Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich (booksvooks TXT) 📕

command of a newly appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Terri-

tories, Alfred Rosenberg. 44 Rosenberg, however, had to take account of the special competences of other agencies, and these included, in particular, Himmler’s

special responsibilities, which Hitler had set out in his second decree, also signed

From Anti-Semitic Terror to Genocide

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on 17 July, on Securing and Policing the Newly Occupied Eastern Areas. 45 This decree determined that ‘securing and policing the newly occupied Eastern areas is

the responsibility of the Reichsführer SS and the Head of the German Police’. He

was authorized to give the Reichskommissars instructions for carrying out these

tasks, and, in the case of ‘instructions of a general nature or of fundamental

political importance’, Rosenberg was to be involved. In order to ensure that these

areas were ‘effectively secured by police measures’ each Reichskommissar was

assigned a Higher SS and Police Commander, who was to be under his ‘direct and

personal’ command; similarly, the other commissars were also assigned SS and

Police Commanders. This decree conferred responsibility for the ‘police’ solution

of the ‘Jewish question’ in the occupied Eastern areas on Himmler. 46

The ‘major campaigns’ that were to be undertaken by the Higher SS and Police

Commanders in the weeks that followed (which will be described later in this

chapter) show how Himmler understood his responsibility to ‘secure through

police measures’ these areas. He saw his mission as gradually making large areas

‘free of Jews’, or in other words as extending the shootings on the one hand and

concentrating the surviving Jewish population in ghettos on the other. The

conduct of the SS and Police formations in the following weeks and months

does not allow us to infer without doubt that an order to murder all the Soviet

Jews was given to the Reichsführer SS in mid-July. Given the expectation of the

National Socialist leadership to end the war in a short time, and in any case not

later than the start of the winter, fulfilling such an order would hardly have been

possible with the forces they had at their disposal. Instead, we have to assume that

mass shootings and ghettoization were seen at that point as measures anticipating

the ‘Final Solution’ planned for after the end of the war—the deportation of the

Jews into a single area that would not be able to support them.

Settling the spheres of competence and responsibility in Himmler’s favour on

16–17 July corresponded to what had for months been the direction of planning for

the administration of the occupied Eastern territories. Hitler had by no means

been carried away by victory-induced euphoria to make the decision during the

discussions of 16 July for Himmler to be given far-reaching instructions to deploy

large-scale murder squads; 47 this deployment had long been planned and was merely set in motion on 16–17 July. Himmler’s decree of 21 May had already

mentioned the Higher SS and Police Commanders earmarked ‘to carry out the

special orders given to me by the Führer in respect of the area under political

administration’, 48 and a discussion amongst the Reichsführer SS’s Command Staff on 8 July suggests that the units under the Command Staff would mainly be

deployed in the area under political administration. 49 Only after the basic structural principles of the political administration had been determined by Hitler,

after the first Reichskommissars had been named and the priority of ‘securing and

policing the occupied Eastern areas’ had been established could the time come for

Himmler to deploy the third of his teams of police and SS forces, the SS Brigades.

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Mass Executions in Occupied Soviet Zones, 1941

Himmler had one very significant political motive in making his mission to

‘secure through police measures’ the Eastern areas as radical as possible and in

extending it in the direction of a war of ethnic annihilation: intensifying the mass

murder of the Jews in the East was a key component of his attempts to extend his

competence as Reichskommissar for the Strengthening of the German Nation as

soon as possible to the Eastern areas in order to bring them under the control of

the SS via a violent ethnic ‘reordering’ of the newly conquered ‘living space’. 50

Already in June, before the war had begun, Himmler had suggested to Lammers

that he should be entrusted with ‘politically securing and policing’ the occupied

East European areas and given the responsibility for ‘pacifying and consolidating

the political situation’, whereby he should ‘take into particular account the need to

fight Bolshevism and his task as the Reichskommissar for the Strengthening of the

German Nation’. 51 But these desires on Himmler’s part had met with resistance from Rosenberg and had not been taken into account by Hitler when areas of

responsibility were settled on 16 and 17 July: Hitler had specifically restricted

Himmler’s powers to ‘securing through police measures’, albeit after a long

debate. However, Himmler had not been distracted by this setback to his leader-

ship ambitions in the East, but had simply begun to take practical measures to

‘reorder’ the Eastern areas even before the war had ended. To this end, only two

days after the outbreak of war he told his head of planning, Konrad Meyer, to

present a draft of an extended version of the ‘Overall Eastern Plan’ (Generalplan

Ost) within three weeks and ensure that it covered the areas that were to be

conquered. 52 This draft was completed by 15 July before Himmler had to accept the division of responsibility in the East with Rosenberg, Goering, and the Reichskommissars after the decisions taken by Hitler on 16 and 17 of that month. But

Himmler continued to work on the basis that the responsibility he had been given

in October 1939 for ‘the strengthening of the German nation’ was valid in the

occupied zones, too.

On 11 July Himmler had told the ‘Ethnic Germans’ Office’, which answered to

him, to gather details of ‘ethnic Germans’ in the occupied Soviet Union, an activity

that was to run hand in hand with the work of the Einsatzgruppen. 53 On 17 July, the same day that he was formally charged with ‘securing through police measures’ these areas, he ordered the SS and Police Commander in the district of

Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, to establish a network of police and SS bases in the newly

occupied areas centred on Lublin. In other words, under the banner