Already in November 1944 Himmler had issued a decree empowering regional offices of the Gestapo to implement ‘measures of atonement’ as ‘reprisal for grave acts of terror and sabotage’. The measures were to be directed ‘usually against persons from foreign peoples who don’t come into question as perpetrators but belong to the entourage of the perpetrator’.79 The terror was plainly aimed to serve as a deterrent, opening up thereby a freeway to arbitrary killings, decided at the local level. Gestapo execution squads were recruited in numerous cities and equipped with a general remit to shoot ‘looters, deserters and other rabble’.80 The decentralization of any control over executions effectively became complete by February 1945 when the head of the Security Police, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, authorized local police chiefs to use their own discretion on when they saw fit to execute foreign workers, especially Russians.81 The heads of the Gestapo stations in Düsseldorf, Münster, Dortmund and Cologne had been warned on 24 January that ‘elements among the foreign workers and also former German Communists’ would take advantage of the current situation to engage in ‘subversive’ action. In all reported cases, the response should be ‘immediate and brutal’. Those involved were to ‘be destroyed, without requesting special treatment beforehand from Reich Security Head Office’.82
Arbitrary executions of foreign workers now became commonplace. At least 14 Russians were executed by a shot in the back of the head, then tumbled into a ready-made pit, in a labour camp near Dortmund on 4 February; 24 members of a presumed subversive group, the ‘Kowalenko Gang’, were hanged or shot in Duisburg between 7 and 10 February; 74 persons were murdered in Cologne83 (where, as we noted in an earlier chapter, something approaching a local war between dissidents and the police had been going on since the autumn) on 27 February and another 50 hanged in Gestapo headquarters on the day before the Americans occupied the city at the beginning of March. In the north of Germany, the Kiel Gestapo regularly carried out mass executions from January onwards, totalling around 200 prisoners by the end of April. One such was the shooting of 20–25 persons in late January or early February, and 17 Russian prisoners on 1 March. In the east of the country, in the penitentiary of Sonnenburg, near Frankfurt an der Oder, as many as 753 Gestapo prisoners, among them around 200 foreigners, were massacred on 30–31 January.84 Even this was only the beginning of an orgy of killings of foreign workers in big cities across Germany in the final weeks of the war.
For the legions languishing in Germany’s prisons and concentration camps, the situation was even worse. The concentration camp population at the beginning of 1945 numbered around 700,000 prisoners from all over Europe, just under a third of them women, an estimated 200,000–250,000 of them Jews, the rest mainly political internees, watched over by 40,000 SS guards. A further 190,000 or so prisoners, many of them interned for ‘political’ offences, were held in German penal institutions at this time.85 This entire population of the dispossessed, beyond the reach of any conventional judicial constraints, however harsh, and utterly exposed to the whim of their captors, was now in the greatest peril. Hitler had made no bones about the need to eradicate any internal threat on enemy approach. Probably in February 1945 he issued verbal orders to blow up the concentration camps on the approach of the Allies. According to Himmler’s masseur, Felix Kersten, the Reichsführer-SS told him at the beginning of March that ‘if National Socialist Germany is going to be destroyed, then her enemies and the criminals in concentration camps shall not have the satisfaction of emerging from our ruin as triumphant conquerors. They shall share in the downfall. Those are the Führer’s direct orders and I must see to it that they are carried out down to the last detail.’86
Himmler himself had already, in June 1944, passed executive powers to the Higher SS and Police Leaders to take necessary action in the event of a rising of prisoners on enemy approach.87 Camps were to be evacuated and those interned there moved back into other camps. Should this not be possible, they were to be liquidated.88 In January Himmler ordered the evacuation of the camps in the east, telling their commanders that Hitler held them responsible for ensuring that no prisoner should fall alive into enemy hands.89 Precise responsibilities were, however, as so often in the Third Reich, left unclear. When the camps came to be evacuated, it was amid much confusion and panic rather than through precise implementation of clear orders from above.90
Two imperatives, at least partially contradictory, played their part in the confusion. One was that prisoners should not fall living into the hands of the enemy, presumably to prevent their giving testimony about the barbarity of their treatment, and also because they might be used as hostages in any possible deal with the Allies. The other—offering the most slender of lifelines for the prisoners—was the need, still bizarrely felt even at this juncture, to retain them for their economic value as slave-labourers for the war effort. Extermination versus economic exploitation had long been a contest of Nazi racial policy. The contest continued to the last.
Himmler was by now playing a double game, demonstrating his unquestioned loyalty by maximum ruthlessness and brutality, exactly along the lines that Hitler would wish, while seeing his concentration camp empire as a pawn in possible feelers towards the western Allies with an eye on retaining a place in the post-Hitlerian order. Resorting to a long-held view in leading Nazi circles, he continued to entertain the vague notion that Jews could be used as hostages or a bargaining tool with the enemy. An attempt had already been made, in spring 1944, to barter the lives of Hungarian Jews for lorries to be used on the eastern front, in a fairly transparent tactic to try to split the enemy coalition. And in October 1944, Himmler met the former Swiss Federal President, Jean-Marie Musy, the go-between in an attempted deal to arrange the release of Jews in German hands against a payment of 20 million Swiss francs from Jewish sources in the United States. Himmler and Musy met again in the Black Forest on 12 January, when the Reichsführer agreed to transport 1,200 Jews to Switzerland every fortnight in exchange for $1,000 for each Jew to be paid into a Swiss account in Musy’s name. On 6 February the first train-load of Jews from the camp at Theresienstadt in north-west Bohemia did actually reach Switzerland, and 5 million Swiss francs were deposited in Musy’s account. But Ernst Kaltenbrunner, involved in his own soundings (which eventually came to nothing) to ransom Jews, sabotaged the deal. Kaltenbrunner brought to Hitler’s attention press reports of the arrival of the first transport of Jews in Switzerland, together with an intercepted piece of intelligence suggesting, wrongly, that Himmler had negotiated with Musy about asylum for 250 Nazi leaders in Switzerland. An enraged Hitler promptly ordered that any German who helped a Jew to escape would be executed on the spot. Himmler immediately halted the transports, though he was soon to attempt another route to try to use the Jews as a bargaining pawn with the Allies, this time through Sweden. For now, Hitler and Himmler still needed each other. But Hitler’s suspicions of his ‘loyal Heinrich’ can only have been sharpened by what he had learnt.91