Heinrich Himmler
Page 4
The smallholding at Waltrudering became a modest enterprise and was left largely in the hands of Marga Himmler. They kept about fifty hens, and they marketed produce and agricultural implements; it made a little money over and above Himmler’s salary, which stood now at around 200 marks a month. The following year Marga gave birth to her only child, their daughter Gudrun.
This year, 1929, became the turning-point in Himmler’s life. On 6 January Hitler issued an order appointing him Reichsführer S.S. in place of the commander Erhard Heiden, whose deputy he had been. It was a far-seeing appointment. Something in this clerk-like man with his military ambitions and scrupulous self-discipline must have revealed to Hitler that he had in him the kind of perfectionism necessary to create a reliable counter-force to the undisciplined mob of storm-troopers who roamed the streets in the name of the Nazis.14
II. Reichsführer S.S.
Though the appointment of Himmler to the command of the S.S. was for Hitler a matter of expediency, for the man himself it was a moment of fulfilment. He was now Reichsführer S.S. This new, high-sounding title was in itself a challenge to his tenacity and an inspiration to the particular vision germinating in his brain, his own interpretation of what Hitler, with his aid, might make of the German people in the distant future.
Himmler was now twenty-eight, a young man with a pregnant wife older than himself, and a modest smallholding. To be Reichsführer S.S. based on Munich was to be in command of less than 300 men, and there were limits even to this very minor place of power. In Berlin, the centre of radical action stirred up by Goebbels’s violent propaganda, Kurt Daluege was also appointed by Hitler to be head of the local S.S. and empowered to operate independently of Himmler, who was in any case regarded, along with his force, as subordinate not only to Hitler but to the general organization of the S.A., the brownshirt Party battalions on the streets. The S.S. was in fact a force within a force, its special task nominally the protection of Hitler and other Nazi leaders at meetings, rallies and parades. But, according to Gunther d’Alquen, who was later to become editor of Das Schwarze Korps, the special journal of the S.S., Hitler had instructed his Reichsführer S.S. to make the corps into an utterly dependable body of carefully selected men.
Himmler was therefore able to indulge his vision. In spite of his sloping shoulders, his close-cropped hair, his neatly trimmed moustache and rimless pince-nez with its ear-chains suitable for a respectable clerk, he saw his unit of Black Guards as an elite band of warriors whose unique character would elevate them far above the street-ruffians of the S.A. They were to be made into Hitler’s knights-at-arms.
This elevation of his men became Himmler’s great obsession. The fact that he played comparatively little part in the day-by-day strategy and intrigue with which Hitler, Goring and Goebbels worked their way to power between 1929 and 1933 did not at this stage trouble him. He had his own bright, particular star to follow. His immediate ambitions in the Party were fulfilled for a while by his command of the S.S. and by the seat in the Reichstag that was allocated to him after the 1930 elections. His domestic ambitions, such as they might be, were fulfilled when his wife had given birth to their child, Gudrun, in 1929. Marga Himmler was attended by a Dr Brack, whose son, Dr Viktor Brack, was some twelve years later to take charge of Himmler’s euthanasia programme, after first serving him in the capacity of a chauffeur.
The S.S. did not expand suddenly under Himmler’s leadership. The years 1929 and 1930 represent primarily a period of preparation; the final stage of expansion came later, as we shall see, during 1931, when many thousands of men were added to the force. Their initial duties, when the S.S. had been summoned to roll-calls and allocated in groups to accompany various Party speakers to their meetings, were by then superseded; by 1931 the S.S. had other work, at once more secret and more spectacular.
The first substantial stage in the establishment of a permanent, élite corps came when Himmler issued, in January 1932, the notorious marriage code for the members of the S.S. The code was based on the principles outlined by Walter Darré in his book Um Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), which was published under the auspices of the Party in Munich in 1929.
Darré was Hitler’s agricultural expert, and he had come to believe in selective breeding as a result of his studies. He was born in the Argentine in 1895, and had been educated in England at King’s College School, Wimbledon. He had for a while been a civil servant in the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, but had been dismissed in 1929 after a disagreement with his colleagues. In the same year he published a book on the peasantry as the life source of the Nordic race. His ambition was to become Reich Minister of Agriculture, and this indeed is what he became in 1933.
Darré is of importance only because of the hardening influence he had on certain of Himmler’s prejudices, which were later to develop into dire obsessions. Darré was some five years older than Himmler, and in a movement that found it expedient to encourage unscientific theories if the results arrived at were useful as propaganda, Darré became an accepted ‘thinker’ on behalf of the Nazis, closely linked with Alfred Rosenberg, one of the principal propounders of the myth which convinced the Party that the true Germans possessed a unique racial superiority.
Rosenberg was of German stock, but he had been born in the Baltic town of Reval and had studied architecture in Moscow before escaping to Germany at the time of the Russian Revolution. He had become editor of Hitler’s journal Völkischer Beobachter in 1923. In his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century, published in 1930, he declared the humane ideals of Christian Europe to be a useless creed. What Europe needed, he said, was to be freed from the soft, abstract Christian principles derived from Asia Minor and the East, and to discover a new philosophy, which would be rooted once more in the entrails of the earth and recognize the racial superiority and cleanliness of Nordic man. ‘A culture always decays’, wrote Rosenberg, ‘when humanitarian ideals… obstruct the right of the dominant race to rule those it has subjugated.’ He saw in the German people the race endowed by nature with a true, mystic understanding, a ‘religion of the blood’. Christianity, on the other hand, taught the decadent doctrine that all races shared an equality of soul, which the German race would soon show to be nothing but a vicious and insidious illusion.
In place of the meek and all-forgiving, Rosenberg created the ideal of the ‘powerful, earth-bound figure’, the ‘strong peasant’, and it was at this point that Darré, Rosenberg’s disciple and Himmler’s teacher, took over the spiritual education of his leader.
In Blood and Soil, Darré gave his reasons why the German race was so especially privileged. His assumptions were based on the essential nobility of the Nordic peasantry, whose blood was as rich and fruitful as the soil they tilled. So great was their virtue that the future strength of Europe depended on the survival of their stock; it was essential they should breed and multiply until their blond and shining youth outnumbered and outfaced the lurking, decadent Slavs and Jews, whose blood was poison to the human race and whose haunts were the healthless streets of towns and cities.1
Himmler’s energies during this initial period were, as we have said, devoted to the theory and practice of the S.S. In 1931 Darré joined his staff to organize the department known as the Race and Settlement Office, Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (R.U.S.H.A.). This office was set up to determine the racial standards required of good German stock, to conduct research into the surviving ethnic groups in Europe that could be claimed as German, and to decide all matters connected with the descent of individuals at home and abroad about whom there were any racial doubts. Darré remained in charge of this office with its increasing powers until 1938, though he was also, from 1933, Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture. It was with his aid that searching tests were devized for the brides of S.S. men and made obligatory in the notorious Marriage Law of the S.S., dated 31 December 1931 and coming into force the following day.
In its opening paragraphs, Himmler’s Marriage Law insisted on the import
ance of maintaining the high standard of blood in the S.S.2 The principal clauses that followed filled many unmarried S.S. men with dismay:
‘Every S.S. man who aims to get married must procure for this purpose the marriage certificate of the Reichsführer S.S.
‘S.S. members who though denied marriage certificates marry in spite of it, will be stricken from the S.S.; they will be given the choice of withdrawing.
‘The working-out of the details of marriage petitions is the task of the Race Office of the S.S.
‘The Race Office of the S.S. directs the Clan Book of the S.S., in which the families of S.S. members will be entered after the marriage certificate is issued.
‘The Reichsführer S.S., the manager of the Race Office, and the specialists of this office are duty bound on their word of honour to secrecy.’
Himmler ended his Marriage Code with a defiant flourish:
‘It is clear to the S.S. that with this command it has taken a step of great significance. Derision, scorn, and failure to understand do not move us; the future belongs to us!
(Signed) Heinrich Himmler’
Himmler’s Marriage Code for members of the S.S. required every man who wanted to marry to obtain a certificate of approval for his bride in order that the purity of the Nordic stock which he already represented should be maintained unimpaired in the blood of his descendants.
The Office kept stud records for every S.S. man, who was issued with a genealogical or clan book (Sippenbuch)3 which recorded his right and duty to mate with his chosen woman and procreate children by her. His bride and her parents were required to prove that they were free of all disease, mental or physical, and the girl was meticulously examined and measured by S.S. doctors who had to satisfy themselves that she could be suitably fertile. The Aryan blood of her ancestors, uncontaminated by Slav, Jewish or other inferior racial elements, had to be established as far back as 1750 for every woman marrying into the S.S.
Later Himmler was to set up a number of S.S. Bride Schools at which, in addition to their political education, the future wives of S.S. men were taught housewifery, the hygiene of childbirth and the principles of rearing their future children in the correct Nazi tradition.
The order, as inhuman as it was outrageous, lay at the heart of Himmler’s future racial policy, and what seemed at first to be merely an absurdity to some of Himmler’s own colleagues was later to become the poisonous root from which sprang the practice of compulsory euthanasia and the genocide of those he regarded as racially impure.
The significance of the S.S. Marriage Code must be understood in its proper light. It could be claimed that, in introducing eugenics and selective breeding among the restricted group of men in his charge, Himmler was anticipating a principle which civilized societies will be led to adopt in the future. He would most certainly have argued himself that this was so. But if such principles are eventually to be adopted, there must surely be every medical, psychological and social safeguard to ensure that the men and women who are bred represent in one way or another the widest capabilities and qualities latent in the human race. It is not necessarily to Himmler’s discredit that he was ambitious to see the human race improved; but it was pernicious that he believed himself fit, together with a few unqualified and unscrupulous colleagues, to determine what the ideal human being should be. He had absorbed a few ill-founded theories and with the temerity of ignorance hastened to put them into immediate practice without taking any account of the cost in human suffering. Thus the men who had through various motives, either worthy and unworthy, joined the S.S. found themselves caught in a ludicrous trap, and had either to submit to Himmler’s oppressive decrees or find methods of evasion which soon became common practice not only in the S.S. but in the whole of Nazi society as the oppression spread.
Himmler’s ideal man was a fair-haired, blue-eyed, superhuman athlete whose values were derived from a medieval concept of relationship with the cultivation of the earth, a man who despised most developments in modern culture because he had no judgment in such matters, though like Heydrich, he might well play accepted music on the violin or read accepted books. He was a man who left all political and social judgment to his leaders, and gave them his unquestioning obedience. Though he might well be in private a kindly husband and an indulgent father, he was essentially a destructive man, ready to act on the vilest or most stupid orders that only served to show the prejudice and cruelty of his commanders. This image of the ideal man, primitive in his outlook and brutal in his behaviour, was the result of the racial intolerance of Rosenberg, Darré and Himmler, whose collective vision was blinded by the same false idea of past glories which bore no relation whatever to historic truth, to the needs of modern society, or to any future social order which might be called civilized.
It was in June of the year when Darré and Himmler were concocting their marriage code that a man arrived to help them who had all the appearance of a young Messiah. Himmler was approached by one of his staff, the Freiherr von Eberstein, with a request that he interview a young man who had recently joined the S.S. in Hamburg. His name was Reinhard Heydrich; he was of good family and had until recently been a lieutenant in the Navy. Heydrich was a godson of Eberstein’s mother. Himmler agreed, then fell ill and cancelled the appointment. Heydrich took no notice of the cancellation and travelled overnight south to Munich, relying on Eberstein to arrange for him to see Himmler, who had returned to his poultry farm to recover from his sickness. Himmler agreed over the telephone that, since Heydrich had come to Munich, he should visit him in Waldtrudering.
The first meeting between these two men, whose strange relationship was to constitute the direst threat to the well-being of Europe that resulted from conquest by Hitler, took place on 4 June 1931. Himmler understood that Heydrich had been a naval Intelligence officer, and he had a particular, important task in mind which he felt might be carried out by a man with this kind of background and training. He wanted to establish an Intelligence or security service of his own within the S.S. to conduct secret research into those members of the Party, particularly among the leaders of the S.A., whose ambitions seemed hostile to his own, or whose presence degraded the ideals of the Party as he conceived them.
The young man who came down to Waldtrudering was of impressive appearance. He was tall and blond, blue-eyed and Nordic, with a model physique that corresponded exactly to Himmler’s conception of what an S.S. man should be. His eyes, in fact, were of a peculiar lightness, piercing and hypnotic. Although there was some mistake in his records (he had been a code and signals officer in naval Intelligence, not an Intelligence officer), his handsome bearing and assurance of manner made an immediate impression on Himmler, whose diffidence of nature always made him nervous when he had to deal with men of a capacity greater than his own. In order to assert himself, Himmler set Heydrich a written test, like a schoolmaster sizing up an over-bright pupil; first he described to him the kind of Intelligence service he had in mind, and then invited Heydrich to outline on paper how he would set about organizing it. He gave him twenty minutes to complete the project, and Heydrich seized this chance to impress still further a man whose limitation of character he could already sense. Himmler read the paper and offered him a post on his personal staff as head of an entirely new department in the S.S., the Sicherheitsdienst (S.D.) or Security Service.
During the next ten years Heydrich was to create a network of power which was eventually to threaten not only his master but every other member of the Nazi leadership, including Hitler himself. This cold and brutally handsome man, three and a half years younger than Himmler, was the son of a distinguished teacher of music, who had once been a performer in opera and came, like Himmler’s mother, from a musical family. Heydrich’s second name was Tristan, and he had begun his own musical studies at an early age. He became an outstanding violinist, but his musical talents did not prevent him undergoing the strict training given to schoolboys at the school in Halle, where the family lived. He was brillian
t at school, and it seemed that he could have succeeded equally well in an academic or musical career. He was also a skilled athlete and a notable fencer. His mother, who was a strict Catholic, brought her son up in the Catholic faith; scepticism, however, seems to have developed fairly early in his cold and cruelly intelligent nature, and the traditional faith of his family in German nationalism led him at the age of sixteen to join the nationalist Free Corps movement that spread throughout Germany after the First World War. He decided to abandon a career in music and train to become an officer in the Navy.
His character was already well developed. He was alert, filled with a nervous energy, restless, hard-working, strong-willed and intolerant. His lean face was hard and ruthless, and he had grown over six feet tall. As a naval cadet he soon mastered the technicalities of navigation and he charmed the wife of Commander Canaris, the First Officer of the training cruiser on which he was stationed, by playing to her on the violin. He was invited by Frau Canaris to form a quartet for the performance of chamber music. Meanwhile, his energetic mind turned to the study of languages, and he rapidly gained a fair knowledge of English, French and Russian. He also began to develop his lifelong taste for philandering. In 1926 he was promoted lieutenant, and in 1928, at his own request, he was made a signals and radio officer stationed at Kiel. Here one night at a ball held just before Christmas in 1930 he met a beautiful girl of nineteen, Lina Mathilde von Osten, who was as blonde as himself. Within three days they had become engaged, in spite of the fact that a scandal arose because another blonde girl, the daughter of a prominent industrialist, claimed he was in love with her and she with him. The industrialist, who, unfortunately for Heydrich, was a friend of the Grand Admiral Raeder, used his influence to have Heydrich dismissed the service when he refused to break his official engagement and marry the other girl. He was required to resign his commission in April 1931, and his fiancée insisted on maintaining her engagement to him in spite of the opposition of her parents now that he was disgraced.4