Hitler's Hangman (38 page)

committed to paper’.17

When, on 12 September, Canaris drew the attention of the chief of the

German army’s High Command, General Wilhelm Keitel, to Heydrich’s

plans for large-scale executions, stressing that ‘the nobility and clergy wil be

exterminated’ and warning him that ‘the world wil hold the Wehrmacht

responsible’ for al owing these atrocities to happen, Keitel answered that this

matter had ‘already been decided by the Führer’. Hitler had made it clear to

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him that he aimed to destroy Poland’s intel ectual and political elite, and

that he had ordered the shootings as part of the ‘political cleansing’ of newly

conquered Polish territory. If the army did not wish to have anything to do

with the ‘ethnic exterminations’, it would have to accept that the SS and

civilian militias would carry out the liquidations independently.18

Hitler’s endorsement of SS policies was hardly surprising. Even before

the German invasion, on 22 August, he had announced to German generals

that the military campaign against Poland required a ‘brutal approach’ and

the ‘greatest toughness’, a stance that was further radicalized by the subse-

quent attacks on ethnic Germans in Poland.19 Shortly after the Bromberg

massacre, on 11 September, the Army High Command official y notified

General Adolf Strauss, commander of the Fourth Army, that Hitler had

authorized Himmler to arrest 500 hostages in Bromberg and that summary

executions were to be carried out until the city was ‘pacified’. The army was

explicitly ordered not to hinder the
Einsatzgruppen
in carrying out their

task. Receiving this order, Strauss was less concerned about the mass kil ings

themselves than by the apparent loss of the army’s executive powers to the

Einsatzgruppen
, complaining to the Army High Command that the order

would lead to a ‘total reversal of responsibilities’.20

By the time Heydrich had returned to Berlin from his inspection tour

of the task forces in the field, the smouldering conflict between the

Wehrmacht and the SS over executive competences in occupied Poland

was threatening to escalate. On 18 September, Brauchitsch reminded the

army commanders in the field that the Wehrmacht was the sole executive

authority in the occupied territories and that orders from any party agency

affecting the judicial autonomy of the military courts were to be ignored.

This was a scarcely concealed blow against SS ambitions. On the very

same day, Himmler reiterated his earlier order to the Security Police

commanders in the operational area that ‘all members of Polish insurgent

groups are to be shot’. The military commanders in Poland were once

again not informed of this order.21

In view of the mounting tensions between the SS and the army leader-

ship, Heydrich and Wagner met again on 19 September and engaged in ‘a

highly important, necessary and open’ conversation about the rapidly dete-

riorating relationship between the Wehrmacht and the
Einsatzgruppen
.

Wagner insisted that the army be informed of the
Einsatzgruppen
’s exact

tasks. In response, Heydrich confirmed that the task assigned to him by

Hitler was the ‘fundamental cleansing’ of Jews, clergy and nobility from

Poland. Wagner did not object to the planned liquidations as such, but he

was keen to keep the army dissociated from them. In particular, he and

Heydrich agreed that the ‘ground sweeping’ operation should only be carried

out after the military administration over Poland had come to an end.22

E x P E R I M E N T S W I T H M A S S M U R D E R

147

Although the terms of the agreement necessitated a delay in what he

considered to be pressing policing actions, Heydrich was nonetheless

pleased with the outcome of the meeting. That same afternoon, he

informed his senior staff that ‘a highly advantageous result’ had been

achieved. Even if the
Einsatzgruppen
would continue to be formally

subordinate to the army commanders, they would nonetheless receive

their orders directly from him.23

The following day, Hitler authorized the agreement that had been

reached between Heydrich and Wagner. In a meeting with Heydrich,

Himmler and Brauchitsch, the Führer reassured an uneasy Brauchitsch

that major ethnic cleansing campaigns would begin only after executive

power had been handed over by the army to a civilian administration.

Adjusting to these new realities, Brauchitsch informed his army

commanders on 21 September that the
Einsatzgruppen
had been ordered

by the Führer ‘to carry out certain ethnic tasks in the occupied territory’.

He chose not to elaborate on the nature of these tasks, but insisted that

their execution would lie ‘outside the responsibilities’ of the army

commanders. Close consultation with the Security Police was to continue

to ensure that police activities would not hinder army operations.24

That Brauchitsch was not happy with this turn of events became clear

in a subsequent meeting with Heydrich the following day. Brauchitsch

again insisted that the army should be informed of all orders given to the

Einsatzgruppen
and also made it clear that he wanted Himmler’s order to

shoot ‘insurgents’ without trial rescinded. Heydrich agreed to have the

order withdrawn and to provide the army leadership with continuous

information about
Einsatzgruppen
activities. At the same time, he reiter-

ated his criticism of the apparently slow pace of the court-martial process.

Brauchitsch refused to concede the point, but stated that in order to expe-

dite the trials he had authorized the establishment of additional military

courts. He did not articulate any reservations about future ethnic-

cleansing policies and shootings, provided that the implementation of

these policies were postponed until after the military administration of

Poland had ended, thus avoiding a situation in which the armies’ reputa-

tion abroad would be tarnished or its position as the executive power in

Poland undermined by the SS.25

After Brauchitsch had left, Wagner succeeded in extracting from

Heydrich the assurance that the most notorious
Einsatzgruppe
, under the

command of Woyrsch, would be withdrawn from Poland. Heydrich was

deeply dissatisfied. Wagner, on the other hand, was jubilant. In a letter to

his wife he wrote that he had dealt ‘a great blow to invisible forces’.26

Brauchitsch and Wagner had successfully wrung concessions from

Heydrich, but if the Army High Command believed that Heydrich

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

intended to play according to their rules, they were wrong. Although he

officially reminded the
Einsatzgruppen
commanders in September that

military operations in Poland should not be disturbed and ordered that

the shooting of insurgents was to be carried out only ‘in cases of emer-

gency’, Heydrich also ordered his men to ‘overburden’ the military courts

systematically to the extent ‘that they can no longer function properly’. He

further demanded that a record be kept of all sentences handed out by the

army’s courts so that he would be aware of any judgements that did not

call for the death penalty. Presumably he intended to keep these records

both as incriminating proof of the military courts’ inefficiency and for

future reference in the next rounds of killings.27

Since Brauchitsch never communicated any details of Hitler’s decision to

wage ethnic warfare in Poland to his military commanders in the field,

many among the officer corps objected both to the randomness of the

Einsatzgruppen
violence and to what they perceived as an SS chal enge to

their role as the sole executive power in the newly occupied territories.

Unease about SS methods turned into unmistakable and open criticism

when the military commander-in-chief in Poland, Colonel General

Johannes Blaskowitz, condemned them as ‘criminal atrocities, maltreatment

and plundering’ and signs of the SS’s ‘animal and pathological instincts’.28

When Blaskowitz’s report was passed on to Führer headquarters on

27 November 1939, a furious Hitler expressed his frustration over the

Wehrmacht’s ‘maudlin sentimentality’, and responded to Blaskowitz’s

criticism by offering an amnesty for all those who had committed atroci-

ties against Poland’s civilian population during the invasion and by ending

the military courts’ jurisdiction over the SS. If anything, the Wehrmacht’s

complaints reinforced Hitler’s determination that the emerging German

civil administration in Poland should be an instrument of, rather than an

obstacle to, Nazi racial policy.29

Building a New Racial Order

Long before the beginning of the military campaign in September 1939,

it had been clear to Heydrich that Poland would be treated differently

from the previous two areas of Nazi expansion, Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Throughout the summer, Hitler had repeatedly asserted that the war

against Poland would entail a ‘harsh racial struggle’. Unlike many

Wehrmacht commanders who deluded themselves about the true nature

of the conflict ahead of them, Heydrich had immediately understood the

implications and opportunities of Hitler’s exhortations. The task that lay

ahead of him required both energetic ruthlessness in combating Germany’s

enemies and the development of substantial policy plans to implement

E x P E R I M E N T S W I T H M A S S M U R D E R

149

Hitler’s vague ideological pronouncements. Heydrich also understood

better than some of the Wehrmacht’s senior officers that those imple-

menting the policies most attuned to Hitler’s wishes would be rewarded

with enhanced powers to enforce them.

Yet plans for what was going to happen to the majority of Poles

remained uncertain. As Heydrich explained during a meeting with senior

SS officers in Berlin on 7 September, a general consensus existed within

the Nazi leadership on a break-up of independent Poland and a ‘neutrali-

zation’ of anti-German elements through mass arrests and shootings.

Apart from that, Hitler had decided on very few concrete policies. All that

was certain at this point was that the ‘primitive population’ not immedi-

ately affected by the current cleansing operations would ‘receive no special

education’ and would be ‘suppressed in some way’.30

On 20 September, in the euphoria of an imminent victory over Poland,

Hitler approved SS proposals for the future of Poland. As Heydrich

informed his senior staff and
Einsatzgruppen
commanders in Berlin the

following day and again on 29 September, it had been decided that Poland

would effectively disappear from the map. The Polish territory now under

Nazi control would be divided into three ethnically homogenized zones:

one German, one Polish and a small Jewish ‘reservation’. The formerly

German border areas of West Prussia, the Warthegau region around

Poznań (Posen) and the extended province of Upper Silesia were to

become purely German through the expulsion of all Poles, Jews and

Gypsies, as well as through the resettlement of ethnic Germans from

those territories in Eastern Europe that had recently come under Soviet

control in fulfilment of the secret terms of the 1939 Hitler–Stalin Pact.

That task in itself was enormous: in the territories to be brought into the

Reich lived 8.9 million Poles, 603,000 Jews and a mere 600,000 ethnic

Germans. An ‘Eastern Wall’, a fortified ring of German settlements,

would surround these new German provinces, shielding them from

the ‘foreign-speaking’ Polish and Jewish zones, the latter of which was

to be established in the furthest, most eastern part of the now Nazi-

controlled area.31

Heydrich had every reason to see Hitler’s decision for a fourth partition

as a green light for further harshness in pursuing the SS’s policies of ethnic

‘unweaving’ in Poland. His apparatus accordingly began preparations for

the large-scale deportation of Poles from the incorporated territories,

to be carried out as soon as the military administration had been

passed into civilian hands.32 As a preliminary step towards the ‘solution

of the Polish problem’, the
Einsatzgruppen
were to draw up further lists of

significant leaders to be sent to concentration camps, as well as lists

of various professional and middle-class groups to be expelled into the

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Polish ‘rump territory’ soon to be known as the General Government.

The remaining ‘primitive Poles’ were to be gradually deported from