Hitler's Bandit Hunters (46 page)

Corruption was an ever present problem facing the SS in Poland. In 1941, SSPF Lublin under SS-Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik was handed responsibility for
Aktion Reinhard
, the plan to exterminate Polish Jewry. To
facilitate this plan, extermination camps were erected at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Globocnik had been removed from his previous post because of corruption, and immediately recognized the potential for personal gain from the new posting. In the fall of 1940, SS-Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger was posted to SSPF Kraków to conduct security duties. The battalion was then posted to SSPF Lublin. In a bizarre twist, Oskar Dirlewanger, Globocnik, Berger, and Krüger became entangled in a serious case of corruption. Officially, Dirlewanger received a promotion on the recommendation of Krüger and Globocnik for services against smugglers, illegal trade, and Polish resistance. However, Krüger also tipped off the SS legal officer, Dr. Konrad Morgen, about Dirlewanger’s behavior, including wanton acts of murder, extortion, and the crime of sexual relations with Jews (
Rassenschande
). Krüger probably hoped to divert Morgen from investigating Globocnik and himself. The tip backfired, and Krüger was forced by SS etiquette, if not by self-interest, to protect Globocnik as his lieutenant and SSPF against Morgen. Berger pledged faith in Dirlewanger. Morgen was blamed, consequently reduced in rank, and forced to serve in a Waffen-SS unit.
¹⁰
Dirlewanger moved east to join Bach-Zelewski in 1942. Himmler’s suspicions of Globocnik lingered into 1943 and his backing of this protégé only lasted while he was politically useful.

Elsewhere, security merged with policing in the first stages of establishing Bandenbekämpfung operations Poland. In one example from November 29, 1942, a
Gendarmerie-Hauptmannschaft
from Radom conducted actions in the forest area of Lubionia, south of Ilza, against “Polish-Jewish bandits.”
¹¹
The motorized gendarmerie detachment had three companies, with a platoon of Schutzpolizei and an additional twenty gendarmes from guard duty. Fifteen German foresters from Lubionia and forty Polish foresters from Forsterei Marcule assisted them. They shot three “armed Jews” in the forest and then a firefight ensued. The final casualty list was forty-one “bandits” killed and one arrested. The police collected fifteen Polish rifles, a hunting rifle, and grenades. They took reprisal actions against the villages in the area as a matter of course. The German analysis of the security situation in Poland, recorded a growing tendency of the fight for freedom. In January 1943, Luftwaffe Colonel Kollee’s “bandit situation report,” previously discussed in
chapter 4
, described the Polish predicament, “they fight for their independence…. The Poles know that they have no possibility for independence from Germany, nor Russia.”
¹²
These two examples contrast the extremes of security in Poland.

Two aspects underlying Nazi ethnic cleansing in Poland have hitherto received only the briefest of research attention—the link between SS security measures and the Holocaust and the impact of operational training to prepare troops for genocide-based operations.

In 1939, Fritz Katzmann became the senior SS representative assigned to the 14th Army prior to the invasion of Poland. Katzmann then served as SSPF Radom but, in April 1942, was transferred as SSPF Lemberg based in the Galician city of Lvov.
¹³
He was tasked with extermination of the Galician Jews. His final report to Krüger was a chilling example of Nazi thoroughness.
¹⁴
Katzmann explained that the “evacuation” of Jews from the district was systematic from April 1942. By November 10, exactly “254,989 Jews had been evacuated
[ausgesiedelt].”
On June 23, 1943, the report concluded that 434,329 had been “evacuated” and that the remaining Jews (21,156) were confined in twenty camps. All confiscated valuables and property had been handed over to the Special Staff Reinhard. Katzmann’s description of the task was depraved. He explained how the SS-Police forces and Ukrainian police were “exposed to physical and mental strains” of having to overcome the “nausea” of entering “dirty and pestilential Jewish holes.” Bizarrely, Katzmann described in diabolical terms how he overturned an absurd biological warfare plot, “during the searches there has been found, moreover, a number of leaflets in the Hebrew language, inciting the Jews to breed lice carrying spotted fever, in order to destroy the Police Force.” Katzmann gathered together a suitably large police force inoculated against spotted fever; he went into action “to destroy this plague boil.”
¹⁵

Irrespective of his preparations, Katzmann’s men suffered 120 cases of spotted fever, and eighteen died. He described searching for Jews in concealed places such as chimneys, sewers, cellars, and inside furniture. They seized weapons from the Jews that had been purchased from Italian soldiers. They also discovered bunkers “masterly” concealed from detection. There was evidence that Italian soldiers stationed in the area had helped Jews to escape for large sums of Polish Zloty and even U.S. dollars. On May 13, 1943, an armed Jewish band hijacked a Luftwaffe vehicle and its driver. The driver offered to help them escape but drove them into a local NSKK barracks, where they were disarmed. Their weapons again proved to be Italian. After an interrogation, another large group of Jews was located in woods near Brody; these Jews were declared members of the Polish resistance movement. A search was initiated by the gendarmerie, Ukrainian police, and two companies from the army. During what appeared to be a firefight, thirty-three Jewish “bandits” were shot dead. A Polish gamekeeper, working for the Germans, was killed, and an SS man wounded. On May 21, another “Jewish band” was overwhelmed; they were also armed with Italian small arms. Ten days later, an additional Jewish band of 139 members existing in six bunkers was hunted down and killed. In June, the SS again combed the area and discovered more traces of Jews trying to escape into Hungary. After further Bandenbekämpfung in the area, the cleansing action counted twenty thousand Jews rounded up and three thousand Jews who had committed suicide. Katzmann reported
losses of 11 dead and 137 injured. “Only thanks to the sense of duty of every single leader and man have we succeeded to get rid of this PLAGUE
[sic]
in so short a time,” he concluded his report.
¹⁶

Christopher Browning, in his study of the Order Police, raised the issue of the “initiation to mass murder” as the first step toward mass extermination.
¹⁷
Browning had little available evidence to work his ideas beyond general interpretation. Bandenbekämpfung, it was explained in
chapter 6
, combined training and the “baptism of fire” with operational security. The modus operandi of Bandenbekämpfung rarely included frontline battalions and regiments; the allocation of manpower was generally ad hoc. Bach-Zelewski’s expertise was in maximizing the operational capability of diverse and limited resources. The rationalization of training, after 1942, forced the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS to establish common goals and outcomes. Bandenbekämpfung ensured rapid completion of recruit training through their “baptism of fire” prior to frontline posting. After 1942, specialist facilities, such as the SS-Waldlager Bobruisk, were constructed to rush recruits through basic and advanced training. Poland was the perfect hunting ground for racial “enemies of the state,” granted the potential for “blooding” that was encouraged by both the SS and Wehrmacht. Uprisings or revolts in Poland became an opportunity to place recruits in an earlier baptism of fire.

The proscribed training set by the German armed forces for street fighting involved flanking and encircling maneuvers. The idea was to waste defenders by cutting off access to water, food, and energy supplies. The Germans saturated defenders and defensive positions with continual artillery and aircraft bombardment. Once identified, sections of streets or houses were repeatedly assaulted until isolated as pockets of resistance so they could be destroyed piecemeal. Another German tactic was to drive through a municipality, cut off the escape route, and then traverse over the town, combating the enemy among the population. The Germans also fought on two levels, through cellars and sewers, knocking holes through walls to maintain their momentum. After capturing an area, they sealed it up with mines and barbed wire to prevent the defenders from returning. During the fighting, the Germans forced civilians to clear the streets to allow armored vehicles to be brought forward to support the fighting.
¹⁸
These principles were twice applied to Warsaw.

The importance of on-the-job training was apparent in the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising (April 20–May 16, 1943). The heroic stand by the Jewish community against deportation to the death camps was pacified by a young security force. The subsequent Warsaw ghetto report by the SS commander, SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, detailed the daily actions and the pacification process.
¹⁹
This was a lesson in SS methods of suppression and the prevailing security thinking in 1943, as well as the SS skills of
coordinating a mixed force of police and Wehrmacht troops. The Polish historian Andrej Wirth’s introduction to the infamous “Stroop report” was overly concerned by what he viewed as the cynical use of youth in killing. Wirth thought involving the youthful SS troops only added to the scale of the tragedy; he did not grasp that it was a conscious act. The pacification of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto was, for the Nazis, a baptism by fire for German youth. The report was a meticulous description of the daily activities in the process. To the SS, the report was instructional and illustrated the expertise required for the command and coordination of mixed force security actions. The Stroop Report detailed the deliberate employment of recruits in a Judenaktion and was, therefore, a training manual.

The report also offers insight into the character of SS professionalism. It both explained and reported use of flamethrowers and anti-aircraft guns to destroy pockets of resistance. This professionalism, however, was inverted; the fire brigade and the Technische Nothilfe participated in the pacification by conducting controlled fire-raising and closing down water supplies. This corruption of socially beneficial expertise (rescue services) was first adapted during the “Night of Broken Glass” of November 1938, when the German police started fires in synagoges. The same units in Warsaw blocked sewers, denying free movement to the resistors. The fire brigade assisted the troops in placing heavy weapons to minimize the damage to surrounding buildings. One aspect of the report that was unusual, given the concentration on firepower, was the relatively small proportion of heavy weapons utilized during the operation.

The report’s coverage of casualties provides a limited survey of manpower. Jewish losses included five thousand to six thousand killed in the fighting, 56,065 captured, and 13,929 killed in Nazi extermination camps.
²⁰
Total German casualties were seventeen dead and eighty-five wounded. The SS-Police troops deployed were collected from five separate force pools. The Order Police assigned units from the 22nd SS-Police Regiment, a detachment of Technische Nothilfe, a troop of gendarmerie, and the fire brigade. The average age of police casualties was thirty-one, the oldest thirty-seven, and the youngest twenty. The SS-Totenkopfverbände committed two battalions, the 3rd SS-Panzer-Grenadier Training Battalion (Warsaw), and the SS-Cavalry Training Battalion (Warsaw). Their casualties averaged twenty-four years of age; the eldest forty-two (a senior NCO) and the youngest, a seventeen-year-old private, among a total sample of sixty-four casualties. A collaboration battalion of Trawniki police from the SSPF Lublin had a casualty ratio averaging twenty-six years of age, although the eldest was fifty-one. The German army sent a flak battery, a company of regular engineers, and a reserve engineer battalion; they worked alongside railway troops. An SD detachment was present, as usual in all such actions. Stroop declared that the young men of the SS deserved special commendation. With only three to four weeks training
behind them, they had acted with a devil-may-care (
Draufgängertum
) attitude. Stroop also commended the officers and men of the police who were already experienced in this kind of “front fighting.”

The testimony of SS-Grenadier Willi Hansen, a batman for SS-Obersturmbannführer Nowak, has left some idea of the preparations to destroy the Warsaw ghetto. Hansen’s job was to serve Nowak while training with the 1st Company of the 3rd SS-Panzer-Grenadier Training Battalion (Warsaw) from November 1942 to August 1943. In conversations with Nowak, Hansen alleged that the SS received orders from Berlin to destroy the ghetto because of attacks by the inmates on the German garrison. From April 11–22, the members of the Totenkopf training unit were mobilized every morning for “partisan warfare.” Nowak was not officially part of the suppression forces but unofficially took part in looting the ghetto.
²¹
SS-Oberscharführer Anton Schaffrath, born in 1918, was a railwayman. He joined the Allgemeine-SS, called up in May 1943, and was then sent to NCO training with the 3rd SS-Panzer-Grenadier Training Battalion (Warsaw). He participated in the pacification from May 14, his 2nd Company assigned to blocking around the ghetto. Schaffrath stated that members of the SD had executed Jewish prisoners, and he witnessed many women and children deported via the railway station. Schaffrath listed the approximate ages of his fellow NCOs as ranging from twenty-four to forty, with an overall average of thirty-two years.
²²
SS-Sturmann Erwin Maletz trained as a nineteen-year-old recruit in the 4th Company of the 3rd SS-Panzer-Grenadier Training Battalion (Warsaw). Captured in August 1944, Maletz told his British interrogators that SS-Unterscharführer Warth had forced men to shoot Jews, while SS-Sturmann Erlach delighted in killing Jews and “the more the merrier” was his motto.
²³
Franz van Lent, a Dutchman, served as an SS-Sturmann and was captured by the British army in Normandy in 1944. He volunteered a statement to the British. His first posting was the 1st SS-Panzer Grenadier Regiment Totenkopf. On April 18, 1943, the regiment sent its 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th companies into the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. They remained there until May 18, he explained: