Hitler's Hangman (36 page)

Berlin home with his closest staff members – Werner Best, Heinrich

Müller, Heinz Jost, Walter Schellenberg and Helmut Knochen – in order

to discuss ‘the most fundamental questions’ of the impending attack on

Poland, during which the deployment of 2,000 men in four equally sized

task forces was agreed.100

The men appointed to lead the task forces and their various sub-units,

the
Einsatzkommandos
, were senior SD and Security Police officers, mostly

wel -educated, middle-class men in their late twenties to mid-thirties who

had turned to the far right during the Weimar Republic. Heydrich insisted

on appointing individuals who possessed the ‘relevant experience and

faultless military bearing’.101 Many of the more senior commanders

such as Emanuel Schäfer, Lothar Beutel, Josef Meisinger and Heydrich’s

friend from the early SS days in Hamburg, Bruno Streckenbach, had

served in the violent Freikorps campaigns of the early 1920s. Many of

them could also build on practical experiences gathered during the annex-

ation of Austria and Czechoslovakia. Heydrich by no means regarded

their deployment in the field as a punishment but rather as an opportunity

to prove the value of the SS’s ‘fighting administration’ under fire.102

Even though the assembly of the SS task forces proceeded without

problems during Heydrich’s holiday, the nature of the working relation-

ship between the
Einsatzgruppen
and the Wehrmacht remained unclear.

The Wehrmacht commanders had been informed of the planned deploy-

ment of SS units during the forthcoming Polish campaign in the spring

of 1939. Yet the escalation of SS violence during the conquest of Austria,

Bohemia and Moravia had raised concerns within the army leadership

about an all too independent SS acting on its own initiative in the

occupied territories.103

In order to clarify the command relations between the army and the

Einsatzgruppen during the forthcoming campaign, Heydrich and Best

met with the chief of staff of the army’s General Quartermaster, Eduard

Wagner, on 29 August. As Wagner noted in his diary after the meeting:

‘We came to a quick agreement. Both rather inscrutable types. Heydrich

particularly disagreeable.’104 According to the agreement, Security Police

commanders were required to maintain close working relationships with

all local military commanders, the heads of the civil administration and

R E H E A R S A L S F O R W A R

137

Kurt Daluege’s Order Police. A liaison officer from each
Einsatzgruppe

was to be named to ensure ‘frictionless communications’ with the relevant

military and police officials.105

According to the ‘Guidelines for the Foreign Operations of the Sipo

and SD’ drafted by Werner Best and signed by Heydrich on 31 July, the

Einsatzgruppen
were instructed to ‘render impotent’ the ‘leading stratum

of the population of Poland’ and to ‘combat all elements in enemy territory

to the rear of the fighting troops who are hostile to the Reich and the

German people’.106 These tasks were part of a concerted effort to

‘neutralize’ centres of real and potential resistance. The lack of clarity as to

what exactly was meant by ‘neutralization’ and who was to be subjected to

it would give individual commanders in the field considerable leeway in

interpreting their brief – a characteristic element of Heydrich’s leadership

style and one that encouraged his men to show initiative. At the same

time, the SD was to establish an intelligence network in the field, made

up of members of the German minority, and to collect and confiscate

material pertaining to Jews, Freemasons and Catholic clergymen in

Poland.107

In terms of content, the regulations contained in these directives

provided little that was new: the sections dealing with the tasks of the

Einsatzgruppen
and their relationship with the Wehrmacht were largely

identical to the instructions sent to the task forces during the invasion of

the Sudetenland. One of the few differences was that this time the

instructions contained a section on racial hygiene, forbidding all sexual

relations with women of non-German origin as a ‘sin against one’s own

blood’, and threatening that ‘violations’ of this order would be ‘severely

punished’. At the same time, the guidelines contained regulations that

stood in profound contrast to the subsequent actions of the
Einsatzgruppen
.

For example, they stated that ‘the mistreatment or killing of detained

persons is strictly prohibited and, to the extent that it is undertaken by

other persons, it is to be prevented. Force may be used only to break up

resistance.’108

Although the formulations contained in these guidelines appear rela-

tively innocuous when compared to the reality of the invasion, neither

Heydrich nor the Wehrmacht leadership had any illusions about the

radical nature of the approaching war against Poland. At a meeting with

some fifty senior army commanders at the Berghof on 22 August 1939,

Hitler talked of the ‘destruction of Poland’ and ‘brutal approaches’.109 On

29 August, the day of the meeting between Heydrich and Wagner, the

latter informed the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz

Halder, that the
Einsatzgruppen
would arrest some 30,000 Poles and

deport them to concentration camps.110

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

In mid-August, at a conference in Berlin, leading members of the

Einsatzgruppen
received further oral instructions from Heydrich and

Best, instructions which even by Heydrich’s standards were ‘extraordi-

narily radical’ and which included a ‘liquidation order for various circles of

the Polish leadership’ affecting ‘thousands’.111 According to post-war trial

testimonies of leading task-force officers present that day, Heydrich

opened the meeting by informing the men of the atrocities being

committed against ethnic Germans in Poland, noting that he expected

heavy partisan resistance against the German invasion. It was the respon-

sibility of the
Einsatzgruppen
to ‘neutralize’ these threats – particularly

those posed by saboteurs, partisans, Jews and the Polish intelligentsia – in

areas conquered by the German army, and to punish individuals who had

committed crimes against Poland’s ethnic Germans in the preceding

weeks. Although carefully guarded in his language, Heydrich insisted that

in carrying out their difficult tasks, ‘everything was allowed’.112

Heydrich’s SD was also assigned the role of staging armed border viola-

tions immediately prior to the planned attack, which could then be

blamed on the Polish side and used to justify the start of the war. Hitler

had announced to his generals at the Berghof on 22 August that he

would give ‘a propagandistic reason for starting the war, no matter

whether it is plausible or not’. Heydrich managed this top-secret opera-

tion himself and in mid-August he personally showed Himmler the

border sections he had in mind. The co-ordination of the mission was left

in the capable hands of Herbert Mehlhorn, the SD lawyer who had

advised Heydrich in his family disputes over the Halle Conservatory in

the mid-1930s.113

On 31 August, small SS units under the command of Alfred Naujocks,

dressed in Polish uniforms, attacked the radio station in Gleiwitz, a

customs house and a forestry lodge along the German–Polish border in

order to stage, as Hitler called it the following day, Polish ‘frontier viola-

tions of a nature no longer tolerable for a great power’. The men proceeded

to broadcast declarations in German and Polish through the Gleiwitz

station. They left behind a number of dead concentration-camp prisoners

who had been murdered and stuck into Polish uniforms.114

That same night in Berlin, Heydrich wrote his testament, drafted as a

private letter to his wife and signed at 2 a.m. on 1 September 1939, less

than three hours before the beginning of the German invasion of Poland.

Heydrich instructed his staff to keep this letter in the safe of his office and

to hand it to his wife only ‘when I am no longer alive’.

Dearest Lina, my beloved Children! I hope that this letter will never

leave my safe. However, both as a soldier of the Führer and as a good

R E H E A R S A L S F O R W A R

139

husband and father I have to consider all possibilities. The Führer of our

Greater Germany, Adolf Hitler, whose handshake earlier this evening

continues to burn in my hand, has already made the great decision:

tomorrow morning at 4.45 a.m. the German armies will march into

Poland; the Reichstag will convene at 10 a.m. I do not believe that

anything will happen to me. But if fate chooses differently then all my

worldly possessions shall be yours . . . Dearest Lina, I believe that even

though the past weeks have been impossibly difficult for both of us

(notably your lack of faith in me has, due to its unclear foundation,

profoundly hurt me), they have nevertheless deepened and strengthened

our relationship. Educate our children to become firm believers in the

Führer and Germany; to be true to the ideas of the Nazi movement.

[Make sure] that they strictly adhere to the eternal laws of the SS, that

they are hard towards themselves, kind and generous towards our own

people and Germany and merciless towards all internal and external

enemies of the Reich . . . My dearest Lina, I am not without faults. I

have made mistakes, both professional and human, both in thought and

in deed, but my love for you and my children is boundless. Please

remember our life together with respect and fondness. And once time

has healed the wounds, you must give our children a new father. But he

has to be a real man
[ein Kerl]
, the kind of man I aspired to be. In endless

love, Heil Hitler, Reinhard115

Heydrich’s deeply personal letter, written exclusively for his wife’s

consumption, illustrates how far he had developed since he entered the

SS in 1931. He had successfully reinvented himself as a model Nazi

and firmly believed in his new identity. The mention of the Führer’s

‘burning’ handshake, the precise instructions given for the upbringing of

his children and his insistence that Lina remarry a ‘real man’ in the true

Nazi spirit, all testify to a rare certainty of purpose and ideological

commitment that was largely a result of formative experiences within

the SS.

For Heydrich, the outbreak of the Second World War represented an

unprecedented opportunity. He had spent the first six years of the Third

Reich as Himmler’s first lieutenant, developing an ever-expanding polit-

ical police apparatus that was intricately linked with the SS. Now, against

the background of the war, intoxicating new possibilities arose. Neither

Heydrich nor anyone else in the Nazi leadership had a blueprint for the

future of Eastern Europe, but it was clear from the start that Poland –

unlike the racially allied Austria and the economically vital Protectorate

of Bohemia and Moravia – would become some sort of laboratory for

Nazi experiments in racial imperialism and ethnic engineering. The kind

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

of utopia that Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich intended to implement

in the yet to be occupied territories remained blurry and unspecified.

What was clear was that its implementation would not be limited by the

same kind of ‘restraint’ imposed on the SS during the military campaigns

of 1938. The German attack on Poland, launched in the early morning

hours of 1 September, was to become a watershed for the Third Reich’s

war of annihilation against the ‘lesser races’ of the East.116

C H A P T ER V I

✦

Experiments with

Mass Murder

The Invasion of Poland

Invaded from three sides, unaided by its Western allies and

confronted with a militarily superior German army, the poorly prepared

Polish troops were in a hopeless situation. Although the defenders put up a

valiant fight, staging a counter-attack at Kutno on 9 September 1939 and

inflicting unexpectedly heavy losses on the invading Germans, the

Wehrmacht quickly advanced on Warsaw. On 17 September, the day the

Red Army marched into Eastern Poland in accordance with the secret

clause of the Hitler–Stalin Pact, the Polish government fled to Romania.

Warsaw fel at the end of the month and the last Polish troops surren-

dered on 6 October.1

Behind the regular troops, Heydrich’s five – later seven – SS task forces

swiftly moved across the border and descended on Poland’s civilian popu-