Latvijas Vēsturnieku komisijas raksti - 23.sējums

Dr. Matthew Kott. What Does the Holocaust in the Baltic States Have to Do with the SS’ Plans?
Firstly, by noting the continuity of key personnel, hand-picked for the most important
special tasks, we can deduce that trying to take control of Norway in 1940 was just as
important to Himmler in his grand scheme, as was the annihilation of the Jews in the
newly occupied East a year later.
Secondly, we have the deployment history of PB 9. This Orpo battalion spent time
securing Norway right after the occupation, and then was transferred to serve with
the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front, often in conjunction with the aforementioned
key SS personnel form Norway, such as Stahlecker and Ehrlinger. The battalion then
returned to Norway, this time to the town of Kongsvinger, the organisational epicentre
for the planned SSification of Norway. Here, the men from PB 9 passed on their
knowledge and experience in genocide directly to the coming elite of an SSified
Norwegian police.
Thirdly, the Baltic region becomes the locus for the first attempt to forge a Norwegian
Staatsschutzkorps through trying to apply the lessons learned from predecessors like
PB 9 in combating partisans and other representations of the Jewish-Bolshevik enemy,
all under the command of the arch-genocidaire Jeckeln. The hope of the SS and police
leadership in Germany and Norway as that this would make the cream of these veterans
of Vernichtungskrieg into good practitioners of kämpfende Verwaltung. The Holocaust
in the Baltic in 1941 was, in a way, a paradigm that Jonas Lie would have liked his
Norwegian Police Companies of the Ordenspolitiet to live up to. Far from being a curious
appendix to the history of the Waffen-SS recruitment in Norway, these four small Police
Companies take on a more central and sinister meaning when seen in this context.
There are of course other connections to be found as well. For example, it has
already been mentioned in passing that Himmler expected that Norwegian colonists
in the tens of thousands would help Germanise the eastern Lebensraum that SSadministered
genocide was in the process of clearing of its existing Jewish and Slavic
inhabitants. Norwegian volunteers who signed up for service in the Waffen-SS were
even promised a good farm in the East after the Nazi victory, should they prefer that
to a job in the police or the SS back home in Norway.
Once one begins to look, it becomes possible to see surprising and significant links
between widely separated parts of Nazi-dominated Europe during World War II, in this
case between Norway and the Baltic region. By continuing to look for the connections
between the different peripheries, instead of purely concentrating on the relations to
the centre in Nazi Germany, we may begin to gain a deeper understanding of how
and to what extent the crimes inspired by Nazism came so deeply to affect the entire
European continent.
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