Heinrich Himmler : A Life (104 page)

Two days later, on 9 August, in the Fuhrer’s headquarters Himmler met first of all Hitler, then Wagner and Bürckel, Gustav Simon, head of the civil administration in Luxembourg, the state secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Stuckart, as well as Ribbentrop and Keitel, to discuss the principles of ethnic policy in the west.
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Bürckel reported later that on this occasion Hitler had made the decision in principle that ‘asocials’, ‘criminals’, ‘all inferior elements’, and ‘anyone who does not belong to us by blood’ should be sent to France, while ‘anyone who belongs by blood to the German nation and must not be handed over to France [ . . . ]—is to be resettled in the Reich without regard to political or other attitudes, insofar as these elements in the population cannot be sustained in Alsace’.
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Though warning that at the time there was no scope for larger-scale operations, Hitler had allowed the possibility of smaller ones (in ‘individual and special cases’).

By persuading Wagner, Himmler had therefore succeeded in making Hitler revise his original position that ‘inferior people’ should simply be sent off ‘to the east’. Now a racial examination was to be the first stage and the deportations diverted to France. This was by no means merely a question of geography, but rather Himmler had managed to pin his ‘Führer’ down to Himmler’s own principles: the crucial factor in official membership of the
German nation was not now political loyalty, language, or cultural tradition but race (scrutinized on an individual basis by SS experts). A German-speaking inhabitant of Alsace who felt himself to be ‘German’ and was loyal to the Third Reich could be deported to France as being ‘of inferior race’, while an opponent of German policy who defined himself as French and spoke French could, if the racial examination was positive, be moved to the Reich on the grounds that he was ‘capable of being re-Germanized’. It was precisely this group that stubbornly resisted the imposition of ‘Germanness’ who attracted the particular attention of the racial examiners, for the latter detected behind this obstinacy the possibility of the influence of Nordic blood.
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With regard to France, Himmler pursued many far-reaching plans. On 12 April 1942 he came out with the view, during a meal with Hitler, that ‘once a year there should be a trawl through the Germanic population of France for good blood. There should be an attempt to move the children of this section of the population while very young to German boarding schools and direct them away from their accidental French nationality towards their Germanic blood and to the fact that they belong to the great German nation.’
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A start had been made some considerable time before on establishing the number of ethnic Germans and those of German descent in France.
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An ‘advisory centre for returning ethnic Germans’ established at the headquarters of the military command in Paris in 1940 had already registered 74,000 ethnic Germans in France by May 1941.
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In June 1941 Heydrich therefore created a branch office of the EWZ (Central Office for Immigration, based in Ł
ó
ódź) in Paris that was not only to register the ethnic Germans but also to examine their racial characteristics. Lambert von Malsen-Ponickau, who was at the same time head of the EWZ in Ł
ó
ódź, was put in charge of the office, for which Himmler laid down special guidelines. By the end of 1944 almost 20,000 people in France had been registered and settled in Alsace, Lorraine, the Old Reich, and in the annexed Polish territories.
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These results fell far short of the SS’s expectations: ‘The racial profile of the returning ethnic Germans processed in February can only be described as moderate’, we read for example in 1942 in the summary produced by the branch office in Paris in its report for that month.
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In northern France, on the other hand, the racial examiners encountered a sizeable group of around 15,000 people, originally from Poland, who had lived for a considerable time in Germany, mostly in the Ruhr, and had
emigrated to France after the First World War, where they called themselves ethnic Germans. In 1943 they were the object of a ‘special emigration operation’, and 5,000 of them were registered in the Ethnic German List. In March 1943 Himmler consented to their being given German nationality. The decisive factor in this decision was not, however, that these people regarded themselves as Germans, but that, even though their ancestors originated from Poland, they had proved by their stubborn attitude as migrants that they represented a racial selection and therefore had ‘Germanic’ roots.
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Himmler’s Germanization policy in no way stopped at his plans for resettlement. As a result of the war against the Soviet Union he rather became increasingly convinced that in the ‘inferior’ population of the Soviet Union there must nevertheless still be genetic remnants of extinct Germanic peoples, which by, as it were, a back-cross with living ‘Germanic’ people could again be made fruitful. The immense number of people needed for the new order envisaged for the east led to a certain generosity in defining what was to be understood by ‘Germanic’.

Himmler, therefore, from time to time contemplated including all the eastern workers brought into the Reich in the process of re-Germanization.
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The fact that forced labourers from the east could not be examined as part of their whole family—something that, as Himmler repeatedly stressed, was crucial for the ‘overall impression’—did, however, run counter to this. The process of re-Germanization for eastern workers was therefore applied only in particular individual cases, and in September 1944 halted altogether.
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It was above all those Soviet agricultural workers earmarked for ‘individual deployment’ on German farms who, as part of a ‘rough-and-ready selection process’, were tested for their ‘capacity for re-Germanization’. Underlying this was concern about the biological ‘threat’ to the female rural population.
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By contrast, racial testing of female domestic staff from eastern Europe developed differently. In October 1941 Himmler had already ordered that girls from Poland, the Ukraine, and the former Baltic States who, after careful racial examination, were judged to be ‘capable of re-Germanization’ should be brought to the Reich as housemaids,
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in order to relieve German
housewives of work and thus promote in them a greater desire to have children. If these girls, as Himmler expressed his thoughts in July 1941,

have, depending on their age, worked impeccably for 3–5 years as housemaids, cooks, or nannies in a family with three or more children or where there is one child and the mother is expecting a second, they will be given German nationality and also be entitled to marry a German. Furthermore, such girls should be given the prospect of their family also being judged by the girls’ behaviour and attitude and then later having the opportunity of coming to Germany and being Germanized.
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Yet only 3–5 per cent of these eastern European girls, for whom members of the elite eagerly placed orders at the Race and Settlement Main Office, satisfied the racial criteria.
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As their ‘capacity for re-Germanization’ had been overestimated, in 1942 another method was tried: the search for suitable workers was extended to the occupied Soviet territories, particularly to the Ukraine and Byelorussia, and the racial criteria were relaxed. Now the aim was not primarily to identify those capable of being re-Germanized but to conduct a ‘preliminary selection’, in other words, to exclude particularly ‘primitive’ people. Girls belonging to Racial Group III did still seem to be acceptable, though not for subsequent citizenship. As many as 50,000 girls may have been brought to the Reich with this proviso.
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The supposed biological risks associated with these girls being employed in German households were therefore considered much less serious than those to which lonely farmers’ wives saw themselves exposed by Soviet agricultural workers.

Even though sexual intercourse between Germans and ‘ethnic aliens’ had been ruled as strictly forbidden, Himmler did not apply without exception the rigorous punishment originally envisaged for such cases. Instead, he instructed that a differentiated procedure be adopted, based on the findings of the ‘racial’ examination of the ‘ethnic alien’ involved and designed to ensure that no ‘valuable blood’ was lost. From 1941 onwards he no longer had slave workers caught in ‘cases of sexual intercourse’ summarily executed, but rather first subjected to a racial examination; if this had a positive outcome they were sent to a concentration camp.
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German women who had become pregnant by civilian workers or prisoners of war were also subjected to a racial test, on the outcome of which depended whether the Race and Settlement Main Office would require the pregnancy to be terminated.
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From December 1942 onwards pregnant workers from the east were also required to undergo a racial examination. If a child ‘of good race’ could be expected the mother was allowed to carry the child to term but not to keep it. Rather, it was handed over after birth to a German foster-family. If the child was ‘racially undesirable’ considerable pressure was often put on the mother to agree to a termination, and sometimes even force was used. If such ‘undesirable’ children were nevertheless born they were put in ‘care facilities for foreign children’, where most died of systematic neglect—without doubt several tens of thousands of infants in all.
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The dangers to ‘racial policy’ created by mass deportations from eastern Europe to Germany and the numerous provisions for individual cases that were made either to contain these risks or to filter out ‘good blood’ seem to have prompted Himmler to introduce a radical reversal of racial policy in the spring of 1942. In March that year he decreed, in his capacity as Settlement Commissar, that the term ‘related’ (
artverwandt
), which up to that point had been used consistently in Nazi racial terminology to refer to the non-German European nations, was to be replaced by a set of new prescribed terms. The term ‘related’, it was claimed, was based on the ‘presupposition [ . . . ] that the racial structure of all European nations is so closely related to that of the German nation that if interbreeding occurs there is no danger that the German nation’s blood will be racially contaminated’. This, it was claimed, is not at all the case, however: even in the European context, ‘racial intermingling’ was a threat, particularly in the case of contact with ‘Slavdom’.

The corresponding directive states that at a meeting in the Party Chancellery of the party branch offices involved it had therefore been decided, ‘with immediate effect’ (until a comprehensive law protecting German blood was passed after the end of the war), to divide the term ‘related’ into, first, ‘German blood and blood of related (= Germanic) races’ (to which members of ‘non-Germanic’ nations who were ‘capable of re-Germanization’ also belonged, in other words those who exhibited ‘Nordic-Faelish (
nordische-fälische
) racial elements’), and secondly, ‘related blood but not from related races’, by which was meant all non-Germanic European nations (Slavs, Latins, Celts, Balts).
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The introduction of this terminology heralded Himmler’s policy of permitting Germans in future to have sexual relations only with other Germans or ‘Teutons’. Although at first intercourse was banned only with Slavs, the directive made a basic distinction undoubtedly intended to
prepare the way for a future ban on sexual relations between Germans and those of Latin, Baltic, or Celtic origin.

The SS not only took children ‘of good race’ from female slave workers sent to Germany, but also forcibly removed tens of thousands of them from the occupied and annexed territories. The historian Isabel Heinemann, who has done pioneering work on the activity of the Race and Settlement Main Office, concludes that as a result at least 50,000 children in eastern and south-eastern Europe were forcibly removed from their families.
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In 1942 the staff headquarters of the Reich Settlement Commissar took the initiative in this matter, calling on the responsible authorities in the Warthegau to search for children of German extraction in Polish orphanages and then to check all children placed in foster-families.
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The children were first sent for observation to a central children’s home and then handed over to the Lebensborn organization, which placed the older ones in ‘German boarding schools’ and offered the younger ones to SS families for adoption. The remaining annexed Polish territories, the General Government, and the occupied Soviet territories were gradually also drawn into this initiative.

As early as 18 June 1941 Himmler had spoken to Arthur Greiser, the Reich Governor in the Warthegau, about this matter: ‘I consider it right that young children of particularly good race from Polish families should be collected together and brought up by us in smallish special crèches and children’s homes. The removal of the children should be justified on the grounds of health risks. Children who fail to do well must be returned to their parents.’
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Rudolf Creutz, the chief of staff at staff headquarters, expressed reservations about this proposal, however, insofar as it applied to ‘Polish children of good race whose parents were still alive’; ‘serious problems’ could arise from such an operation.
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It does, in fact, seem that Himmler’s idea of forcibly separating children from intact families was not systematically implemented, but it certainly did occur in a number of cases, though the number cannot be precisely quantified.
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