The Himmler's SS (15 page)

The SS Hauptamt was charged with the overall responsibility for SS physical training. In August 1942, a decree of the Reichsführer-SS enlarged and consolidated that function as follows:

1.
The organisation and control of all physical training for the whole SS, including routine training, competitive events and military sports, was the responsibility of the SS Hauptamt.

2.
The Chief of the SS Hauptamt, Obergruppenführer Berger, was appointed Inspector of SS Physical Training and Deputy Leader of the SS Sports Clubs (Inspekteur für die Leibeserziehung der SS und stellvertretender Führer der SS Sportsgemeinschaften e.V.).

3.
Amt V of the SS Hauptamt was made the competent department for the physical training of the whole SS, with the title of Amt für Leibesübungen.

4.
The former office of the Inspector and Central Directorate of SS Sports Clubs was incorporated into Amt V.

5.
The Chief of Amt V was appointed Deputy Inspector of SS Physical Training.

6.
The SS Central School of Physical Training in Prague, which taught SS sports instructors, was directly subordinated to the Chief of the SS Hauptamt.

In March 1943, a slight extension of the functions of the SS Hauptamt in this respect took place. By an agreement between the Reichsführer-SS and the German Life Saving Society (Deutsche Lebensrettungs-gemeinschaft e.V., or DLRG), the SS and police formed a special section of the Society under the title of ‘Landesverband SS und Polizei der DLRG', with offices at 18 Bülowstrasse, Berlin. The Chief of the SS Hauptamt or his deputy acted as representative of the SS and police at the central headquarters of the Society. The function of the Landesverband was to promote lifesaving and artificial respiration techniques and, thereafter, hold examinations and grant relevant proficiency certificates. It took in all formations of the Allgemeine-SS, Waffen-SS, SD, security police and uniformed police, and instruction was given in conjunction with physical training.

Disabled servicemen competing on the games field during their convalescence, 28 March 1942. The man on the right wears SS sports kit.

The Reichssportführer, or National Sports Leader, was an SA-Obergruppenführer, Hans von Tschammer und Osten, and consequently the SA tended to organise most of the paramilitary competitive sports events during the Third Reich. At these domestic competitions, however, the SS and police teams always figured prominently and invariably dominated the scene. In February 1937, for example, the SS won the Führer's Prize at the NSDAP Ski Championships at Rottach-Egern, and Himmler and von Tschammer und Osten were present to award it. Internationally, too, SS men made their mark. Hermann Fegelein led Germany's equestrian squad in the 1936 Olympics, and the SS motorcycle team of Zimmermann, Mundhenke, Patina and Knees, all wearing green leathers emblazoned with the SS runes, won the Six Day Trial at Donnington in England in July 1938. Later the same year, an SD team headed by Heydrich himself and comprising von Friedenfeldt, Hainke, Liebscher and Losert, all graduates of the SS-Fechtschule, or SS Fencing School, at Bernau, emerged victorious from the International Sabre Competition in Berlin. Finally, in April 1940, Italy's famous Gran Premio di Brescia motor racing event was won by the SS driver von Manstein in a BMW 328 coupé. Not surprisingly, SS physical training establishments attracted outstanding talent, and at one time eight out of the twelve coaches at the Junkerschule at Bad Tölz were national champions in their events.

Conditions of service in the Allgemeine-SS were therefore very good in terms of the society in which the organisation grew and developed. Members' duties were not onerous, at least prior to the war, and there were excellent promotion prospects, fine medical and welfare facilities, and the very best sporting opportunities. Moreover, the SS man was placed above the law. He and his family were accorded special status, as the physical and racial élite of the new Germany.

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In January 1935, Himmler addressed an audience of senior Wehrmacht officers on his vision of the Third Reich. ‘I am,' he said, ‘a convinced supporter of the idea that the only thing which really matters in the world is good blood. History teaches us that only good blood, in particular the blood engaged in military activity and, above all, Nordic blood, is the leading creative element in every State. I have always approached my task from this angle, and will continue to do so.' It is perhaps surprising, given the generally non-Nazi nature of the audience, that such a statement was accepted at face value, as a valid and realistic opinion to expound. However, it is important to appreciate that this Nazi form of racism was nothing new in Germany. The notion that the Germanic master race or Herrenvolk had somehow been endowed with an inherent superiority, contrasting particularly sharply with the corrupt characteristics of Slavs, Latins and Jews, had enjoyed widespread support in Germany since the mid-nineteenth century. Theories were regularly propounded that stronger peoples had a natural right to dominate or even exterminate weaker nations in the general struggle for survival, and various versions of the message, often supported by the claims of scientific research, appeared in German, British and other European journals over the years.

One of the early twentieth-century proponents of racial ideology was Alfred Rosenberg, born the son of an Estonian shoemaker in 1893. Rosenberg studied in Russia, and received a degree in architecture from the University of Moscow. Having fled to Germany after the Russian Revolution, he settled in Munich and joined the Thule Society, whose members specialised in anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic philosophy. In 1920 he enrolled in the Nazi party with membership number 18, and immediately won Hitler's attention with the publication of the first of his many books attacking Judaism. In 1923, Rosenberg was nominated by the Führer as editor of the NSDAP newspaper, the
Völkischer Beobachter
, which thereafter vigorously denounced communists, Jews, Freemasons and Christians. Rosenberg ultimately proposed a new religion which would counter the weak doctrine of Christian love with a strong ideal of racial superiority. In 1930 he produced his masterpiece,
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
, a massive tome which concluded that any given culture would always decay when humanitarian ideals obstructed the right of the dominant race to rule those whom it had subjugated. The latter were degraded in the book to the level of Untermenschen, or sub-humans. According to Rosenberg, the mixture of blood, and the sinking of the racial standard contingent upon it, was the primary cause for the demise of all cultures. Although over 20 million copies of
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
were eventually sold, few people could be found who actually had the stamina to wade through it from cover to cover. Hitler himself had to admit to ‘giving up' half way through the book.

One who did read and admire Rosenberg's theories, however, was Richard Walther Darré, a First World War artillery officer who turned to agriculture after 1918 and whose consuming enthusiasm was the peasantry. In 1929 he wrote a book entitled
Blood and Soil – The Peasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race
, which called for an energetic programme of selective breeding to ensure the increase of Nordic peasant stock and their domination of the Jews and Slavs. In Darré's view, blood alone determined history, ethics, law and economics, and the blood of the German farmer was related to the ground he worked. The argument ran like this. The farmer who toiled the land would be buried in the same soil, therefore the farmer's daily bread was, in fact, the blood of his forefathers, which fertilised the earth. German blood would be passed on from generation to generation by means of the soil. Himmler loved Darré's book, befriended its author, and took him into the SS to pursue his research with official sanction and financial backing. At Hitler's request, Darré later prepared an agricultural policy for the NSDAP which favoured Aryan farmers and re-established the medieval hereditary system by which no farmland could ever be sold or mortgaged.

Heavily influenced by Darré, Himmler now began to use agricultural metaphors to justify his new SS recruitment policy of racial selection. In 1931 he wrote: ‘We are like a plant-breeding specialist who, when he wants to breed a pure new strain, first goes over the field to cull the unwanted plants. We, too, shall begin by weeding out people who are not suitable SS material'. Applicants for the SS were soon being categorised according to their racial characteristics, from I-a-M/1 (racially very suitable) to IV-3-c (racial reject). Himmler's rapidly increasing obsession with racial purity began to motivate more and more of his schemes during the 1930s. At his behest, the SS kept a genealogical register of its members, and the Reichsführer often pored over it like a horse-breeder examining a stud book. He ordered elaborate investigations into his own ancestry and that of his wife, to gather irrefutable evidence of their pure German lineage, and he dreamed of a new feudal Europe, cleared of Untermenschen, in which model farms would be operated by a racial élite. The spearhead of that élite was to be the SS, an ‘Orden nordischer Rasse', or Order of Nordic Men, of the purest selection, acting as guardians of the German people. The SS would become a ‘Blutgemeinschaft', a blood community. To paraphrase Himmler, they would ‘march onward into a distant future, imbued with the hope and faith not only that they might put up a better fight than their forefathers but that they might themselves be the forefathers of generations to come, generations which would be necessary for the eternal life of the Teutonic German nation'. As late as 1943, when SS manpower shortages were desperate, the discovery of even minor racial blemishes (‘borderline type – eighteenth-century Jewish ancestor') resulted in a swift removal of SS officers from their positions.

Introductory page to a series of prints by the renowned German artist Wolfgang Willrich, commissioned by Himmler in 1936 to illustrate the racial purity of the SS.

Willrich print depicting the ideal SS soldier.

As foretold in
Mein Kampf
, Hitler's Nürnberg Laws of 1935 deprived Germany's Jews of Reich citizenship, the vote and eligibility for appointment to state offices. Marriage or extra-marital relations between Jews and Germans was forbidden, and Jewish businesses closed down. By 1938, the Nazis were raising an international loan to finance the emigration of all German Jews and their resettlement on some of Germany's former colonies overseas. When war broke out, however, Jews began to be moved instead to ghettos in occupied Poland, which was a cheaper and more expedient alternative. This racial fanaticism reached its ultimate and infamous conclusion at the end of 1941, when it became clear that an easy victory would not be won and that the Second World War might drag on for years. The complex prewar plans for the peaceful removal of Jews and Slavs from Reich territory were now shelved. Einsatzgruppen in the east had been executing Jews and suspected partisans on an ad hoc basis since the invasion of Russia, but the actual process of killing was random and had to be accelerated. On 20 January 1942, Heydrich convened a meeting of representatives of the various government ministries at the pleasant Berlin suburb of Wannsee, and they decided upon a much simpler and irrevocable ‘Final Solution' to the problem. All the Jews and Slavs of Europe and western Russia were to be rounded up and transported to specified locations to be worked to death, then cremated. Those who were unfit for work would be killed on arrival by gassing. To that end, large Vernichtungslager, or extermination camps, were established at Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka, all in Poland, and minor ones were set up at Kaunas, Lwow, Minsk, Riga and Vilna. Naturally, all were placed under the control of the Reich's racial warriors, the SS. By the end of 1943, most of the death camps had completed their horrific work and had been closed down and demolished. The gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek, however, continued almost until the arrival of the Soviet army. Those still alive in the slave labour barracks at Auschwitz and Majdanek as the Russians approached were force-marched westwards, to Dachau and Belsen, where tens of thousands died of starvation. In 1946, the Nürnberg indictment concluded that these camps witnessed the deaths of 5,700,000 Jews, Slavs and gypsies between 1942 and 1945, in the Nazi drive towards the ‘racial purification of Europe'.