Hitler's Bandit Hunters (2 page)

All said and done, Bandenbekämpfung was only a tool of the state. The reason it was adopted and adapted by the state is an altogether different issue. The race for space and space for race, purified by a perpetual state of war—these fundamental abstractions represented Hitler’s ideological trinity, from which he never wavered. For public consumption, he dressed them up with political slogans for a greater German empire, the purity of the Aryan race, and short wars of revenge and retribution. Hitler’s ambition was to bequeath German “living space” (
Lebensraum
), a concept not conjured up by him and incorrectly assumed to mean only the acquisition of territory. Hitler’s Lebensraum was about German existence, in its broadest meaning, in a Germanic world. There had been other versions. Woodruff Smith argued that Lebensraum was a product of nineteenth-century agrarian-based anti-industrialism.
¹
During World War I, according to Fritz Fischer, Lebensraum came to shape Germany’s long-term occupation ambitions.
²
After 1918, Germany’s grand exponent of Lebensraum, Karl Haushofer, a retired army general and professor at Munich University, was a prolific scholar who advocated the science of space (
Raumwissenschaft
) or geo-political studies.
³
Ian Kershaw thought Hitler met Haushofer, through Rudolf Hess, before 1922.
⁴
Whatever the circumstances, by the time
Mein Kampf
was published, Hitler’s spatial politics were cast in stone along with his racism. Hitler wrote, “When we speak of new territory in Europe today we must principally think of Russia and the Border States subject to her.” His scheme was not confined to land; Hitler’s expansion envisaged racial cleansing. He synthesized his idea for space in the East with a parody of Karl Marx’s “Jewish question” prophesying, “The end of the Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.” From the outset, Hitler’s grandiose ambitions demanded a foundation of destruction. His vision became Germany’s fate: “We are chosen by Destiny to be the witnesses of a catastrophe which will afford the strongest confirmation of the nationalist theory of race.”
⁵

Bandenbekämpfung, in the context of race, space, and war, had a longer pedigree than Lebensraum. By the time Hitler’s protégé, Heinrich Himmler, proposed it, it had undergone numerous makeovers. Before World War II, the history of banditry in Germany was presumed to have been the residue of the apocalyptic Thirty Years’ War. Bandits in bands, deserters and stragglers from the war, ravaged German towns and countryside.
⁶
The paranoia of that time still resonates deep within the German consciousness today. According to Uwe Danker, it was in the interests of the state and church to depict banditry as a threat to society. The church and state complex denounced criminal banditry as the vile act of immoral and ungodly men and outlawed bandits as robbers and murderers.
⁷
From the outset of state-sponsored education, banditry was portrayed as the antithesis of an ordered society of lawfulness. Criminal banditry, however, was not the only form of banditry rooted in the
consciousness of pre-1939 German society. Political banditry, defined in antiquity as an early form of terrorism or guerrilla warfare, was passed down through the Bible and ancient texts. Banditry or brigandage was as an endemic problem for ancient Rome. Classically educated Germans were tutored against the evils of political banditry and its social consequences. For generations of Germans, Bandenbekämpfung came to mean the restoration of law and order. Himmler was not, therefore, the first to exploit security for political ends.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche warned Prussia against the manipulation of history and the emulation of the past. His words proved prophetic. The distortion of history played its part in German security culture. When Victor Klemperer accused Hitler’s “Jewish war” of lacking any familiarity with Flavius Josephus’s book, he overlooked the classically educated Himmler.
⁸
Gebhardt Himmler, Heinrich’s father, was a classical scholar and court teacher.
⁹
He read excerpts of Josephus’s classical text to young Himmler, and there is every reason to believe this subject was discussed in the Himmler home, especially once the new translation by Dr. Heinrich Clementz was published in 1900.
¹⁰
In the “Jewish war” of antiquity, Roman soldiers “admired the nobility” of the mass suicide of Jews at Masada. By stark contrast, in Hitler’s Jewish war, the SS showed only contempt and loathing for its Jewish victims. Hitler drew parallels with ancient Rome in his table talk. He once explained to Himmler that Rome paid for its mastery in blood and the employment of mercenaries.
¹¹
Martin Van Creveld noted that underpinning the Roman system was the principle of
lex talionis
, making the punishment fit the crime, a law for retaliation. The Romans exploited the law to suit their purposes.
¹²
The Germans, in the name of Roman law, did much the same, and Himmler applied a form of lex talionis through so-called revenge actions (
Vergeltungs-massnahmen
). Himmler understood the meaning of Josephus and the dire implications for Germany if Hitler’s war against the Jews failed. After the war, in a state of utter collapse, one leading Nazi reflected in his Nuremberg cell that the collapse of Germany was synonymous with the fall of Carthage. In 1945, he was presumably alluding to the surrounding piles of rubble.
¹³
These classical influences were instrumental in shaping the character of Bandenbekämpfung.

Gradually, the militarization of Bandenbekämpfung branched off into the dimension of political-security. The Etappen was expected to improve rear-area functions, but in doing so, it became an occupation administration, a security establishment, and a network for colonization. In 1872, the first colonies administered by the Etappen were Alsace and Lorraine. Germany’s brief but violent soirée with colonialism saw the adaptation of Bandenbekämpfung to colonial warfare through the Etappen. Germany used colonial conflict as a dress rehearsal for European war. In the process, Bandenbekämpfung became an extension of offensive operations as Germany perfected its security warfare concept. This kind of warfare percolated colonial policing, military
tactics, and economic warfare. By 1912, security measures had internalized the practice of enslavement and extermination of occupied populations. During World War I, Bandenbekämpfung was further adapted to compensate for the various security demands of different theaters of war. By 1918, Bandenbekämpfung entered the German military lexicon alongside “small war” (
kleine Krieg
), “partisan warfare” (
Partisanenkrieg
), “irregular warfare” (
Freischärlerkampf
), and “people’s war” (
Volkskrieg
). This transformation of Bandenbekämpfung can be traced by comparing the 1908 and the 1929 editions of Brockhaus.
¹⁴
Thus, by 1930, Bandenbekämpfung was already a powerful political weapon.

The struggle between Bandenbekämpfung and Partisanenbekämpfung began long before the Nazis. Before the 1880s, a long-cherished doctine of the professional soldier was the practice of Napoleonic-style small war. This was fundamentally Partisanenbekämpfung and gradually lost ground in the concentrated drive to build a machinelike conscript army led by an autonomous elitist officer corps. By 1900, the Imperial German Army had one measure that was the catchall for all circumstances, known as the
Cannae
principle. The Germans took Hannibal’s victory over the Roman army as the blueprint for their strategic, operational, and tactical war making. The colonial wars from 1900 to 1912 saw the demise of kleine Krieg in favor of the universal practice of Cannae for all operations. In German military terminology, therefore, the last vestiges of Partisanenbekämpfung were subsumed into security warfare before the Battle of the Waterberg (1904). All subsequent military security operations were waged as a desperate struggle against banditry. In 1919, the German army waged unrestricted Bandenbekämpfung in German streets against German communists, thereby removing any pretense at combating criminal banditry.

In a world that placed great store on the classification of opponents, Bandenbekämpfung had significant ideological clout. In 1941, the German army adopted Partisanenbekämpfung to regulate the cold-blooded killing of guerrillas, Red Army commissars, Jews, and stragglers. The army treated Soviet prisoners of war in the same manner as Herero tribesmen had thirty-six years before. Terror as a deterrent failed, and in Hitler’s mind, Partisanenbekämpfung fudged the issue; Hitler demanded the treatment of the Soviet Union as a “Jewish-Bolshevik bandit state” and a doctrine to see it through. He passed the job to Himmler. Once in command, Himmler immediately adopted Bandenbekämpfung. In his crusade against Bolshevism, he encouraged the scourge of banditry to biblical proportions and treated captives and innocents alike in ways more in keeping with the Romans. Under Himmler’s leadership, Bandenbekämpfung reengineered security warfare to enhance the SS leadership in its attempts to install Lebensraum. Typically, political justification for this policy was attributed to the racial and political banditry of Hitler’s opponents. Hitler declared all Soviet and Yugoslavian partisans “Jewish-Bolshevik
bandits.” Not content with denigrating the East, he labeled all Anglo-American Special Forces gangsters and denigrated Winston Churchill as the gangster-godfather of liberal democracy. Criminalizing all resistors placed captives outside the minimal protection of the existing laws of war. The disposition of German retribution catapulted the world into an abyss of horror and despair that has never really gone away. By 1944, Bandenbekämpfung doctrine was not only applied on all fronts but also represented a Nazi response to the laws and customs of war.

Please note that there is a bibliographical review at the end of this book that refers to some of the literature on this topic. In case readers have read or intend to read my PhD thesis, it is necessary to offer some explanation regarding its differences with this book.
¹⁵
The overall Luftwaffe content is reduced and the security battalion case study removed in preparation for another book. The large content on the German army has been greatly reduced. The chapter and content associated with Kurt Daluege, the chief of the German uniformed police, was removed and published as a chapter of a book on European policing.
¹⁶
Replacing this content is a greater focus on Himmler and his lieutenants, in particular Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. The chapters on Poland and Western Europe are post-doctoral extensions of the original research. The aim here has been to create an in-depth study of Bandenbekämpfung from its origins to its domination by the SS.

The research for this book was concerned with upholding the accepted conventions of terms and phraseology. This was not straightforward. If this had been a study of social banditry, there would be little problem in using the word “bandit.” However, this book falls within the parameters of research into the Third Reich and Nazi genocide. The Nazis ensured that “bandit” was at the receiving end of virulent politicization. Since the war, scholars have generally adopted the stance that all “bandits” were partisans, primarily because they fought to resist and destroy Nazism. To delve into the conundrum of whether all “bandits” were partisans or all partisans bandits somewhat panders to Nazi rhetoric. To answer the question what is or was a partisan further complicates matters. The literal definition of the partisan is a soldier fighting on the flank or adjunct of the main army, dressed in uniform, serving under a military code, and operating under superior orders. Not all partisans could meet this definition, while many bandits were the personification of military bearing. What then of the terrorist, brigand, guerrilla, resistor, social bandit,
Freikorps
, freedom fighter, spy, or scout, who do not necessarily fit into this discussion?, it might be asked. Argument inevitably turns on the eye of the beholder: one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. The problem here is that the Nazis also randomly categorized innocent civilians as bandits or Jews, usually to kill them. There has to be some latitude, albeit cautious, in the
use of words without breaching political etiquette. The solution adopted here places a word with Nazi connotations within quotes or leaves it in the German original, for example “bandit” or Banden. Henceforth, through these forms readers are alerted to the contextual usage of words.

Another sensitive issue among scholars concerns the use of SS ranks and titles. Readers might be surprised to find that German titles, especially those of the SS, are kept in their original form, whereas the German armed forces are cited in their English equivalent. There is a practical reason for this. From the standpoint of order, with so many different rank titles across a plethora of organizations, it seemed important to distinguish the SS. The SS organization was judged criminal in 1946, but since then, scholars have tended to refer to them as “SS-Generals,” “SS-Colonels,” or “SS-Majors.” This has aided the social rehabilitation of former SS men; for example, the gravestones of former senior SS officers have “General a.d.” (general officer in retirement) engraved beneath their name. This suggests they had been a general officer in life. Yet the SS ranks were purely political and symbolic of the faith the Nazis had in the “leadership principle” (
Führerprinzip
). The translation into “group-leader” or “storm-leader,” so brazenly political (rank equivalencies are in tabulated form in
appendix 2
), has no military comparison with a general or a major.

During the war, the SS adopted the term Waffen-SS, denoting armed-SS, and by 1944, most SS personnel came under this branch of the service. The SS hierarchy hoped that by adopting the Waffen-SS ranks they could circumvent the onset of allied war crimes. Some authors have unwisely assumed that this differentiated the SS between soldiers with a purely military role and the political soldiers. In the same remit, across all the years of research, no examples were found of SS officers refusing to participate in crimes. Likewise, no evidence was found of a refusal to carry out criminal orders, or for that matter expressing the wish to care for the helpless. The SS officers discussed here did not decline medals or baubles for mass slaughter. In fact they embellished their performance in security reports for material rewards. When the war was over and members of the SS faced judgment, this odious group of men proved both dishonest and cowardly in the denial of their deeds. This book, therefore, does not rehabilitate criminals and sets out to place the SS ranks and recipients within their criminal structures.