Heydrich, for his part, habitually looked a very long way ahead, sometimes too far. We have had an example of this in his scheme for corrupting the German Church from within. Another plan of his, which was too ambitious to begin with, was the establishment of special Action Groups or Einsatzgruppen for policing the back areas of occupied territory—a plan which was drawn up in the summer of 1938, before Munich, to be put into effect when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia.
It was no fault of Heydrich’s that the Gestapo had to rely on outside help; but the fact that it did so rely complicates our picture greatly and makes it extremely hard to apportion the responsibility for this or that particular atrocity. It is impossible, furthermore, to consider the performance of the Gestapo in isolation; we are compelled to introduce into our narrative figures who did not belong to the Gestapo and who were not under the orders of the Gestapo, but whose activity, nevertheless, was an integral part of the Gestapo terror.
Thus, while the Gestapo was in no way responsible for the administration of the concentration camps, it possessed under Article 2 of the decree of the Reich President of February 28th, 1933, the exclusive right to send individuals into “protective custody” (e.g., a concentration camp). It was, moreover, charged with the task of grading the various concentration camps into three categories, from the mildest—e.g., Dachau—to the bloodiest—e.g., Mauthausen, which was an extermination camp. It had, moreover, permanent representatives in the camps, acting as “political advisers.” In a word, when the Gestapo committed a prisoner to “protective custody” it knew precisely what would happen to the prisoner, and desired it.
In the case of the camps designed primarily for immediate extermination—e.g., Auschwitz II (Auschwitz I was a labor camp), Belzek, Treblinka—the connection was even closer. For these camps were designed as part of the apparatus of the “final solution,” the extermination of the Jews in Europe. Heydrich was formally in charge of the “final solution,” and Eichmann and his subordinates who rounded up the Jews and arranged for their delivery to the gas chambers, which were built and maintained on their behalf, belonged, as we have seen, to Section 4b of the Gestapo. Thus the actual killings, carried out in the main by S.S. subordinates of the Concentration Camp Administration, were in fact ordered by the Gestapo.
The institution from which both the Gestapo and the S.D. tried hardest to disassociate themselves was the notorious Einsatzgruppe or Action Group. At Nuremberg the Defense went to extreme lengths of hair splitting to prove that the Action Groups were nothing to do with either the Gestapo or the S.D. as such, but were special-purpose units under Army command which happened to be led in most cases by men who happened to have belonged to the S.D. and also to include in all cases members of the Gestapo. When we come to consider the record of the Action Groups the reason for the anxiety of the Defense will be plain. But at the bottom of all the camouflage, there is documentary proof that the Action Group was in fact the brain-child of Heydrich and the special treasure of the S.D. And it is interesting that although the Action Groups did not get fully into their stride until the early days of the invasion of Russia, when they developed into an instrument of mass murder, the simple and logical end of the whole process of police rule, the idea had been thought up and committed to paper as early as 1938.
In an unsigned draft instruction to the S.D. we read:
“The S. D. should prepare to start its activity in case of complications between the German Reich and Czechoslovakia.…
“The S.D. follows, wherever possible, directly behind the advancing troops and fulfils duties similar to those in the Reich, which are the security of political life and at the same time the security as far as possible of all enterprises necessary to the national economy and so, also, of the war economy.…”
The document goes on to outline the manner in which the occupied territory is to be divided up—
“so that members of the S.D. intended for employment in Czechoslovakia can be immediately assigned to their tasks.”
It then introduces for the first time on record the concept of the Action Group, in general terms:
“The groups detailed for Einsatz from the Reich will be collected in a sub-sector corresponding to their intended sphere of activity.”
Later on in the document the Gestapo appears:
“Measures in Germany are carried out under the guidance of the Gestapo and with the assistance of the S.D. Measures in the occupied regions are carried out under the leadership of the senior officer of the S.D. Gestapo officials are assigned to certain operations staffs. It is important that, as far as possible, similar preparations, training, and the use of materials should be conducted in the Gestapo as in the S.D.”
Finally, the Waffen S.S.:
“It is necessary that an S.S. unit or Totenkopf unit be ready for disposal for special purposes.”
Here we have the ingredients, or most of them, of the unimaginable teams of murderers who, three years later, led by some of the most able members of Heydrich’s entourage, were to ravage the towns and villages of Russia in Europe, from Pskov to the Caucasus: the S.D., the Gestapo, the Waffen S.S.—to which were to be added elements of the Kripo and the Orpo. In 1938, however, the Action Group appeared to be stillborn. It was found no longer necessary to invade Czechoslovakia, and we have a countermanding instruction, issued to Dr. Best of the Gestapo, who was later to win fame as the most philosophically minded apologist for the Police State:
“The suggestion to introduce the Gestapo and the S.D., of which twelve detachments were provided for the Czechoslovakian frontier, will be subject to some modification as a result of the new situation arising from the fact that the Czechs may cede the Sudeten territory. Since some of the detachments will not be employed in the districts which will be ceded, we offer the following changes.”
If these documents appear somewhat vague, the reason is clearly that they form a scarcely measurable fraction of the mass of relevant papers which must have been in circulation and have since been destroyed. For suddenly, in a document dated September 13th, 1938, we find the Action Group no longer a concept but a concrete establishment:
“According to the new regulations … I enclose herewith a photostatic copy of the Einsatzkommandos organizational chart. The chart in its present form has been prepared by Department C.”
This communication is addressed to S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Jost, as Chief of the S.D. (domestic), and it is signed by S.S. Major Schellenberg, who was to be Chief of the S.D. (foreign). It means that the conception of the Action Group, as a special formation for policing occupied territory, was born in 1938 and in the office of Heydrich’s S.D.—which was later, at Nuremberg and elsewhere, to disclaim any organizational connection whatsoever, in a series of gigantic and impudent lies, with the Action Groups, or, indeed, with the Gestapo itself. It was, its members universally declared, purely an intelligence center with no operational functions of any kind. Schellenberg himself, who rose to be an S.S. major general and Himmler’s familiar, denied all knowledge of the Einsatzgruppen and all connection with the activities of the Gestapo. The fact that certain important members of the S.D. commanded certain Einsatzgruppen and supervised their massacres was declared to mean that they had been seconded from the S.D. and ceased to belong to it.
These documents, therefore, are of unusual importance. They penetrate the miasma of confusion and lies which surrounded the whole organization of the R.S.H.A. And they render in themselves all discussion as to the driving power behind the Einsatzgruppen, and the responsibility for the massacres, irrelevant and frivolous. The first document speaks of the Action Group; the second of “detachments” (twelve in number in Czechoslovakia); the third of Action Commandos. In the Russian campaign there came into being four Action Groups—A, B, C, D, each of which consisted of four Action Commandos, or detachments, operating far from Group headquarters. Each of the Groups was theoretically attached to, and under command of, the relevant Army Group; and in fact their commanders had
to negotiate with the Army Group Commanders, who knew very well the sort of work they were engaged in, and thus connived at it. But their operational instructions came from Heydrich’s office in Berlin, and their operational reports were not submitted to the Army, but only to the R.S.H.A., to which the Gestapo, Kripo, and S.D. all belonged.
Thus the Gestapo and the S.D. were collectively involved in, either directly or indirectly, the totality of the crimes against civilians and prisoners-of-war committed by the Nazis, with the exception of atrocities committed by individuals and units of the Wehrmacht, principally in Poland, Russia, and Yugoslavia, and by the Waffen S.S. on a far larger and more brutal scale (e.g., the massacre of American prisoners in the Ardennes and the reprisal raids in France, such as the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glâne).
It should not be thought that the Gestapo, or even Himmler, originated the régime of mass murder and terror. They were merely the willing executants of a policy conceived by Hitler and accepted with enthusiasm by his court. Once the Generals had bound themselves in their own eyes by taking their oath of allegiance to Hitler, there was no power in the Reich capable of resisting the Fuehrer’s most fantastic demands; but still Hitler was conscious of an imponderable weight of public opinion which caused him to go slow: for example, although at any time between 1933 and 1939 he would have been only too pleased to massacre all the Jews in Germany, he knew that this would arouse popular feeling against him to an extent which even he would find it impossible to ignore. It was not until the outbreak of war, with the imposition of wartime controls, and with the public mind diverted, that he felt safe enough to start his deadly action. Similarly, it was not until the invasion of Belgium and Holland in 1940, and the consequent preoccupation of the Western Allies, that he felt able to ignore foreign opinion completely and launch an out-and-out offensive against the defeated Poles. Only then was he in a position to realize to the full his dreams of destruction; and only then did the Gestapo and the S.D. begin to apply themselves to the technique of mass murder.
We have traced the conception of the Action Group back to 1938. But it would be wrong to assume that at that time Heydrich was thinking in terms of simple massacre. As far as the Jews were concerned, the idea of the “final solution,” if it existed at all, existed only in Hitler’s mind. Heydrich was deeply committed to the policy of blackmail and forced emigration, whereby immense sums passed from Jewry into the hands of the Gestapo. As far as the Czechs were concerned, Heydrich had no intention of using his Action Groups to murder them wholesale, but, rather, to establish the sort of terror existing already in Germany, involving the individual killing of leaders and intellectuals likely to prove troublesome.
It was not until Hitler revealed his intention of breaking Poland as a nation by killing off all natural leaders and intelligentsia that the Gestapo and the S.D. began to organize themselves for what was later to become known as genocide (until then it had been called mass murder). And it was not until after the opening of the Russian campaign that the special machinery required for killing in terms of millions rather than tens of thousands had to be set up. Heydrich and the Gestapo and S.D. invariably strove, if not always with complete success, to prove themselves equal to any demand; but the demand came first, from Hitler and the men of his immediate entourage.
Those who were loudest and most thoroughgoing in reinforcing Hitler’s fantasies should be remembered. They included Goering, whose nature we have examined (but Goering was sometimes the cause of confusion, cross-purposes, and administrative muddle because he demanded for his armament factories more and more workers, even including Jews, who were scheduled for the gas chambers); Ribbentrop, who developed into an enthusiast for destruction (he liked to think of complicated ideas, which had no appeal to the Gestapo, such as the fomenting of an uprising in the Ukraine which would end in total devastation and the extinction of both the Jews and the Poles); Bormann, Hitler’s familiar; and Field-Marshal Keitel, Chief of the O.K.W., Hitler’s spokesman to the Army, who somehow managed to add to the most atrocious Fuehrer order the taint of his own peculiar, craven heartlessness.
All the major policy decisions, many of them articulated in minute detail, came from Hitler himself and this inner circle. But they depended for their execution on others. Hitler, once he had given an order, was liable to forget about it and assume that it was being carried out to the letter. Shortly before his death, for instance, he was deeply shocked to find that Heydrich and Kaltenbrunner had failed in their task and that there were still a number of Jews alive in Europe: he had said they were to be exterminated “like bacilli”; therefore they had been exterminated. Similarly, in spite of Keitel’s insane obedience in translating his Fuehrer’s wildest fantasies into standing orders to the Higher Command, there were generals who, although they lacked the courage or the will to co-operate with their colleagues in open resistance to their master, nevertheless at times proved capable of ignoring orders and refraining from handing them on.
Himmler, however, treuer Heinrich, was the ever-obedient subordinate. And although he was never a member of the Fuehrer’s court, and was thus required only to execute the policy laid down by others, he occupied a place of his own. So deep were his own convictions (themselves based on Hitler’s prewar teachings) that his own orders, and his own adaptations of Hitler’s orders, added up to a power in their own right—certainly in all those cases where they had to do with the exaltation of Germanism and with the advancement of what Himmler took to be science. When it was a matter of destruction for destruction’s sake, or for the imposition of terror, Himmler was content to obey, sometimes apparently reluctantly. When it was a matter of destruction to prepare the world for the new German, or S.S., culture, there entered into his commands and exhortations a note of exaltation, mingled with rueful pride at the arduousness of the task. He sympathized with his men, who had to steel themselves for the sternest action in hard circumstances.
Thus we find him addressing the officers of three S.S. Divisions at Kharkov in 1943. He is talking about the projected extermination of the Jews in occupied Russia, and the “decimation” of the Soviet population:
“Very often the members of the Waffen S.S. think about the deportation of this people here. These thoughts come to me today when watching the very difficult work out there performed by the Security Police, supported by your men, who help them a great deal. Exactly the same thing happened in Poland, in weather 40 degrees below zero, where we had to haul away thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands; where we had to have toughness—you should hear this but also forget it again immediately—to shoot thousands of leading Poles.”
And again, to his S.S. Generals, at Posen, in the same year:
“I want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter.… I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It is one of those things it is easy to talk about—‘The Jewish race is being exterminated,’ says every Party member, ‘that is quite clear, it is our programme, elimination of the Jews, and we are doing it, exterminating them.’ And then they come, eighty million worthy Germans, and each has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an ‘Al’ Jew.”
And then he goes on to a passage already quoted:
“Not one of all those who talk this way has witnessed it, not one of them has been through it. Most of you must know what it means when one hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or one thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard.”
Himmler was not talking to members of the Security Police and S.D. on that occasion. He was talking to his own officers, the leaders of a force which was later, collectively, to deny all knowledge of such things.
It was when Himmler was carried away by visions that he appeared to be possessed by the mood of stoic exaltation reflected in those passages. But he could switch with the utmost ease to a crispe
r and more businesslike approach.
“Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology, it is a matter of cleanliness. In just this same way anti-Semitism for us has not been a question of ideology but a matter of cleanliness.”
He could, indeed, be very matter of fact. The Nazis always found it hard to make up their minds whether to kill prisoners (other than British and American) out of hand, or let them die of starvation and exhaustion, or preserve them as workers for Germany. At first, in the East, they invariably took the line of least resistance and killed; but later they were to regret this. And so we find Himmler again, at Posen, in October, 1943, mourning the masses of Russian prisoners captured in the early days of the war and now gone beyond recall:
“At that time we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it today, as raw material, as labor. What, after all, thinking in terms of generations, is not to be regretted, but is now deplorable by reason of the loss of labor, is that the prisoners died in tens and hundreds of thousands of exhaustion and hunger.”
But, though matter of fact, he was perpetually dominated by his vision of Germanism, and the S.S. as the elite of Germanism:
“It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be from this racial super-stratum of the Germanic people. In twenty to thirty years we must really be able to present the whole of Europe with its leading class. If the S.S., together with the farmers … then run the colony in the East on a grand scale without any restraint, without any question about any kind of tradition, but with nerve and revolutionary impetus, we shall in twenty years push the national boundary five hundred kilometers eastwards.”
Gestapo Page 13