Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  In 1936 the S.S. became the sponsor of the Lebensborn (Fount of Life) maternity homes, in which Himmler took great pride and which, as innumerable surviving records show, he supervised personally down to the last detail. In taking responsibility for the welfare of these young Germans, the S.S. ensured that they were suitably indoctrinated from the very start of their education, and every man had to contribute to the maintenance of these homes with deductions from his pay, the main burden being borne by bachelors.19

  Himmler was true to his own teaching. Conscious, no doubt, that many people thought his own appearance remarkably ‘un-Aryan’, he ordered elaborate researches to be undertaken into his ancestry. The files of memoranda on this subject still exist, and they continue well into the period of the war; the centre for this research was at Wewelsburg, from which statements supplemented by elaborate genealogical forms would arrive as each stage of the investigation back to the eighteenth century was gradually completed. Similar research was undertaken into the ancestry of Marga Himmler. As soon as Himmler’s interest became known, namesakes would write to him begging to be acknowledged as kinsmen of the Reichsführer S.S.

  Himmler, an addict to detail, spent time in his office poring over letters and memoranda all concerned with proving the purity of his blood and that of his family, his staff and the men under his command. The surviving documentation on all this research, which represented years of painstaking work by large numbers of genealogists and clerks, and in many cases bitter heart-searching by those unable to prove their ancestry to be free of defilement, amounted to thousands of items in the bursting files of undestroyed Nazi history. After the war had already begun, Himmler intervened personally to reprimand an S.S. man who had accepted refreshments from the father of a Jew he was escorting from a concentration camp, and in April 1940 he sent a long letter of sympathy to another S.S. man at the front who had put on paper the terrible shock he received when he had discovered he possessed Jewish blood. He wrote antedating ancestral purity by a further century:

  ‘I can so well imagine your position and your feelings. So far as our blood is concerned, I have stipulated that the end of the Thirty Years War (1648) is to be the day to which each of us is obliged to make sure of his ancestry. Should there be some Jewish blood after that date a man must leave the S.S… . In telling you all this I hope that you will understand the great sacrifice I have to impose on you… In your heart of hearts you still belong to us, you can still feel you are an S.S. man.’

  Himmler softens the blow he so sympathetically deals by adding that if the man were to die at the front, the S.S. will look after his wife and children.

  During the war Himmler formed a permanent association with a girl called Hedwig who was his personal secretary and by whom in 1942 and 1944 he had two further children, Helge, a son, and Nanette Dorothea, a daughter. Hedwig was the daughter of a regular soldier, who had been at the time of her birth in 1912 a sergeant-major in the German Army. In 1936 she was awarded the standard sports certificate, the Deutsches Sportabzeichen, for her achievements in swimming, running and jumping. Nevertheless, researches into her ‘Aryan’ ancestry were initiated and continued into the years of the war.20

  In spite of the fact that in 1937 Himmler solemnly went through the routine of qualifying for his own S.S. sports badge, forcing his inadequate body to run and to jump until he was persuaded by his adjutants that he had reached the necessary standards, his health was far from good.21 He had been suffering from acute headaches for some years, and his congenitally weak constitution produced stomachcramps, the intensity of which was increased by nervous tension resulting from continued worry over his responsibilities. He feared he might be developing cancer, the disease from which his father died.22 It was Wolff who, knowing his suspicion of orthodox treatment, persuaded him in 1934 to undergo massage, and Franz Setzkorn, a nature healer, was called in to soothe away the pain. It was not until 1939 that a man was found who was able to bring more lasting relief to the strained nerves which made Himmler’s stomach twist with cramp and his head feel like a ball of fire. This was Felix Kersten, the cosmopolitan Finnish masseur whose second home before the war was in Holland. Kersten’s reputation for alleviating nervous pains had enabled him to maintain a lucrative practice in Berlin, near to which he had bought a country estate in 1934 called Hartzwalde. At this stage, however, they had not met.

  In the middle of January 1937 Himmler was once more invited to address officers of the Wehrmacht during a course of political instruction designed to prepare them for the war which Hitler had decided was inevitable.23 He did not spare them the detailed explanation of his views. He began by tracing the history of the S.S. from its original formation in 1923 as shock troops to support Hitler, and its reformation in 1925 in squadrons set up in various cities to patrol meetings. But from these small beginnings, said Himmler, the noble ideal of an elite corps had sprung. ‘I am a strong believer in the doctrine that, in the end, only good blood can achieve the greatest, most enduring things in the world’, said Himmler. In recruiting his S.S. men:

  ‘only good blood, Nordic blood, can be considered. I said to myself that should I succeed in selecting as many men as possible from the German people, a majority of whom possess this valued blood, and teach them military discipline and, in time, the understanding of the value of blood and the entire ideology that results from it, then it will be possible actually to create such an elite organization which would successfully hold its own in all cases of emergency.’

  For this reason, Himmler continued, very exacting standards were set for the recruiting of the S.S., including a minimum height, 1·7 metres, and the careful examination of portrait photographs by Himmler himself, who was determined to detect ‘traits of foreign blood, excessive cheek-bones’. Special burdens were placed on those selected — ‘valuable personnel is never trained by means of easy service’ — and in spite of the economic hardships of the time, the S.S. men were expected to provide their own uniforms. Now, in 1937, the ranks of the S.S. stood at 210,000; only one in ten of those who applied to join were accepted. When a young man of, say, eighteen years wanted to become an S.S. man, ‘we ask for the political reputation of his parents, brothers and sisters, the record of his ancestry as far back as 1750… . We ask for a record of hereditary health,’ and for ‘a certificate from the race commission’, which was made up of S.S. leaders, anthropologists and physicians, who conducted a full examination of the candidate. If he was only eighteen, the minimum age for consideration, he spent three months as an applicant, then after taking the oath to the Führer he became a recognized candidate for the S.S., spending a year obtaining his sports diploma and a further two years of military service in the regular Army. He then returned to the S.S. and was ‘with special thoroughness instructed in ideology’, learning among other things about the S.S. marriage law. Then, but only then, according to Himmler, was he finally accepted into the S.S.

  Himmler did not refrain from putting himself on exhibition. ‘The Reichsführer of the S.S.,’ he said, ‘is just as much an S.S. man in the sense of the S.S. organization as the common man of the front. On this 9th of November he is being awarded the dagger, and this is the occasion when he promises to abide by the marriage law and the disciplinary laws of the S.S.’

  Himmler then laid stress on the importance of good health. City life with its rush made men ‘grow pale and fat… which is never good for the State. If we desire to remain young we have to be sportsmen.’ He went on to describe how he expected men to practise in using both left and right hands equally in learning to fire pistols and rifles, or in putting the shot; everyone from eighteen to fifty years of age must train to keep fit.

  Ideological training went along with physical training. ‘Weekly periods of instruction are held during which pages from Hitler’s Mein Kampf are read. The older a person, the more steadfast must he be in his ideology.’

  He then described the various divisions into which the S.S. were divided, including the S.D.
: ‘the great ideological Intelligence service of the Party and, in the long run, of the state,’ and the Death’s Head units, which ‘originated from the guard units of the concentration camps’. The prisoners in the camps he described as ‘the offal of criminals and freaks, for the most part, slave-like souls’. To attempt to indoctrinate such people was a waste of time; just to train them to keep themselves clean was as much as need be done. ‘The people are taught to wash themselves twice daily, and to use the tooth brush, with which most of them have been unfamiliar. Hardly another nation would be as humane as we are.’

  After dealing with the objective of the Security Service, he turned to the S.S. marriage laws. ‘No S.S. man can get married without the approval of the Reichsführer S.S. A physical examination of the bride and guarantees for the bride’s ideological and human character are required. In addition, a genealogical table up to 1750 is required; this results in tremendous work. It is our concern that our men get married.’

  He went on to describe how he was at that moment in process of unifying the German police system — ‘We now have for the first time in German history a Reich Police.’ The importance of the police in time of war was paramount, fighting in ‘a fourth theatre of war, internal Germany,’ against the insidious forces of ‘Jewish-Marxist-Bolshevist influence… It is the obligation of the S.S., and the police to solve positively the problem of internal security.’

  He ended the speech with further references to the supreme racial struggle in which Germany was engaged:

  ‘We are more valuable than the others who do now, and always will, surpass us in numbers. We are more valuable because our blood enables us to invent more than others, to lead our people better than others. Let us clearly realize, the next decades signify a struggle leading to the extermination of the subhuman opponents in the whole world who fight Germany, the basic people of the Northern race, bearer of the culture of mankind.’

  This speech, as the generals present must have realized, was a direct challenge to the Army and must have reminded them of Roehm’s assaults on their authority, though coming now from a source which was far more powerful, secret and sinister than anything Roehm had represented. The speech had the support of Hitler and was circulated, in a shortened form, as an official document, while the full text, taken down in shorthand, was smuggled abroad and published later in the year in an anti-Nazi journal. By that time, Hitler had favoured Himmler still further by announcing on 15 May that decisions issued from his office should have the same validity as ministerial decrees.

  By the summer Berlin was seething with rumours that the S.S. were planning a putsch against the High Command. Fritsch, the Chief of Staff, was under surveillance by Heydrich’s agents, while Blomberg was about to cause his own downfall. When Hitler held his notorious staff conference on 5 November, neither the field-marshal nor the general was enthusiastic in response to his extraordinary outburst about the necessity for war with the Western Powers and the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia. When Blomberg, after consultations with Goring, approached Hitler with the request that he might marry a typist with whom, at the age of sixty, he had become infatuated, Hitler consented with good grace and, along with Goring, even acted as a witness of the wedding on 12 January 1938.

  The main facts of the disgraceful sequel to this marriage are well known, though accounts differ considerably about the nature of the complicity of Goring, Himmler and Heydrich in Blomberg’s downfall. The dossier proving that the bride’s mother kept a brothel and revealing that Frau Blomberg had herself a police record for prostitution emerged immediately after the wedding from the office of Count Helldorf, the Police President of Berlin. When Helldorf saw it he decided not to give it to Heydrich; he tactfully took the papers first of all to General Keitel, Blomberg’s counsellor at the Ministry, whose son had recently married Blomberg’s daughter. Keitel refused point-blank to handle the matter, and it was decided the papers should be sent next to Goring. According to Gisevius, Goring had some knowledge of the matter from the start, though there is other evidence that contradicts this. Josef Meisinger of the Gestapo, before his execution in Poland in 1947, claimed that he had faked the evidence against Blomberg’s young wife, using her mother’s record for the purpose, and that only Heydrich knew the forgery was on file waiting to be used once the wedding was over. If this were so, it seems most unlikely that Himmler was unaware of it. Whatever machination was used, the result was the same; Blomberg was disgraced and forced to retire.

  This isolated Fritsch, about whom Heydrich also held damaging evidence implying that the general was a homosexual. Meisinger had also been in charge of this work. A professional blackmailer called Schmidt had been interrogated about Fritsch in 1935 and had claimed that he was blackmailing him for homosexuality. Schmidt was produced once again by Heydrich, Himmler and Goring to disgrace their second victim. Fritsch was directly charged with homosexual practices by Himmler in the presence of Hitler on 26 January; Schmidt was called in to identify Fritsch. Hitler did not want to act too hastily; he put Fritsch on indefinite leave pending some form of enquiry into the charges, while Himmler attempted to blacken him still further in the sight of the Führer by suggesting he would be the cause of a military demonstration against the regime when Hitler addressed the Reichstag on 31 January.

  Meanwhile, during further interrogations of Schmidt, their principal witness, the Gestapo officials made a terrible discovery. It appeared that he had made a mistake in his deposition of 1935; the military gentleman from whom he had been exacting payments had been a retired cavalry officer called Captain von Frisch. Gestapo officials went at once to interrogate this officer at his house on 15 January, and found this new testimony was only too true. The Gestapo’s primary case against Fritsch was now destroyed.

  At a meeting with Beck and Rundstedt of the General Staff, Hitler finally agreed to allow official enquiries to be made jointly by the Army and the Ministry of Justice into the evidence against Fritsch. He insisted, however, that the enquiries were to be conducted in association with the Gestapo. This enquiry placed both Himmler and Heydrich in a most difficult position. The assessors now had the legal right to interrogate Schmidt, who was in the hands of the Gestapo. Himmler, naturally enough, had been opposed to any further enquiries from the start of the campaign by the Army to initiate them. Nebe, who appears to have been in touch with both sides in the struggle over Fritsch, had already given Gisevius a hint of the truth about the Gestapo’s dilemma. The assessors were therefore encouraged to insist that the Gestapo hand their witness over. In the end, after close questioning, Schmidt unwillingly gave the assessors the address of the house where, he claimed, Fritsch had retired to fetch the money his blackmailer was demanding from him. The assessors visited the address, and found in a neighbouring house the Captain von Frisch who was the cause of the Gestapo’s embarrassment. He was in bed seriously ill. During the visit the Captain’s housekeeper admitted that the Gestapo had been there the previous month; she even remembered the date, 15 January. As soon as the Gestapo were informed of this visit, they took the Captain from his bed and placed him under arrest.

  Hitler had by now announced the major changes in the High Command and in certain posts. He abolished the Ministry of War and assumed control himself of the organization, the O.K.W. or Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, which replaced it. These changes had been made public by him in a broadcast on 3 February, and in the course of a meeting of the principal officers of the new High Command the following day he went into great detail about both the Blomberg and the Fritsch cases. Ultimately he agreed to a special Court of Honour being convened on 11 March under the presidency of Goring, as the most senior officer in the armed forces.

  Everyone was aware that the Fritsch case had broader implications than the reputation of a senior officer who had been wrongly used. According to Gisevius, the determination to turn the occasion into an exposure of the Gestapo was spreading to a wide circle of influential men, ranging from Admiral Raeder
and Brauchitsch, whom Hitler had made his new Commander-in-Chief, to Guertner, the Minister of Justice, and Schacht, who had finally resigned from his Ministry the previous November because he could no longer tolerate Goring’s interference in economic affairs. If, as Jodl noted in his diary on 26 February, both Raeder and Guertner believed Fritsch to be guilty, their sole interest in the case would be to expose the Gestapo. Blomberg, in one of his final interviews with Hitler, had gone so far as to say that Fritsch was not ‘a man for the women’.

  Fritsch, who was a Prussian nobleman as well as an officer who believed in strict military formality and etiquette, behaved illadvisedly during the intervening weeks before the Court of Honour. He therefore to some extent played into the hands of his enemies. If, as Gisevius claims, he was ‘an absolutely honourable man’, he should have formally denied the charges and then left the dispute entirely in the hands of his lawyers and later of his defence counsel, once he knew the Army was on his side and that a judicial enquiry followed by a Court of Honour was to take place. However, after Himmler’s vicious denunciations he did not wait even to be retired; he insisted on resigning, which not only made him appear guilty but created legal difficulties when the Army proposed to set up a Court of Honour in which the details of the evidence against him could be subject to official examination. He further jeopardized his position by admitting he had once taken ‘a needy Hitlerjunge’ into his household, and then, as an ill-considered demonstration of his innocence, went on his own initiative to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation. In February he decided to challenge Himmler, whom he regarded as his principal enemy, to a duel at pistol-point.24 Rundstedt, to whom he entrusted his formal challenge for delivery to Himmler, considered the whole situation impossible, and never delivered it. He eventually gave it to Hossbach, Hitler’s adjutant, who kept it as a curiosity. It would be interesting to know what Himmler’s reaction might have been had he received it.