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

by J. Lee Ready

  By now the SS einsatzgruppe had outlived their usefulness and these units were slowly being disbanded or altered. Brigadefuehrer Franz Stahlecker of SS Einsatzgruppe A had already become BdS for Ostland, and of his SS einsatzkommando chiefs Sturmbannfuehrer Rudolf Lange had become KdS for Latvia, Sturmbannfuehrer Walter Hoffman was appointed KdS for Minsk, and Standartenfuehrer Karl Jaeger was made KdS for Lithuania. They took their men with them, who entered the SD, Gestapo or Kripo, and thus were ‘legitimized’ again. Most of their hiwis found employment with the SS KZL.

  The einsatzgruppe, though primitive, and certainly evil, must be judged a success. Einsatzgruppe A had shot many Communists and dissidents in addition to 230,000 Jews. SS Einsatzgruppe B had shot 115,000 Jews, including 5,000 in one day at Dubno on 5 October 1941. SS Einsatzgruppe D had executed 92,000 people. In keeping with their ‘medical’ mission they received two more medical doctors to supervise firing squads: Einsatzgruppe D got Obersturmbannfuehrer Erwin Weinman, and Einsatzgruppe C received Obersturmbannfuehrer Josef Auinger.

  The figures for SS Einsatzgruppe C were not in yet, and they were still active. In July 1942 as Brigadefuehrer Curt von Gottberg arrived at Minsk as the new HSSPF for Byelorussia, SS Einsatzgruppe C was busy shooting 10,000 Jews near Minsk - half of them Byelorussian Jews, the other half German Jews. By late summer 1942 only elements of C and D were still active.

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  In April 1942 within Slovakia, an independent nation, young chubby faced Sturmbannfuehrer Dieter Wisliceny gained permission from the government of Roman Catholic priest Josef Tiso to arrest the nation’s Jews and entrain them for the death camps. To do this Wisliceny organized temporary SS einsatzkommandos, drawing people from the SD, Gestapo and Allgemeine SS, many of whom were local Volksdeutsch, and Tiso loaned him the Slovakian Police and Hlinka Guard [a sort of Slovakian SA]. However, there was a public outcry against the deportations, especially by the nation’s intellectuals, and finally after six months Tiso ordered a halt. But it was too late for 58,000 Jews.

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  By June 1942 Sturmbannfuehrer Christian Wirth, the inspector-general for Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, was complaining that the few actual Germans at these camps were overworked, which accounted for the delay in opening Treblinka. With no more than a hundred actual SS men for all three camps, he had to rely completely on his few hundred Estonian and Ukrainian hiwis for guarding the camps and herding the victims, and they in turn relied heavily on several hundred Jewish Sonderkommando for manual labor. There were 700 Sonderkommando at Belzec alone. Moreover as the workload got heavier Wirth was expected to build larger gas chambers. Fewer than half of the SS at these camps was actually German. The remainder was Austrians, Sudetens and Volksdeutsch.

  The kommandant of Treblinka, Sturmbannfuehrer Irmfried Eberl was completely out of his depth. As a T-4 boss he had exterminated 18,000 undesirables in eighteen months. He would now be expected to kill upwards of 10,000 a day!

  The small size of the guard at Belzec was one reason why the German Army units nearby felt they could hinder these exterminations. On 26 July the Belzec guards attempted to move into Przemysl ghetto to round up Jews for ‘special treatment’, but they found an army unit under Major Max Liedtke blocking their path and threatening to shoot them if they tried to pass. Naturally these bullies backed off. Later that day army troops under Oberleutnant Albert Battel forced their way at gunpoint past the local Polish police, entered the ghetto and ‘arrested’ several hundred Jews and took them to an army compound, declaring them to be civilian employees of the army and thus off limits to the Belzec killers.

  Perhaps emboldened by this move, a few weeks later Berthold Beitz a young German manager with the Carpathian Oil Company complained that 250 Jewish men and women at Boryslaw, who had been selected for ‘special treatment’ at Belzec, were in fact his employees and necessary to the war effort: the German word was Ruestungsarbeiter. He was lying, but his bluff saved them. He and his wife were in fact already hiding Jews.

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  In July 1942 the SS RSHA took over the administration of Westerbork Transit Camp in the Netherlands, though its Dutch SS guards remained. Eventually Obersturmfuehrer Albert Gemmeker was put in charge, and he soon had things running smoothly.

  This month French policemen rounded up 12,887 foreign-born Jews in Paris and took them to Drancy concentration camp located outside the city.

  On 17 July Himmler visited Auschwitz and Birkenau for two days, inspecting all ongoing construction with nodding approval, and then he watched the extermination process from start to finish as two trainloads of Jews arrived at Birkenau from the Netherlands. Himmler was well satisfied with the precision of the clockwork death process and he promoted Hoess on the spot. That night Hoess was able to boast to his wife and children.

  In honor of the late Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler renamed the final solution to the Jewish Question ‘Operation Reinhard’.

  In mid July the first transportations arrived at Treblinka. The new camp was fitted with two buildings containing ten gas chambers, each holding 200 persons. Carbon monoxide gas was piped in from engines placed outside the chambers. The bodies were then burned in open pits. However, Wirth soon approved the use of Zyklon-B to replace the truck engines.

  Obersturmfuehrer Johann Kremer arrived at Birkenau as a medical doctor, but found his duty was not to heal but to process prisoners for death. He saw gassings at first hand and was sickened, writing in his diary that he had come to the ‘anus mundi’. Yet he dutifully joined in the slaughter.

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  In July 1942 the Judenrat of Warsaw ghetto was secretly informed by Jewish members of the Gestapo that deportations of Warsaw Jews would soon begin. Thus it came as no surprise when the Gestapo arrested the wife of the leader of the Judenrat, to ensure they gained his compliance. In protest the Judenrat leader committed suicide. This dire act hardly impressed the Nazis. They surrounded the ghetto with German policemen of the 22nd Police Regiment, and also with Polish policemen and Lithuanian and Latvian schumas, following which fifty German SD and Gestapo entered the ghetto accompanied by 200 Latvian schumas and 200 Ukrainian schumas. They were assisted by the Jewish police. They began by asking to see work permits and arresting those Jews without them.

  Josef Szerynski, chief of the Jewish police in Warsaw, had been dismissed when the Kripo caught him with his ‘hand in the cash box’. His successor was Jacob Lejkin.

  After two weeks of arresting Jews in the Warsaw ghetto the senior SS officers were dissatisfied with the numbers, so they brought in more schumas from Latvia, Lithuania and the Ukraine and more German policemen.

  On 20 August a Jew shot and wounded Szerynski. This worried the Gestapo. The fact that a Jew hurt a Jew was irrelevant, but they wondered where a ghetto Jew had managed to acquire a pistol? Next day a Jew shot at some Ukrainian schumas.

  Nonetheless the arrests continued, and by 21 September the SS RSHA considered the operation to have been a success, for by their count 253,741 men, women and children had been arrested and sent for ‘special treatment’. Additionally about 2,500 Jews had been shot in the street for resisting arrest, or had been murdered by bored schumas. Many Jewish policemen had also been arrested, so that only 380 were left in the ghetto.

  On 29 October a Jewish ‘terrorist’ gunned down Jacob Lejkin and his bodyguard in a street in the Warsaw ghetto. Most Germans and Poles in Warsaw did not mind if Jews killed Jews, but the Gestapo realized the implications. Somehow Jews were getting firearms. The Gestapo knew through their informants that Warsaw’s Christian anti-Nazi resistance movement hated the Jews and would not arm them. Furthermore, the small numbers of Communist rebels were too few and too disorganized to handle this, and in any case they wouldn’t part with precious pistols, especially for Jews who were notoriously pacifist. The Gestapo and Kripo came to the conclusion that the Jews must be buying the guns on the black market. Meanwhile the Judenrat and their remaining Jewish policemen hunted high and low for th
e ‘terrorists’ and their weapons stash, but to no avail, and on 28 November someone shot dead a member of the Judenrat.

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  On 22 December 1942 in Cracow a Jewish resistance group blew up a cafe killing twenty Germans. The local SD and Gestapo shot forty Jews in retaliation by order of Oberfuehrer Julian Scherner the regional SSPF.

  By now the 24th Police Regiment [minus its 3rd Battalion] was constantly on the go looking for saboteurs and assassins in the Lwow area.

  During 1942 anti-Nazi resistance bands in the General Government killed 295 ‘Nazis’ [specifically 86 German policemen, 84 Polish policemen, 17 Ukrainian policemen and 108 Polish civil servants].

  The partisan situation in Poland was such that Oberfuehrer Heinz Roch, a combat veteran of the SS Totenkopf and SS LAH Divisions, was assigned a team of SD with the sole mission of protecting construction crews along one highway in Poland for an entire year.

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  At most execution sites the corpses had been buried, but the burning of corpses made better sense, because the death pits were usually not dug deep enough and a good rain often unearthed the cadavers. Moreover some senior Nazis started to wonder what would happen if the German people realized what was going on in their name. The German people still thought that Jews were being resettled in colonies in the east and that rumors of mass exterminations were like so many other wartime rumors - just so much hot air. It is not incredible that this should be so, for the British people were currently unaware of the brutality against native Africans and Asians done in their name, and in the United States the treatment of Negroes inside prisons, especially in the southern states, was horrific, but the public at large knew nothing.

  Besides, the German people had enough to worry about, what with Allied air raids and the lengthening casualty list of the Russian Front. Those Jews and Mischlings still free in Germany were as blissfully ignorant of the exterminations as were their Christian neighbors.

  Following the public outcry over T-4, the senior Nazis suspected that the German people would not approve of the mass killings of Jews if they learned of them, hence some SS KZL leaders began ordering that all corpses should henceforth be burned not buried. Thus another lie. They claimed to kill for idealism, but in truth these killers were not the party faithful proud of their deeds, but rather they were mere criminals, for only criminals hide the evidence of their deeds.

  Therefore open pit burnings began at Auschwitz-Birkenau in September 1942. In addition, the staff was told to dig up the 107,000 corpses already buried nearby and burn them, ostensibly to prevent the fouling of ground water. Recognizing this order to be horrific, the few Germans at the camp made their Ukrainian hiwis do it and the hiwis made their Jewish Sonderkommando do the grisly work.

  Himmler had become alarmed by the increasing number of victims of the NKVD found in shallow graves by the advancing Axis forces. And it has been suggested that Himmler was afraid the advancing Allies would discover his own handiwork, but this is clearly false for the Allies were not advancing in 1942, and Himmler was confident of a Nazi victory. Moreover, he dare not do anything that suggested to Hitler he had lost faith in victory. More likely he did not want future generations of Germans digging up his skeletons - literally. Therefore, he tasked Standartenfuehrer Paul Blobel with a gruesome mission. He was to create ‘Sonderkommando 1005’, the sole mission of which was to travel the ‘east’ and dig up the corpses murdered by the various SS einsatzgruppe and burn them. Blobel separated his unit into several small teams of Germans and hiwis, but they used Jewish slaves to actually perform the macabre task. Usually the Germans and hiwis just stood guard and remained permanently drunk on cheap vodka in order to withstand the stench and the sheer visual horror. Once a location was cleaned up they then shot their Jewish slaves and burned them, and then moved on to another site, commandeering more Jewish slaves as they did so.

  Himmler felt that Franz Stangl had done so well in the T-4 program and at Sobibor that he ordered him to take over Treblinka, where things had not gone smoothly under Eberl. Stangl left Sobibor under the competent administration of fellow Austrian Hauptsturmfuehrer Franz Reichleitner.

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  On 23 September 1942 a force of SD, Gestapo and Ukrainian hiwis entered the Polish Jew village of Tuczyn. They set the houses on fire and machine-gunned the people as they ran out. This incident was one of many such massacres.

  In November 1942 at Trawniki labor camp the guards were ordered to kill all of their workers that were Jews. At once the German civilian employers protested. The SS WVHA assured these businessmen that non-Jewish workers would soon be rounded up to take their place. And so the guards shot 10,000 Jewish workers. Indeed the instructors at the nearby SS KZL hiwi school took advantage of the occasion and loaned their trainees as shooters, as a sort of final exam. Of course the employers had really wished to save lives by their complaints, but they had to act like they simply needed warm bodies. They too lived in fear of the SD and Gestapo, and could not publicly show pity for Jews. One German employer in Cracow, Oskar Schindler, was arrested by the SD for simply kissing a Jewess on the cheek. Fortunately for Schindler several of his SS friends went to bat for him, including Amon Goeth, an Austrian SS KZL obersturmfuehrer. Goeth probably did it for friendship, but then again perhaps Goeth was afraid Schindler would tell the SD that Goeth was having an inappropriate relationship with his Jewish housemaid.

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  Chapter Twenty

  THE ANTI-PARTISAN WAR 1942

  The partisan conflict behind the German lines in Russia was immense and brutal and at times there were battles as large as the front line battles.

  Often a German army unit on its way to the front found itself diverted to hunt partisans or fight off ambushes. Indeed some units of trainees were diverted from their training schedule to hunt guerillas. The Waffen SS replacement transit depot at Bobruisk went one better, siphoning off sufficient new manpower to create the 500th and 501st SS Jaeger Battalions, whose sole job was to keep the partisans from interfering with the flow of replacements to the SS units at the front.

  The Walloon Legion had recuperated from its winter retreat and had been strengthened to 2,000 men by stretching their volunteer age to 16-45. They were now assigned anti-partisan duty. By now the darling of the legion was Leon Degrelle. Not only was he their political leader, but also he had joined as a grenadier and had held every rank available and had been wounded in action. Now a leutnant he had earned the respect of his men.

  As early as March 1942 the German Army had been forced to divert major forces to combat partisans: e.g. two panzer divisions and a security division to attack a partisan band in the Yelna-Dorogobuzh region, and even then they required air support. The partisans were found to possess infantry, horse cavalry, artillery and tanks!

  On 23 March 1942 Franz Stahlecker was ambushed and mortally wounded by partisans. He was replaced as BdS for the Ostland and head of Einsatzgruppe A by Brigadefuehrer Heinz Jost, a lawyer.

  In the spring of 1942 in the rear of Army Group Center the German garrison at Prigorye was wiped out by a partisan attack. In the Bryansk sector three Hungarian battalions battled partisans unsuccessfully, losing 400 men in the process. In the Crimea over a period of a few weeks partisans inflicted a thousand casualties on German units.

  Of great assistance to the combating of partisans was Hitler’s formal recognition of the hiwis and osttruppen in spring 1942. The hiwis were exuberant with their new status and gained a more homogenous look. From now on many a hiwi would be indistinguishable in his uniform from a German soldier, except that hiwis did not wear the German armed forces eagle on their uniform.

  In order to help keep the partisans under control the German authorities expanded the osttruppen. By summer 1942 the BNS - Byelorussian Popular Self-Defense Corps was enlarged to include no fewer than 55,000 men spread out throughout that country in part-time or reservist companies. The UNS - Ukrainian Popular Self-Defense Corps grew to inclu
de 180,000 men. The militias in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia [Aiszargi, Siauliai and Eesti Kaitseliit, respectively] were also expanded.

  Furthermore, Himmler authorized a considerable recruitment for policemen. The schumas were more like light infantry than burglar-hunters, and by summer 1942 the schuma recruitment drive was highly successful, raising its strength to three Polish battalions, eleven Byelorussian battalions, twenty-three Lithuanian battalions, twenty-five Estonian battalions, forty Latvian battalions and seventy-one Ukrainian battalions. As members of the Orpo they could be sent to any locale Himmler wished. One Lithuanian battalion was sent to Yugoslavia. Some Ukrainian schumas were deployed in France.