Heydrich’s files were gutted for evidence that would blacken Roehm and the commanders of the S.A. in the eyes of Hitler, and prove they were conspiring with other acknowledged dissidents, such as the subtle and devious Schleicher, whom Hitler had displaced as Chancellor, and Gregor Strasser, who had in 1932 attempted to draw a radical section of the Nazi party away from Hitler’s authority and was now living in retirement. According to an affidavit made by Frick, Hitler’s Minister of the Interior, and filed at the time of the Nuremberg Trial, it was Himmler rather than Goring who finally determined Hitler to take action.3
Himmler had spent the first weeks of the new phase in his command touring the principal centres where his S.S. detachments were stationed and addressing them on the subject of loyalty to the Führer. In Berlin, Heydrich was preparing for Goring the lists of those members of the S.A. who should be seized. On 6 June, Heydrich’s S.D. was proclaimed by Hitler the official Intelligence office of the Party, from whom no information they required should be withheld. S.A. leaders in Berlin and the south were kept under constant watch.
The pace of events that led to the bloody climax of 30 June began to quicken. Hitler ordered Roehm to give all his storm-troopers a month’s leave from July 1st, and Roehm himself, with Hitler’s agreement, went on a nominal sick-leave to Bavaria on 7 June. He maintained a formal contact with Hitler, who even promised to visit him for further discussions on 30 June. After a conference with Hitler in Berlin on 20 June, Himmler claimed he was shot at while driving in his car to the interment of the body of Carin, Goring’s first wife, in the mausoleum Goring had built at his great country estate of Carinhall, named after her.4
At the Nuremberg Trial, Eberstein described how ‘about eight days before 30 June’ he was summoned and told that Roehm was planning a coup d’état. Himmler ordered him to hold his S.S. men ‘in a state of quiet readiness’ in their barracks. Eberstein also gave an account of how the local executions were conducted under orders from Heydrich:
‘In the course of that day, 30 June, a certain S.S. Colonel Beutel came to me from the S.S. with a special order which he had received from Heydrich. He was a young man, this Beutel, and he did not know what he should do; he came to obtain advice from me, an older man. He had an order in which there were approximately twenty-eight names and a postscript, from which it appeared that some of these men were to be arrested and others were to be executed. This document had no signature on it and therefore I advised this S.S. Colonel to get positive clarification as to what should take place, and warned him emphatically against any rash action.
‘Then, as far as I know, a courier was sent to Berlin and brought back eight orders of execution which came from Heydrich. The order read somewhat as follows: “By order of the Führer and Reich Chancellor…” then followed the name of the person concerned, “so-and-so is condemned to death by shooting for high treason”.
‘These documents were signed by Heydrich… On the basis of these documents eight members of the S.A. and the Party too were shot by the political police of Saxony in Dresden… That’s what I know about it, at least in my area.’5
Himmler during the period immediately preceding the purge kept in touch with the War Office, and in particular with Walter von Reichenau, a general in Army Administration who was prepared to work with the Nazis.
Between 21 and 29 June, Hitler toured restlessly from place to place on a variety of official duties, while in Berlin Himmler held a conference of the S.S. High Command on 24 June, while the Army was put on an alert on 25 June. On the same day Heydrich began, with the help of a few chosen officers of the S.D., to prepare the final lists of marked men both in the S.A. and outside it. In the middle of the wedding-feast of Gauleiter Terboven of Essen, for whom both Hitler and Goring acted as witnesses, Himmler arrived from Berlin with urgent news that action must be taken with as little delay as possible. This was no doubt part of Göring’s and Himmler’s scheme to keep Hitler in a state of alarm; after further conference, they left Hitler and returned to Berlin to carry out the final preparations for the purge.
Hitler was finally goaded into action during the small hours of 30 June, when he flew to Munich before dawn and drove by car to the sanitorium at the Tegernsee, where he roused Roehm from sleep, accused him of treachery and had him arrested. Himmler’s special detachment of guards commanded by Sepp Dietrich, the Leibstandarte, whose duty it was to protect Hitler, had been sent south to give all necessary aid, but Hitler, unable or unwilling to face the summary executions that were due to follow, retired to the Brown House, the Party headquarters in Munich. Confusion followed, for Hans Frank, the Bavarian Minister of Justice, was unwilling to execute men in the mass without trial merely because their names were on a typed list provided by Goring and Himmler and underlined in pencil by Hitler. Roehm himself was not finally shot until 2 July.
In Berlin, Goring and Himmler had neither time nor desire to observe the formalities of justice. They had their lists, they had their prisoners, and the executioners, squads of Göring’s private police, stood waiting to shoot their victims at Gross-Lichterfelde. The scene in Göring’s private residence at Leipzigerplatz, where he and Himmler identified the prisoners as they were brought in, accused them of treason and summarily ordered them to be shot as soon as their names had been ticked on the lists, has been described by eye-witnesses — in particular by Papen who, as Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor, Goring thought it wise to protect. He sent his adjutant, Bodenschatz, to bring him to the Leipzigerplatz, where he could be placed under guard. As soon as Papen arrived, Himmler gave the signal by telephone that the Vice-Chancellery could be raided. Bose, Papen’s press counsellor, was shot and his personal staff arrested. When Papen was finally given permission to leave, he found his office occupied by S.S. men and a state of violent confusion existing between them and Goring’s own police. Finally Papen was put under house arrest with an S.S. guard, whose captain said he was responsible to Goring for the Vice-Chancellor’s safety. Without doubt Himmler and Heydrich, new to the exercise of such absolute power, would have had him shot. Goring was more diplomatic.6
The orgy of killing that spread throughout Germany during the weekend started from Göring’s headquarters. When they learned that Hitler accompanied by Goebbels was flying to Berlin from Munich, Goring and Himmler gathered their typed sheets together and drove with Frick to the Tempelhof airport to deliver an account of their stewardship. The sky was blood-red as the plane landed, and Hitler, sleepless for forty-eight hours, silently shook hands with the men, who clicked their heels as he greeted them, and then inspected a guard of honour lined up on the tarmac. The scene, unforgettably described by Gisevius who was present, had its own Wagnerian melodrama. Himmler, obsequious but officious, pressed his list of names under Hitler’s bloodshot eyes. While the others stood around at a discreet distance, the Führer ran his finger down the record of the dead or those about to die, while Goring and Himmler whispered to him. Then, with Hitler in the lead, the executioners moved off to the waiting cars, moving silently like a funeral procession in order of precedence.
Goebbels hastened to suppress reports of the mounting deaths in the German press, which was by now under his complete control. Only representatives of the foreign press, who had been hastily convened earlier that afternoon by Goring, were given a bare outline of Roehm’s alleged conspiracy by the man who had invented it. The assassinations did not stop until the following day, which was Sunday, when Frick, unburdening himself to Gisevius, finally expressed his horror at the behaviour of Himmler and Göring. He then went to warn Hitler, who had by now had some sleep, that the S.S. might well offer an even more sinister threat to his security than the S.A. But the Führer only wanted to relax at a tea-party he was giving in the garden of the Chancellery.
For Himmler and Heydrich, the provincials from the south, the massacre of 30 June was a rapid initiation into the ways of Hitler’s court. Heydrich was created a lieutenant-general of the S.S. with effect from the date the men he had
listed had begun to face the firing-squad. Goring received the personal congratulations of Hindenburg, sent from his deathbed. On 26 July the S.S. was formally given its independence by Hitler. When Hindenburg eventually died on 2 August, Hitler merged the offices of President and Chancellor and made himself Der Führer, Supreme Head of the State, and also Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Reich. The Army was immediately required to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler in person.
On the day before Hitler’s proclamation of the independence of the S.S., their associates in Vienna murdered the Austrian Federal Chancellor, Dr Dollfuss, as part of an abortive attempt to seize Vienna for the Austrian Nazis. Hitler at once disowned any part in this plot that had failed, not because he disapproved of what had been attempted but because it had been both ill-timed and unsuccessful. As would be expected, there is no exact record that either Himmler or Heydrich were directly involved in the instructions given to the S.S. in Austria. It must at least have shaken Hitler’s confidence in the discretion of his S.S. commanders. Although they remained strictly silent at this stage, when Hitler chose to dissociate himself from the assassination, they were at a later and more favourable time after the Anschluss to hear the Austrian S.S. men who died during the course of the putsch proclaimed as martyrs by Rudolf Hess. In July 1934, however, when Hitler was still involved in the aftermath of the Roehm purge, this bloody act by his adherents in Austria compromised still further the heroic reputation he was attempting to build up in the world outside Germany. It is not known whether he reprimanded the men he had so recently promoted into the select ranks of the Nazi leadership, but at the very least, Himmler must have carried some responsibility for the indiscreet murder of the Chancellor, since the Austrian S.S. obtained their arms from the S.S. in Germany. Among the men arrested in Austria was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a lawyer whom Heydrich had employed as his agent. After Heydrich’s assassination in 1942, Kaltenbrunner was to take over the responsibilities Heydrich had exercised in Berlin.
Himmler as a senior schoolboy at Landshut (front row, second from the right)
Landshut: the town where Himmler spent much of his youth. Himmler’s house is shown prominently at centre right
The apartment in Amalienstrasse where Himmler lived from 1904 to 1913
Now that the S.S. was an entirely independent force, responsible through Himmler only to Hitler himself, Himmler became absorbed in consolidating its membership and carrying still further his growing obsession with their racial purity and their loyalty to his idea of establishing them as a special Order in the Party and the State. His concern was more for the quality of the S.S. than for their numbers. As we have seen, he had already begun, before 30 June, to remove those men who had been too hurriedly recruited after the seizure of power and who failed to pass his stringent tests. According to Eberstein at Nuremberg, during the period 1934-5 some 60,000 men were released from the S.S. Nevertheless, the S.S. was kept at a strength in the region of 200,000 men and represented a formidable force which made the Army, already divided in its attitude to Hitler, increasingly anxious. But Himmler’s natural caution always made him wary of stirring up trouble. He preferred to work in secret, though he was always prepared to make public statements about the high standards he exacted from the S.S. and its undying dedication to Hitler.
From 1934 the S.S. was forbidden to take part in any troop manoeuvres with the Army, although some of its members were Army reservists, nor did its members openly receive a specifically military training. Nevertheless they were armed with small-calibre rifles and were trained to shoot. They were now vigorously selected for their Nordic excellence. As Himmler put it, the S.S. was to be ‘a National Socialist Soldier Order of Nordic Men’.
As Gisevius said when giving evidence at Nuremberg,7 ‘The members had to be so-called Nordic types… if I am not mistaken, the distinguishing characteristics of men and women went as far as underarm perspiration.’ The moral deception involved in recruitment was, Gisevius claimed, often irreparable; men joined frequently out of an honest desire to assist a force dedicated, as it seemed, to order and decency in contrast to the degenerate hooliganism of the S.A., only to find themselves later involved in the criminal practices imposed on them by Heydrich and Himmler. Large numbers of the S.S. were part-time men who pursued their normal activities, except for special occasions and national emergencies, giving only spare time to their S.S. duties. The oath taken by every man on entering the S.S. was: ‘I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer and Reich Chancellor, loyalty and bravery. I vow to you, and to those you have named to command me, obedience unto death, so help me God.’8
Heydrich had in 1932 founded a leadership school at Bad-Toelz in Bavaria, a centre for training which was to be maintained, with considerable variation in its curriculum, until well into the years of the war. Heydrich was as much concerned with the intelligence as he was with the physique of the S.S. leader. Sport, gymnastics and other activities that imposed the meaning of discipline on the students were the basis of their education, together with the Nazi version of history, geography, militarism and racial consciousness.
Himmler was determined to establish a centre for the S.S. leadership which would be worthy of the racial purification they represented. Though Himmler’s mind had moved far from the Catholicism in which he had been brought up, the self-dedication of the Catholic monastic orders influenced him in devising his plans for this centre. Even Hitler compared him with Ignatius Loyola. Walter Schellenberg, who had studied both medicine and law at the University of Bonn and was one of the bright young intellectuals who joined Heydrich’s S.D., was later to become one of the inner circle of men who made a study of Himmler and learned how to control him. In his Memoirs he writes: ‘The S.S. organization had been built up by Himmler on the principles of the Order of the Jesuits. The service statutes and spiritual exercises presented by Ignatius Loyola formed a pattern which Himmler assiduously tried to copy.’9 The Jesuitical ideal in Himmler’s mind merged with his medieval vision of the Teutonic knights, whose combination of religious observance and brutalized chivalry inspired him to found a similar S.S. Order of Knights in a Germanic castle of their own.
The Order of Teutonic Knights founded at the close of the twelfth century with the combined aim of conquest and conversion, had its centre in the castle of Marienburg, which became the residence of the Grand Master of the Order. The Teutonic Knights boasted alike of their valour and their statesmanship, their self-denial and their skill as administrators, and at the height of their power in the fourteenth century they stretched their conquests through Poland as far as the Baltic States. The image of the Grand Master became a part of Himmler’s obsession, but his mind, incapable of largeness of thought or inspiration, could only absorb simplified concepts from past history out of which he attempted to create dogmas for the present. He began to see himself as Grand Master of a modern Teutonic order designed to rid Nordic German society of degenerate infiltration by Jewish blood. Like the medieval Teutonic Knights, he also looked east towards that other great threat to German purity, the inferior Slav races with their evil communist doctrines. As he put it himself in 1936: ‘We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevistic revolution of sub-humans be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without.’10
For inspiration he founded the new Teutonic castle of Wewelsburg in the forests near Paderborn, an ancient town in Westphalia with historic associations that went back to Charlemagne. Wewelsburg was built on the foundations of a medieval burgh; it was designed for him by an architect called Bartels and took a year to construct, at a cost of some 11 million marks.
According to Schellenberg, the castle was run like a monastery and a hierarchic order of leadership after the pattern of the Catholic Church was imposed on those members of the S.S. privileged to visit Wewelsburg for the regular retreats organized by Himmler, who was, in Jesuitical terms, General of the Order. Each member of the secret Chapter had his
own chair with a silver name-plate, and ‘each had to devote himself to a ritual of spiritual exercises aimed mainly at concentration’, the equivalent of prayer, before discussing the higher policy of the S.S.11
Wewelsburg was Himmler’s only indulgence in the kind of luxury with which most of the Nazi leaders were surrounded. The castle was as magnificently appointed in the medieval manner as Carinhall, Göring’s vast residence north of Berlin which he was extending and reconstructing at the same time as Himmler was building Wewelsburg. The design and association of the rooms were supposed to conjure the spirit of Germany’s greatness; each was named after an historic figure such as Frederick the Great, and a collection of relics of the past was assembled in the castle’s museum. Himmler’s own room was named after Heinrich I, Henry the Fowler, the king who a thousand years before had been the founder of the German Reich.
The S.S. leaders, whether they were intellectuals or not, had to submit to these historical charades in order to please Himmler, who gave more and more of his time to the detailed study of such useless history as his power increased. Himmler had in him the makings of a recluse, a ruthless anchorite devoted to his studies and determined to remake mankind in the particular image conjured up by his eccentric scholarship. The great tragedy of our time is that for several years he possessed the power to experiment in Europe at the cost of millions of lives.
He had become by now violently anti-Catholic and anti-Christian, substituting for the faith in which he had been reared a facile acceptance of those particular superstitions, such as astrology, that suited his Germanic prejudice.12 The Catholic Church came under attack in Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Guards), the illustrated weekly journal of the S.S. which began publication in April 1935 with the S.S. chronicler Gunter d’Alquen acting as editor under the special direction of Heydrich.
Heinrich Himmler Page 7
