These orders were to be carried out at once. Almost at once a truck arrived with two police officials and a handcuffed civilian. The commandant opened and read the orders, which said, quite briefly: “By command of the Reichsführer SS the prisoner is to be shot. He is to be informed of this while in custody, and the sentence is to be carried out one hour later.”
The commandant immediately informed the condemned man of the orders he had received. The man was completely resigned to his fate, although, as he later said, he had not expected to be executed. He was allowed to write to his family, and was given cigarettes for which he had asked.
Eicke had been informed by the commandant and arrived in the course of the hour before the sentence was to be carried out.
As adjutant, I was head of the commandant’s staff and, in accordance with the secret mobilization order, had to carry out the execution. When, on the morning that war was declared, the commandant opened the sealed mobilization order, neither of us thought that we should have occasion to follow the instructions in it regarding executions on that very same day.
I quickly got together three of my older and more imperturbable junior staff officers, told them what had to be done, and instructed them in matters of procedure.
A post was rapidly erected in a sand pit adjoining the workshops, and almost at once the trucks arrived. The commandant told the condemned man to stand by the post. I led him there. He calmly made himself ready. I stepped back and gave the order to fire. He collapsed and I gave him the coup de grâce. The doctor established that he had received three bullets through the heart. In addition to Eicke, a few officers of the reserve formations were also present at the execution.
None of us who had listened to Eicke’s instructions that morning had imagined that his words would so quickly become harsh reality. Nor indeed had Eicke, as he himself told us after the execution.
I had been so busy with the preparations for the execution that it was not until it was over that I began to realize what had happened. All the officers who had been present at the shooting assembled for a while in our mess. Oddly enough, no real conversation took place, and each of us just sat, wrapped in his own thoughts. We all remembered Eicke’s speech. We had just been given a clear picture of war with which we would be faced. Apart from myself, all those present were elderly men who had already served as officers during the First World War. They were veteran leaders of the SS, who had held their own in street battles during the NSDAP’s early struggle for existence. All of us, however, were deeply affected by what had just happened, not least myself.
Yet in the days to come we were to have plenty of experiences of this kind. Almost every day I had to parade with my execution squad.
Most of those we executed were men who refused to do their war service, or saboteurs. The reason for execution could only be learned from the police officials who accompanied them. They were not given on the execution order itself.
One incident affected me very closely. An SS leader, a police official with whom I had had many dealings, since he frequently accompanied notable prisoners or came to the camp to deliver important secret documents to the commandant, was himself suddenly brought in one night for immediate execution. Only the day before, we had been sitting together in our officers’ mess discussing the executions. Now a similar fate was to overtake him, and it was I who had to carry out the order! This was too much even for my commandant. After the execution, we went for a long, silent walk together through the camp, trying to calm our feelings.
We learned from the officials who had accompanied him that this SS officer had been ordered to arrest and bring to the camp a man who had formerly been an official of the Communist Party. The SS officer had known the man well and for a long time, since he had had to keep him under supervision. The Communist had always behaved with complete good faith. Out of kindness the SS officer had let him pay a last visit to his home, to change his clothes and say goodbye to his wife. While the SS official and his colleagues were talking with the wife in the sitting room, the husband escaped out of the back. By the time they realized he had fled, it was too late. The SS officer was actually arrested inside the Gestapo building while reporting the escape, and the Reichsführer SS ordered him court-martialed immediately. One hour later he was sentenced to death. The men who had accompanied him were given long terms of imprisonment. Even attempts by Heydrich and Müller to intercede on his behalf were sharply dismissed by the Reichsführer SS. This first grave dereliction of duty on the part of an SS officer since the start of the war must be punished with terrifying and exemplary severity. The condemned was a respectable man in his middle thirties, married and with three children, who had hitherto carried out his duties faithfully and conscientiously.
Now he had fallen victim to his own good nature and trustfulness.
He met his death with calm and resignation.
I cannot understand to this day how I was able, quite calmly, to give the order to fire. The three men of the firing squad did not know the identity of their victim, and this was just as well, for their hands might well have trembled. I was so agitated that I could hardly hold the pistol to his head when giving him the coup de grâce. But I was able to pull myself together sufficiently to prevent those present from being aware of anything unusual. I know this, because I asked one of the three junior officers in the execution squad about it a few days later.
This execution was always before my eyes to remind me of the demand that had been made upon us to exercise perpetual self-mastery and unbending severity.
At the time I believe that this was asking too much of human nature, and yet Eicke was insisting on ever greater harshness. An SS man must be able to destroy even his closest dependents should they commit an offense against the state or the ideals of Adolf Hitler. “There is only one thing that is valid: Orders!” That was the motto which he used as his letterhead.
What this motto implied, and what Eicke meant by it, I was to learn in these first few weeks of the war, and not only I, but also many of the other old SS leaders. Some of these, enjoying very senior rank in the General SS and with very low SS serial numbers, dared to express their opinion in the mess that such hangman’s work soiled the black uniform of the SS. This was reported to Eicke. He sent for them and also summoned all SS officers in his Oranienburg district, and he addressed them more or less as follows: The remarks about hangman’s work and the SS show that the men concerned, despite their long service with the SS, have not yet understood what the function of the SS is. The most important task assigned to the SS is to protect the new state by any and every means. Every opponent of the state, according to the danger he represents, must either be kept in custody or be destroyed. In either case it is the responsibility of the SS to see that this is done. Only thus can the security of the state be guaranteed, until a new code of laws has been created which will give true protection to the state and the people. The destruction of internal enemies of the state is just as much a duty as is the destruction of the enemy from beyond the frontiers, and such action can therefore never be regarded as dishonorable.
The reported remarks show adherence to the ideology of an out-of-date bourgeois world which, thanks to Hitler’s revolution, has long ceased to exist. They are a sign of weakness and sentimentality, emotions which are not only unworthy of an SS leader, but which might become dangerous.
For this reason it was his duty to export the persons concerned to the Reichsführer SS, with a view to punishment.