Himmler founded at the same time an institution known as the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) for research into Germanic racial origins.13 Himmler made himself President of this Society, and its director was Professor Dr Walther Wuest, whom Himmler made an honorary captain in the S.S. The institute had a special task to link the present with the past by investigating the claims of the Nordic peoples of belonging to Indo-Germanic stock and to revive the spiritual and cultural heritage of this, the noblest race on earth. Ahnenerbe undertook, for example, extensive archaeological excavations of Germanic remains at Nauen and Altkristenberg, and even sent an expedition to Tibet. To pay for these researches Himmler turned once more to his friend Keppler, Hitler’s economic adviser, who founded a society of industrialists called the Friends of the Reichsführer S.S. which subscribed large sums to support Himmler in this work.
The supervision of the concentration camps passed to Himmler and the S.S. after the Roehm purge. Heydrich took charge of this work and made Eicke, now a brigadier-general of the S.S., his Inspector of Camps. The Death’s Head Unit, which Eicke had trained for Himmler, took charge of those camps which had been established on a permanent basis, such as Dachau, the so-called model camp in the south, Buchenwald, founded centrally near Weimar in 1937, and the northern camp of Sachsenhausen, near Berlin-Oranienburg. The base camps and their subsidiaries multiplied with the development of tyranny until their establishment reached nearly a hundred centres before the war, and afterwards extended over the whole of occupied Europe with the spread of Hitler’s conquests.
The record of these camps, in which between five and six million Jewish victims alone are estimated to have died by the end of the war, became the ultimate indictment of the Nazi system. Their continued existence over a period of twelve years makes our century, which should have been the most civilized, one of the worst in human history. A pathological fear of the camps and what was done in them to helpless people spread all over Germany and occupied Europe; even to admit knowledge of them at the time they were in operation became a lasting inhibition in the minds of most German people. Open recognition of detailed facts which were first made known at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg after the war and have been elaborated at subsequent trials is still avoided by the majority of people both inside and outside Germany.
The principal author of this extended act of human degradation was Himmler, who believed his task to be a necessary duty in which human feeling had no proper place. Suffering was inevitable when a mass-deterrent on this scale had to be created, and he believed the guardians in the camps were more the victims of necessity than those whom they oppressed. It would be quite wrong to think that Himmler had no conscience and no pity; but his real pity was given to the men and women of his Death’s Head units who had to have this fearful burden placed upon them. It became a constant anxiety that preyed upon him and eventually destroyed his health. His feelings about this, the worst of all his tasks, he was eventually to let loose on Kersten, the man who relieved his pain and became as a result the confidant of his most secret thoughts.
During this early phase, however, Himmler took great pride in the concentration camps. In October 1935, after receiving birthday congratulations from Hitler, he conducted Hess and other distinguished guests round the show places of Dachau, where the following month a unit of the S.S. additional to the Death’s Head specialists were to be housed in cheerful barracks built for them by the prisoners. This new unit shared some garrison duty with the camp guards, but their main purpose was to undergo military training. The base camps had married quarters attached to them, and even in the worst phases of the history of the camps during the war the wives and families of the S.S. guards had to accustom themselves to the experience of living near these centres of torture and death.14
After the Roehm purge, the para-military nature of the S.S. was soon to be developed. Hitler had to watch not only those who were critical of his regime abroad and might have been prepared to take action against him, but also the High Command of the German Army, which still had the remnants of power to depose him if the will could be turned into the deed. The period of his gradual open defiance of the Allies and of the terms imposed by them in the Treaty of Versailles was about to begin, and the pattern of training for the S.S. changed in accordance with the stages through which Hitler’s successful defiance of the Allies and his subjection of the High Command were to pass. In January 1935, he regained the Saar by plebiscite; in March he announced conscription for the Army and the open establishment of an Air Force, Goring’s Luftwaffe; in June Ribbentrop, then Ambassador in Britain, succeeded in bringing off the Naval Pact which permitted Germany to develop a limited naval fleet; while in December came the shady dealings over Ethiopia which were in the end to leave Mussolini free to proceed with its conquest.
Hitler decided the S.S. should provide a full division of men trained for war, and he induced the Army to accept this anomalous position by making it part of the plan for conscription. In November 1934 a lieutenant-general in the Army, Paul Hauser, was selected to take charge of this aspect of S.S. training. Hauser took over Heydrich’s leadership school at Bad-Toelz and turned it into the first of a number of highly disciplined establishments for training officer cadets. According to Reitlinger, Hauser after the war regarded his S.S. school at Bad-Toelz as an ideal model for the training of NATO officers. His school represented the beginning of Himmler’s Waffen S.S., the military section of the S.S. corps which was later to become an international force when the S.S. spread its recruitment among the more ‘suitable’ races in the conquered territories.
Himmler’s relations with Hitler, with Goring, Frick, and Schacht, the banker who became Hitler’s Minister of Economics in 1934, with the Army High Command, and above all, with his principal officer, Heydrich, were governed by the opportunism which controlled the actions of all the Nazis, whatever the level of the position they held in the Party or the leadership. Opportunism is the peculiar vice of politicians, and the Nazi mentality, with its complete rejection of any kind of political morality, forced the pace of the intrigues by means of which they tried to outwit each other. Hitler was quite prepared to squander the limited talents of his commandants, ministers and advisers by allowing them to undermine each other’s powers while leaving him supreme as the final arbiter of what after all should be done.
Himmler’s place in this strange and ugly administration was still circumscribed on the one hand by Frick, the weak but obstinate bureaucrat who was Minister of the Interior, and on the other by the High Command of the Army, who disliked the continued existence outside their control of a quarter of a million men in S.S. uniform just as they had disliked the larger, but far less well disciplined forces of Roehm. As far as the bureaucrats were concerned, now that Goring’s attention was diverted from the political police in his pursuit of other interests, Himmler and Heydrich made short work of Frick and of Guertner, the Minister of Justice, both of whom sought during 1934-5 to restrain them and their agents in the S.S. and the Gestapo from seizing any person they wished and holding them in ‘protective custody’. Frick even attempted to draft a law, initially limited to Prussia, giving prisoners in the camps a right of access to the courts. When this draft was put on the agenda of the Prussian Ministerial Council by Göring, Himmler was invited to attend the meeting, though he was not a member of the Council, and he saw to it that the draft was rejected. His victory over Frick was complete, when on 2 May 1935, the Prussian court of Administration accepted that the activities of the Gestapo were outside their jurisdiction.
It was not, however, until 10 February 1936 that Hitler finally decreed that the Gestapo was a special police organization with powers that extended to the whole of Germany. The following June Himmler was made Chief of the German Police in the Ministry of the Interior, so confirming by right of decree what had been the practice for a considerable period owing to the absence of any effective opposition. Frick, though technically Himmler’s superior in pol
ice matters, gave up the hopeless task of attempting to interfere with him.15
Another open critic of Himmler was Schacht, the banker, who was a ruthless and ambitious autocrat. Having been made Minister of Economics by Hitler, he was determined to conduct his affairs in his own way, though he was eventually to be superseded by Goring. Gisevius states that he went to Schacht’s residence and at his request searched it with an engineer for hidden microphones when the Minister suspected that Heydrich’s agents were spying on him and recording his sharp-tongued remarks; they found a microphone built into the telephone. Schacht in his memoirs, My First 76 Years, claims that Himmler had threatened him at the time he had accepted office, and had even gone so far as to tell him to resign; Schacht sent a curt message back that he would resign only when the Führer told him to do so and that the S.S. should keep out of his way.
The strategy adopted by Himmler and Heydrich against the High Command of the Wehrmacht was even more insidious and led up to the notorious cases against Blomberg and Fritsch early in 1938. Werner von Blomberg, Hitler’s Minister of Defence until he was dismissed in 1938 for marrying a prostitute without knowing of her police record, was ostensibly an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler. Blomberg was tall, white-haired and smooth-faced, a man with insufficient intelligence or guile to match the cunning of those determined to be rid of him. His effective opposition to the extensive militarization of the S.S. when conscription was introduced by Hitler in 1935 was sufficient to make Himmler his enemy.
Werner von Fritsch had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht in 1934 without Blomberg’s approval; indeed Fritsch and Beck, his Chief of Staff, who was later to be closely involved in the Army plot against Hitler’s life, were rumoured to be un-co-operative, and opposed to the introduction of conscription, though Hitler continued to have confidence in them. The rumours were instigated by Himmler, and Goring, who by 1935 wanted Command of the Army for himself, was by now prepared to take any suitable opportunity to denigrate both Blomberg and Fritsch. The atmosphere in Berlin vibrated with gossip about putsch and counter-putsch.
On 19 January 1935, Blomberg, as part of an attempt to restore friendly relations, invited both Goring and Himmler to address the High Command in the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy, but they used the occasion to make it clear to the Army that a military putsch would be illegal. Nevertheless Blomberg went even further in his efforts to appease Himmler; he invited him in the following month to address a gathering of Army officers in the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten in Hamburg. Conscription, though still unannounced, was already agreed and Himmler took his revenge on Blomberg by announcing that the S.S. in time of war would have to be increased in numbers to fight the enemy inside the frontiers of Germany while the Army fought abroad; in this event the S.S. could resist any treacherous stab in the back on the home front such as happened in 1918. As he spoke of the ideal men he had enlisted in the S.S., he seemed to be challenging the racial purity of the officers in his audience.
In January 1935 Blomberg had appointed Canaris as the Chief of Military Intelligence, the Abwehr, an office which Heydrich, who had carefully informed on Canaris’s predecessor, would have liked to absorb into the S.D., though this was hardly possible at the time. Thus began the uneasy relationship between Heydrich and his old naval instructor which covered the divergent political exploitation of their two Intelligence services. An initial working agreement, known as the Ten Commandments, limited Canaris’s operations to military and not political espionage. A superficially friendly social atmosphere was re-established, and Heydrich was able to relieve the tension once more by playing his violin in Canaris’s family circle. But the Admiral soon grew to fear Heydrich and his ultimate influence on Hitler and was prepared to receive secret information from such men as Helldorf, the Chief of Police in Berlin, about the activities of both Himmler and Heydrich.
Himmler’s interest was by now no longer limited to Germany. He thought of those Germans who lived abroad, and in 1936 came to terms with Ernst Bohle, head of the foreign organization of the Nazi Party, which was concerned with spreading Nazism among Germans outside the Reich and establishing whatever proved possible in the way of espionage by setting up agents for Heydrich’s S.D. abroad. Out of this intrusion into fields which, if they belonged properly to any department, were the concern of Canaris for Military Intelligence or of the Foreign Office, arose the curious incident of the Tukhachewski plot against the Stalin regime and the forged documents which Heydrich supplied to the Soviet government.
Marshal Mikhail Tukhachewski was at this time Deputy Defence Commissar of the Soviet Union, and had been in 1926 the principal Russian signatory of the protocols which had introduced German military experts into Russia. The story, as it has been reconstructed subsequently from statements and admissions by various men involved, 16 seems to have been that Heydrich heard late in 1936 that Marshal Tukhachewski and other generals in the Russian High Command were planning a military putsch against Stalin. Two lines of action were possible to make use of this information; the first was to support the putsch, the other to see that knowledge of it reached Stalin in such a form that the largest possible number of Russian generals should be arrested and tried for treason. Canaris, who also knew of the plot, favoured the first line until a more opportune time came to use the second; Himmler and Heydrich wanted to exploit the second line of action immediately. Later Heydrich claimed that Hitler authorized the forging of documents by Behrens of the S.D. and a Russian political agent who was in the pay of the Germans. The ‘documents’ which were actually used as evidence in the subsequent secret treason trial in Moscow in 1937, bore the forged signatures not only of the Russian generals, but of the German officers with whom they were represented as being in touch. These papers were sold by Heydrich to Stalin through Russian agents. Stalin is said to have paid 3 million gold roubles for the evidence of his generals’ treason; but he marked the money, since he rightly assumed that it would be used by the Germans to pay their agents in Russia, and that this would enable the police to trace a number of S.D. spies. Later it also emerged that Stalin may well have planned the whole operation and made use of the S.D. to provide him with the evidence he needed to convict Tukhachewski and his associates.
The final stage in the modification of Himmler’s power did not come until the summer of 1936. This was preceded by the legal recognition of the Gestapo in a Prussian statute of 10 February in which a clause was inserted that no judicial appeal could be instituted against any decision made by the Gestapo; its activities were absolute. By a succession of decrees starting on 17 June, Himmler was, as we have seen, made Chief of the German Police, an office still separate from that of the Reichsführer S.S.17
Himmler celebrated his new appointment with an odd ceremonial on 2 July at which he commemorated the thousandth anniversary of the death of Heinrich I, the protagonist of German expansion in the East. This took place at Quedlinburg, a town in the region of the Harz mountains which had been founded by Heinrich.
In his speech about one of the ‘greatest Germans ever’, as Gunther d’Alquen called him in a glowing description of the event, Himmler praised the ‘clever, cautious, tenacious politician’ in terms he felt also suited himself. He used the occasion to attack the influence of the Church in German history; Heinrich, he said, had refused to allow the Church to interfere in State affairs. According to Himmler, this Saxon Duke known as Henry the Fowler, who became the founder of the German state, ‘never forgot that the strength of the German people lies in the purity of their blood’.18
In an article published in the same year, Himmler impressed once again on readers, whom he addressed as fellow peasants, that the precious heritage of blood in the German race must be maintained by force:
‘I, as Reichsführer S.S., who am myself a peasant according to ancestry, blood and being, would like to state this second fact to you, the German peasants: the idea of blood, advocated by the S.S. from the beginning, would be condemned if it were not eternally bound to
the value and the holiness of the soil.’
The S.S. themselves, he wrote, stood side by side with the German peasant stock, and were ceaselessly vigilant to protect the noble German blood:
‘I know that there are some people in Germany who become sick when they see these black uniforms; we understand the reason for this and do not expect we shall be loved by all that number of people; those who come to fear us, in any way or at any time, must have a bad conscience toward the Führer and the nation. For these persons we have established an organisation called the Security Service… Without pity we shall wield a merciless sword of justice…
‘Each one of us knows he does not stand alone, but that this tremendous force of 200,000 men, who are bound together by oath, gives him immeasurable strength… We assemble and march according to unalterable laws as a National Socialist military order of prominently Nordic men, and as a sworn community on our way into a far future,… ancestors of later generations, and necessary for the eternal life of the Germanic people.’
Himmler’s immersion in the past did not limit his interest in the future. He always urged his S.S. men to procreate in order to increase the number of pure-blooded German stock in Europe. This advice culminated in Himmler’s celebrated edict published in October 1939, in which he exhorted the S.S. to conceive children before going into battle. He watched the S.S. birthrate most carefully, but statistics for August 1936 which have been preserved show that the average size for S.S. families at that time was only between one and two children. At the same time, Himmler was determined to take care of the mothers of illegitimate children provided both they and their babies met the required racial standards.
Heinrich Himmler Page 8
