in much the same way as they trained their German recruits, with the addition of a basic German language course. One of the trainees was a teenager, Samuel Kunz.

  __________

  In Liepaja Lithuania in December 1941 the local SD organized a reprisal for anti-Nazi partisan activity, specifically the shooting of 3,000 local Jews. The massacre was performed by the Lithuanian 21st Schuma Battalion.

  __________

  In spite of the secrecy that Himmler insisted upon regarding the T-4 euthanasia program within the Reich, some medical personnel spilled the beans and some relatives of the victims found enough evidence to blow the whistle before they could be arrested. T-4 became public knowledge and there was an immediate public outcry in Germany. By August 1941 Hitler, fearing that this response from the German people would spur others to investigate the rumors of the murder of helpless Jewish civilians by the einsatzgruppe, ordered Himmler to officially shut the T-4 program down. Hitler then attempted to distance himself from it. However, unofficially the T-4 killings continued, often at concentration camps. An estimate of 70,000 Germans murdered by the T-4 program from 1939-45 is as accurate as any. The killing of newborn infants in maternity hospitals also continued.

  Kurt Gerstein was one of those who were appalled by T-4 with his realization that his own sister-in-law had been murdered by the T-4 program. Aged thirty-six he should have been serving in the military, but he was a medical student and therefore had a draft deferment. Moreover, he had already been in trouble with the SD for defending his staunch Protestant views, even if his own religious leaders refused to do so, and he had been arrested and sentenced to a period of confinement in a concentration camp. Having survived this, he was under no illusions as to how brutal the Nazis could be. But he decided to continue to fight the Nazis, this time from within, and he enlisted into the SS KZL. That he was obviously an anti-Nazi was evidently overlooked in the eagerness to gain one more recruit, and this is proof that the SS recruitment regulations regarding ‘character’, ‘clean police record’ and ‘proven political loyalty’ were just so much gibberish. More lies.

  Clemens August the Count of Galen, who was also the Roman Catholic Bishop of Munster, was equally appalled by T-4 and publicly said so. Bernhard Lichtenburg, a Roman Catholic priest and politician, also publicly spoke out against T-4. Unfortunately their superiors in the Roman Catholic Church, including the pope, had already been bought off by Hitler and they remained relatively silent on the matter. The leading Protestant churches were equally insensitive to the continuing evidence of Nazi brutality. The SD took notice of anyone who complained and eventually they arrested Galen and Lichtenburg.

  __________

  In January 1942 at Birkenau, the newest satellite camp of the Auschwitz complex, a small team of inner perimeter guards and Ukrainian hiwis under orders from Sturmbannfuehrer Rudolf Hoess, began regular killings of Jews and other undesirables using Zyklon B crystals, which were poured through the air vents of cellars packed with people. The victims were told they were entering delousing showers, hence the removal of their clothing and the shaving of their heads before they entered the cellars. But instead of water, a gas poured out of the shower heads. After several minutes the shrieking ended. The doors were opened to air the rooms, and then prisoners of a sonderkommando dragged the bodies out and searched for jewelry and gold teeth, before burying the corpses in a mass grave. The description of the cellars as showers not only enabled the German and Ukrainian guards to peacefully convince the new arrivals to enter, but the removal of clothing and hair beforehand prevented them from being contaminated by the Zyklon B, so that they could be resold.

  The Zyklon B had been delivered to the camp by a squad of SS men commanded by none other than Kurt Gerstein, who, when he learned of the purpose of the poison, secretly informed several Jewish community elders and foreign embassies.

  __________

  Reinhard Heydrich was still busy recruiting specialists. He took Walther Rauff into the SD full-time after the man left the Kriegsmarine.

  In addition to running the SS RSHA Heydrich had become the ruler of the Czech Protectorate. This had come about because Hitler decided that his first choice of ruler for the Czechs, Konstantin von Neurath, was far too soft on the Czechs. They were unruly, and acts of sabotage and riots were creating disorder.

  Heydrich jumped into his new position in the Protectorate with relish, but ironically he behaved totally different from that which was expected. Under his orders the SD and Gestapo began executions, it is true, but when the list of victims was published - itself an oddity - the people realized that in addition to saboteurs and other such ‘terrorists’ the dead included black market operators, known gangsters and war profiteers. Many were Volksdeutsch. Some were actual Germans. A good number were Czechs whom their own people would have loved to strangle with their bare hands. One was Premier Elias who had collaborated with the Germans shamelessly.

  Furthermore, Heydrich increased the food ration, introduced better working conditions and showed respect to the Czech Police and Czech culture. Even his treatment of Jews appeared more humane. He established a ghetto at Theresienstadt in Sudetenland to incarcerate famous Jewish people, whose disappearance would be noticed by the world, and it would also house Jews who had served in the German or Austrian armed forces. The ghetto was crowded to be sure, but compared to the other ghettoes it was positive luxury. The ghetto even had outdoor cafes and classical orchestras. An SS public relations team made movie newsreels of the Jews here, and the Czechs watched these in their cinemas with the comment: ‘They live better than we do.’

  Soon Heydrich was so confident, claiming “My Czechs will never harm me,” that he lived in Prague with his wife and children and rode to work in an open topped chauffeured car without an escort.

  In addition to his positions as head of the SS RSHA and Reichsprotektor of the Czechs, Heydrich had also gained control of the final solution of the Jewish question. As part of this responsibility, Heydrich’s Jewish expert, Adolf Eichmann, helped him organize the Wannsee Conference, which would be held at an office in Berlin. This conference has been hailed in the post war world as the death knoll for the Jews. But clearly this is completely wrong. Its purpose was not to decide when the killings of Jews should begin, for that had already begun, and everyone invited to the conference already knew this, but rather its purpose was to decide when the killing should stop.

  The conference took place on 20 January 1942. Besides Heydrich and Eichmann, the following gentlemen were in attendance: Gauleiter Dr. Meyer and Dr. Georg Leibbrandt, both representing Rosenburg’s ministry for the occupied eastern territories; Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart representing the Ministry of the Interior; State Secretary Neumann, who was the Plenipotentiary for the [economic]
Four Year Plan; Secretary of State Dr. Freisler representing the Ministry of Justice; Josef Buehler, Frank’s representative from the General Government; Dr. Martin Luther, Ribbentrop’s representative from the foreign office; Oberfuehrer Gerhard Klopfer of the Nazi Party Chancellery; Ministerialdirektor Kritzinger, Hitler’s representative from the Reich Chancellery; Gruppenfuehrer Otto Hofmann chief of the SS RuSHA; Gruppenfuehrer Heinrich Mueller head of the Gestapo at the SS RSHA; Oberfuehrer Eberhard Schoengarth the HSSPF for the General Government; and Sturmbannfuehrer Rudolf Lange, the commander of an SS einsatzkommando and the KdS for Latvia.

  Here Heydrich exhibited a completely opposite attitude towards humanity than he did in Prague, almost as if there were two Heydrichs.

  It is interesting that only seven of those attending were members of the SS, and only five of those were here in their SS role: Eichmann, Hofmann, Mueller, Schoengarth and Lange. Heydrich was here as the director of the Final Solution. Klopfer was representing the Nazi Party. Furthermore Eichmann liked to brag that he was in a very senior position in the SS, but in truth he was never more than an administrator. Here he was merely an advisor and was not even invited to sit at the table. Lange was there as a witness. In other words of the decision makers eight out of thirteen were not SS. The conference was in reality a meeting of civil servants. Moreover, most of them were mere representatives of their departments, not the heads. Only Heydrich, Mueller and Hofmann were department chiefs. Where were Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Rosenberg, Frank, Ribbentrop, Goebbels and the other leading Nazis?