Walter Schellenberg was, as we have seen, one of the intellectuals of the S.S. He had been educated in a Jesuit school; his university training in law and medicine at Bonn was over by the time he was twenty-two. His alert intelligence and quickness of observation fitted him for the various missions of espionage which he describes with such zest and self-satisfaction in his memoirs. As he gained the confidence of Heydrich and Himmler, he advanced his position in their service, and his value to us includes not only his detailed accounts of the more entertaining activities he undertook for the S.D., but the descriptive analyses he has left of his colleagues and, in particular, of Heydrich and Himmler. In the various departments into which Heydrich divided the S.D., Schellenberg worked in A.M.T., or Department IV, specializing in counter-espionage inside Germany and the occupied countries. Later, in June 1941, he was to take over Department VI, which co-ordinated Foreign Intelligence, and when Canaris’s Intelligence Service for the High Command was disbanded in 1944, Schellenberg’s responsibilities were expanded to include this work as well. At the height of his career after Heydrich’s death, he was to become one of the closest of Himmler’s advisers, and he worked hard for some action independent of Hitler to end the war and to ease the situation in the concentration camps.
Schellenberg was soft-spoken, even ingratiating in his manner; he wanted his superiors to like him. He claims he was for a brief period attracted to Heydrich’s neglected wife, Lina.4 For him intrigue was a profession, and his pride in it survived the war and is present in every chapter of his fascinating and exciting autobiography. In the use of intrigue he was as guilty as any of his associates, but he remains a far more engaging rascal than they.
Meanwhile Heydrich had achieved his private ambition by flying sorties with the Luftwaffe. Later in September he visited Himmler in his train, and he took charge of security arrangements for the victory celebration in Warsaw. On 27 September, he was rewarded by being made head of the Reichsicherheitshauptamt, the Reich Chief Security Office (R.S.H.A.).5 This was to give him a far greater measure of independence in his relations with Himmler, and opened up for him the means of direct access to Hitler. R.S.H.A. gave Heydrich control of Mueller’s Gestapo, Nebe’s Criminal Police or Kripo, the German C.I.D., and the S.D., which now became an official organization of the State as distinct from the Party. It was R.S.H.A., still nominally under Himmler, that moved into action in Poland, using special formations of S.S. men and police known as the Einsatz, or Action Groups, to carry out the duties assigned them. 6
On 6 October, the day following his victory parade among the ruins of Warsaw, Hitler made the notorious speech in the Reichstag in which he attacked Poland and challenged her allies: ‘The Poland of the Versailles Treaty will never rise again’, he declared. The mass movement of population was forecast in order to knit the German peoples together and sever them from contamination by the Jews, of whom large numbers living in Poland were already at the mercy of Heydrich’s raiding groups. On 7 October, Himmler’s fortieth birthday, Hitler appointed him head of a new organization, the Reich Commissariat for the Consolidation of German Nationhood (R.K.F.D.V.), with the essential task of creating colonies of Germans in areas from which Jews and other alien and unwanted people had been expelled. Himmler’s friends celebrated the day by dedicating to him a handsome volume published in his honour — Festgabe zum 40 Geburtstage des Reichsführers S.S. (A Memorial Address to the Reichsführer S.S. on the Occasion of his Fortieth Birthday) — in which he was singled out as the man primarily responsible for building a new order in Europe to meet the needs of German expansion.
Himmler was himself to describe what happened less than a year later, after the fall of France. Notes in Himmler’s handwriting survive for a lecture given to the Supreme Army Commanders on 13 March 1940. In this speech he made his policy for Poland absolutely clear — that the Slavs were to be dominated by the Germanic leadership, that their living space was to be appropriated so that they might never again attack Germany in time of weakness, that their inferior blood meant there must be no mixing of the races. ‘Executions of all potential leaders of resistance’, scribbled Himmler in his angular, spidery hand. ‘Very hard, but necessary. Have seen to it personally… No underhand cruelties… Severe penalties when necessary… Dirty linen to be washed at home… We must stay hard, our responsibility to God… A million workslaves and how to deal with them.’
The fearful winter of 1939—40 saw whole communities of men and women uprooted from their homes in order to fulfil a compulsory emigration plan for which no proper provision had been made. The chain of callous orders passed down the line from Himmler’s and Heydrich’s offices until they reached the local Action Groups, who had been trained to carry out orders without consideration for the consequences to the human beings they evicted. Over 250,000 people of German origin living in Russian-occupied Poland and the Baltic States were by agreement to be transferred to German-occupied Poland, while as the result of an order made by Himmler on 9 October, double that number of Jews and rejected Slavs had to be moved away east to make room for them. Later, by 1943, the numbers exchanged were increased to 566,000 racial Germans brought in from the eastern and south-eastern areas and 1,500,000 Poles and Jews expelled.7 In November Darré, Reich Minister of Agriculture, was given by Himmler at his own request the task of re-settling the German immigrants on confiscated Polish farms. He wanted to play his part in the great racial migrations which were the outcome of the theories he had taught Himmler ten years before. That he failed in this self-appointed task was perhaps inevitable in view of the vast, complex, overlapping and rival administrations imposed on the torn body of Poland by Hans Frank’s cruel administration, and the mutually antagonistic organizations of the military and of Himmler’s and Heydrich’s police. The S.S. commanders were Friedrich Krueger, a former expert in street-fighting and gun-running, and the peculiar alcoholic sadist whom the S.S. had first enlisted in Austria, Odilo Globocnik, whom Himmler had finally to remove because of his persistent thieving.
Historians have been at pains to find some date for the original conception of genocide in the minds of the Nazi leadership. The casual massacre of Jewish people by the S.S. or the Action Groups began with the war itself, but by January the mass evacuation of Jews from the western provinces had reached proportions which made a high death rate inevitable in the chaos of overloaded and unheated wagons that were shunted around in railway sidings, until the bodies of adults and children alike fell frozen to the ground when the doors were finally thrust open. In December Eichmann was ordered by Heydrich to try to bring some order into the handling of the deportation. The migration of Jews from Germany itself was about to begin when Goring interposed, as President of the Reich Defence Council, to stop the movement because of the rumours of death and suffering which were circulating among the diplomatic corps in Berlin. Meanwhile, Hitler accepted a plan presented to him by Himmler to enslave those Poles in the west who could not be evacuated, depriving them of their property and their children of education, unless they were racially suitable for removal and integration into Germany through Lebensborn, which first tested them and then placed them with foster-parents.