Oskar Schindler, page 12
Himmler’s principal representative in the General Government was the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF; Höherer SS-und Polizeiführer). The HSSPF oversaw the various branches of the Order-Keeping Police (Orpo; Ordnungspolizei) and Sipo (Security Police; Sicherheitspolizei), which included the Gestapo, Kripo (Kriminalpolizei; criminal police) and the Border Police (Grenzpolizei). The HSSPF had under him subordinates who oversaw SS and police matters in the five districts of the General Government. During his five years in Kraków, Oskar Schindler not only had to deal with two General Government HSSPFs (Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, 1939–1943; Wilhelm Koppe, 1943–1945) but also with the Kraków district’s HSSPFs (Karl Zech; Schedler; Julian Scherner, 1942–1943; and Teobald Thier).100
Originally, Himmler saw the HSSPF as the overseer of the various police forces and SS units in areas under German control. During the war, he tried to expand powers of the HSSPF to include authority over all political and racial matters in the Third Reich. Consequently, Himmler and his subordinates became Frank’s principal competitors in the General Government during Frank’s long years of rule there.101
The Wehrmacht and the Armaments Inspectorate in the General Government
Because Frank had no authority in military matters, the Wehrmacht was less problematic to Frank than Himmler and the SS. Frank had the greatest difficulties with General Blaskowitz and played an important role in his dismissal. Blaskowitz was succeeded by Generalleutnant Curt Ludwig Baron von Gienanth, who held the title of Military Commander in the General Government (Militärbefehlshaber im Generalgouvernement) and, in 1942, Military Commander of the General Government District (Wehrkreisbefehlshaber im Generalgouvernement). In 1943, General der Infantrie Siegfried Haenicke replaced Gienanth as commander of the General Government military district.102
The relationship between Frank, the HSSPF, and the military was always tense, particularly after the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union in 1941 and the transformation of the General Government into the prime killing center of the Final Solution, the German plan to mass murder of all the Jews of Europe. Though we now know that the Wehrmacht played more of a collaborationist role in this mass murder campaign against Jews, the deadliest military complicity took place in occupied parts of the Soviet Union. Regardless, the Wehrmacht regarded the General Government as an important staging area for its war with the Soviet Union and resented the conflicting goals of the SS and its various police operatives, who came to see the General Government less as a war zone than as a killing field.103
Oskar Schindler’s success in protecting and saving his Jewish workers in Kraków and Brünnlitz centered around his close ties with Wehrmacht officers in Kraków, Berlin, and elsewhere. As previously mentioned, his ties within Admiral Canaris’s Abwehr were essential to his work. Equally important, however, were his links to the Wehrmacht’s Armaments Inspectorate (Rüstungsinspektion) and Himmler’s Security Police, Sipo. On three occasions after the war, Schindler specifically thanked his friends in Abwehr, the Armaments Inspectorate, and Sipo for their help not only in aiding his Jews but also for arranging to have him released after his three arrests during the war. In his letter to Fritz Lang in 1951, Oskar explained their motives. He said that the supportive officers in Abwehr and the Armaments Inspectorate were “partly anti-Nazi, or at least opponents of the SS and its methods.” He added that they were “on the side of Canaris during the ever-widening gap between the Abwehr and the SD.”104
The person he always mentioned first in his postwar statements about helpful Wehrmacht officers was Generalleutnant Maximillian Schindler, the head of the Armaments Inspectorate in the General Government. As the war with the Soviet Union lengthened, the military viewed the General Government, with its large human labor resources, as an important element in war production. And key to Wehrmacht war planning in the General Government was Oskar Schindler’s namesake, General Schindler. Though not related to Oskar Schindler, the Sudeten German businessman let everyone he dealt with in the General Government think that he and General Schindler were relatives; indeed, some thought that Oskar was General Schindler’s son. The fictitious tie between the two men worked to Oskar’s advantage, though Maximillian Schindler and his Sudeten German namesake had very little in common. Born in 1881 in Bavaria, Max-imillian Schindler had served as an infantry officer in World War I. According to Oskar, General Schindler later was a German delegate to the League of Nations and also served as Military Attaché to the German embassy in Warsaw. In September 1939, General Schindler became the OKW’s representative for industrial matters in Poland (Industriebeauf-tragter des OKW in Poland) and then head of the Armaments Inspectorate of the General Government (Inspektor der Rüstungsinspektion im Generalgouvernement), with the rank of General. In 1944, he became the head of the Armaments Inspectorate West (Rüstungsbeautragter West). He settled in Munich after the war and died in 1963. 105
General Schindler was also one of only a handful of officers whom Oskar thanked at the end of the war for helping him save his Jews. What we know about General Schindler’s activities in the General Government comes from a study of German defense and armaments production, Geschichte der deutschen Wehrund Rüstungwirtschaft (1919–1943/45), by the head of the Armaments Inspectorate, General Georg Thomas, and Albert Speer’s Der Sklavenstaat (The Slave State). Though neither work provides clues as to General Schindler’s political sentiments, he must have been well respected throughout the German armaments industry because he remained in his post after Thomas’s dismissal in 1943. Oskar Schindler’s choosing to put General Schindler at the top of his small list of officers who helped him during the war also says a lot about Maximillian Schindler. One possible assumption is that General Thomas, himself a vocal critic of Hitler’s inadequate wartime military plans, provided General Schindler with the same type of protection that Admiral Canaris did for his own rebellious officers and administrators. The relationship between Thomas and Canaris is particularly intriguing, as we shall see. Though they were never close, their erstwhile antipathy to Hitler’s ongoing war efforts periodically brought them together.
Given Oskar’s friendship with General Schindler, it should come as no surprise that he also had close ties with two other prominent Armaments Inspectorate officers, Oberstleutnant Ott, the head of the Wehrmacht’s Armaments Inspectorate in Kraków, and Oberstleutnant Süßmuth, who headed the Armaments Inspectorate office in Troppau (Opava) in what had become the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Later, Oberstleutnant Süßmuth, at least according to Oskar, was instrumental not only in helping Oskar get permission to move his factory from Kraków to Brünnlitz in the fall of 1944, but he also had about 3,000 Polish Jewish women transferred from Auschwitz to smaller forced labor camps, where they all survived the war. Ott died at the end of the war or soon thereafter; Süßmuth settled in Vienna.106
Oskar was also close to another armaments specialist, Erich Lange of the Army High Command’s (OKH; Oberkommando des Heeres) Ordnance Department (Heereswaffenamt). Lange, an engineer, would play a key role in getting Schindler’s Jewish workers released from their brief incarceration in the Auschwitz and Groß Rosen (Polish, Rogożnica) concentration camps in the fall of 1944 while en route from Kraków to Brünnlitz. Emilie described Lange as a gentleman who always wore civilian clothing whenever he visited the Schindlers in Brünnlitz to show “his disapproval of the Nazi regime.” Lange frequently mentioned that he worked for Germany and not the Nazi regime. Emilie found Erich Lange to be “most cordial and friendly” with a strong “sense of justice” and moral integrity.107
The most interesting thing about the support that Oskar received from important figures in the Armaments Inspectorate is the similarity between these ties and those with Abwehr. Some Abwehr officers, particularly those who helped and befriended Oskar, were operating under the umbrella protection of Admiral Canaris, who shared some of their sympathies. Could the same be said of Armaments Inspectorate officers? Yes. General Thomas also had serious misgivings about Hitler and the Nazis, though they had less to do with Nazi political and racial policies than with Hitler’s ill-thought-out military plans. Regardless, Thomas would be increasingly seen by Nazi leaders as a defeatist and critic of the Nazi regime. And like Canaris, he would be arrested after the July 20, 1944 assassination plot against Hitler for his activities.
Thomas and Canaris
Yet who was Georg Richard Thomas? He was the son of a factory owner from Forst in eastern Germany. He joined a Junker unit in 1908 and was commissioned a lieutenant in 1910. He served on the Western Front in World War I. A decorated officer, he remained in the army after the war and he became a protégé of Ludwig Beck, later Hitler’s Chief of the General Staff of the Army (Chef des Generalstabes Wehrmacht) and later an anti-Nazi resistance leader. Named Chief of Staff of the Army’s Weapons Office (Chef des Stabes des Heereswaffenamts) in 1930, Thomas would be the center of military planning for the German armed forces when Adolf Hitler came to power three years later. The rearming of Germany had long been one of Adolf Hitler’s priorities. Well before his public announcement of German rearmament in 1935, Hitler had greatly increased state expenditures for Germany’s armed forces. Some in the military, Thomas and Canaris among them, would argue on the eve of World War II that Germany was not ready to fight a lengthy war. And they were right. Hitler’s efforts to rearm and build a modern economy had created tremendous tensions between the military and civilians charged with revitalizing various sectors of Germany and preparing it for war.108
How did Thomas fit into all this? According to the Reich Defense Law of 1935, which was amended in 1938, the Minister for Economic Affairs, who also served as the General Plenipotentiary for the Economy (GBW; Generalbevollmächtigter für die Wirtschaft), would oversee general supervision of businesses important to the war economy. During wartime, the Wehrmacht, particularly Thomas’s office, would supervise businesses involved in armaments production. Hitler tried to resolve the conflicting demands and needs of both groups by putting Hermann Göring in charge of a new overall economic rebuilding program in 1936—the Four Year Plan (Vierjahresplan)—which envisioned a nation and military ready for war once the plan was completed. Göring quickly became Germany’s economic dictator, though the military, which retained control over armaments production, did everything possible to reassert its control by hammering out a special relationship with the GBW.109
Though Germany made tremendous strides in the early years of the Four Year Plan, its efforts to rearm for Hitler’s goal of a lengthy conflict backed by a full war economy fell far short of the military’s needs in even a limited war. In the summer of 1939, General Thomas told Wehrmacht leaders that Germany’s economic preparation for war had weakened over the past year and that supplies of essential raw materials would last only a few months. Thomas hoped his report would help Wehrmacht leaders talk Hitler out of war; but if war came, it should be “total war” against Poland and the countries of southeastern Europe to acquire vital raw materials.110
After he read Thomas’s negative report, Admiral Canaris asked the general to talk to General Keitel, the head of OKW, about the inadvisability of war over Poland. This was the beginning of a special relationship between Thomas and Canaris that lasted at least until Thomas resigned as head of Defense Economy and Chief Armanents Office (Wi-Rü Amt Werkwirtschafts-und Rüstungshauptamt) in 1943. Thomas, long a voice in the wilderness about Germany’s military readiness to fight aggressive war, was frustrated when Albert Speer (whom Hitler appointed in 1942 as his new Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions [Rmf- BuM; Reichsminister für Bewaffnung und Munition]), decided to place Thomas’s regional officers and armaments inspectors directly under Rmf- BuM. Though Thomas still commanded Wi-Rü, his power and influence were reduced considerably by Speer’s move.111
Canaris had become acquainted with Thomas when the latter commanded the army’s Weapons Office (Heereswaffenamt). By the time Ca-naris approached Thomas about the Wehrmacht’s war preparedness, Thomas was recognized as the military’s foremost armaments expert. Yet Thomas was more than that and Canaris knew it. The forty-nine-year old Thomas was also a well-placed and influential officer with strong misgivings about the Nazi system. He was particularly shaken by the twin crises in 1938 surrounding the resignation of Minister of War Werner von Blomberg, on charges that he had married a prostitute, and the dismissal of Supreme Military Commander Werner von Fritsch, who was charged with being a homosexual. The failure of the army’s leadership to protest Fritsch’s treatment troubled many officers, including Thomas and Ca-naris, who saw in the Fritsch crisis an assault on their treasured military values. Hitler now used both situations to his advantage by assuming full personal control of the Wehrmacht through the newly created OKW under Keitel. The Fritsch crisis was also an important watershed for Thomas, Canaris, and other officers later involved in various aspects of the anti-Hitler resistance.112
It was no accident that in August 1939 Canaris tried to enlist Thomas’s help in convincing General Keitel of the foolishness of war at that time. In early 1940, both men were drawn together around the issuance of the “X-Report,” but this time they were on different sides of the resistance fence. In the fall of 1939, a new conspiracy plot against Hitler developed initially with Canaris’s approval that involved Thomas and Abwehr officers such as Oberst Hans Oster, now head of Abwehr’s Central Division and Canaris’s Chief of Staff, and Sonderführer K (Hauptmann) Dr. Johannes von Dohnányi, the brother-in-law of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The recently appointed Dohnányi officially served as adviser to Canaris and Oster on military and foreign policy, though he also worked to expand Abwehr’s antiHitler contacts. Also working with Oster and Dohnányi was Oberstleut-nant Helmut Groscurth, Canaris’s Abwehr liaison with the OKH, and retired Generalleutnant Ludwig Beck, now one of the principal figures in the military opposition to Hitler.113
Soon after the German invasion of Poland, Oster convinced Canaris to appoint a new army second lieutenant, Dr. Josef Müller, to Abwehr’s main office in Munich. Oster intended to use Leutnant Müller, a staunch Catholic, to establish ties with the British government by way of the Vatican. Oster and other conspirators wanted to determine the interest of the British in peace terms in the aftermath of a coup that would topple Hitler and form a new government. Müller’s contact with the Vatican was a Jesuit priest, Father Robert Leiber. From the end of September 1939 until early 1940, Müller, who was known in intelligence documents as “Mr X,” met several times with Leiber, who transmitted information to Müller about the Vatican’s contacts with the British government. The Abwehr officers hoped to take the British terms to General Franz Halder, the army’s Chief of Staff, and his boss, army commander Oberst General Walther von Brauchitsch, in hopes they would support the coup and halt plans for the German invasion of Western Europe. The result of these talks was the controversial “X Report,” which was prepared by Dohnányi in January 1940 and delivered by General Thomas to General Halder in early April 1940. The mysteriously rewritten “X Report” had little effect on Halder and Brauchitsch because they did not see it until just before the invasion of Denmark and Norway.114
Despite Hitler’s successes in the spring and early summer of 1940, Thomas and Canaris remained concerned about Hitler’s aggressive war plans. Yet both men played both ends against the middle as they sought to promote and protect their own careers. After Canaris learned of the details of Aufbau Ost (buildup in the east) in August 1940, the initial planning stage for Hitler’s planned assault against the Soviet Union, he asked Thomas to prepare a detailed report about the ability of the Wehrmacht to wage such an extensive war. Thomas, now enamored with the expansion of his own vast power, particularly after his appointment as head of Werkwirtschafts-und Rüstungshauptamt on August 1, 1940, saw the invasion of the Soviet Union as a means of resolving some of Germany’s raw material and labor problems. Consequently, he had no problem supporting Göring’s plan to let I. G. Farben build factories at Auschwitz to make synthetic rubber and gasoline.115 After Thomas was made head of the Economic Organization East (Ostorganisation; Wirtschaftsorganisation Ost) in 1941, he became less sanguine; in reports to OKH and Keitel, he spoke of huge military shortages. There is some sense that Thomas might have been trying to convince Hitler to reconsider his attack against the Soviet Union. Thomas continued his negative reports when the war with Russia began. Over time, Keitel came to view Thomas’s reports as “defeatist,” and Hitler refused to read them.116
Yet something else was also lurking in Thomas’s mind, particularly once the invasion of the Soviet Union began. Thomas visited the Russian front in the fall of 1941 and learned first hand the policy of mass murder adopted by Hitler and the SS. According to Ulrich Hoffmann, a prominent civilian leader in the resistance, Thomas visited selected commanders on the Russian front in an unsuccessful effort to drum up new support for a coup in August or September 1941. By this time, talk was widespread in upper Wehrmacht circles about the atrocities being committed in Russia. On September 15, Canaris signed a memorandum prepared by Count Helmuth James von Moltke, a military and international affairs expert at OKW and head of the Kreisau resistance circle. The memo, which was given to Keitel, voiced strong objections to the recent OKW decisions regarding Soviet POWs. Thomas, who had close ties with Moltke and Ca-naris, was probably consulted about its contents.117
As the atrocities continued, the Wehrmacht was drawn deeper and deeper into the genocidal circle through its support of the various SS killing squads. In October, General Thomas visited General Brauchitsch, to discuss the rising tide of atrocities in the Soviet Union. The army commander already knew of the “beastliness” that was rampant in the east, and realized that he had to share responsibility for it.118 Yet these discussions were never acted upon, probably because of the air of victory surrounding Germany’s dramatic successes in the Soviet Union. Moreover, the resistance was not well organized, and resistance leaders were now being watched by various branches of Germany’s super police organization, the RSHA. More serious discussions of a coup would come after the failed offensive before Moscow in 1941–1942 and the terrible losses at Stalingrad a year later. By that time, Thomas and Canaris’s reputations and careers were damaged beyond repair.119
