Army of Evil: A History of the SS (24 page)

*
Best joined the Foreign Office and in 1942 became German plenipotentiary in Denmark.

*
Desk VII C3 within Office VII, the
Hexen Referat
, was specifically tasked to monitor “witchcraft, sorcery and popular superstition.”

T
he SS was relatively insignificant in the early stages of the Holocaust. Historians have categorised the steps towards the Holocaust as “identification, concentration and extermination,”
¹
and it was only in the latter phases that Himmler’s branch of the National Socialist state assumed primacy. Although, of course, members of the SS had played their part in the brutalisation of Germany’s Jews even before the NSDAP gained power.

The first steps in the National Socialist regime’s persecution of the Jews were taken through legislation introduced by the Interior Ministry. On 7 April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service decreed that government officials of “non-Aryan descent” were to be retired. Four days later, a supplemental regulation—the so-called
Arierparagraph
(Aryan Paragraph)—defined “non-Aryans” as “any person who had a Jewish parent or grandparent.”
²
This law had a marked effect because “government official” did not merely refer to civil servants: a wide range of professions (including teachers, university lecturers and so on) were employees of the state and so subject to the measure. Although this law was characterised by the NSDAP as
racial, and thus in line with National Socialist policy, Jewishness was defined by a religious rather than a racial criterion: if the parent or grandparent followed the Jewish religion, their offspring was deemed “non-Aryan”; but someone with an ethnically Jewish, non-observant parent or grandparent fell outside the law’s scope. Similar laws were enacted later the same month. One was supposedly aimed at preventing overcrowding in schools. It imposed a strict quota on the number of non-Aryans who could attend state-funded schools, which had the effect of forcing Jewish children out of the state education sector and into private Jewish schooling. Another law prevented Jewish doctors from treating patients under the national health insurance scheme. And a third restricted entry of Jews into the legal profession.
³

Enacting these early laws created a number of practical difficulties for the new regime. First, several foreign nations, including Japan, found the implication that non-Aryans were inferior to Aryans deeply offensive. In response, the German Foreign Office instructed its overseas missions to explain that the laws were designed merely to identify “physical and spiritual qualities” within each race,
⁴
rather than to rank them. Unsurprisingly, this failed to satisfy the Japanese. Second, numerous experienced public officials now had to be dismissed, and this was especially destructive after 28 February 1934, when General von Blomberg, the Minister of War, extended the Aryan Paragraph to the army.
⁵
Some senior officers who had served in the First World War were exempted, but several hundred men—mostly of mixed backgrounds but also a few “full” Jews—were forced to leave the service.

As a corollary to this, it was decided that the term “non-Aryan” was unsatisfactory. Everybody knew that the legislation was primarily intended to discriminate against the Jews, rather than non-Aryans in general, so the regime needed to formulate a precise definition of what it meant to be Jewish. This came to a head at the National Socialist Party rally at Nuremberg in September 1935. Hitler ordered a decree to be drafted under the title “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour.” The principal purpose of this law was to prohibit intermarriage
and extramarital sexual intercourse between Jews and citizens of German or related blood, but it also went much further than the earlier law in legally excluding Jews from participation in the German state. Further provisions banned Jews from employing Germans under the age of forty-five as domestic staff, and a separate law forbade Jews from raising the Reich flag. The next day, the Reich Citizenship Law was drafted. This excluded Jews from German citizenship—they became “subjects of the state”—and finally legally defined the term “Jew.” This definition was fairly straightforward. It included: anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents; anyone who had two Jewish grandparents and was a member of the Jewish religious community on or after 15 September 1935; and anyone who was married to a Jewish person on or after 15 September. Furthermore, anyone born as a result of a marriage involving a Jew that was contracted after the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour had come into force, or anyone born out of wedlock from a relationship involving a Jew after 31 July 1936, would be considered a Jew.

This legislation also created a host of “semi-Jews.” Anyone with two Jewish grandparents who did not practise the Jewish religion, and was not married to a Jew, was now considered
Mischlinge
(mixed race) of the first degree. Anyone with a single Jewish grandparent was
Mischlinge
of the second degree. In coming years, the
Mischlinge
were subjected to harassment, but they were not persecuted to the same extent as “full Jews” (although many
Mischlinge
of the first degree were murdered in the Holocaust). They were normally barred from National Socialist party and state positions, but, for instance, they could serve in the armed forces.
*

One of the key outcomes of the passing of these so-called “Nuremberg Laws” was that they introduced criminal sanctions based on race,
and it was this that formally brought the machinery of the SS security apparatus into action against the Jews. Hitherto, the SS had been just one of several party formations involved in the harassment of Jews. And, of course, SS posts had collected information on Jewish activities since the early days of the organisation. But by criminalising the everyday lives of Jews, Sipo and the SD would clearly have major roles to play in their persecution in the future.

The Gestapo had been conducting surveillance on Jewish groups and individuals ever since the National Socialists had come to power, but the extent of that surveillance was largely decided by the local Gestapo commander. For instance, Robert Gellately’s study of Gestapo activity in the Franconian town of Würzburg suggests that the political police’s interest in Jewish activities was limited. Between 1933 and 1935, pressure against the Jewish population largely emanated from the party, rather than the state. To some extent, the Gestapo and other police elements even reined in party members’ excesses. While it was certainly official (party
and
state) policy to reinforce negative images of the Jews, party-sponsored activities such as trade boycotts tended to damage foreign relationships, international trade and the tourist industry, so they were not always encouraged.

This changed with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws. In November 1935, the Gestapo office in Münster noted: “after the promulgation of the Jewish laws at the Party meetings in Nuremberg, a certain tranquillity set in with regard to the ‘Jewish question.’ Excesses against Jews, as well as individual actions against Jewish businesses, have not taken place again in the past month.”
⁶
This probably reflected a general satisfaction within the National Socialist–supporting population that, after years of propaganda against the Jews, the government had finally taken some concrete steps to back up its rhetoric.

The Gestapo’s remit evolved into the defence and enforcement of National Socialist ideology, and in many respects it was free to act outside the law. But the Nuremberg Laws also gave it a legal framework within which it could persecute the Jews. For instance, between
1933 and 1945, the Würzburg Gestapo investigated 175 cases of
Rassenschande
(race defilement)—the criminal offence of sexual intercourse between a Jew and an Aryan—and “friendship towards Jews.”
*
Although the latter was not a criminal offence, it was taken to indicate a refusal to accept the spirit of National Socialist racial doctrine and so was suggestive of opposition to the regime. The Würzburg office (and its sub-unit at Aschaffenburg) covered the whole of Lower Franconia, comprising a population of some 800,000, of whom only around 25,000 were Jewish. Consequently, it seems fair to conclude that the local Gestapo’s investigations into “Jewish crimes” comprised a relatively small proportion of its work.

The lack of surviving data makes it difficult to draw a nationwide picture of the Gestapo’s role in the persecution of the Jewish population in the early years of the Third Reich. But it seems that “the police role in all this was not extraordinary, it was simply police work directed to whatever conclusion the state directed.”
⁷
Each local office attempted to apply National Socialist law and policy to the Jews, but in no sense did the Gestapo lead the persecution.

In fact, the first SS agency to take a serious interest in the “Jewish question” was the SD. As we have seen, Office II dealt with all “enemies” of National Socialism. But from mid-1935, the Jews became the specific responsibility of Office II 112. Heydrich appointed SS-
Untersturmführer
(Second Lieutenant) Leopold Edler von Mildenstein to lead it. Born in Prague in 1902, von Mildenstein trained as a civil engineer but seems to have spent most of his time before joining the SD as a traveller and writer. He came to Heydrich’s attention because of an article he wrote for
The Attack
, the Berlin-based NSDAP newspaper, in which he described a visit to British-mandated Palestine and the prospects for creating a Jewish state there. Considering where this
article appeared, it was quite a moderate piece, and von Mildenstein was not a conventional Jew-baiting National Socialist. Along with others in the SD, he recognised that harassment and persecution of Jews might cause more problems than it solved, and he was convinced that a better solution to the “Jewish question” was to persuade Germany’s half-million Jews to emigrate. This had been proposed before, but had always foundered on the unwillingness of other Western countries to accept large numbers of German-Jewish emigrants. As a way round this, von Mildenstein suggested that Germany’s Jews should be “exported” to Palestine. He undoubtedly came to this conclusion partly because he was in friendly contact with a number of Zionist leaders and had even attended Zionist congresses in the past.
⁸

Von Mildenstein had a heavy workload, so he was given permission to take on an assistant. The man recommended for the role was an SD NCO who was currently employed in the organisation’s museum of Freemasonry, where he catalogued seals and medallions. His name was Adolf Eichmann.

In her account of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Hannah Arendt portrayed him as an unintelligent, simple man who was not overtly anti-Semitic. She argued that he became, in effect, the logistician of the Holocaust simply because it represented professional advancement for him. Certainly, the Eichmann who appeared in the dock did not come across as a monster: he was puny in appearance and mild and submissive in manner. But there can be no doubt that he accepted the SS’s ideological framework and believed that the
Volk
had to be protected from Jewry. That was what motivated him to behave as he did. Eichmann was not conscripted into the SS: he volunteered when the SS was at its most selective; and he was accepted because he demonstrated the “correct” outlook.

Adolf Eichmann was born on 19 March 1906 in Solingen in the Rhineland. At the time, his father was an accountant for the Solingen Light and Power Company, a subsidiary of AEG, but when Eichmann was just seven the family moved to Linz in Austria. His father became
commercial director of the local power company, and Eichmann attended the Kaiser Franz High School—Hitler’s alma mater—until the age of fifteen.
⁹
By that point, his father had gone into business for himself, opening a shale oil mine and taking an interest in a machine shop in Salzburg. Eichmann attended the local engineering vocational college, but he was pulled out by his father because of his poor results and sent to work in the mine. After a few months of this he did an apprenticeship at his father’s old company. He remained there until 1928, when he became a travelling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company. He also joined a monarchist youth group called the Young Veterans’ Association, through which he came into contact with the NSDAP for the first time. At a National Socialist meeting in late 1931 or early 1932, Eichmann bumped into an acquaintance, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who invited him to join the local branch of the SS. Eichmann later recalled: “Ernst Kaltenbrunner put it to me straight from the shoulder: ‘You’re going to join us!’ That’s how easy it was in those days, all very free and easy, no fuss. I said: ‘Alright.’ So I joined the SS.”
¹⁰

In 1933, Eichmann was made redundant by the Vacuum Oil Company and decided to move to Germany to try his luck there. By this stage, Austrian NSDAP, SA and SS activities were being suppressed by the government, and the Upper Austrian Regional Leader had already fled over the border. Kaltenbrunner needed to get some documents to his party boss, and he entrusted Eichmann with the task. Having handed over the papers, Eichmann asked for some help finding work. Instead, the Regional Leader suggested that he should join the newly formed SS-Special Purpose Troops and “play soldiers”
¹¹
for a while. With nothing better to do, Eichmann joined the SS-Regiment
Deutschland
. He was one of the older members of the unit, as well as competent and organised, so he was quickly made his company’s administrative NCO and given the rank of
Oberscharführer
(sergeant). After originally forming up at Kloster Lechfeld, the unit moved to the Munich suburb of Dachau, where they occupied quarters outside the concentration camp.