Landshut is a pleasant place some fifty miles north-east of Munich with the water of the River Isar flowing through its centre. It had a castle and sufficient history to encourage young Heinrich’s growing interest in national tradition and in the ancestral pictures and other mementoes his father collected to show their family’s link with Germany’s past. Professor Himmler did everything he could to encourage serious interests and self-discipline in his sons; he had a willing and assiduous pupil in Heinrich, who always remained devoted to both his parents in his own formal way. He was never to lose touch with them all their lives.
The first personal note by Heinrich to survive is a fragment of a diary he kept during 1910 in Munich. In a typical entry on 22 July he wrote: ‘Took a bath. The thirteenth wedding anniversary of my dear parents.’ It is a diary in which he simply adds up the smaller facts of his life from taking baths to going for walks, and he is careful always to show his respect for adults by entering their correct titles. The impression he gives already is that he has a painstaking primness of nature.3
The sections of Himmler’s early diary that survive increase in length and scale during the later years of his youth, and so reveal more about his mind and character. The principal period they represent includes the first year of the war, when he was a schoolboy of fourteen in Landshut, and the period of his adolescence and young manhood in Munich, when he was from nineteen to twenty-two years of age, and then again when he was twenty-four. The total span of the diary covers ten important and formative years in his life, but the entries themselves are intermittent and survive in notebooks that cover only occasional periods of a few months in any detail. Nevertheless, they are of the greatest interest because they reveal so much of the nature of their author.
Although the war seems at first to have affected life at Landshut very little — Himmler’s diary is full of the records of peaceful walks and church-goings, of working on his stamp collection and doing his homework — it is evident that the war news excited him sufficiently to make him enter up various events which he copied from the newspapers. Occasionally he bursts out into schoolboy slang. He notes on 23 September that Prince Heinrich has written to his father, and that the Prince has been wounded. But the initial German victories fill him with enthusiasm for the war, and on 28 September he says how he and a schoolboy friend ‘would be so happy if we could go and slog it out’ with the English and French. But principally he lives the normal life of a schoolboy — attending Mass, going out with his brothers to visit friends (‘had tea with the Frau President, who was very gracious’), playing games and practising on the piano, for which it seems he had little aptitude. He pours scorn on the grumbling and timid people of Landshut who so dislike the war — ‘all the silly old women and petty bourgeois in Landshut… spread idiotic rumours and are afraid of the Cossacks who, they think, will tear them limb from limb.’ On 29 September he notes that his mother and father went to the railway station to help hand out refreshments to transports of wounded soldiers. ‘The entire station was crowded with inquisitive Landshuters who cut up very rough and even began to fight when bread and water were given to seriously wounded Frenchmen who, after all, since they are prisoners, are worse off than our chaps. We took a walk in town and were frightfully bored.’ On 2 October he is roused to enthusiasm by the mounting statistics of Russian prisoners. ‘They multiply like vermin’, he writes. ‘As for the Landshuters, they are as stupid and chickenhearted as ever.’ ‘Whenever there is talk about our troops retreating, they wet themselves,’ writes Himmler, in an attempt to be vulgar, and he continues the following Sunday, after church, ‘I use dumbbells every day now so as to get more strength.’ On 11 October, a few days after his fourteenth birthday, he refers to an army exercise in his locality, and how he ‘would have loved to join in’.
The diaries of this earlier period already begin to reveal that, in spite of his frequent walks, his swimming, and other exercise, he is constantly complaining of heavy colds and suffering from feverishness and stomach upsets. He seems to have been a diligent, not brilliant, pupil at school; he refers frequently, among other subjects, to history, mathematics, Latin and Greek, and to the homework he has to do. He practised assiduously at the piano, but unlike his elder brother, he had no talent at all as a pianist; it was years, however, before he asked his parents to allow him to give up this impossible task. He was also studying shorthand, and began in 1915 to use it for the entries in his diary. But after September 1915 he seems virtually to have given up the diary until a year after the war, in August 1919, when the entries are suddenly resumed.
To judge from his schoolboy enthusiasm, Himmler’s one idea was to grow up and join the Army. His elder brother became seventeen on 29 July 1915, and Heinrich records how on that very day ‘he enters the Landsturm’, that is, the Reserve Army. ‘Oh, how I wish to be as old as that’, writes Heinrich, ‘and so able to go to the front.’
He had to wait until 1917 before he too could volunteer. The draft of a letter written by his father on 7 July survives to show how he used his influence with the Bavarian royal household to ask that, while his son might be regarded as a future officer-cadet, he should at the same time be allowed to remain at school long enough to matriculate before being conscripted. The application form he filled in, dated 26 June, also survives; this was designed to secure his son’s eventual acceptance for training as an Army officer.
Himmler did not in fact formally matriculate until 18 October 1919, two days before he began the study of agriculture in the Technical High School of the University of Munich. Meanwhile in 1917 he had been called up; he served in the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, training at Regensburg, his mother’s home town. Much later, Himmler was to claim that he had led men into action during the First World War,4 but this does not accord with an application for military papers that is still preserved in his own handwriting; this is dated 18 June 1919, and makes it clear that Himmler had been released from the Army on 18 December 1918 without having received the military documents due to him following the completion of a course for officer-cadets in Freising during the summer of 1918, and another as a machine-gunner in Bayreuth during September. He needs these papers, he claims, because he is about to join the Reichswehr, having served meanwhile in the local Landshut Free Corps.
Himmler therefore did not qualify as an officer in time to serve on the Western Front, but continued what military activities he could after the Armistice in 1918. It is clear that in spite of his weak health soldiering appealed to him, but meanwhile during the difficult post-war years — Bavaria had for a while a Communist state government during 1919, and the effects of inflation were soon to be felt — he had to qualify for some civilian occupation. It was then that he decided to study farming. By the time he resumed his diary more fully in August 1919, he was already working on a farm near Ingolstadt, a small town on the Danube to which the family were to move from Landshut during September, when Professor Himmler took up a post as headmaster.
Himmler’s work as an apprentice farmer was not to last long; on 4 September he suddenly felt ill. At the hospital in Ingolstadt it was found he had paratyphoid fever. When he recovered he was told he must leave the farm for at least a year, and on 18 October he was accepted as a student in agriculture at the University of Munich. The diary also makes it clear that for the time being he had to give up his hopes of serving as a reservist either in the Army or in the Free Corps movement. He managed, however, to join the traditional student fencing fraternity.
Himmler was to remain a student in Munich until August 1922, when at the age of twenty-one he gained his agricultural diploma. What remains of his diary during this three-year period shows that he was anxious to live the life of the conventional student, persistently seeking out fencing partners until he had received the traditional cut in the face during his last term at college, and making enthusiastic friendships which enabled him to indulge in earnest intellectual discussions. He also believed in enjoying himself, and he even le
arned dancing in his youthful determination to become a social success. He found the dancing lessons troublesome: ‘I’ll be glad once I know it’, he writes on 25 November. ‘This dancing course leaves me absolutely cold and only takes up my time.’
He lived in rooms where no food was provided, and he took his meals at the house of a certain Frau Loritz, who had two daughters, Maja and Käthe. Although he went home frequently at weekends, and remained on close terms with his brother Gebhard, he soon fell in love with Maja in Munich. ‘I am so happy to be able to call this wonderful girl my friend’, he writes in October, and again the following month: ‘had a long talk with her about religion. She told me a great deal about her life. I think I have found in her a sister.’ Some of his entries are enigmatic: ‘we talked and sang a little. It gives one plenty to think about later.’ But apparently this slight love affair soon drifted into an unimpassioned friendship, even though in November he ‘talked to Maja about relations between man and woman’, and after a discussion on hypnotism he claims to himself that he has considerable influence over her.
It was, apparently, an uneasy time for him. He was restless, and dreamed of leaving Germany eventually and working abroad. Though he often had to work in the evenings, he began to study Russian in case his future travels took him east. His closest friend, apart from his brother Gebhard, was a young man called Ludwig Zahler, a companion from his days in the Army, with whom he talked endlessly, but whose character evidently disturbed him. ‘Ludwig seems to me more and more incomprehensible’, he writes, and then two days later, ‘I have now no more doubts about his character. I pity him.’
He shows that he also had some doubts about himself. ‘I was very earnest and depressed’, he records in November, after an evening with Maja. ‘I think we are heading for serious times. I look forward to wearing uniform again.’ Less than a week later he confesses to himself, ‘I am not quite sure what I am working for, not at the moment at any rate. I work because it is my duty. I work because I find peace of mind in working … and overcome my indecision.’
At the time he was writing these entries at odd moments in his diary, Himmler was only nineteen, but already he reveals qualities in his nature which were to remain unchanged throughout his life. Although he enjoys a narrow social life with a small circle of friends, he instinctively avoids any human relationship that commits him too deeply. The force that drives him is what he believes to be his duty, and this leads him to work hard at his studies, and force his unhealthy body to succeed in the accepted exercises, such as swimming, skating and, above all, fencing. His conventionalism becomes in itself a kind of passion; he is gregarious without any real warmth, and he is only prepared to seek the companionship of girls on the understanding no passion enters into his relationship with them. He still attends Mass, and, in his spare time, practises shooting with Gebhard and Ludwig against the future when he can, once more, ‘wear uniform’. He is an ardent nationalist in politics, and seriously alarmed by events in the east.
The diaries lapse again between February 1920 and November 1921, and again between July 1922 and February 1924. The final phase of his life as a student followed much the same pattern, broken by minor military exercises as a reservist and clerical duties for a student organization known as Allgemeiner Studenten Ausschuss. His ambition to farm in the east has, however, changed; he considers Turkey now to be more suitable, and he travelled to Gmund, where he was later to establish his lakeside home on the Tegernsee, to meet a man who knew something of the prospects in Turkey. He is, however, still uncertain about his own character. In November 1921, in his twenty-second year, he writes: ‘I still lack to a considerable degree that naturally superior kind of manner (die vornehme Sicherheit des Benehmens) that I would dearly like to possess.’
His relations with girls are still platonic. He mentions meeting a girl from Hamburg on the train, and remarks in his diary that she was ‘sweet and obviously innocent and very interested in Bavaria and King Ludwig II’. His friend Ludwig, who worked in a bank, tells him that Käthe thinks he despises women, and Himmler says she is right. Then he adds:
‘A real man will love a woman in three ways: first, as a dear child who must be admonished, perhaps even punished, when she is foolish, though she must also be protected and looked after because she is so weak; secondly, he will love her as his wife and loyal comrade, who helps him fight in the struggle of life, always at his side but never dampening his spirit. Thirdly, he will love her as the wife whose feet he longs to kiss and who gives him the strength never to falter even in the worst strife, the strength she gives him thanks to her childlike purity.’
Although he mentions many girls in his diary, it is with increasing primness and resistance. He still attends church, and he moralizes after eating in a restaurant on how the beauty of the waitress will inevitably lead to her moral downfall and how, if he had the means, he would love to give her money to prevent her from going astray. He mentions a coolness, even a breach, in his relations with Frau Loritz and Käthe, whose ‘feminine vanity’ he considers a waste of his precious time. In May 1922 he notes in the diary how shocked he had been to see a little girl of three permitted by her parents to ‘hop round in the nude’ before his shocked gaze. ‘She ought at that age’, he says, ‘to be taught a sense of shame.’
The recollections of certain fellow students complete the portrait of Himmler in his youth that his diaries contain.5 He is remembered as being meticulous in his studies and awkward in his social relationships. He wore his rimless pince-nez even when duelling, he recited Bavarian folk poetry rather badly, he avoided association with girls except those who expected to be treated with formality and politeness, and he never made love like his fellow students where love was to be found. He told his brother Gebhard he was determined to remain chaste until marriage, however much he might be tempted. Yet he was socially ambitious, putting himself forward as a candidate for various student offices for which he seldom received more than an unflatteringly small number of votes. The student society in which he tried most to shine was the Apollo club, which had a cultured rather than a sporting or merely beer-swilling membership. The members of Apollo were mostly ex-service men and senior graduates, and the president of the society at that time was a Jew, Dr Abraham Ofner. Although Himmler, a junior member of Apollo, was studiously polite to Dr Ofner and the other Jewish members, he was already strongly anti-Semitic in feeling, and he joined in violent discussions as to whether Jews should not be excluded from the society. In politics he is remembered as inflexibly right-wing, a natural if not very efficient member of the Free Corps formed to oppose the Communist infiltration into post-war Bavarian administration. We are left with a picture of a small man, prosaic and platitudinous, concealing his shyness under a certain arrogance. He disguised his fear of seeming unable to fulfil the hot-blooded life of a student by displaying excessive diligence in his work and making it quite clear he was determined to take part in the various right-wing, militaristic movements of that unsettled time. His exactness of habit seems to amount to a mania, for he never ceases to record when he shaves, when he has his hair cut, even when he has a bath. All these experiences take their due place alongside the duelling and the military exercises, and the serious discussions of religion, sex and politics. He notes down the comparative beauty of his dancing partners with exactly the same calm, meticulous cataloguing that he shows when he notes the cutting of his hair or the shaving of his beard:
‘Dance. Was rather nice. My dancing partner was a Frau [lein] von Buck, a nice girl with very sensible opinions, very patriotic, no bluestocking and apparently quite profound… The girls were on average rather pretty, some close to beautiful… Mariele R. and I talked together for some time… Accompanied Fraulein von Buck home. She did not take my arm which, in a way, I appreciated… A few exercises, to bed.’
Himmler used his diary to castigate himself at those times when he seemed to fall short of his own very modest ideal. He complains that he talks too much, that
he is too warm-hearted, and that he lacks self-control and a ‘gentlemanly assurance of manner’. He enjoys helping people, visiting the sick and, occasionally, assisting and comforting old people, going home to visit the family: ‘they think I’m a gay, amusing chap who takes care of things — Heini will see to it’, he writes in January 1922. It is plain that, like many people, he sought recognition and a place in his social and family circle by involving himself as much as he could in other people’s affairs. At the same time, a certain genuine kindness of heart has to be allowed him. But always he sought for popularity and for acceptance in student circles, though his primness of manner and his weak constitution, which prevented him from drinking beer without upsetting his stomach, led his fellow-students to look down on him and to make fun of his excessive diligence.
As a church-goer he remained regular in his habits at least until 1924, though the signs of religious doubt begin to appear much earlier in his diaries. ‘I believe I have come into conflict with my religion’, he writes in December 1919, ‘but whatever happens I shall always love God and pray to Him, and remain faithful to the Catholic Church and defend it even if I should be expelled from it.’ In February 1924 he is still attending church, but refers to his discussions of ‘faith in God, religion, doubts (immaculate conception, etc.), confession, views on duelling, blood, sexual intercourse, man and woman’. The subject of sex exceeds even religion in its attraction, no doubt because of his conviction that abstinence from intercourse was morally binding before marriage. He seems to have remained virgin until the age of at least twenty-six, and he evidently experienced the pangs of unsatisfied sexual desire. After one of his frequent discussions of sex with his friend Ludwig, the bank clerk, he wrote in February 1922:
‘We discussed the danger of such things. I have experienced what it is like to lie closely together, by couples, body to body, hot;… one gets all fired up, must summon all one’s reasoning. The girls are then so far gone they no longer know what they are doing. It is the hot, unconscious longing of the whole individual for the satisfaction of a really powerful natural urge. For this reason it is also dangerous for the man, and involves so much responsibility. Deprived as they are of their will-power, one could do anything with these girls, and at the same time one has enough to do to struggle with one’s self.’
Heinrich Himmler Page 2
