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Endlösung

Arthur Nebe

Arthur Nebe

SS-Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe served as the commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe B in Russia, although that was not his most-important function in the Third Reich.

Born in Berlin on November 13, 1894 to an elementary school teacher, he graduated from the Leibniz-Gymnasium in Berlin (high school) and served in the 17th Pioneer Battalion, a combat engineer organization in World War I.  At the front, he was wounded twice by poison gas and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class.

After the war, in 1920, Nebe joined Berlin’s detective force, the Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police), called Kripo for short.  By 1924, he had advanced to the rank of Police Commissioner; that year he married Elise Schaeffer – the couple had one daughter two years later.  In 1928, he assumed responsibility for the Kripo offices in Potsdam and Frankfurt an der Oder, where he investigated numerous narcotics and murder cases.  Nebe joined the Nazi Party on July 1, 1931.

In 1932, Nebe helped form the National Socialist Civil Service Society of the Berlin Police and became friends with Kurt Daluege, a police official and prominent Nazi.  Daluege recommended that Nebe be appointed the Chief Executive of the State Police.  In July 1936, the Kripo became the criminal police department for the entire Third Reich.  It was merged, along with the Gestapo into the Security Police under Reinhard Heydrich.

Arthur Nebe, who formally entered the SS on December 2, 1936, was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer and appointed head of the entire Kripo, making him a direct subordinate of Heydrich.  Evidence shows that about this time, Nebe began to dislike the methods of Himmler and Heydrich, although he continued to have lunch with them frequently.

By 1938, Nebe’s dislike turned to hostility and he joined anti-Nazi conspirators Dr. Karl Sack and Hans Oster.  Nebe provided information on SS forces to the conspirators involved in the September 1938 coup attempt, a plan to overthrow Hitler if Germany went to war with Czechoslovakia.  However, Britain and France caved in to Hitler’s demands and there was no war over Czechoslovakia.

In 1941, perhaps sensing some reluctance on the part of his subordinate to get his hands dirty, Reinhard Heydrich selected Nebe to command Einsatzgruppe B, which would follow the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Center in the invasion of the Soviet Union.  Nebe asked for a transfer to the International Police Commission to avoid this duty, but Heydrich insisted; anti-Nazis Ludwig Beck and Hans Oster urged Nebe to accept, so they would have direct evidence of SS crimes and organization.  During Nebe’s tenure in the east, Einsatzgruppe B murdered about 46,000 victims.  With the technical assistance of Dr. Albert Widmann, Nebe experimented with the use of explosives and carbon monoxide gas vans (used to suffocate victims) to kill the mentally defective in lunatic asylums in Minsk and Mogilev, to spare his men the anxiety of shooting them.

Nebe served in Russia from June to November 1941, returning to Berlin to command the Kripo once again.  In March 1944, after the mass escape of Allied prisoners of war from Stalag Luft III, Nebe helped select fifty re-captured prisoners for execution.  He also reportedly suggested in June 1944 to SS physician Dr. Ernst Grawitz that the Gypsies held at Auschwitz would be good patients for medical experiments at Dachau.

Arthur Nebe appears to have been on the fringe of the July 20, 1944 bomb plot to kill Hitler at Rastenburg.  Supposedly, his mission in the plot was to lead a team of twelve police officers to assassinate Heinrich Himmler, but his whereabouts on the day remain in question (He may have been in Berlin with conspirator General Paul von Hase) as does the method by which he was to have received the signal to act.

In any case, Nebe – using various disguises after a warrant was issued for his arrest on July 24 – fled into hiding.  There are many versions of what happened next; one of the most logical is that Nebe contacted a female acquaintance in the police, one Adelheid Gobbin at the end of July, requesting help.  She took him to her apartment and then arranged a hiding place with the Walter Frick family at Motzen on Lake Motzen, twenty miles south of Berlin.  Gestapo investigator Willy Litzenberg appears to have tracked Gobbin down in January 1945 and in a later interrogation, she revealed Nebe’s hiding place.  Nebe, who according to one source attempted to fake his own suicide in January, was arrested in February 1945 and sentenced to death by the People’s Court.

On March 21, 1945, executioners at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin hanged Arthur Nebe (and Walter Frick.)  After the war, there were reports that he had been sighted in Turin, Italy and Ireland, but nothing has ever confirmed that he survived the war.

Arthur Nebe2016-03-04T20:41:34-06:00

Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was born in München on October 7, 1900 in a Roman Catholic middle-class family.  His father, Gebhard Himmler, was a teacher; his mother was Anna Maria Heyder.  He had one older brother Gebhard Ludwig and one younger, Ernst.  Heinrich was named after his godfather, Prince Heinrich of Bavaria of the royal family of Bavaria, who had been tutored by Gebhard Himmler.  Heinrich attended grammar school in Landshut, where Gebhard served as deputy principal. He did well in his schoolwork, although he struggled in athletics.

Young Heinrich’s health was poor; he would have lifelong stomach complaints and other ailments.  To remedy this, he trained daily with weights as a youth and exercised to become stronger.  Fellow students recalled him as studious but awkward in social situations.  In 1915, Himmler began training with the Landshut Cadet Corps.  His father used his connections with the royal family to get Heinrich accepted as an officer candidate, and Himmler enlisted with the reserve battalion of the 11th Bavarian Regiment in December 1917.

After the war, Himmler completed grammar school.  Following an apprenticeship on a farm and a subsequent illness, he studied agronomy at the Technische Hochschule in München.  In his second year, he joined an Anti-Semitic nationalist group, the Reichskriegflagge.

Himmler joined the Nazi Party in August 1923, with a Nazi Party number of 14,303.  He was involved in the Beer Hall Putsch on November 9, 1923.  From mid-1924, Himmler worked under Gregor Strasser, a leading party leader, as a party secretary and propaganda assistant.  Travelling across Bavaria agitating for the party, he gave speeches and distributed literature; within months, he became the head of the party office in Lower Bavaria and was responsible for integrating the areas membership with the ‘Nazi Party, under Hitler, when the party was re-founded in February 1925.

That same year, Himmler joined the SS (SS #168), initially holding a position of SS-Gauführer for Lower Bavaria.  He soon became the deputy propaganda chief for the party as well.  In September 1927, Himmler briefed Adolf Hitler on his vision to transform the SS into a loyal, powerful, racially pure elite unit.  Hitler’s response was to appoint Himmler as the Deputy Reichsführer-SS, with the rank of SS-Oberführer, under Erhard Heiden.  Heiden fell into disgrace, after allegations surfaced that parts of his uniform were customized by a Jewish tailor, and on January 5, 1929, he was dismissed by Adolf Hitler and succeeded by Heinrich Himmler as Reichsführer-SS.  Never one to underestimate a potential rival, in April 1933, Himmler ordered Erhard Heiden arrested members of the Sicherheitsdienst.  Heiden was killed shortly after, presumably at SD headquarters in München, but his corpse was only found in September 1933; he was buried on September 15, 1933.

During the 1930s, Himmler set up an SS empire in Germany, to include the concentration camp system in March 1933.  He led the purge of the SA, Sturmabteilung Brownshirts on June 30, 1934 (known as “The Night of the Long Knives.”)  In addition to assuming control of the police, Himmler established an SS military branch that later became known as the Waffen-SS.  Growing the Waffen-SS became a Himmler priority, as did establishing the Einsatzgruppe beginning in 1939 with the invasion of Poland.  During the war, he was a major architect of the “Final Solution.”

The Waffen-SS grew in scope to several dozen divisions and 800,000 troops.  Hitler relied on these forces even more after the failed July 20 Bomb Plot against his life.  Hitler appointed Himmler the commander of Army Group Vistula on the Eastern Front in January 1945, but replaced him on March 20, 1945, when Himmler’s military incompetence proved too great.  That spring, Himmler attempted to negotiate an independent peace settlement through the Swedish Red Cross, using Jewish prisoners as bargaining assets.  The Allies refused.  Himmler and Hitler met for the last time on April 20, 1945, on Hitler’s birthday, at the Führer bunker, where Himmler swore total loyalty to Hitler.  At a military briefing later that day, Hitler stated that he would not be leaving Berlin, in spite of Soviet advances. Along with Hermann Göring, the head of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) Himmler quickly left the city immediately after the briefing.  Himmler made his way to Flensburg in northern Germany, where he reported to Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had been named by Hitler as his successor.  Dönitz, knowing that Himmler was of no value at this point, dismissed Himmler from all his positions.

At the end of World War II in early May 1945, Heinrich Himmler attempted to go into hiding. Although he had not made extensive preparations for this, as other high-ranking Nazis had, he had equipped himself with a forged paybook under the name of Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger.  With a few companions, he headed south on May 11, 1945 to Friedrichskoog, without a final destination in mind.  The group continued to Neuhaus, before splitting up; Himmler and two aides were stopped at a British checkpoint on May 21, 1945 and detained.  Over the following two days, Himmler – still in disguise – was moved around to several camps, before arriving at the British 31st Civilian Interrogation Camp near Lüneburg on May 23, 1945.  During a routine interrogation, Himmler admitted who he was and was immediately searched.  After finding nothing, military police took him to the headquarters of the Second British Army in Lüneburg, where a physician conducted a medical exam.  When the doctor attempted to examine the inside of Himmler’s mouth, Himmler jerked his head away, bit into a hidden cyanide pill and collapsed onto the floor.  He was dead within fifteen minutes.  Shortly afterward, the British buried Himmler’s body in an unmarked grave near Lüneburg.  The precise location of the grave remains unknown.  Since the war, pictures of the deceased Himmler appear to show that his nose had been broken, and rumors still persist that a British physician gave him an injection of some unknown substance just before he died.

Heinrich Himmler2016-03-04T20:45:26-06:00

Reinhard Heydrich

Reinhard Heydrich

SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich served as the chief of the Reich Main Security Office, Deputy Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, and one of the main architects of the Holocaust.   Historians regard him as the darkest figure within the Nazi elite.  Even Adolf Hitler called him “the man with the iron heart.”  Heydrich was born on March 7, 1904 in Halle an der Saale to composer and opera singer Richard Bruno Heydrich and his wife Elisabeth Anna Maria Amalia Krantz.  Young Reinhard was very intelligent and excelled in his schoolwork at the Reformgymnasium; he was a talented athlete and became an expert swimmer and fencer.  However, Reinhard was shy and insecure; he was frequently bullied for his high-pitched voice and rumored Jewish ancestry, which earned him the nickname “Moses Handel.”

After World War I, Heydrich joined a Freikorps, a paramilitary unit that fought Communists near his hometown.  In 1922, he joined the German Navy and became a naval cadet at Kiel.  On April 1, 1924, he was promoted to senior midshipman and sent to officer training at the Mürwik Naval College.  Two years later, he advanced to the rank of ensign and was assigned as a signals officer on the battleship Schleswig-Holstein, the flagship of Germany’s North Sea Fleet.  Admiral Erich Raeder dismissed Heydrich from the Navy in April 1931, after a charge of “conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman,” for breaking an engagement promise to a woman he had known.   Heydrich was devastated by the dismissal and the absence of prospects for a career.  Six months later, he married Lina von Osten, a Nazi Party follower.

The same year, Heydrich joined the SS and began establishing a counterintelligence division.  Heinrich Himmler interviewed him and was so impressed that he appointed Heydrich to a position as chief of the new “Ic Service” (intelligence service).  Heydrich set up office at the Brown House, the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich and created a network of spies and informers for intelligence-gathering purposes and to obtain information to be used as blackmail.  [29] Information on thousands of people was recorded on index cards and stored at the Brown House.  In the summer of 1932, Himmler appointed Heydrich chief of the renamed security service – the Sicherheitsdienst (SD).  Himmler named Heydrich to head the Gestapo on April 22, 1934.  Two months later, the SD was declared the official Nazi intelligence service.  In 1934, Heydrich assisted Himmler and Hitler in crushing the SA in the “Night of the Long Knives.”  He helped organize Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on November 9–10, 1938.  On September 27, 1939, the SD and the Security Police (made up of the Gestapo and the Kripo) were subordinated into the new Reich Main Security Office or SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), which was placed under Heydrich’s control.

By late 1940, the Wehrmacht had swept through most of Western Europe, to include France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway.   The following year, Heydrich’s SD was given responsibility for carrying out the Nacht und Nebel (Night-and-Fog) decree.  According to the decree, “persons endangering German security” were to be arrested in a completely discreet way: “under the cover of night and fog.”  Thousands of people disappeared without a trace and no one was told of their whereabouts or their fate.  Prior to the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Heydrich established four Einsatzgruppe, each with several Einsatzkommando, whose mission was to kill undesirable elements and potential partisans in Russia immediately after the German Army conquered the area.

On September 27, 1941, Hitler appointed Heydrich as Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (the part of Czechoslovakia incorporated into the Reich in 1939), sending the actual Reich Protector, Konstantin von Neurath, on permanent leave, based on his soft approach to the Czechs.  Upon his appointment, Heydrich told his aides that he would “Germanize the Czech vermin.”  Heydrich, from his headquarters in Prague, enforced German policy, fought resistance to the Nazi regime and maintained production quotas of Czech military equipment and weapons, vital to the German war effort.

Heydrich chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, which laid out plans for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, comprising the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory in Europe.

A British-trained team of Czech and Slovak agents attacked Heydrich was in Prague on May 27, May 1942.  The group had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill him in an operation code named “Operation Anthropoid.”  Himmler sent Dr. Karl Gebhardt to Prague to assist.  Gebhardt disdained the use of sulfonamide, expecting Heydrich to make a full recovery without antibiotic use (which Gebhardt thought worthless).  Heydrich died of sepsis a week later.  When hearing of Heydrich’s death, SS-Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich proclaimed, “Thank God that sow’s gone to the butcher.”  The Nazis retaliated for Heydrich’s death by linking the assassins to the village of Lidice, razing Lidice to the ground, executing all adult males and sending most of the women and children to concentration camps.

Heydrich was buried in Berlin in an elaborate Nazi State funeral at the Invalidenfriedhof.  Heydrich’s grave and remains were ransacked and destroyed after the war.

Reinhard Heydrich2016-03-28T19:24:12-05:00

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler, the Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the Nazi Party, hailed from Ranshofen, a small village in the municipality of Braunau am Inn, Austria.  He was born on April 20, 1889, the fourth of six children of a minor customs official, Alois Hitler – and Klara Pölzl.  At age three, Adolf moved with the family to Passau, Germany, but remained there only two years before locating in Leonding, near Linz, Austria.  This early traveling between the two countries helped Adolf later adopt the feeling that he was more German than Austrian.

Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, was the illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber.  The baptismal register did not show the name of Alois’ father, so Alois received his mother’s surname.  In 1842, a Johann Georg Hiedler married Maria Anna.  After she died in 1847 and he in 1856, Alois was brought up in the family of Hiedler’s brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler.  In 1876, Alois was legitimated and the baptismal register changed by a priest before three witnesses.  However, many in the family – and others as well, although they kept quiet – were convinced that Maria Anna, Alois’ mother, was employed as a housekeeper for a Jewish family in Graz, Austria and that this family’s 19-year-old son, Leopold Frankenberger, had actually fathered Alois.  If true (and many prominent historians disbelieve this assertion) that would make Hitler – who hated all Jews and wanted to exterminate them – a quarter Jewish himself in the Nazi way of determining race.

In June 1895, the Hitler family moved to a small landholding at the village of Hafeld near Lambach, Austria, when Alois retired from customs and tried his hand at farming and beekeeping.  Young Adolf attended school at the village of Fischlham.  However, he rebelled against the school discipline, as well as that of his father, and began to emotionally separate from members of the family.  With the farming attempt in shambles, Alois moved the family back to Lambach and a year later to Leonding.  In February 1900, Edmund, Adolf’s younger brother, died from measles, which further pushed Adolf to being a sullen and detached boy, constantly bickering with his father and schoolteachers.  That September, Alois sent Adolf to the Realschule in Linz, Austria, hoping the son would become a customs bureau employee.  This event soured Adolf further, as he had wished to become an artist and attend a classical high school.  His schooling declined, when on January 3, 1903, Alois suddenly died.  Adolf transferred to the Realschule at Steyr, Austria for a year, before leaving school completely.

From 1905 to 1913, Adolf lived in Wien, Austria.  Following a bohemian lifestyle, he was financed by orphan’s benefits; his mother also supported him.  During this time, Hitler worked as a part-time laborer and eventually as a painter of watercolors.  The Academy of Fine Arts, Wien, rejected Hitler for admittance in 1907 and 1908, because of his inaptitude for painting, and the academy’s director suggested that Hitler study architecture.  Klara Hitler died on December 21, 1907, an event that crushed Hitler’s spirit.  Running out of money, he lived in a homeless shelter in 1909 and by 1910, he had settled into a house for poor working men.  He probably began his virulent Anti-Semitism at this time.  Hitler left Austria in February 1914 and moved to München.

At the outbreak of World War I, Hitler volunteered to serve in the Bavarian Army as an Austrian citizen.  He was assigned to the 1st Company of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment “List Regiment” and served as a dispatch runner on the Western Front in France and Belgium.  He was in combat at the First Battle of Ypres, the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Arras and the Battle of Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres.)  He was soon decorated for bravery, receiving the Iron Cross 2nd Class in 1914.  During the Battle of the Somme in October 1916, he was wounded in the groin area and left thigh by shrapnel from an artillery shell that exploded in the dispatch runners’ dugout.  He subsequently spent almost two months in the Red Cross hospital at Beelitz, not returning to his regiment until March 5, 1917.  Hitler received the Iron Cross 1st Class on August 4, 1918, having previously received the Black Wound Badge on May 18, 1918.  On October 15, 1918, Hitler was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack and was hospitalized in Pasewalk.  At this hospital, he received word of Germany’s defeat, and suffered a second bout of blindness.

Now a decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party (a precursor of the Nazi Party [NSDAP]) in 1919, and became the leader of the NSDAP in 1921.  On November 9, 1923, Hitler and his followers attempted a coup d’état, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in downtown München.  The failed coup resulted in a conviction for treason and imprisonment at Landsberg Prison, during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle).  After Hitler’s release from prison in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, Anti-Semitism, and Anti-Communism through the use of charismatic oratory, superb organizational skills and Nazi propaganda.

Slowly, but surely, the Nazi Party gained traction.  After his appointment as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism.  Now as Führer and Reichskanzler, his public aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe.  His private discussions revealed Hitler’s foreign and domestic policies that had the goal of seizing “living space” (Lebensraum) for the Germanic people in Eastern Europe and Russia.  Hitler directed the rearmament of Germany, the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia and the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht in September 1939.  These actions led to the outbreak of World War II in Europe.  Under Hitler’s rule, in 1941 German forces and their European allies occupied most of Europe and North Africa and invaded Russia.  The Nazis “Final Solution,” the destruction of the European Jews, accelerated at this point.  By 1943, Hitler’s military decisions led to escalating German defeats.  In 1944, the Western Allies invaded France and the Soviet Union reached Poland in the east.  In 1945, the Allied armies successfully invaded Germany.

In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time mistress, Eva Braun.  On April 30, 1945, Hitler finished dictating his final testament and the pair committed suicide, Hitler by biting down on a cyanide capsule, while simultaneously shooting himself in the head with a pistol, to avoid capture by the Red Army.  SS troops doused the corpses with gasoline in the garden of the Reichs’ Chancellery and burned the corpses.  Rumors persisted for three decades that Hitler had fooled his enemies and had fled to South America, but all the stories proved false.

Hitler said numerous outrageous things during his career.  Here are a few perverse statements he made about women:

“A highly intelligent man should have a primitive and stupid woman.”

“These women are so oddly primitive.  A hairdresser, clothes, dancing, theaters can distract them from any serious activity.

“The only things they’re willing to read are magazines and novels.”

“With all due respect for older ladies, I would prefer having younger ones nearby.”

“I detest women who dabble in politics.  And if their dabbling extends to military matters, it becomes utterly unendurable.”

“Other women are extremely careful of their appearance, but not beyond the moment when they’ve found a husband.  They’re obsessed by their outlines, they weigh themselves on exact scales – the least gram counts!  Then you marry them, and they put on weight by the kilo!”

“Intelligence, in a woman, is not an essential thing.”

“Spanish women, even though they speak several languages, are outstandingly stupid.”

Adolf Hitler2016-03-28T21:03:53-05:00

SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr. Eduard Strauch, Einsatzkommando 1b & 2

SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr. Eduard Strauch, Einsatzkommando 1b & 2

SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr. Eduard Strauch, born August 17, 1906 in Essen, commander Einsatzkommando 1b and Einsatzkommando 2, winner of the Iron Cross 1st Class, sentenced at Nürnberg to Death, released from prison by reason of insanity, died on September 9, 1955 in a mental hospital in Uccle, Belgium, said in 1943 on killing Jews: “Gentlemen…we are convinced that someone must carry out these tasks.  I can state with pride that my men…are proud to act out of conviction and fidelity to their Führer.” 

SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr. Eduard Strauch, Einsatzkommando 1b & 22016-02-28T18:29:39-06:00
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