Heinrich Himmler: The Nazi Leader’s Master Plan

By Heather Pringle | World War II  | 5 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

The three regions would then be repopulated with small villages of ethnic German and SS settlers. Each village, Himmler explained to his personal physician Felix Kersten, “will embrace between thirty and forty farms. Each farmer [will receive] up to 300 acres of land, more or less according to the quality of the soil. In any case a class of financially powerful and independent farmers will develop. Slaves won’t till this soil; rather, a farming aristocracy will come into being, such as you still find on the Westphalian estates [in Germany].”

A “manor house” occupied by an SS or Nazi party leader would dominate each village. In addition, each settlement would feature a Thingplatz and a local party headquarters that Himmler envisioned as a “center for general intellectual training and instruction.” Himmler also planned to transform parts of the Russian steppes, with their sweeping grasslands, into his vision of a proper Teutonic homeland. “Germanic man,” he explained to Kersten, “can only live in a climate suited to his needs and in a country adapted to his character, where he will feel at home and not be tormented by homesickness.” So Himmler decided to plant thick groves of oak and beech trees to reproduce the ancient forests of northern Germany. “We’ll create a countryside something like that of Schleswig-Holstein,” he boasted.

Himmler was well aware that such a colonization scheme would help motivate SS officers to carry out his murderous orders. Many SS men had grown up in small, crowded apartments in German cities, and they craved what they saw as the outdoor life of a feudal lord: riding fine horses, dining on abundant fresh food and hunting game whenever they chose. As Himmler’s physician recalled after the war: “They all dreamed of the grand estates in the East that had been promised to them as the first fruits of victory. They waxed hot and eloquent on the subject. There were even quarrels, occasionally, over the exact dimensions of the farms that should be allotted to them, the comparative wealth of the reward according to the years of their service!”

So in early July 1942, Himmler began to press Hitler for a decision on his settlement plan. The Führer had privately ridiculed some of Himmler’s ideas on history, particularly his enthusiasm for Germany’s Iron Age tribes. “It’s bad enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts,” Hitler grumbled on one occasion to Albert Speer. “Now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds.” But Hitler was pleased with Himmler’s program of racial selection in the SS. The countryside near his Alpine residence in Berchtesgaden, Hitler observed in April 1942, “is abounding with jolly and healthy young children,” thanks to the SS regiment stationed there. “It is a practice which must be followed; to those districts in which a tendency towards degeneracy is apparent we must send a body of elite troops and in ten or twenty years time the bloodstock will be improved out of all recognition.”

So Hitler listened attentively to Himmler as he presented his new plan for planting SS-led colonies along the far borders of the new Eastern territories. On July 16, 1942, the SS leader informed his physician that Hitler had at long last approved this massive settlement scheme. It was a great personal victory. Indeed, Himmler called it “the happiest day” of his life.

Such sweeping plans, involving the relocation of millions of people by rail, could not possibly be carried out in 1942—with a world war yet to win and the Final Solution to carry out. They would have to wait for victory. In the meantime, however, Himmler resolved to establish a small trial colony around his own field headquarters at Hegewald, not far from the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. He proceeded with his customary blend of brutality and efficiency. On October 10, 1942, his troops began rounding up 10,623 Ukrainian men, women and children from around Hegewald, packing them at gunpoint into boxcars destined for labor camps in the south. By the middle of the month, many houses in the region stood eerily empty, with dishes still on the tables and linen neatly folded in the cupboards.

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Tags: Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, World War II

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