The Nazi Murder Machine: 13 Portraits in Evil (4 page)

Göring, Hermann

Born January 12, 1893, the son of a cavalry officer, Göring received numerous medals for his bravery as a fighter pilot during the First World War, including the Iron Cross and the prestigious
Pour le Merite
(the ‘Blue Max’).

In every way the stereotype of the healthy, strapping, active Aryan male, Göring enjoyed mountaineering, and was found to have an IQ of 138. (The adult ‘average’ is around 100.)

Göring was one of those (along with Hitler) who strongly believed in the so-called ‘Stab-in-the-back’ legend. This was the belief that Germany had not actually ‘lost’ the First World War in military terms, but had instead been betrayed or ‘sold out’ by a civilian leadership comprised chiefly of Marxists, Jews and republicans.

As such, it was inevitable that Göring should become a member of the Nazi Party right from its earliest days. He was instrumental in the ‘Beer Hall Putsch’, a failed attempt by Adolf Hitler and several others to gain control of Germany in Munich.

Early Nazis prepare for the 1923 ‘Beer Hall Putsch’

In the ensuing bloodshed, in which fourteen Nazis and four policemen were killed, Göring was shot in the groin. Treatment for this injury required the use of morphine, a drug to which Göring would become addicted for the rest of his life, and which left him prone to fits of violent mania. (On one occasion, a straightjacket was required in order to restrain him.)

Göring founded the Gestapo, although subsequently passed control over to
Heinrich Himmler
, and by the time Hitler became Chancellor was certainly the ‘second most powerful’ man in Germany.

Proclaimed Hitler on the September 1, 1939 – the same day that Germany invaded Poland and began the Second World War:

‘…
Should anything befall me, I name Hermann Göring as my successor…
’

By 1942, however, it was obvious that the tide of war was turning slowly, but surely, against Germany. Hitler began to feel animosity towards Göring for this, in particular blaming him for the perceived failure of the ‘Luftwaffe’ during the Battle of Britain.

As such, Göring found himself having to largely ‘retire’ from his previous war activities. Instead, he devoted himself to categorizing and labeling the numerous treasures and works of art looted from Jews who’d been killed, sent to concentration camps or forced to emigrate.

However, it is certain that Göring did not feel anything like the level of hatred towards the Jews as did, for example,
Joseph Goebbels
and
Heinrich Himmler
. At his trial, following the end of the war, he said almost mournfully:

‘…
I thought we would just eliminate the Jews from their positions in big business and government
…’

It was also noted that Göring’s younger brother, Albert, a staunch anti-Nazi, had actually assisted Jews to escape from concentration camps. Arrested no less than four times for such an ‘offence’, it was Göring himself who ensured Albert’s release on each occasion – something which further damaged Göring’s reputation within the Nazi Party.

Nevertheless, Göring was certainly present at meetings in which the mass-killings of Jews was discussed, and authorized various sanctions against them such as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

As German’s end drew near – and mindful of what Hitler had said that fateful day September 1, 1939 – Göring sent a telegram to his leader on the April 22, 1945, detailing his intention to assume leadership of Germany.

But regardless of what Hitler had said some years previously, the Fuhrer was less than delighted to receive this communiqué. There in the bunker in which he would shortly take his own life, he ranted:

‘…
I knew it all along! That Göring is lazy and incompetent. He let the air force go to ruin, and by his example all corruption was made possible in our state. Moreover, he’s been a drug addict for years. Yes, I’ve known it all along…
’

Convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials, Göring was sentenced to hang. The night before his execution, however, on October 15, 1946, the one-time ace fighter pilot committed suicide by cyanide.

Grese, Irma

‘
…As a child she was a coward… always she would run away whenever there was any fighting… She did, however, like to hit people who were for whatever reason unable to hit her back…
’

So declared Grese’s own sister; Irma’s father (an agricultural worker), moreover, beat her and turned her out of the house for joining the SS and for doing concentration camp work.

Unlike many captured Nazis, who stood proudly during their trial and refused to show the slightest contrition for their appalling crimes, Grese at first refused to admit the charges against her, stating that she’d only punished those prisoners under her command with an ‘open hand’, and saying that:

‘…
Himmler is responsible for all that has happened…
’

Only when confronted with cast-iron proof of her barbaric cruelty –

eyewitness accounts and the like – did Grese suddenly decide to ‘reflect further’ and admit what she was being charged with. Always this was with some attempted way of ‘explaining’ what had happened, some attempt at mitigation, along with the usual ‘buck-passing’.

Born in 1923, Grese was an academically ‘average’ student, who worked in agriculture and nursing (at a sanatorium for the SS) before going to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in early 1942. A year later, she was transferred to Auschwitz, where she remained until early 1945.

At Auschwitz, Grese (who soon earned the nickname
Die Hyäne von Auschwitz
– ‘The Hyena of Auschwitz’
)
was in charge of approximately 30,000 women. She delighted in exercising her authority through the use of a whip, gun, jackboots and vicious dogs which she would set on the starving prisoners, so that they were torn to pieces, whenever the mood took her.

Auschwitz personnel pictured while on holiday

One of her favorite tortures was to have the female inmates stand outside their block-huts, holding heavy stones above their heads. Anyone unable to maintain this position was beaten by Grese with a rubber truncheon. She also delighted in indicating to a non German-speaking inmate that they were to get something from beyond the four-foot high wire fences, before the camp’s high, barbed-wire fences, that made up an area strictly forbidden to all inmates.

These women prisoners would be challenged by guards as they climbed over the first fence, would be unable to understand what was being said, and so would be shot. It is estimated that Grese caused some thirty women per day to be murdered in such a manner; and this was quite apart from all those she herded into the gas-chamber, also on a daily basis.

Torture, cruelty and murder of the
dreck
(how the Nazis referred to those whom they had imprisoned and killed – ‘human animals’) were not Grese’s only daily pastimes, however. At her trial, it was revealed how she liked to arrange little white stones in various patterns in the camp Commandant’s garden, creating ‘rock gardens’; she also liked to pick flowers.

Captured on April 17, 1945, (after Auschwitz, she had gone to the concentration camp called Belsen for a short while) Irma Grese was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to hang after a fifty-three day trial.

Once she realized there was no way out, she dropped any pretence concerning her true character, even singing Nazi songs the night before she was hanged.

She was executed by famous British hangman Albert Pierrepoint, with Regimental Sergeant-Major O’Neil assisting.

Remarked O’Neil later:

‘…There on the gallows, I placed the white ‘hangman’s’ cap over Grese’s head, and as I did so she said, '
Schnell
' (‘Quickly’)...
’

Aged twenty-two years and sixty-seven days when she was hanged, Irma Grese (who, it was rumored, had been the lover of
Josef Menegele
, Auschwitz’s ‘Angel of Death’; who particularly enjoyed tormenting those starving, shaven-headed camp inmates who still retained traces of their past beauty; and who had once informed one such inmate that she intended to become an actress once the war was over) was the youngest woman to die judicially under British law in the twentieth century.

Heydrich, Reinhard

The man who was known to members of his own party as the ‘Blond Beast’ or ‘The Hangman’ – and about whom even Hitler remarked ‘He is a man with an iron heart’ – was originally a timid, insular child, bullied at school for his unusually high voice (which continued into adulthood) and slightly Jewish appearance.

His parents were professional musicians, something which resulted in Heydrich becoming an expert violinist. They were, however, also rigid disciplinarians, with Frau
Heydrich in particular frequently flogging her young son for the slightest of reasons.

Although such corporal punishment (along with the bullying from other children) caused Heydrich to retreat even further into himself, he was from an early age possessed with an almost maniacal desire to succeed in anything he set his mind to doing.

In 1922, aged eighteen, Heydrich joined the
Reichsmarine
, the (at that time) small and almost ‘elite’ German navy. It was a coveted position for a young man, although the bullying Heydrich had endured at school continued aboard ship. He was nicknamed ‘Billy Goat’ (a reference to his high-pitched voice and irritating, braying laugh) and, somewhat peculiarly, ‘Moses Handel’ – ‘Moses’ was in reference to his slightly Jewish appearance, and Handel his musical ability.

(Heydrich’s ‘Jewish appearance’ caused him particular distress – especially as he was, like
Joseph Goebbels
and
Heinrich Himmler
, so virulently anti-Semitic. Some years later, by now a high-ranking Party member, Heydrich returned home one evening drunk, saw his reflection in the mirror, and roaring ‘Filthy Jew!’ pulled out his pistol and fired two shots at the glass.)

Heydrich succeeded in reaching the rank of second lieutenant, but a sexual relationship with the daughter of a prominent shipyard director forced him to resign his naval commission.

In 1931, aged twenty-seven, Heydrich joined the Nazi Party. He succeeded in impressing
Heinrich Himmler
with his obvious ability, intellect and drive, so that Himmler tasked Heydrich with creating the intelligence gathering organization known as the SD (
Sicherheitsdienst
).

Huge dossiers were subsequently created, full of information concerning all those deemed to pose even the slightest ‘threat’ to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party as a whole. Heydrich also delighted in quietly collecting information concerning the sexual proclivities of various high-ranking Party members.

His Jewish appearance again caused him problems, with a whispering campaign that there was Jewish blood on his father’s side of the family. Himmler, however, ultimately decided to disregard such rumors, writing thoughtfully in one report concerning Heydrich:

‘…He is an extremely talented but also very dangerous individual, whose gifts the Party must retain...’

When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Heydrich immersed himself in arranging the mass arrests of all those – Catholic priests to communists – who had opposed Hitler. Such people were shipped to concentration camps such as Dachau where (if they survived the brutal conditions, and indeed were ultimately released) their will was broken, and all resistance to this new regime stripped away from them.

Heydrich became a figure feared as much by those within the Party as the general German public. He’d an extremely intimidating stare, and regarded every woman he met as a potential bedmate. Those women who resisted his advances usually received a visit from the Gestapo shortly afterwards.

Heydrich the Jew-hater established the Gestapo Office of Jewish Emigration, whose chief purpose was to ensure that all Jews trying to leave Germany were first stripped of their wealth.

A skilled manipulator of people and events, often on an international scale, Heydrich engineered the fake Polish attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, Germany, a mile from the Polish border. This gave Hitler the excuse he needed to launch a Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

Heydrich ordered Polish Jews to be shot, sent to concentration camps or herded into ghettos where disease and starvation were epidemic. He also created the Einsatz death-squads, which followed the German army into invaded territory with the express purpose of ‘liquidating’ any ‘racial or political’ undesirables.

Usually, in an occupied village or town, a commander of one of the Einsatz units would demand that all Jews present themselves for the purpose of their ‘resettlement’.

Once they had then handed over all their valuables, they would be made to strip and taken to a pre-dug ditch, in which their bodies would be thrown after they had been shot in the back of the head or neck. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were murdered in this way. (The Einsatz units actually had bets between them, concerning which team of men could get the highest ‘kill-count’.)

An Einsatz ‘death-squad’ at work.

Declared Heydrich to his subordinate
Adolf Eichmann
(revealed by Eichmann during his trial for war crimes):

‘
…The Fuhrer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews…
’

Accordingly, on January 20, 1942, Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference in Berlin with other top Nazi bureaucrats. The subject for discussion
Endlosung
– the ‘Final Solution’ – and the desired extermination of some 11,000,000 Jews across Europe and the Soviet Union.

Stated Heydrich during this meeting:

‘
…Europe should be combed of Jews from east to west…

SS
Obergruppenführer
Heydrich (as he now was) was responsible for apprehending the resistance movement within the former Czechoslovakia. He frequently traveled between his home country and his headquarters in Prague in an open-topped Mercedes, refusing any accompanying guard so confident was he that no one would dare try to attack him.

On May 27, 1942, however, a team of Free Czech agents, trained in England, attacked his car as Heydrich slowed down to negotiate a bend. The agents first fired upon the vehicle, and then threw a converted anti-tank mine at it. Wounded, Heydrich nevertheless succeeded in drawing his own pistol and returning fire.

Heydrich developed blood poisoning from tiny shards of steel (from the bomb), along with bits of his own uniform, which were lodged in his spleen. He died June 4, aged thirty-eight, with 152 Jews in Berlin being executed in ‘revenge’ that same day. The Free Czech agents who attacked Heydrich were also hunted down and killed, with anyone even suspected of having assisted them being murdered. As a rough estimate, some 1000 people paid the price for Heydrich’s death.

Still this ‘revenge’ for Heydrich’s death was deemed insufficient. So falsely accusing the Czech mining village of Lidice (located some twenty-kilometers northwest of Prague) of having assisted Heydrich’s assassins, Hitler ordered that all of its male inhabitants over the age of sixteen were to be shot. The women were sent to Ravensbruck, where most died. Lidice’s buildings were then dynamited, the remains being flattened and covered over with soil and grain.

By the time the German forces had finished, it was as though the little village of Lidice had never existed. Even its name was removed from all maps. Such was the scale of the revenge exacted by the Nazis for the death of Reinhard Heydrich.