After the war, Otto Ohlendorf, one of Himmler’s intellectuals and an officer in charge of an Action Group, made a sworn statement which reveals in terrible detail how these commando security squadrons went to work:
‘In June 1941 I was appointed by Himmler to lead one of the special action groups which were then being formed to accompany the German armies in the Russian campaign… Himmler stated that an important part of our task consisted in the extermination of Jews — women, men and children — and of communist functionaries. I was informed of the attack on Russia about four weeks in advance… When the German army invaded Russia, I was leader of the Action Group D in the Southern Sector;… it liquidated approximately 90,000 men, women and children… in the implementation of this extermination programme… The unit selected… would enter a village or city and order the prominent Jewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of resettlement. They were requested to hand over their valuables … and shortly before execution to surrender their outer clothing. The men, women and children were led to a place of execution which in most cases was located next to a more deeply excavated anti-tank ditch. Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, and the corpses thrown into the ditch… In the spring of 1942 we received gas vehicles from the Chief of the Security Police and the S.D. in Berlin… We had received orders to use the vans for the killing of women and children. Whenever a unit had collected a sufficient number of victims, a van was sent for their liquidation.’20
Later in his statement, Ohlendorf said that he was prepared to confirm the affidavit given by another Action Group commander that he had been responsible for the deaths of 135,000 Jews and Communists during ‘the first four months of the programme’.
The ferocity with which Hitler, Goring and Himmler planned their assault on Russia is unique in history. Goring, in a directive to his agents dated 23 May 1941, the first of the series that were to make up the notorious Green File on the economic exploitation of Russia, spoke of ‘the famine which undoubtedly will take place’, and accepted as inevitable that ‘many tens of millions of people in this area will become redundant’. So enthusiastic was Himmler to equip his men for Russia that as early as February he had made a special journey to Norway, where he travelled to the northern areas to visit his police units and to survey the needs for campaigning during the Russian winter. When he came back, he ordered Pohl to obtain the currency to buy stoves and furs in Norway for his men.
In March, the following month, Himmler summoned Heydrich, Daluege, Berger and a number of senior officers to his retreat at Wewelsburg. Wolff was also present, and so was Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, an expert on partisan warfare who was later to be called as a witness for the prosecution before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. According to Bach-Zelewski, Himmler declared at this secret conference that one of the aims of the Russian campaign was ‘to decimate the Slav population by thirty millions’.21 Wolff prefers to remember this statement in another form, namely that Himmler considered war with Russia would result in millions of dead.
The decision to adopt genocide as an active and fully organized policy in the purification of Europe for the ‘Aryan’ race was undoubtedly reached in 1941. There is a fundamental distinction between the practice of genocide and the callous and deliberate cruelties that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of unwanted people from the time of the occupation of Poland and the exchanges of population that followed. Wolff declares that Himmler was deeply oppressed by the decision that he was to be ultimately responsible for this crime, the greatest that any one man has ever committed in recorded history against his fellows. Kersten confirms this.22 The decision in favour of genocide was preceded by a vaguely conceived ‘final solution’ in the form of despatching millions of the European ‘sub-humans’ to Madagascar, following an enforced agreement with the French to use the island for this purpose; this idea had sprung from the early policy of encouraging Jewish emigration from Germany during the middle ’thirties. The Madagascar project, first discussed openly in 1938, was kept alive (in theory, at least) until the end of 1940, since during that year Eichmann himself was detailed to prepare a plan to set up an autonomous Jewish reserve under a German police-governor on the island, to which some four million Jews should be sent. Both Heydrich and Himmler approved the plan, but according to the Dutch edition of Kersten’s Memoirs, Hitler had already abandoned this idea shortly after the capitulation of France, and had told Himmler he would have to undertake the progressive extermination of European Jewry.23 It was not, however, until February 1942 that what was by then the fiction of the Madagascar project was officially abandoned in a memorandum sent by Hitler to the Foreign Office.
The decision to practise organized mass extermination, a national policy of genocide, seems to have been arrived at only after secret discussions which were inevitably dominated by Hitler. According to both Wolff and Kersten, Himmler was often very disturbed during this period, as if absorbed in a problem he was unable to discuss with anyone around him.
During the summer a firm decision was reached. On 31 July 1941, Goring sent his carefully worded directive to Heydrich, who was entrusted with the administrative planning for the extermination.
‘Supplementing the task that was assigned to you on 24 January 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions, I herewith instruct you to make all necessary preparations as regards organizational, financial and material matters for a total solution [Gesamtlösung] of the Jewish question within the area of German influence in Europe… I instruct you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan showing the measure for organization and for action necessary to carry out the desired final solution [Endlösung] of the Jewish question.’24
According to Lammers, Head of the Reich Chancellery, while giving evidence at the Nuremberg Trial, the nature of the final as distinct from the total solution was made known to Heydrich by Goring verbally. There can be little doubt that Heydrich knew it in any case, and he appointed Adolf Eichmann his principal deputy in the matter. Eichmann was also responsible to Himmler, who had retained his direct control over the concentration camps, some of which were to be set aside as centres for extermination. Giving evidence at his trial in Israel in 1961, Eichmann claimed that even as late as November 1941 he ‘did not know any details of the plan’, but that he ‘knew one was being drawn’.25
Heydrich’s assistant, Wisliceny, gave evidence at Nuremberg in January 1946 which implied that Eichmann received definite orders from Himmler during the spring of 1942. At a meeting in Eichmann’s office at the ‘end of July or the beginning of August’, the killing of Jews in Poland was discussed:
‘Eichmann told me he could show me this order in writing if it would soothe my conscience. He took a small volume of documents from his safe, turned over the pages and showed me a letter from Himmler to the Chief of the Security Police and the S.D. The gist of the letter was something as follows: the Führer had ordered the “final solution” of the Jewish question; the Chief of the Security Police and the S.D., and the Inspector of the Concentration Camps were entrusted with carrying out this so-called “final solution”. All Jewish men and women who were able to work were to be temporarily exempted from the so-called “final solution” and used for work in the concentration camps. This letter was signed by Himmler in person. I could not possibly be mistaken, since Himmler’s signature was well known to me.’26