Latvijas Vēsturnieku komisijas raksti - 23.sējums

148 Konferences “Baltija Otrajā pasaules karā (1939–1945)” referāti par holokausta tematiku
The Norwegian police cadets were not only trained according to the German Orpo
model, they were even taught by experienced German Orpo officers in addition to their
Norwegian instructors. 60
Thus, from mid-1942 onwards, Norwegian police recruits at Kongsvinger would
be able benefit from the practical expertise in SS-style policing the officers and men
of PB 9 gained from murdering tens of thousands of innocents on the Eastern Front,
including Lithuanian, Latvian, and Belarusian Jews. If this had not already been the case
before, now it was clear that the courses at Kongsvinger were essentially a school for
Vernichtungskrieg and genocide in Norway.
SS ideals: Staatsschutzkorps and kämpfende Verwaltung
That genocidal mass murderers would be directly involved in educating what was
supposed to become the new elite of Norwegian law enforcement may seem perverse
to us today, but it was completely in line with two key principles of Himmler that were
designed to blur the delineations between the police, the Waffen-SS, and the various
other branches of the SS. These two principles are the ideas of a Staatsschutzkorps
and of what historian Michael Wildt has identified as kämpfende Verwaltung.
The idea of the Staatsschutzkorps (Corps for State Protection) began to develop
in the late 1930s, after Himmler had become the supreme head of all the police in
Germany. Not only did he wish to fuse the various different German police forces
into one cohesive whole, he sought to blend it inextricably with the SS. Furthermore,
the police was also to be thoroughly militarised. This was to be expressed not only in
military-style organisation and discipline, but also in the ability to actually serve in combat
at the front. The ideal was a unified corps of politicised soldier-policemen, who were
equally capable of defending the Nazi racial Volksgemeinschaft from external enemies
at the front, as from the internal enemies lurking within the home society. 61
During World War II, the German Orpo most closely realised this goal of a Staatsschutzkorps.
Its battalions and regiments spread out to commit genocide and war crimes
throughout Nazi-dominated Europe, and later many of its more successful members
returned to Germany to either take up important positions in the police of their home
locality, or even to rise up the ladder of the central RSHA hierarchy in Berlin.
It is this process by which exemplary duty at the front resulted in career advancement
at home that is central to the other key idea mentioned, that of kämpfende Verwaltung
(“fighting administration”). Within the SS in general, but particularly in the various police
and security services united under the RSHA, the idea prevailed that one had to prove
one’s strength of character and commitment to the SS cause through active front service
before one could take up the highest ranks or offices within the SS empire. Being able to