The great scandal that shamed the SS-Police came from a totally unexpected source. For several years, Kurt Daluege had been afflicted by a rash of absences caused by bouts of mysterious illness. Then, on July 5, 1943, Daluege officially stepped down. This finally ended the “Himmler-Daluege-Heydrich” triumvirate; Himmler was alone in command of the SS for the first time since 1929. The death of Heydrich in 1942 had rocked the regime; Daluege’s demise because of the regressive effects of “congenital” syphilis was a body blow to the SS-Police establishment.64 Hitler had spent seven pages of Mein Kampf arguing for the combating of syphilis and had attributed it to the moral collapse of Germany. He blamed his predecessors: “Particularly with regard to syphilis, the attitude of the leadership of the nation and the state can only be designated as total capitulation…. The fight against syphilis demands a fight against prostitution, against prejudices, old habit, against previous conceptions, general views among them not least the false prudery of certain circles.”65 Thus, at the point when Hitler was about to lose the initiative in the war, the man he had written of as “my honour is loyalty” (Meine Ehre heist Treue) was cast out in shame. Daluege became a non-person within the regime. Hitler, as good as his word, shunned Daluege for the rest of the war.
Bach-Zelewski immediately broke off his relationship, while Himmler was later forced to warn Daluege not to cause intrigues. The only confirmation of Daluege’s circumstances comes from Albert Speer who briefly convalesced with him.66 Himmler remained embarrassed about Daluege, informing the gathering of senior SS officers at Posen,
Our old friend Daluege has such severe heart trouble that he has to undergo courses of treatment and now has to retire from active service for one-and-a-half to two years … we may hope that Daluege will have recovered in about two years and can then return to the front and get into harness.67
Daluege was replaced by Alfred Wünnenberg, a career police officer. Wünnenberg was an accomplished soldier-policeman but not a political soldier of Daluege’s calibre. The difference between the two concepts was profound and further indicates why Himmler did not give the job to Bach-Zelewski. The choice of Wünnenberg points the way toward Himmler’s thinking: the Order Police was reduced in political stature although its role remained crucial to Bandenbekämpfung. There was another significant change in the Order Police organization: the Kolonialpolizeiamt (discussed in chapter 2) was closed in 1943. Its commander, Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, became a Waffen-SS corps commander.
On August 20, Hitler sacked Wilhelm Frick and replaced him with Himmler as minister of the interior. This centralized the vast German legal and state bureaucracy and the SS completing the Nazi national security state.68 At the same time, Bach-Zelewski was gradually introduced into the grand circles of the regime as part of his grooming for high office. On August 7, Himmler, no doubt aware of the events to follow, held a meeting with Wolff and Bach-Zelewski, who had taken time out during Operation “Hermann.” Seven days after Himmler’s promotion, he met with Bach-Zelewski and Prützmann. Bach-Zelewski also held meetings to engage liaison officers from many institutions to his new office, a standard routine within the regime. One venue for these meetings was Göring’s Air Ministry building in Berlin. On August 31, Bach-Zelewski met Wünnenberg and Maximillian von Herff to discuss his influence over Order Police personnel policy. Herff was chief of SS personnel and had a major influence over the whole SS-Police organization. Meetings held on September 4 were especially significant because of their strategic prominence. The first discussions involved the role of the Luftwaffe in Bandenbekämpfung operations. Luftwaffe chief of staff General Korten opened discussion on the role of the Luftwaffe in “bandit war” (Bandenkrieg). That evening Bach-Zelewski met with General Wagner. On September 21, Bach-Zelewski met with Artur Nebe, the former Einsatzgruppen commander and associate during the “Barbarossa” pogroms, and Major General Dahlem, another of Göring’s senior staff officers. The next day, Himmler and Bach-Zelewski consulted with Grand Admiral Dönitz and three admirals, a continuation from earlier in the year. In October, Luftwaffe colonel Dr. Bormann, a Knight’s Cross recipient, became Bach-Zelewski’s senior Luftwaffe liaison staff officer. On December 12, 1943, Bach-Zelewski was introduced into Himmler’s “circle of friends” (SS-Freundeskreis, RFSS), a gathering of industrialists and business leaders, almost certainly to discuss labor matters.69 However, this ended as the situation on the Eastern Front deteriorated and Bach-Zelewski was ordered to defend Kovel (discussed in detail in chapter 8). In October 1943, Himmler, after a turbulent year, was able to present further expansion from the new office in his presentation of the infamous Posen speech:
I considered it necessary for the Reichsführer-SS to be in authoritative command in all these battles, for I am convinced that we are in the best position to take action against this enemy struggle, which is a decidedly political one. [He added that this new office had contributed to an increase in the SS organization.] … It is notable that, by setting up this department we have gained for the SS in turn a division, a corps, an army and the next step, which is the High Command of an army or even a group … 70
Bandenbekämpfung and Enemy Classification
A common defense for German security methods by German defendants during the Nuremberg war crimes trials was attributing their brutality to the illegality of the resistance. This argument pinpointed single aspects of the partisan and resistance operations to explain the German campaign. They ignored the racial aspect underpinning German measures, the roundup of labor, and the widespread exploitation. The defendants were well aware that, as the war came to end, German measures had turned more severe. They hoped to steer the prosecution away from focusing on the integrated character of Bandenbekämpfung and its classification of the enemy. Since the trials, academic have consistently compared Soviet and German methods, partisan and antipartisan respectively, finding a common conclusion of mutual brutality. Their picture is one of a vicious cycle of blind terror, cold-bloodedness, and wanton destruction and ignores the rational processes underpinning German behavior in forging policy, irrespective of the opponents. More important, comparative analyses have failed to explain why, as the Germans lost the war, their brutality found greater release for deeper depravity.
Modern Prussia and Imperial Germany were erected on a comprehensive body of state and national laws. In parallel to the national laws, Germany was a proactive participant in the international conventions governing the conduct of warfare. Before 1914, Prussia and later Imperial Germany attended The Hague and Geneva conferences and conventions. Germany was a full signatory of the 1907 Hague Convention IV, “Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land.” After the First World War, Weimar Germany endorsed the Geneva Protocols on Gas Warfare and Prisoners of War. Hitler conducted law making like a barrack-room lawyer; to whit, laws were only acceptable as long as they worked for his benefit and to the detriment of his enemies. In 1939, he typically promised to abide by the existing precedents of war, while threatening the Jewish race with extinction and practicing ethnic-cleansing against the Polish people. In 1941, Hitler’s rules of engagement invading Soviet Russia were encompassed in the infamous Barbarossa directives. By 1943, the Nazi regime was calling forth a different kind of language for the conduct of the war.71 The shift in the regime’s tone was matched by renewed attempts to further circumvent the laws of war.
The circumvention of The Hague conventions had been simplified by the German occupation of Holland, rendering its existence obsolete by right of conquest. The Dutch hoped the Germans would recognize The Hague conventions as binding.72 When Arthur Seyss-Inquart became the Reichskommissioner for the Occupied Netherlands in 1940, he reported to Hitler that the favorable way to incorporate the Dutch into Hitler’s Reich was through economic collaboration. However, Seyss-Inquart declared The Hague Conventions redundant as his administration aggressively ignored their rulings. By 1943, Dutch labor, like labor across occupied Europe, was combed by conscription waves from Sauckel’s offices. E
ventually, more than a half million Dutch people were conscripted for labor. Seyss-Inquart was also responsible for imposing a catalog of Nazi measures in the persecution of the Jews. In his contribution to the Holocaust he ensured the mass deportation of more than one hundred thousand Jews to extermination camps and ghettos in the east.
The racial impetus of Fortress Europe went in two directions, decided either by “expediency” or extermination. Goebbels’s diary in the first six months of 1943 is evidence of how fixated the Nazis were on the “Jewish question” and of their commitment to extermination. In May 1943, Goebbels published an article titled “Der Krieg und die Juden” (The War and the Jews) and pleaded his cause to ensure the “evacuation” of the Berlin Jews.73 In 1942, the British diplomatic services monitoring German attitudes thought the extermination of Jews was gradually working against the Nazis. One ambassador noted,
Germans are now beginning to discuss whether perhaps in their treatment of the Jews they have gone too far and to be anxious lest one day they may have to pay dearly for their inhumanity. The conviction is spreading that in any case the future of generations of Germans will have to pay.74
The pacification of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in April–May 1943, discussed in chapter 8, from a diplomatic standpoint backfired on the Nazis. In April 1943, the German propaganda service announced the discovery of a site of massacred Polish army officers at Katyn. In 1940, the Soviet secret police had executed more than ten thousand Polish POWs in several killing sites. Goebbels hoped to exploit the incident, but his scheme was undermined. The Germans placed posters in Polish streets denouncing the massacre and listing the names of the Polish officers discovered at Katyn. Many of the victims on the lists were Jewish, and according to Joseph Mackiewicz, the Germans blamed their murdering on “Jewish Bolshevism.” The Germans named three members of the Minsk NKVD, all with Jewish names, as responsible for the killings.75 The Nazis had projected the destruction of Lidice and Warsaw to the world, and the world responded by believing the Nazis had committed Katyn.
After the wave of defeats in February and March 1943, the Waffen-SS delivered a tactical victory at Kharkov. One reward for the battle-scarred veterans was a speech from Himmler, the first in what became a series of important speeches presented through the year. Himmler’s speech corresponded to Hitler’s mission. “I would like to give it a name: it is the great fortress Europe,” Himmler said. “The fortress of Europe with its frontiers must be held and will be held too, as long as is necessary.” German success, according to Himmler, was her destiny, but this could only be assured through a political-military victory underscored by security and mass killings. He reiterated the master plan: “The decision … lies here in the East; here must the Russian enemy, this people numbering two hundred million Russians, be destroyed on the battlefield and person by person, and made to bleed to death.” This tidal wave of human destruction also included the last phase in the extermination of the Jews as he declared,
Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness…. We shall soon be deloused. We have only 20,000 lice left, and then the matter is finished within the whole of Germany…. We have only one task, to stand firm and carry on the racial struggle without mercy.76
In 1943, Dr. Rudolf Thierfelder published a report on the German occupation of France.77 The thrust of Thierfelder’s argument was that German methods adhered to The Hague conventions (1899 and 1907) and the Lieber code. His argument exploited the cyclical interpretation that underpinned any analysis of the laws of war. The Lieber code was spun and weaved to prove Germany was conducting its war within legal limits. The thread of Lieber’s code stated, “A territory under military occupation automatically falls under martial law…. Martial law in a hostile country suspends criminal and civil law as well as civil administration.”78 Lieber reasoned that “The more vigorously wars are pursued the better it is for humanity. Sharp wars are brief.”79 Lieber’s principle underpinned Goebbels’s call for rapid and total war. Thierfelder exploited Lieber’s interpretation of partisans or “bandits,” in the general classification of combatants and non-combatants. Lieber’s definition of the partisan was recognized by all belligerents:
Partisans are soldiers armed and wearing the uniform of their army, but belonging to a corps, which acts detached from the main body for the purpose of making inroads into the territory occupied by the enemy. If captured they are entitled to all the privileges of the prisoner of war.80
Lieber was intolerant of guerrillas, whom he deemed robbers and scoundrels, and equated guerrilla war to the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War. Guerrilla warfare was defined as criminal banditry: “so much is certain, that no army, no society, engaged in war, any more than a society at peace, can allow unpunished assassination, robbery, and devastation, without the deepest injury to itself and disastrous consequences, which might change the very issue of the war.”81 Thierfelder judged German intolerance of resistance as further proof of Germany’s observance of the Lieber code.
In 1942, Directive 46 was introduced to eradicate “banditry” in order to exploit Soviet lands uninterrupted. Addendums “a” and “b” were attached to extend the application of punitive measures to include allied Special Forces (discussed in chapter 3). In May 1944 the OKW issued the formal regulations for Bandenbekämpfung, replacing all prior standing orders or guidelines (discussed in chapter 5).82 Long before then, the language and principles of Bandenbekämpfung had become routine for the Wehrmacht and SS. A Luftwaffe Eastern Front “bandit-situation” report (Bandenlage) from January 1944 provides an example. The report, written by Colonel Kollee, advised that “amongst the bandits the Jews have a certain role, they work according to their nature, and they act as spies. There is an independent Jewish bandit group operating near Leszniow.” Kollee went on to discuss the different forms of resistance: “There has been an increase in the number of opportunists’ bandits with the minimum of training. Their numbers have increased with the German retreat.”83 The “bandit bands” were identified as composed of Red Army stragglers, enemy troops that infiltrated the front lines, parachutists (Fallschirmspringer), POW escapees, German deserters, former collaborators, civilian volunteers, and coerced locals. The larger bands included specialists in their order of battle including bridging units, demolition parties, cavalry detachments, and antitank squads. The bands’ signals detachments were known for their superior training, and their capture was highly prized. The Germans particularly singled out armed women (Flintenweiber) or females assisting in supply, medical signals functions, and serving as enemy agents. Many reports identified the leaders of the “Bolshevist bands” as “bandits” but then went on to describe them as Red Army officers, political commissars, or public servants. Russian village leaders or Ukrainian chieftains who raised private bands were categorized as “bandit leaders” (Bandenhäuptling).84
Bandenbekämpfung regulations recognized that some bands were organized as military formations with internal military structures. The Germans often reported in a patronizing way how a band adopted military terms. For example, the Soviets often used “brigade” to identify bands more than a hundred strong, and the Germans believed this was a deliberate misuse of correct terminology. Their language focused on the question of uniforms and discipline. The Germans often referred to the ability of the bands to maintain discipline. The question of uniforms was ambiguous; some bands wore civilian clothing while the Red Army’s partisans wore full uniforms. This failure to treat captives in a recognizable uniform as combatants was a clear breach of the laws of war.85 The Germans described the fighting style of “bandits” as aggressive and destructive. The bands were linked to six tasks. Three were military tasks: attacking strongpoints, depots, transports, marching troops, supply columns, and individual vehicles; attacking German offensives (destroying bridges, mining roads, blocking tracks, and disrupting rail traffic); and disrupting German communications. A fourth task was econ
omic warfare: the bands were ordered to destroy everything of economic value to the Germans, particularly the harvest. The two political tasks of the bands included terrorizing the populace to undermine German authority and administration and undermining the morale of all collaborators. Himmler summarized the picture of the opponent:
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