Latvijas Vēsturnieku komisijas raksti - 23.sējums

Dr. Matthew Kott. What Does the Holocaust in the Baltic States Have to Do with the SS’ Plans?
It was hoped that Ehrlinger would be able to recruit enough Norwegians and Danes,
and even Swedes and Finns, 17 to Nordland that the regiment could eventually be fielded
comprising a majority of Germanic fighting men.
Despite some promising early results from Denmark, the overall recruitment to
Nordland cannot reasonably be deemed a success. 18 Even though the Germans had
more direct control over occupied Norway than in semi-sovereign Denmark, Ehrlinger’s
job in Oslo was hampered by the drawn-out negotiations regarding the collaborationist
cabinet in the summer and autumn of 1940. After several months’ delay, the recruitment
to Nordland was announced with great fanfare in January 1941, following a speech by
Quisling that intimated that this marked the beginnings of the rebirth of the Norwegian
army, following the humiliating defeat and occupation in 1940. 19 Only some 160 Norwegian
volunteers who heeded Quisling’s call met the SS’s strict physical and racial
criteria. 20 Many of these earliest volunteers were convinced national socialists who
sympathised with the rhetoric of pan-Germanism that Quisling also employed at the time. 21
Nevertheless, despite these meagre results that were much lower than for similar
recruitment drives in other occupied Germanic countries, Himmler still flew to Oslo on
28 January 1941 to personally oversee the induction of the first Norwegian volunteers
into the Waffen-SS. 22
This was the first of two important visits to Norway by Himmler in 1941. 23 The
second one coincided with the official founding in May 1941 of Norges SS, a Germanic
equivalent of the Allgemeine-SS for ethnic Norwegians. 24 In the six months prior to the
start of Operation Barbarossa, Himmler thus spent a significant amount of time visiting
Norway.
It is not clear whether Ehrlinger was also tasked with preparing the creation of
Norges SS, or if he was only to organise recruitment to the Waffen-SS. Formulations in
some of the documents pertaining to the post-war trail against Ehrlinger are ambiguous
in this respect. 25 As mentioned previously, he had already been transferred back to the
RSHA in Berlin in February 1941.
In June 1941, Ehrlinger was given command of Sonderkommando 1b (Sk 1b) within
EG A. On its way to its final operation destination in Belarus, Sk 1b was involved in the
massacre of at least 185 Lithuanian Jews during its sojourn in Kaunas from 29 June
to 4 July 1941. 26 Upon his arrival, Ehrlinger met up with his superior officer and former
colleague from Norway, Stahlecker, who was then overseeing the instigation of pogroms
in Kaunas before moving onward towards Riga. 27 In his post-war trial, Ehrlinger testified
that, in a conversation in Kaunas on 29 June, Stahlecker had informed him personally of
the full extent to which the mission of the Einsatzgruppen was to involve mass murder
of all Jewish men, women, and children on purely racial grounds. 28 One might speculate
as to what role their former working relationship had in getting Ehrlinger appointed to
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