The Private Heinrich Himmler by Katrin Himmler

Author:Katrin Himmler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466870895
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Sofia, 7.5.419

Dear Mami!

I spent the night here and toured the city. Now I am off to Athens. I am very well. To you and Püppi many affectionate greetings your Pappi.

With full knowledge and intent, the NS and Wehrmacht leadership planned an unlawful war on the Soviet population. The so-called Commissar Order, according to which all political officers of the Red Army were not to be captured, but rather executed immediately, contravened all accepted conventions of warfare, as did the order that German soldiers guilty of violent attacks on the civilian population were not to be subject to military justice.

Because the NS and Wehrmacht leadership calculated that the attacking army of three million German soldiers would advance rapidly and thus not be able to be fed by traditional military supply lines, the directive stipulated that the soldiers would have to rely on whatever provisions they could find in the countryside for themselves. In May 1941 a State Secretaries Conference in Berlin recorded literally that “countless millions will doubtless starve if we can take what we need from the land.” Hitler himself declared that Moscow and Leningrad should be razed to the ground “to prevent people from staying there whom we would then have to feed in the winter.”

The Wehrmacht leadership did not bother about providing care for Soviet prisoners of war. Tens of thousands died while marching to the camps; the camp inmates had inadequate housing, often in open fields where the soldiers themselves had to dig holes in the ground, and where they were left to die of starvation and disease. Nearly two million Soviet soldiers who were captured in 1941 died in the Wehrmacht prisoner of war camps before the spring of 1942.

From the very beginning, National Socialist policy was aimed at the complete subjugation and permanent domination of the eastern region. Thus the conquest of the Soviet Union proceeded with an ideology based on “blood” and “racial hygiene,” which required the murder, expulsion, and starvation of whole population groups. Heinrich Himmler and the SS received “special orders from the Führer” that proceeded from the “struggle to be waged between two opposing political systems,” as directives from the Wehrmacht High Command stated. In addition to the infamous Einsatzgruppen of the Secret Police and the SD, countless units of the Ordnungspolizei and the Waffen-SS were set up. These groups were all subordinate to higher-ranking leaders in the SS and the police, who commanded and coordinated the death squads.

In the first weeks of the invasion, the SS death squads targeted primarily Jewish men, but women and children were not spared either. In Bialystok, for example, on June 27, 1941, members of a police battalion forced approximately 2,000 Jews (men, women, and children) into the local synagogue and set it on fire, burning all inside. In the course of the summer, the destruction expanded to include whole Jewish communities, including women, children, and old people. In the Ukrainian town of Kamenez-Podolsk, at the end of August, units commanded by SS-Obergruppenführer and Polizeiführer

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