Bill O’Reilly - Killing the SS: The Hunt for the Worst War Criminals in History

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This book is dedicated to my son, Spencer,
who likes history as much as his dad.

B ILL OR EILLY

M AY 7, 1945

R EIMS, F RANCE

2:41 A.M.

T he devil is being hunted.

In a classroom of the cole Professionelle technical school, Nazi chief of staff Gen. Alfred Jodl applies his signature to a sheet of foolscap, an oversize piece of paper, formally surrendering the German army after nearly six horrific years of fighting. Berlin has fallen. Nazi fhrer Adolf Hitler is dead from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, his body then doused in gallons of gasoline and set ablaze by his personal bodyguard. Troops from the Allied powers of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union now swarm unopposed throughout Germany, quieting the few remaining pockets of resistance.

Despite the late hour, the walls of the schoolroom are lined with journalists and generals on hand to bear witness. Maps showing the progress of fighting in Europe cover the walls, their final update having taken place just one day ago. Newsreel cameras record the somber moment of Germanys defeat, the intense heat of their lights making the room stifling. American supreme commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, leader of the Allied forces in Europe, is present but does not participate in the formal signing. Ike prefers to let his chief of staff, Gen. Bedell Smith, act on his behalf.

With this signature, Jodl announces in a noticeably emotional voice, the German people and the German armed forces are for the better or worse delivered into the victors hands.

* * *

But the devil is not fully submitting, and neither are many of his disciples. They know their actions during the conflict will be considered war crimes. These men murdered and brutally tortured innocent human beings on a scale so large that the word atrocities does not even come close to describing the acts.

Thick dossiers on these war criminals have been compiled by American and British intelligence agencies. The special admonition IMMEDIATE ARREST has been stamped next to their names on this most wanted list. If caught and convicted, the punishment will be death.

Execution will be swift.

If they are caught.

* * *

Nearly six hundred miles northwest of General Jodls surrender, the most infamous Nazi murderer of World War II has no intention of delivering himself into the victors hands. Instead, Reichsfhrer Heinrich Himmler is running for his life. The mass killer now hides in a small farmhouse with a handful of his most trusted aides, just outside the north German town of Satrup. Himmler and these men are all members of a Nazi paramilitary organization known in German as the Schutzstaffel.

The rest of the world calls these butchers by another name: the SS.

Schutzstaffel means protection squadron, and for the first four years after its founding in 1925, watching over Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was its main priority. But when Hitler appointed Himmler as Reichsfhrersupreme leaderof the SS in 1929, the twenty-eight-year-old former chicken farmer was not content to be a mere bodyguard. The SS soon began gathering intelligence about Hitlers enemies and, in its recruiting, demanding that all applicants demonstrate German racial purity.

By 1933, when Adolf Hitlers National Socialist Party assumed power in Germany, the military was divided between the Wehrmachtthe traditional army, navy, and air force of the German stateand the SS, a paramilitary organization loyal to Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Hitler gave Heinrich Himmler and the SS sweeping powers to incarcerate all political opponents of the Third Reich, which came to include lawyers, homosexuals, gypsies, the mentally handicapped, Catholic priests, and the entire Jewish population. For the first time in modern history, anti-Semitism became governmental policy. Jews became foreigners in their own country, with a series of new laws rescinding their legal rights and forcing their removal from trade and industry. Virtually any man, woman, or child with the temerity to speak out against Adolf Hitler was in grave danger.

Heinrich Himmler controlled perceived enemies through a system of prisons known as concentration camps. These were administered by notoriously cruel divisions called SS-TotenkopfverbndeDeaths Head Units. All members of the SS, including the military arm that came to be known as the Waffen SS and concentration camp supervisors the SS-TV, wore the insignia of a skull on their caps. The Deaths Head squad had the added distinction of wearing a special skull and crossbones badge on their right collar.

The emblem spread fear throughout all enemies of the Third Reich. Persecution of the Jews, in particular, rose to an unprecedented level once the war began in September 1939, with thousands forcibly deported from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Even as the German army began waging war on Europe, the SS operated as a completely independent entity, exterminating Hitlers enemies and all those deemed racially impure. Beginning that same year, handicapped individuals throughout Germany were murdered with poison gas at Himmlers command. In January 1942, that method of execution was also put into use against the Jewish population as part of Germanys Final Solution for complete genocide against that religion. Himmler prided himself on contriving brutal methods to transport, torture, and kill those deemed unworthy. He also destroyed their corpses.

Heinrich Himmler, center, SS-Reichsfhrer

The conspiracy or common plan to exterminate the Jew was so methodically and thoroughly pursued that despite the German defeat and Nazi prostration, this Nazi aim largely has succeeded, American attorney Robert H. Jackson will declare at the opening of the 1945 Nuremberg Trials, where Nazi war criminals were prosecuted.

Only remnants of the European Jewish population remain in Germany, in the countries which Germany occupied, and in those which were her satellites or collaborators. Of the 9,600,000 Jews who lived in Nazi-dominated Europe, 60 percent are authoritatively estimated to have perished. Five million seven hundred thousand Jews are missing from the countries in which they formerly lived, and over 4,500,000 cannot be accounted for by the normal death rate nor by immigration; nor are they included among displaced persons. History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty.

At the urging of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler planned and executed these murders.

The Times of London refers to him as the most sinister man in Europe.

Others call Himmler the devil incarnate.

* * *

Germany is in a state of chaos. The end of the war sees its major cities and ports reduced to rubble, due to Allied air and ground bombardments. Simple amenities like running water and electricity are often nonexistent. There is little food or livestock. Piles of trash and human excrement singe the nostrils, an aroma made worse by decomposing corpses still in need of disposal. Throughout Germany, the Americans and British try to care for the millions displaced by war, building refugee camps to house and feed those with no place to go.