In the wake of Daluege’s Order Police Battalions (Orpo) came Heydrich’s SpecialTask Forces – the elite killers of Himmler’s security militias. To lead these Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units, the Einsatzkommandos, Heydrich and his recruitment chief Werner Best had turned to a cadre of elite SS officers. Best especially favoured an older generation, born in Silesia, who had ‘won their bones’ fighting with German Freikorps against the Poles after Germany’s defeat in 1918 and had ever since cultivated violent anti-Polish sentiments. During the Weimar period, many of the younger SD recruits had absorbed radical nationalist and anti-Semitic doctrines at German universities. These German students, organised in reactionary fraternities, the Burschenschaften, had become Hitler’s most fanatical backers and, after 1933, were generously rewarded. Membership of Himmler’s SS provided a fast track for academic careerists. In universities, the new power brokers expelled Jewish professors and impatient young Doktoren gratefully occupied their vacated positions. Outside the universities, SS agencies like the Race and Settlement Office, the RuSHA, and SS-Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage, a think tank that investigated German prehistory and related topics) took on many of Germany’s best and brightest. The Nazi seizure of power was a young man’s revolution and the sclerotic German armed forces had already been thoroughly radicalised by this ‘NSDAP generation’.
This meant that the men Heydrich recruited to lead the Einsatzgruppen were not thuggish brutes by any means. But the kind of education they had received in the Weimar period appears to have reinforced bigotry rather than encouraged genuine critical thinking. One SD recruit, Friedrich Polte, who attended a number of universities, wrote an autobiographical sketch when he gave up his doctorate and joined up. He described his academic studies as a ‘revolutionary mission’ that would expose the factual evidence of ‘international conspiracies’.24 In 1939, of the twenty-five Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommando leaders, fifteen had acquired the prestigious Doktortitel. 25 For example, Dr Alfred Hasselberg, Dr Ludwing Hahn, Dr Karl Brunner and Dr Bruno Müller had all studied law, and like many German lawyers had rushed to join the NSDAP bandwagon in 1933, eager to become the judicial vanguard of the New Order. For this highly politicised elite, membership of the SS or SD was highly seductive – and useful. Lawyers and other professionals soon dominated the higher ranks of the German police. Himmler’s Doktoren, as meticulous as they were dedicated, would play a deadly role in the Nazi genocide. Their fanatical commitment to mass murder, in the words of historian Joshua Rubenstein,‘staggers the imagination’.26
In Berlin, the Sonderrefferat Tannenberg managed every aspect of Special Task Force operations in Poland. In SD offices, ‘desk killers’ liaised with Task Force commanders in the field – men such as SS-Brigadeführer Bruno Streckenbach who would lead the largest group Task Force 1, which had been mobilised in Vienna. Heydrich issued all his commanders with the wanted persons lists (Sonderfahndungslisten) filed in custom-designed ledgers that each Task Force commander took with him into the field. These ‘hit lists’ named Polish political leaders, nobility, Catholic clergymen and prominent Jews. As well as Streckenbach’s Special Task Force 1, Heydrich and Best assembled six other operational groups, split into smaller Einsatzkommandos and numbering between 2,700 and 3,000 men.
Himmler took a special interest in the activities of one particular Special Task Force, Einsatzgruppe zur besonderen Verwendung (Einsatzgruppe z.b.V.). The commander of this ‘Special Purpose Operational Group’ was SS-Obergruppenführer Udo von Woyrsch (b. 1895), who had served on Himmler’s personal staff since 1935 and knew the SS chief well enough to address him with the familiar Du. Himmler had a high regard for aggressive radicals like von Woyrsch and Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski who had roots in Germany’s troubled borderlands, like Silesia and Pomerania. For them, Heimat was not a bucolic world of rolling hills and farms, but a human wall thrown up to defend Germany from the Slavic east. The chaos that followed in the wake of Germany’s unexpected defeat in November 1918 sharpened this instinctive contempt for treacherous eastern peoples – and their Jewish allies. Von Woyrsch proved himself a tough fighter for the Nazi cause – and when he joined the SS rose quickly through the ranks. Now his reward would be to lead Himmler’s campaign of terror in Poland.
Himmler used this Special Task Force (Einsatzgruppe z.b.V.) as a kind of shock troop and once the Polish campaign was under way, he followed its progress closely and ordered von Woyrsch to send situation reports listing ‘special incidents and measures’ every three hours. From these it is evident that the task of the Special Task Force was to target not only Polish bandits, but Polish Jews.
On 3 September, von Woyrsch travelled to the Silesian city of Gliwice (Gleiwitz) some 60 miles south-east of his old powerbase in Breslau. At the police praesidium, he picked up orders from Himmler appointing him Sonderbefehlshaber der Polizei (Special Police Commander). His task, the orders continued, would be the ‘ruthless suppression’ of a local Polish uprising ‘mit allen zur Verfügung stehenden Mitteln’ (‘with every means available’). But von Woyrsch soon discovered that the uprising had already been neutralised. His deputy Emil Otto Rasch reported to Berlin that, as a result of executions carried out by another Special Task Force, the ‘insurgency movement no longer existed’. But that was no reason for the Einsatzgruppe men to withdraw – instead they turned their attention to other kinds of ‘hostile element’.
For the next three days, von Woyrsch scoured the region and soon enough tracked down his quarry. On 6 September, the Special Task Force crossed into eastern Upper Silesia and began attacking Jewish settlements in Katowice, Bedzin and Sosnowiec. They used flamethrowers to burn down synagogues and in Bedzin murdered more than 100 civilians, including Jewish children. The orgy of violence continued over five days and as the Special Task Force made its way towards Kraków, the men took every opportunity to ‘terrorise’ Jews. On 11 September, von Woyrsch met Bruno Streckenbach, commander of EG 1, and SD Chief Heydrich, who was ‘touring’ southern Poland. There is no detailed record of what the three men discussed, but according to Streckenbach’s post-war testimony, Heydrich outlined a plan to expel Polish Jews eastward across the San River – the demarcation line established by the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet Pact – ‘using the harshest measures’. Shortly afterwards, Himmler, following a meeting with Hitler, issued orders that Jews must be pushed into the Soviet sphere, rendering German-occupied Poland Judenfrei.
For Himmler, the Polish campaign offered a unique opportunity to experiment, to try out ways and means of securing and pacifying an occupied territory, and setting in motion its eventual Germanisation. Although he was forced to contend with a barrage of criticism from the Wehrmacht top brass and new rivals like Hans Frank, front-line experience had bolstered the SS and forged even closer bonds between its different offices. Himmler’s fiefdom had been transformed into an unique paramilitary elite that shared a code of brutally simplistic values: blind loyalty and ‘hardness’. These values saturated the SS police and its armed wing, the Waffen-SS.
In the summer of 1939, no one had heard of the Waffen-SS.27 As soon as he had been appointed Reichsführer-SS in 1929, Himmler had explored ways and means of arming his elite corps. Before 1934, in the period when the SS was a junior partner to the heavily armed SA, this was a mere pipe dream. But in 1934, when the SA leadership was liquidated, Himmler earned the gratitude not just of Hitler but the German army, which had feared the SA and its ambitious leader Ernst Röhm. In the aftermath of the ‘Röhm Purge’, the SS was well rewarded. The SS was detached from the SA and permitted to form an ‘armed standing Ver fügungstruppe of the strength of 3 SS regiments and one intelligence department … subordinated to the Reichsführer of the SS’.28 It was that final clause that should have sent shivers down the collective spines of the German high command – but it took some time for the military establishment to see the SS as a threat. Himmler had helped crush the upstart storm troopers and, in any case, Hitler could not afford to be seen encoura
ging SS military ambitions; so the arming of the SS necessarily proceeded covertly in fits and starts.
The slow, uneven emergence of the ‘armed SS’ should not obscure its vital role in Himmler’s expanding empire. The SS-VT regiments developed alongside the SS Totenkopfverbände, or Death’s Head units, recruited by SS-Gruppenführer Theodor Eicke, who was Inspector of the Concentration Camps and Commander of SS Guard Formations. Military historians sometimes defend the Waffen-SS as an ‘army like any other’ – in other words, SS soldiers, including non-German recruits, should be viewed as combatants not agents of genocide. This defence does not stand up to scrutiny. Waffen-SS men were by definition politische Soldaten (ideological warriors). Take the case of Eicke himself. On 15 March 1937 this brutal and devoted SS man retreated to his office inside the Dachau concentration camp near Munich to update his curriculum vitae. This remarkable document begins ‘Elementary and secondary school not completed’. After the war:
financial resources ran out … fought the November republic … reactionary agitation … unemployed … security officer with IG Farben … On March 21st, 1933, the Day of Potsdam, I was once again arrested … Gauleiter Bürckel described me as a ‘dangerous mental case’ … at the end of June, 1933, the Reichsführer-SS freed me and assigned me as commander of the Dachau concentration camp.29
Eicke was a born fighter and astute empire builder. He built up his Sturmbanne (guard units) into three Totenkopfstandarten (Death’s Head regiments), headquartered at concentration camps: the ‘Oberbayern’ at Dachau, the ‘Brandenburg’ at Sachsenhausen/Orienenburg and the ‘Thuringia’ at Buchenwald. Eicke did not admire Himmler, and regarded his Death’s Head regiments as a private army. His rigorous training programme, conducted inside the camp system, instilled in his men a uniquely savage fighting ethos – which would define the values of the Waffen-SS. And in September 1939, Eicke’s Death’s Head units marched out of their concentration camp training grounds to fight Hitler’s ‘war of annihilation’. By 7 September, a week into the Polish campaign, Eicke’s SS Death’s Head units had swelled to 24,000 men. Hitler ordered Eicke to deploy his men in the army rear areas, with full authority to conduct ‘police and security measures’.30 Eicke’s mission deliberately blurred any distinction between combat and security – and these SS regiments operated as murder squads like the Special Task Forces. The SS ‘Oberbayern’ and ‘Thuringen’ followed the German 10th Army into the region between Upper Silesia and the Vistula River south of Warsaw; the ‘Brandenburg’ followed the 8th Army into west central Poland. As a Higher SSand Police Leader (HSSPF), Eicke had sweeping powers to ‘pacify’ areas already conquered by the Wehrmacht in the three central Polish provinces of Poznan, Łódź and Warsaw. Eicke did not trouble to visit the front line. Instead, he managed his murderous campaign from Himmler’s special train, Heinrich, or his dedicated motor cavalcade the Wagenkolonne-RFSS.
The trail of blood left by the ‘Brandenburg’ is documented both by the unit’s reports, compiled by Eicke’s devoted Standartenführer Paul Nostitz.31 As Himmler’s warriors set about pacifying their allotted territory, (Nostitz reported to Eicke) they zealously shot ‘suspicious elements, plunderers, insurgents, Jews and Poles’ ‘while trying to escape’. On 22 September, the ‘Brandenburg’ arrived in the city of Wloclawek, which lies on theVistula north-west of Warsaw. Here they embarked on a vicious spree of killing and destruction that Nostitz logged as a Judenaktion: the SS men plundered Jewish shops, dynamited and burned synagogues, and carried out mass executions. As this Judenaktion continued, Eicke (on board Hitler’s train) sent new orders to Nostitz to carry out what he called an ‘intelligentsia action’ (meaning, of course, murdering ‘listed’ Polish civilians) in nearby Bydgoszcz, already the site of Einsatzgruppe mass killings. On 24 September, two ‘Brandenburg’ storm units entered Bydgoszcz equipped with ‘death lists’ that named some 800 Polish civilians. They shot all of them.
Eicke’s killers hunted down other ‘lives not worthy of life’. At the end of October, the 12th SS Totenkopfstandarte marched into Owinska, where there was a large psychiatric hospital. The Death’s Head men rampaged through the wards, dragging screaming patients into trucks. They drove them to specially excavated pits, where SS-VT squads waited with loaded rifles.
It was not only the SS Death’s Head regiments that took part in such ‘special operations’. The SS ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’ (the Führer’s personal SS bodyguard) was, like Himmler’s other SS-VT regiments, assigned to army divisions and corps as they advanced towards Warsaw. Commanded by one of Hitler’s favourite generals,SS-Obergruppenführer ‘Sepp’ Dietrich, ‘Leibstandarte’ men crossed the Polish border just before dawn on 2 September. Dietrich had been ordered to protect the right flank of the 17th Infantry Division – but at 5 a.m. SS men on motorcycles roared into the small town of Bolesławiec. According to Karol Musialeck ‘they drove around the market place three of four times and went back the same way’.32 Less than an hour later, SS ‘Leibstandarte’ units returned. They began dragging Jews and Poles from their homes, and herding them into the market place. As this was going on, other SS men randomly began shooting Jews, often in the back at point blank range. Back in Bolesławiec market, the Germans separated villagers into two groups – Poles and Jews – and began marching them eastwards in the direction of the Soviet demarcation line. The Germans provided the Poles with basic foodstuffs, Musialeck recalled, but the Jews they starved, beat and robbed. In the meantime, the SS ‘Leibstandarte’ men set fire to the village.
As the SS men followed the 17th Infantry eastwards, they took every opportunity to harass and murder Jews in every village they passed through. On 3 September, German soldiers and SS ‘Leibstandarte’ men arrived in Złoczew. They began burning buildings and shooting anyone still on the streets. A German soldier (not SS) smashed the skull of a baby. A teenage girl was shot and disembowelled. This opportunist barbarism soon became standard practice. The ‘Leibstandarte’ men, as they followed in the wake of the 17th Infantry in the direction of Łódź, shot civilians and burnt their homes, their synagogues and churches. In fact, the SS ‘Leibstandarte’, which was supposed to be a fast-moving motorised unit, was so preoccupied with its ‘security tasks’ that the SS men began to lag far behind the German infantry: vandalism and murder was time consuming. Regular army officers sent reports to headquarters criticising the SS men’s sluggish progress, the ‘wild firing’ and ‘reflexive tendency’ to set villages alight. Some German army soldiers and officers also took part in the shooting of unarmed civilians and Jews. The difference was that Himmler and Hitler expected the SS men to treat Jews and Polish civilians without mercy and they did not disappoint.33
Throughout September and October 1939, these Säuberungsaktionen (cleaning-up operations) took place in scores of towns and villages behind the swiftly advancing German front line. In many such operations, local Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) spontaneously participated. As this carnage engulfed the Polish countryside, the special headquarters trains of the Nazi elite, including Himmler’s opulent Heinrich, clattered towards Warsaw, loud with the sound of busy typewriters and euphoric congratulation.
The SS paramilitary police force sand thenew, armed VT regiments had been blooded by the Polish campaign. A few German army commanders may have grumbled about ‘excesses’, but Himmler smeared complainers with the most damning word in the Nazi lexicon: disloyalty. In any case, many Wehrmacht soldiers did not hesitate to join in with cowardly attacks and murders if they had the opportunity. In Hitler’s armies, hatred of Poles and Jews was pervasive. Army denunciations reflected anxiety about the rising power of the SS rather than moral outrage. Hitler had few difficulties sabotaging isolated efforts to penalise SS men accused of ‘excess’. On 17 October 1939 a ‘Decree relating to the Special Jurisdiction in Penal Matters for members of the SS and for Members of Police groups on Special Tasks’ abrogated the power of Wehrmacht military courts to court-martial SS personnel. But still Himmler had to tread carefull
y. He could not afford to be openly confrontational. Even after the lightning triumph in Poland, Hitler had nothing to gain from undermining his delicate transactions with his Wehrmacht generals – even though he was commander-in-chief of the army. So when Field Marshall Walther von Brauchitsch insisted on a meeting to discuss SS tactics, Himmler proved to be more conciliatory; he assured von Brauchitsch that he wanted ‘good relations’ with the Wehrmacht and promised that ‘special operations’ would be carried out in ‘a more considerate way’ in future. Himmler’s act of kowtowing evidently worked, for soon afterwards von Brauchitsch officially dismissed the reports of SS atrocities as mere ‘rumours’. The majority of the German army top brass let the SS get on with its appointed tasks of ‘maintaining security’ and dealing with ‘hostile elements’. This moral abdication had fateful consequences. In the mind of German commanders and front-line soldiers, it normalised the mass murder of unarmed civilians deemed to be hostile in some way to the Reich. In occupied Serbia, for instance, it was the Wehrmacht not the SS that took the lead role in the mass murder of Serbian Jews in the summer of 1941.34
As the victorious Wehrmacht withdrew its armies from Poland, the SS muscled in to undertake what Hitler called a ‘new ordering of ethnographic relations’.35 The Nazi-Soviet Pact had divided the Polish lands between Germany and the Soviet Union. But to begin with, Hitler dithered about what to do with his portion – until Stalin forced his hand. Although the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini tried to persuade Hitler to create a relic Polish state to placate the French and British, Stalin insisted on the annihilation of the Polish state. As enticement, the Russians offered to cede the Lublin district in return for German recognition of Soviet interests in Lithuania. The offer intrigued Hitler and Himmler. Once the SD Special Task Forces had completed the liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia, the problem of what to do about the Ostjuden (eastern Jews) became a more pressing concern. Himmler concluded that the Lublin region offered a solution, albeit temporary, as a ‘reservation’ or dumping ground for ‘the whole of Jewry as well as other unreliable elements’.
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