SS Einsatzgruppen

Nazi Death Squads, 1939–1945

Gerry van Tonder

• Editorial: Pen & Sword Military
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526729101
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire de l'Holocauste

"Provides important details about the Einsatzgruppen's leadership... Numerous photographs illustrate the text. A grim read, but a necessary one." — The Washington Times In June 1941, Adolf Hitler, whose loathing of Slavs and Jewish Bolsheviks knew no bounds, launched Operation Barbarossa, throwing four million troops, supported by tanks, artillery and aircraft into the Soviet Union. Operational groups of the German Security Service, SD, followed into the Baltic and the Black Sea areas. Their orders: neutralize elements hostile to Nazi domination. Combined SS and SD headquarters were set throughout Eastern Europe, each with subordinate units of the SD, the Einsatzgruppen, and lower echelons of Einsatzkommandos. Communist and Soviet federal agents were targeted, and from August 1941 to March 1943, 4, 000 Soviet and communist agents were arrested and executed. In addition, far greater numbers of partisans and communists were shot to ensure political and ethnic purity in the occupied territories. In the early stages of the operation, Einsatzgruppe A, under Adolf Eichmann, executed 29, 000 people listed as Jews or mostly Jews in Latvia and Lithuania. In the Einsatzgruppe C report for September 1941, 50, 000 executions are foreseen in Kiev. In five months in 1941, Einsatzkommando III commander, Karl Jger, reported killing 138, 272, 34, 464 of them were children. The Einsatzgruppen were death squads, their tools the rifle, the pistol and the machine gun. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen executed more than 2 million people between 1941 and 1945, including 1.3 million Jews. Drawing on translated memos, operational reports from the field as well as other primary and secondary sources, historian Gerry van Tonder provides a comprehensive look at one of the darkest periods of human history.

1. MY LOYALTY IS MY HONOUR

BLACKEST PAGE IN HISTORY

23 Nazi Officers Face Trial

Twenty-three former commanding officers of the ‘S.S. Einsatzgruppen’ – special task commandos – who are being charged with killing more than 1,000,000 Jews, gypsies and other anti-Nazis, were described by the prosecution in Nuremberg yesterday as ‘cruel executioners whose terror has written the blackest page in human history.’

Mr Benjamin Ferencz, leading the U.S. prosecution, said of them: ‘Death was their tool and life their toy.

‘If these men be immune, then law has lost its meaning and men must live in fear.’

The men accused of this ‘world’s biggest murder case,’ who pleaded not guilty at a previous formal sitting, were alleged to have established a ghastly record of wild butchery, killing on an average fifty persons an hour over two years.

It is expected that the trial will only take three days. The opening speech was the shortest at any of the eight trials held by the Americans since the first international war criminals’ trial.

Aberdeen Press and Journal, Tuesday, 30 September 1947

The dogmatic and zealous fundamental belief in the superiority of the German people – specifically the Aryan race – is not unique to the Nazi faithful of the Second World War.

Regarded as the first ethnic genocide of the twentieth century, from 1904 to 1907, as many as 65,000 men, women and children of the indigenous Herero and Nama tribes, perished at the hands of their colonial masters in German South West Africa (Namibia). Despite a ‘protection’ treaty entered into by the Herero and Imperial Germany’s colonial governor and father to Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring, Heinrich Göring, German settlers confiscated Herero land and livestock, while using the tribespeople as slaves.

When the Herero rose in rebellion, Berlin despatched a force of 14,000 Schutztruppe (colonial protection troops) under Prussian officer Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha to the colony to suppress the insurrection. On his arrival on 11 June 1904, von Trotha declared his plan to resolve the Herero issue: ‘I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated, or, if this was not possible by tactical measures, have to be expelled from the country.’

Prussian officer General Lothar von Trotha is met by fellow officers in German South West Africa.

After defeating a ‘force’ of Hereros at Waterberg, the Schutztruppe shot and bayoneted to death every Herero they could find, regardless of age or gender. On 2 October, von Trotha issued a proclamation declaring that the Herero were no longer German subjects, and were therefore required to leave the country. His troops were ordered to kill every male Herero they encountered, but to maintain the ‘good reputation of the German soldier’, they were to drive all women and children into the desert to die of thirst and starvation. Trotha added that the rebellion ‘is and remains the beginning of a racial struggle’.

Whilst fully agreeing with von Trotha’s definition of the conflict as being racial, Chief of the Imperial German General Staff, Generalfeldmarschall Alfred von Schlieffen, did not approve of the methodology. As a consequence, from the end of 1904, the Herero were incarcerated in concentration camps, such as Shark Island, and employed as slave labour under horrific conditions. Starvation and disease claimed the lives of thousands. In a chilling prelude to a common Nazi practice, inhuman medical experiments were performed on prisoners, and as many as 300 skulls were shipped to Berlin for research and experimentation.

Unwittingly, the Herero experience would provide a historical template for Hitler’s Holocaust, perhaps drawing inspiration from something von Trotha once wrote: ‘I destroy the African tribes with streams of blood … Only following this cleansing can something new emerge, which will remain.’

THE HERERO RISING

Treatment of Natives

(Reuter’s Telegram) Berlin, Tuesday: Increasing light has been thrown on the cause of the Herero rising in South-West Africa. Nettled by the attacks made on the missionaries the ‘Reichsbote,’ the official organ of German Protestantism, now accuses the German settlers in the colony of having driven the Hereros to desperation by their brutalities and usury, their general methods of trade, as well as by their expropriation of native property.

The Journal declares that the Germans are accustomed to flog the natives with sticks and rhinoceros hides whips, 25 strokes being often inflicted on innocent blacks. It mentions cases of natives swooning under such punishment, and falling in a pool of blood.

The ‘Reichsbote’ maintains that the Hereros were formerly peaceful people, whereas now, in consequence of the behaviour of the whites, they have become filled with intense hatred of the Germans. Finally, the ‘Reichsbote’ repudiates the charge that the Hereros are slaying women and children alike; on the contrary, it declares that the Hereros have spared the German women and children, and concludes by asserting that they were driven to rebellion, as the whites respected neither native women nor native property.

The ‘Kreuz Zeitung’ [Prussian conservative newspaper taken over by the Nazi Party in August 1937] expresses a hope that the methods of the Conquistadores in Mexico will not be imitated by the German soldiers in suppressing the rising. It demands that every case of shooting unarmed natives or prisoners shall meet with exemplary punishment.

The colonial organs demand more rigorous measures against the natives and stronger reinforcements.

Western Daily Press, Wednesday, 23 March 1904

On 22 June 1941, the Soviet Union was attacked on a broad front by three German armies as Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. Tearing up the fraudulent pact with which Hitler had duped Stalin to buy him time to adequately subjugate Western Europe, this was no ordinary war. Fuelled by patriotic propaganda, the Führer demanded absolute loyalty and pride for his war of annihilation to succeed. The Bolsheviks were the dregs of humanity, and, together with the Jews, had to be removed from the face of the earth to provide his master race with lebensraum, that extra room in which to expand and flourish. His war machine was duty bound to destroy and not to just conquer his most-hated enemy to the east, zealously spurred on: ‘The German soldier has now proved his valour, saving Europe from Bolshevism, enemy of the world.’

Hitler’s master plan to cleanse Eastern Europe required a disciplined and ruthless individual whose fervent loyalty to the Reich was beyond question and his integrity impeccable.

The 41-year-old SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was the perfect choice. Chief of the German Police, Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation, Reich Minister of the Interior, and Commander of the Reserve Army, Himmler was the Schutzstaffel (SS). He lived the National Socialist ideology, and as his Führer’s security-measures envoy, he would compose and orchestrate the grand design for the ‘Aryanization’ of an ethnically sullied Eastern Europe through the instrument of racial selection and genocide.

Born on 7 October 1900, the son of a well-placed Munich schoolteacher, Heinrich Himmler grew up in a regulated home environment, characterized by a robust work ethic combined with strict religious obedience. The royalist, conservative and financially comfortable Himmler family shunned the liberal modernity of Munich in the early 1900s. With the birth in December 1905 of younger brother Ernst, Heinrich was now the middle child, junior to brother Gebhard. Heinrich suddenly found himself confronting significantly diluted parental attention.

SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler (centre) with SS-Obergruppenführer August Eigruber visit Mauthausen concentration camp, east of Linz, Upper Austria.

Although small in stature, the frail and illness-prone Heinrich evolved into an individualist, determined to define his own future, as witnessed by his entries into a diary that he maintained religiously. Only 14 years old at the outbreak of the Great War, Himmler watched with great envy as his 17-year-old brother, Gebhard, enlisted in the army reserve. Writing, ‘If only I were old enough,’ the besotted Himmler would spend hours with his friends playing war games. His diary accounts, however, often read like real conflict as he ‘fought’ the enemies of Germany and Austria.

From April 1915, Himmler enlisted for the summer with the Jugendwehr, or Cadet Corps, where he received his first taste of the basics of military training. He continued with this pre-military training in the Landshut Cadet Corps, in the town where his father was now a teaching professor. In 1917, and despite connections in the Bavarian royal family, Himmler’s father failed to have his son accepted for officer training in one of the Bavarian regiments. This setback, though hugely disappointing, did not hinder the teenager’s aspirations of becoming an officer in an elite German regiment. In October, the Regensburg city administration accepted his application to join the patriotic auxiliary service’s welfare office. With the threat of conscription – which would have dashed his hopes for officer training – Himmler returned to grammar school, but not for long.

On 23 December, the ecstatic Himmler received notification that he had been accepted as a candidate for officer training in the 11th Infantry Regiment, based near Regensburg. However, this had a major impact on Himmler – he became extremely homesick. His only consolation, albeit slight, were the letters from home. If, after just a few days he had not heard from his mother, the fractious Himmler would admonish his parents for failing in their duties to look after his welfare. His craving for parental affection and attention was insatiable, and he did all he could to get home at every available weekend.

The Armistice on November 1918 and the capitulation of Germany left Himmler inconsolably devastated. Unlike his brother Gebhard (who had earned the Iron Cross), Himmler did not see action, which, for him, was an abject failure. The final humiliation came with his discharge on 18 December, his dreams of fulfilling his true vocation in shreds.

In the months that followed, Himmler wrote his school-leavers examination (Abitur) and joined the Bavarian People’s Party (BPP).

For Heinr...