At Eichmann’s own suggestion Himmler established the Office of Jewish Emigration in Vienna and put him in charge of it. As a result of Eichmann’s work more than 100,000 Jews left Austria between mid-1938 and the outbreak of the war. All but a few departed destitute, their wealth and property in Austria seized by the Nazis. Baron Louis de Rothschild was only permitted to leave after a year’s detention; the price of his freedom included the sacrifice of his steel rolling-mills to Goring, while the Palais Rothschild in Vienna became Eichmann’s headquarters. The Jews were encouraged to emigrate, but the price exacted for exit permits, stamped Jude, was the loss not only of money and possessions but the fulfilment of orders to leave the country for ever, disowned and stateless. It was Germany over again.
This was the period when Himmler first conceived the idea of commercializing concentration camps. It was the Anschluss with its enormous influx of prisoners that made it evident to him that so many idle hands were a scandalous waste of potential labour for the Reich. Up to the time of the Anschluss, the population of Himmler’s camps has been estimated by Reitlinger at an average of 20,000, and the prisoners’ principal tasks had been the construction and extension of the camps themselves, with barracks and other amenities for the S.S. By April 1939, the prison-camp population had grown to some 280,000.
While Eichmann was extracting the wealth of the Jews, Himmler was forming companies on behalf of the S.S. to exploit the new labour resources of the camps in quarrying stone and providing bricks and cement for the vast building projects which Albert Speer, Hitler’s young architectural adviser and future Minister of War Production, was encouraging the Führer to undertake.27 The head of this business undertaking was Oswald Pohl, a man of working-class origin who in looks resembled Mussolini and whose sadistic greed in driving the human flesh under his control to the last flicker of productive energy made him one of the worst of Himmler’s scourges.
Hitler’s policy of divide and rule was extended now by Himmler to the administration of the camps. He had been careful in 1936 not to give Heydrich the entire control; both Eicke’s inspectorate office and Pohl’s business administration, the Verwaltungsamt, were from Heydrich’s point of view intrusive elements which directly interfered with his own free hand in the management of the prisoners. Since the destruction of ‘sub-human’ racial elements and of the enemies of the State was Heydrich’s aim, it conflicted with any interest, however low in character, which would lengthen the lives of the prisoners and give them any kind of encouragement through the provision of extra food. The attempt to commercialize the camps, which until the middle years of the war was to be a failure, was sabotaged from the start as a result of various rivalries that developed between those administering the camps. The supervision of their victims’ labour gave the Kapos, the habitual criminals placed by the S.S. in the camps and employed as bullies and watch-dogs, new opportunities for exploiting and torturing the prisoners.
At the notorious conference over which Goring presided after the November pogrom in 1938, Göring’s interest lay solely in preventing further loss to the Reich economy by the looting of property which, though occupied by Jews, was not always actually owned by them and was in any case insured against damage and theft. Heydrich’s interest lay solely in the statistics of destruction and in the avoidance of paying any compensation. He boasted that already in a few months 50,000 Jews had left Austria, while only 19,000 had left Germany. He wanted the Jews segregated and expelled from the German community as soon as possible. Heydrich had in fact done what he could in advance to make the pogrom effective; after consulting Himmler, who was in Munich, he had issued detailed instructions to the Chiefs of State Police on how their men should control the anti-Jewish demonstrations so as to prevent damage to German-owned property, and he followed the pogrom with further arrests of Jews whose presence in Germany offended his sense of decency and order.
Hoess, who by 1938 had been promoted adjutant to the commander of Sachsenhausen, recalls an inspection of the camp by Himmler during the summer of 1938. He brought with him Frick, the Minister of the Interior, who was paying his first visit to a concentration camp. Himmler was ‘in the best of humour and obviously pleased that he was at last able to show the Minister of the Interior and his officials one of the secret and notorious concentration camps’. He answered questions ‘calmly and amiably although often sarcastically’. Afterwards his colleagues were entertained to dinner.
His successful intrusion into Austria had given Himmler a taste for foreign affairs, and like Goring Himmler was to be used by Hitler, though in a minor capacity, to carry out his less formal diplomacy alongside the formal negotiations of the Foreign Office, which Ribbentrop had taken over early in 1938. Himmler had become one of Hitler’s close and more trusted subordinates. Though their relations remained punctilious, Himmler became to some extent a recognized companion who, unlike the generals who were doing their best to edge Hitler away from grandiose schemes for war, always supported Hitler’s policy without question and, when asked to do so, gave advice on how best to carry this policy out. It was Himmler who had led the delegation that received the Führer at Linz, and a few weeks later, in May, he was among those chosen to accompany Hitler on his state visit to Italy, where he had to stay along with the Führer in the Quirinal, the Palace of the King. ‘Here one breathes the air of the catacombs’, Himmler was heard to remark, and his observation was passed on to the King.
Nevertheless, Hitler felt Himmler was worth cultivating as a diplomat; he had been sent to Italy before in both 1936 and 1937 on goodwill visits, and had on each occasion taken Heydrich with him. Friendly relations had been established with Bocchini, Mussolini’s Minister of Police, and with Mussolini himself, who granted Heydrich a personal interview when Himmler fell ill during their first visit.
From 1938 Himmler used against both the Foreign Office and the High Command exactly the same secret strategy he had used to undermine Goring’s initial authority over the police. He maintained his friendly relations with Ribbentrop while at the same time he encroached on the duties of the Foreign Office, or duplicated them through the S.D. spy-ring abroad. Following talks with Hitler, in which the possibility that the Western Powers might use North Africa to counter-attack Europe once Germany had overrun it, Schellenberg, the most intelligent agent on Heydrich’s staff, was sent in the autumn of 1938 on an adventurous mission to West Africa to spy on the harbour facilities, while the following January Himmler made a report for his staff on conversations he had had with the Japanese Ambassador about a treaty to consolidate the Tripartite Pact, and an attempt which the Japanese were making to send agents into Russia to assassinate Stalin. In May 1939, Ciano reports that Himmler advised him that the Italians should establish a protectorate in Croatia, a policy in opposition to that of Ribbentrop, who wanted Yugoslavia to remain untouched. The following month, Hitler assigned to Himmler the difficult task of negotiating with the Italian Ambassador, Bernardo Attolico, for the resettlement of the Tyrolean Germans in the Reich. This was the first of these wholesale movements of population on racial grounds which appealed so strongly to Himmler’s sense of ethnology.