Stephen Harding - The Last Battle

The reprehensible skills Wimmer demonstrated in the Sudetenland were put to extensive use during Germany’s September 1939 invasion of Poland. Tasked to operate in the province of Kielce, Upper Silesia, behind the lines of Major General Walter von Reichenau’s 10th Army, Wimmer and the other troops of Totenkopfstandarte Oberbayern [43] The other two Totenkopfstandarten, Brandenburg and Thüringen, were involved in identical activities. tortured and killed large numbers of Jews, anti-Nazi Catholic clergy, mental patients, Polish nationalist activists, and Polish soldiers attempting to escape capture. Mass murders were committed at such villages as Ciepielow, Nisko, and Rawa Mazowiecka; [44] The four thousand Jews who survived the initial shootings were later confined in a ghetto; in 1942 all were sent to Treblinka concentration camp and subsequently killed. indeed, so heinous were the atrocities committed by the Totenkopfstandarten troops under the guise of “police and security” operations that several senior Wehrmacht officers complained directly to Himmler. Their pleas were ignored, however, and Wimmer and his accomplices continued their murderous rampage until all three of the original Totenkopfstandarten were withdrawn from Poland in late 1939. [45] See Sydnor, Soldiers of Destruction , 40–42. The units’ withdrawal did not, of course, mean that German atrocities in Poland came to an end. New Totenkopfstandarten moved in to continue the horrific work and were joined by SS einsatzgruppen (special task forces)—units intended solely to carry out systematized mass executions in very short periods of time. [46] By the time Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the einsatzgruppen had so perfected their murderous technique that they were able to kill more than thirty-three thousand people in two days at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev, Ukraine.

Following their withdrawal from Poland, the three original Totenkopfstandarten were used to form the 3rd SS Panzer Division, [47] The 3rd SS Panzer Division is also often, and incorrectly, referred to as SS Division Totenkopf. commanded by Theodor Eicke. Equipped largely with captured Czech weapons, the division took part in the German invasions of France and the Low Countries, with Wimmer apparently serving in one of the division’s panzer-grenadier (motorized infantry) regiments. Not surprisingly, given its provenance and fanaticism, the 3rd SS Panzer Division committed a variety of war crimes, including the May 1940 murder of ninety-seven captured members of the British army’s 2nd Battalion, the Royal Norfolk Regiment, in the French village of Le Paradis.

The SS division’s propensity for committing war crimes only increased following its April 1941 transfer to the Eastern Front, where it saw action with Army Group North in the advance on Leningrad. Russia was harder on the division than France had been: despite initial tactical successes in the spring and summer of 1941, by winter Eicke and his troops were being heavily battered by the Red Army. By the spring of 1942 the 3rd SS Panzer Division was encircled by superior Soviet forces near the town of Demyansk, south of Leningrad, and had lost almost 80 percent of its combat strength.

Wimmer, however, was not among the casualties. In January 1942 he was transferred to the 2nd SS Panzer Division, “Das Reich,” which was itself engaged in fierce combat with the Red Army as part of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center. The reason for the transfer is unclear, as is the exact nature of Wimmer’s duties, but it seems likely that he reverted to the sort of “police and security” tasks he’d earlier undertaken in Poland. This assumption is bolstered by the fact that in September 1942 he was transferred yet again, but this time out of the combat zone to the relative safety of a staff job at a then little-known concentration camp just outside the city of Lublin, in central Poland. Officially referred to as a “prisoner of war camp of the Waffen-SS in Lublin,” it became infamous simply as Majdanek.

Though established in October 1941 primarily as a slave-labor camp—prisoners were put to work in nearby factories producing weapons and vehicles for the German war effort—Majdanek also quickly became a de facto extermination center where Russian POWs, Polish Jews, and political prisoners were shot, hanged, and gassed. Sebastian Wimmer was personally responsible for Majdanek’s day-to-day operations. In that capacity he undertook such mundane tasks as ordering supplies and equipment, overseeing personnel and staffing operations, and managing the warehouses that held the clothing and personal items confiscated from prisoners.

However, Wimmer also played an active role in the camp’s more horrific activities. In addition to deciding which prisoners would be worked to death in the nearby factories and which would be killed outright, he also ruthlessly quashed any sign of resistance from those he and his guards so cruelly oppressed. Any inmate who showed even the slightest hesitation to follow an order or perform a task was made an example of, usually in the most public and painful way. As a true disciple of Theodore Eicke’s “inflexible harshness” doctrine, Wimmer made sure that every prisoner in Majdanek—whether Polish or Russian, POW or Jew, man, woman, or child—suffered as much as possible.

Wimmer spent some five months at Majdanek, and his performance there so impressed his superiors that in mid-February 1943 he was transferred back to where his SS career had begun: Dachau. Though his position title was the same as the one he’d had at Majdanek—chief of the preventive detention camp—Wimmer’s personal power was even greater than it had been in Poland, because Dachau was literally the center of the concentration-camp universe for SS-TV men. And while he ostensibly answered to camp commandant SS-Lieutenant Colonel Martin Weiss, Wimmer was the man in charge of most of Dachau’s day-to-day operations and, arguably, one of the camp service’s most powerful younger officers.

And this may be one possible answer to the question about how a man like Wimmer—a textbook sociopath with a penchant for violence and a reputation for brutality toward both prisoners and his own soldiers—obtained such a plum and politically sensitive job as commandant of Schloss Itter. Crude Wimmer might have been, but he most obviously was not stupid. Despite its importance within the camp system, Dachau was a decidedly unpleasant place to work. Why put up with masses of unwashed prisoners and the pervasive stench of burning human flesh when by pulling some strings and calling in a few personal favors he could get himself a cushy posting at a castle-hotel turned VIP prison? Why, his wife, Thérèse, who’d spent most of the war years living with her parents in southern Germany, could even join him, and they could both spend the remainder of the war in safety and relative luxury. And if part of the price he had to pay for such good fortune was to be civil to a bunch of VIP prisoners, why not? After all, he could still brutalize his own men whenever he chose.

There is, of course, one other possibility. It might well have been that the planners at Dachau tapped Wimmer for the Schloss Itter command not in spite of his proven record of brutality but because of it. While the VIPs soon to be incarcerated in the hotel-turned-prison would have to be relatively well cared for as long as there was a chance they could be exchanged for important Germans held by the Allies, they might also need to be eliminated should the tide of war turn against Germany. The man in charge at Schloss Itter would therefore have to be ready, willing, and able to kill the VIP prisoners at a moment’s notice, without compunction and without remorse. And “Wastl” Wimmer had certainly proven that he could be that man.