‘Hanging is to be done by prisoners: in the case of foreign workers preferably by their own compatriots. The prisoners are to be issued a fee of three cigarettes for each hanging …
‘The responsible S.S. leaders are to see to it that, while we have to be hard and cannot tolerate softness, no brutality is to be allowed either.’
In June 1944 he was forced to remind his S.S. men of the regulations he had made against taking snapshots of these executions. ‘In time of war’, he added to this reminder, ‘executions are unfortunately necessary. But to take snapshots of them only shows bad taste, apart from being detrimental to the interests of our Fatherland. The enemy might well abuse photographs of this kind in his propaganda.’
Himmler’s concern with his own independence grew. In March he tried to establish munition works in certain camps, but Speer, the new Minister for Armaments, forestalled this; as Speer himself said when giving evidence before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, ‘uncontrolled arms production on the part of the S.S. had to be prevented… It was Himmler’s intention to exercise his influence over these industries and in some way or other he would undoubtedly have succeeded in getting them under his control.’2 Speer was only prepared to make use of prisoners on his own terms, and he saw to it that Hitler rejected Himmler’s schemes. Those prisoners who were eventually used in the armaments works were made to fulfil a sixty-hour week. But the death-rate at the camps was so great and the number available for work diminished so rapidly that on 28 December Himmler was forced to send out another directive: ‘The Reichsführer S.S. has ordered that the death-rate absolutely must be reduced.’3
During the first six months of the following year, Himmler replenished his diminished labour forces by taking into custody some 200,000 foreign conscripts who had committed petty offences, on the grounds that as a result they came properly under his jurisdiction. He was in a position to kidnap this large force of slave-workers from Speer as the result of a hard-fought agreement with Otto Thierack, Hitler’s recently-appointed Minister of Justice, following a discussion between them at Himmler’s Field Headquarters at Zhitomir on 18 September.
Thierack, a judge of the Nazi People’s Court, had been made Reich Minister of Justice at the suggestion of Goebbels, and his instructions had been to create a system of law favourable to the Nazis. Among the points of agreement noted by Thierack’s aide after the meeting with Himmler were:
‘Correction by special treatment at the hands of the police in cases where judicial sentences are not severe enough.
‘The delivery of anti-social elements from the execution of their sentence to the Reichsführer S.S. to be worked to death.’
(These ‘anti-social elements’ included persons under protective arrest — Jews, gypsies, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles with more than three-year sentences, Czechs and Germans with more than eight-year sentences.)
‘It is agreed that, in consideration of the intended aims of the Government for the cleaning up of the Eastern problem, in future Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians and Ukrainians are no longer to be judged by the ordinary courts, so far as punishable offences are concerned, but are to be dealt with by the Reichsführer himself.’4
As conditions in the camps became less and less controlled, the opportunities for private, in the place of public, looting increased. For example, by special orders from Himmler, the first dated as early as 23 September 1940, gold teeth were to be removed from the bodies of prisoners who had died, while the living had the dental gold taken from their mouths if it seemed ‘incapable of repair’. The gold was supposed to be deposited along with all other confiscated valuables in the Reichsbank in favour of an account held by the S.S. under the cover-name of Max Heiliger; the Reichsbank during the middle years of the war endeavoured to pawn the piles of unwanted valuables for hard cash.5 Speaking of this macabre treasure-trove in the course of a speech made in October 1943, Himmler said: ‘We have taken from them what wealth they had. I have issued strict orders which S.S. General Pohl has carried out, that this wealth should, as a matter of course, be handed over to the Reich without reserve. We have taken none of it for ourselves.’ He added that S.S. men who stole would be shot. It soon became apparent, however, that this macabre treasure-trove was receiving only a proportion of its rightful booty and that unscrupulous men in every rank at the camps were stealing. Globocnik, for example, amassed a fortune in Lublin during 1943, and Himmler was forced in the autumn to send an official investigator to enquire into the smuggling of gold, which was rife in Auschwitz. Prisoners were often more valuable for the gold in their teeth than for the labour of their hands.
With the development of his business sense, Himmler realized that another source of money lay in the outright sale of Jewish liberties. At the end of 1942 he was approached with the suggestion that a whole S.S. division could be financed in Hungary by the sale of emigration permits to Jews in Slovakia; Himmler was known to be in favour of compromise with his policy of extermination in certain cases where the financial gain to the Reich far exceeded the disadvantage of the survival of certain Jews. A memorandum written in December 1942 and signed by Himmler reads: ‘I have asked the Führer about the absolving [Loslösung] of Jews against hard currency. He has authorized me to approve such cases, provided they bring in genuinely substantial sums from abroad.’
Eichmann, however, regarded such dealings as a sign of weakness, and opposed them. The attempt to bargain over Jewish life and liberty in this way eventually centred on the so-called Europa Plan, which Eichmann’s representative Wisliceny first negotiated on behalf of the S.S. in the semi-independent state of Hungary, where Jewish refugees were congregating. At Eichmann’s trial, Yoel Brand, a Zionist resident in Budapest, gave evidence of the many meetings he had had, some with Eichmann himself, in which the price of liberty for Jews was discussed. ‘At one of these meetings,’ said Brand, ‘I was told that Himmler was very much in favour of Eichmann’s proposal. Himmler, I was told, was in fact a good man and did not want the extermination of the Jews to continue.’ Little was to come out of these negotiations; like the thirty pieces of silver, they proved in the end the price of betrayal. Only in the final losing stages of the war was Himmler, urged on by Kersten and Schellenberg, to give ground and conduct his own hard bargains with the Jews through their agent Masur.6
The policy from 1942-4 was extermination — extermination through work for those prescribed as medically fit for labour, immediate extermination for those who for reasons of age, ill-health or infirmity were held to be waste material. Himmler was to make his policy implacably clear in a speech he made at a meeting of his S.S. major-generals held at Posen on 4 October 1943, 7 speaking of the ravages and loss of life in Russia, he said:
‘Thinking in terms of generations, it is not to be regretted; but in terms of here and now it is deplorable by reason of the loss of labour, that prisoners died in tens and hundreds of thousands from exhaustion and hunger… We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood, but to nobody else. What happens to a Russian or to a Czech does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them for slaves for our Kultur; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished… It is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and give them ideals, thus causing our sons and grandsons to have a more difficult time with them. When somebody comes to me and says, “I cannot dig the anti-tank ditch with women and children, it is inhuman because it will kill them”, then I must reply, “You are a murderer of your own blood, because if the anti-tank ditch is not dug, German soldiers will die, and they are the sons of German mothers. They are our own blood.” That is what I want to instill into the S.S. and what I believe I have instilled into them as one of the most sacred laws of the future… I want the S.S. to adopt this attitude to the problem of all foreign, non-Germanic peoples, especially Russians.’