The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [17]
What was to be called the policy of Schrecklichkeit (frightfulness) had begun as soon as the Germans had entered Poland. For the master race to have their living space, large numbers of Slavic and Jewish Untermenschen had to disappear, and during the war Poland lost a staggering 17.2 per cent of her population. The commander of three Totenkopf (Death’s Head) SS regiments, Theodor Eicke, ordered his men to ‘incarcerate or annihilate’ every enemy of National Socialism that they found as they followed the troops into Poland.17 Since Nazism was a racial and political ideology, that meant that huge swathes of the Polish people were automatically classed as enemies, to whom no mercy could be shown. The Wehrmacht took active part in the violence: the country was handed over to civilian administration on 26 October, only eight weeks after war broke out, but by then the German Army had, without special orders needing to be given, burnt 531 towns and villages and killed thousands of Polish POWs.18 The claim made by many German soldiers to Allied re-education officers, and to each other, that they had been simple soldiers who had known nothing of the genocide against the Slavs and the Jews – or at best had heard only rumours – was a lie.
The Schutzstaffel (defence unit, or SS) was originally the protective guard of the National Socialist Party. It was formally described as an independent Gliederung (formation) of the Party, led by its Reichsführer-SS (Chief of the SS), Heinrich Himmler. Yet by the time of the outbreak of war it had grown, and by 1944 could be described accurately by an Allied briefing book as ‘a state within a state, superior both to the Party and the government’. Officially described after Hitler came to power as ‘protecting the internal security of the Reich’, the SS revelled in the terror its ruthlessness and cruelty inspired. ‘I know that there are millions in Germany who sicken at the sight of the black uniforms of our SS,’ wrote Himmler in a brochure for his organization entitled Die Schutzstaffeln, in 1936. ‘We understand that well, and we do not expect to be loved by too many.’19
From the early days when it provided the bodyguards for Nazi street and beerhall speakers, the SS grew – especially after it wiped out the leadership of its rival the SA – into an organization that was intimately involved in many aspects of the state. As well as providing ‘the Führer’s most personal, selected guard’, the SS promoted the doctrine of ‘Race and Blood’; dominated the police force; set up a military section – the Waffen-SS – numbering 830,000 by 1945, which fought in every campaign except Norway and Africa, and the Totenkopf Verbände, a self-contained entity which ran the concentration and extermination camps; ruled the state security service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD); and had its own depots and notoriously tough training establishments, as well as having departments covering economics, supply, works and buildings, finance, legal affairs, industrial and agricultural undertakings, medical matters, personnel, racial quality, the family, resettlement, discipline, camp construction, the regions, liaison, pardons and reprieves, the strengthening of Germanism, signals and communications, education, folk schools and the repatriation of racial Germans. These SS entities were quite separate from the rest of the German state.20 Hitler devised their motto: Meine Ehre heisst Treue (My honour is loyalty) in 1931, neatly encapsulating his need to have a force that he could trust to put allegiance to him before any system of morality.
The nature of their operations became immediately apparent. On 5 September 1939, a thousand civilians were shot by the SS at Bydgoszcz, and at Piotrków the Jewish