Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  Faced with Schmidt’s admission to the assessors, Heydrich decided the Gestapo had better lie its way out of the difficulties. He had been directly responsible for the accusations levelled at Fritsch in Hitler’s presence on 26 January, ten days after the discovery by his investigators that Schmidt was in error over the two similar names. Heydrich categorically denied that any Gestapo official had been to Frisch’s house on 15 January, and he then had Schmidt brow-beaten into a further admission that he had taken money from both men, and that therefore both Frisch and Fritsch were guilty. The unfortunate Frisch was prised out of the Gestapo’s grip and placed at the disposal of the Minister of Justice. He admitted his guilt and confirmed that he had been a victim of Schmidt’s blackmail. The final ordeal proved too much for him; he collapsed and died.

  Himmler and Heydrich were now dependent on Schmidt and the Gestapo witnesses keeping to the lies they had been ordered to tell while giving their evidence before the Court of Honour on 11 March. Brauchitsch, Raeder and two Senate Presidents of the Supreme Court in Leipzig were to sit in judgment; Goring, as President of the Court of Honour, would, according to custom in such tribunals, conduct the examination.

  Everything was set for what promised to be an extraordinary scene. The judges, except for Goring, were opposed to the Gestapo, but Goring had power to conduct the proceedings in his own way. A great deal depended on Fritsch; he was obstinately convinced that his name would be cleared, but would he develop the occasion into an assault on the Gestapo now that he had been denied the satisfaction of shooting Himmler? Would the Gestapo witnesses be able to sustain their latest story? Would Schmidt break down, or would Goring protect him? Would Heydrich and Himmler be called as witnesses? Nebe told Gisevius that Heydrich was certain the Court of Honour would mean the end of his career. The situation was so tense that this case to determine whether or not a man was a homosexual became one of those rarer moments in the history of the Nazi regime when the pressures of resistance to Hitler might well have erupted on a scale sufficient to shatter the foundations on which his tyranny was based.

  No one, however, had reckoned on what actually did happen. On 10 March, the day before the Court of Honour, after a month of growing political crisis in Vienna, Hitler gave orders for the Army to be prepared to invade Austria two days later. At the very moment the Court began its session Hitler was using Seyss-Inquart and other Nazi leaders in Austria to force Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, into an impossible position so that the Army should have an excuse to invade. Schuschnigg was proving intractable, and before noon Hitler ordered Goring, Brauchitsch and Raeder to abandon their proceedings and come at once to the Chancellery. Himmler, Heydrich and the Gestapo had won a temporary reprieve. That afternoon Goring began his celebrated conquest of Austria by telephone, and by the following day Austria was in Nazi hands and Himmler was in Linz supervising security arrangements for Hitler’s arrival that afternoon. Fritsch was forgotten in this hour of national triumph.

  When the Court was reconvened a week later on 17 March, the whole political atmosphere had changed. Hitler was once more the hero, the great leader, and there was no longer any heart in the military opposition to make a stand against him. It is unlikely, in any event, that Fritsch would have had either the stamina or the effrontery to press his attack home until the Gestapo witnesses were discredited; all he was concerned about was the formal recognition of his innocence. In the end it was Goring himself who decided on the tactics to adopt to protect the Gestapo. He determined to sacrifice Schmidt, whom nobody was concerned to protect, and, by using his authority to bully and threaten him, forced admissions from him which, had they been used to charge the Gestapo with dishonourable treatment of its witness, could have put the case in its proper perspective. But having at least achieved, on the second day of the examination, an admission from Schmidt that he had been lying about Fritsch, Goring hastily called on Fritsch to make a closing statement in his defence, following which he was acquitted.

  Both Himmler and Heydrich were far too preoccupied establishing a reign of terror in Austria with the aid of their allies, the Austrian Nazis, to be in attendance at the Court during 17 and 18 March. They left their Gestapo agents to survive as best they could. But both of them had been deeply concerned during January and February; Heydrich’s wife has testified to her husband’s tension during this time, and Schellenberg has told the story of how Heydrich, in a fit of nerves, asked him to dine at his office and came armed because he expected the Army to ‘start marching from Potsdam’. Himmler’s reactions were even more extraordinary. Describing Himmler during the earlier stages of the enquiry, Schellenberg wrote:

  ‘I witnessed for the first time some of the rather strange practices resorted to by Himmler through his inclination towards mysticism. He assembled twelve of his most trusted S.S. leaders in a room next to the one in which von Fritsch was being questioned and ordered them all to concentrate their minds on exerting a suggestive influence over the general that would induce him to tell the truth. I happened to come into the room by accident, and to see these twelve S.S. leaders sitting in a circle, all sunk in deep and silent contemplation, was indeed a remarkable sight.’25

  Himmler was sufficiently prepared for the Austrian putsch to have ready a new and special uniform of field grey in which to invade Austria. Accompanied by his staff and S.S. bodyguards, all heavily armed, he flew south to Aspern aerodrome, near Vienna. With him was his adjutant Wolff, Walter Schellenberg, who had been in charge of co-ordinating intelligence reports from Austria, and the Austrian official in the S.D., Adolf Eichmann, now a specialist in Jewish affairs, who had prepared lists of the large number of Austrian Jews Himmler was determined should be given no chance to cause trouble.26

  The weather was bad and made the flight to Vienna in the overloaded plane unpleasant, and Schellenberg records that Himmler discussed with him the administration of the new state of Ostmark, as Austria was now to be called. They were standing in the rear of the plane when Schellenberg noticed Himmler was leaning against the aircraft door and that the safety-catch was undone. He grasped him by his coat and flung him aside. When Himmler had recovered from the shock, he thanked Schellenberg and said he would be happy to do the same and protect his life for him some day.

  Himmler and his entourage arrived at Aspern aerodrome before daybreak. They were uncertain of their reception in Vienna, but by the time they had arrived the struggle for Austria was already over. Hitler’s troops had crossed the frontier overnight and on behalf of the provisional government orders had been given by Seyss-Inquart to the Austrian Army that they were to offer no resistance to the invaders. Himmler, who was Hitler’s most senior representative in Austria, was met by the Austrian Chief of Police, Michael Skubl, whose feelings at having this duty to perform must have been bitter, since he had been appointed by Dollfuss on the very day of his murder by the Nazis. Himmler hurried by car to the Chancellery in Vienna to confer with Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Austrian S.S. Following exactly the procedure he had originated for himself in Germany, Himmler dismissed Skubl and put the police in the charge of Kaltenbrunner. Leaving the immediate control of Vienna in this man’s hands, Himmler left by air for Linz to supervise the reception to be given Hitler that afternoon in the town where he had lived as a child. With him went Seyss-Inquart, now the new Nazi Chancellor of Austria. On the same day Heydrich joined Kaltenbrunner in Vienna, and the Austrian capital began to experience the savagery of Nazi control.

  The hysteria of Hitler’s reception in Austria — he had arrived on Saturday, and on Sunday with tears in his eyes had become President of Austria, which was created ‘a province of the German Reich’ by a legal enactment hurriedly put together — did not stop Himmler from warning the Führer against entering Vienna until every security precaution had been taken. He had himself returned there from Linz and set up his headquarters in the Imperial Hotel, while Heydrich commandeered the Metropole for the S.S. and S.D. headquarters. Together the unholy team went to wo
rk, Himmler and Heydrich of Germany, Kaltenbrunner and his colleague Odilo Globocnik of Austria.

  Kaltenbrunner, who was in 1943 to be appointed successor to Heydrich by Himmler and who after the war was to stand trial at Nuremberg, was a lawyer who had turned to political intrigue. He was a huge man, coarse and tough, with small, penetrating eyes set in a wooden, expressionless face. He was excitable, and would slap the table with his hard, clumsy hands, which were discoloured with nicotine and reminded Schellenberg of the hands of a gorilla. He had joined the S.S. in 1932 and had been imprisoned by the Dollfuss Government for his activities. His associate Globocnik came from Trieste; he had been involved in robbery with violence and he continued to mix his criminal activities with politics even after Hitler had appointed him Gauleiter of Vienna.

  The campaign of terror launched by these two men and the Austrian S.S. on behalf of Heydrich and Himmler was more fearful than anything that had yet happened in Germany; Seyss-Inquart himself was to admit after the war that 79,000 arrests took place in Vienna within a matter of weeks. Jews were evicted, humiliated and forced to scrub the streets. Many men of distinction among those opposed to the Nazis, both Jews and non-Jews, were to be sent to Dachau and other camps in Germany; the freight trains transporting prisoners crushed together in wagons became a regular service from Austria.

  Schuschnigg and Baron Louis de Rothschild, the two most eminent men held in custody, were temporarily confined by Kaltenbrunner in the servants’ quarters on the fifth floor of the Metropole Hotel, and they were inspected there by Himmler. Baron Rothschild, who realized that Himmler was planning to ransom him, spoke with ironic reserve when the Reichsführer S.S. enquired after his welfare, while Himmler showed off his authority by taking Schuschnigg with him to inspect the attic lavatories and command in his presence that the ancient fitments should be replaced by something more modern and hygienic for his distinguished prisoners. Nevertheless, he refused to let Schuschnigg, who like himself was short-sighted, have the use of his spectacles, which had been confiscated.

  This oppression was the immediate outcome of Hitler’s annexation of Austria. The Führer had come eventually from Linz to Vienna on Monday 14 March, staying one night only at the Imperial Hotel, where Himmler was also lodged; those Austrians prepared to be ecstatic were so: ‘never… have I seen such tremendous, enthusiastic and joyous crowds’, wrote Schellenberg. Nevertheless, he had to rush ahead of Hitler’s procession of cars touring the city in order to supervise the dismantling of explosive charges attached to a bridge on the route. Himmler had been right to be cautious.

  The Jewish population of Austria was about 200,000, and their organized persecution and removal became a major undertaking. Himmler went in person to search for a site for a local prison camp, and found a suitable place near Mauthausen on the Danube, where a camp was built on the wooded slopes above a quarry by slave-labour brought from Dachau. Himmler decorated the wooden guard-house set on the granite walls with curling roofs in imitation of the guardhouses on the Great Wall of China.

  The importance of Adolf Eichmann as the agent of Himmler and Heydrich in the organization of Jewish affairs dates from the Anschluss. This man was lifted out of the obscurity to which he had almost always clung when he was abducted from the Argentine in 1960 and put on trial in Israel. He had escaped from an American internment camp after the war. When he stood under the glare of the lights in his bullet-proof box, he was revealed as a small-minded, if able and energetic, administrator and he shared a bureaucratic urge for tidiness in his fulfilment of the orders he had been given to organize the extermination of the Jews in his power; an overriding sense of duty compelled him to carry out whatever he was required to do. He had begun his S.S. career in the Death’s Head Unit at Dachau, so he had few qualms about the spectacle of suffering in the camps, and it has been suggested that he was not averse to accompanying Heydrich on his frequent excusions into the city’s brothels. He travelled all over Europe to threaten, to harry or to cajole the inefficient or the reluctant agents of the S.S. to get their Jews destroyed. His concern was with the transport of the victims and the statistics of death, which in his enthusiasm he was prepared to exaggerate in his reports to his superiors. Only when hard-pressed at his trial did he admit that he hated the work he had been given to do.

  At Eichmann’s own suggestion Himmler established the Office of Jewish Emigration in Vienna and put him in charge of it. As a result of Eichmann’s work more than 100,000 Jews left Austria between mid-1938 and the outbreak of the war. All but a few departed destitute, their wealth and property in Austria seized by the Nazis. Baron Louis de Rothschild was only permitted to leave after a year’s detention; the price of his freedom included the sacrifice of his steel rolling-mills to Goring, while the Palais Rothschild in Vienna became Eichmann’s headquarters. The Jews were encouraged to emigrate, but the price exacted for exit permits, stamped Jude, was the loss not only of money and possessions but the fulfilment of orders to leave the country for ever, disowned and stateless. It was Germany over again.

  This was the period when Himmler first conceived the idea of commercializing concentration camps. It was the Anschluss with its enormous influx of prisoners that made it evident to him that so many idle hands were a scandalous waste of potential labour for the Reich. Up to the time of the Anschluss, the population of Himmler’s camps has been estimated by Reitlinger at an average of 20,000, and the prisoners’ principal tasks had been the construction and extension of the camps themselves, with barracks and other amenities for the S.S. By April 1939, the prison-camp population had grown to some 280,000.

  While Eichmann was extracting the wealth of the Jews, Himmler was forming companies on behalf of the S.S. to exploit the new labour resources of the camps in quarrying stone and providing bricks and cement for the vast building projects which Albert Speer, Hitler’s young architectural adviser and future Minister of War Production, was encouraging the Führer to undertake.27 The head of this business undertaking was Oswald Pohl, a man of working-class origin who in looks resembled Mussolini and whose sadistic greed in driving the human flesh under his control to the last flicker of productive energy made him one of the worst of Himmler’s scourges.

  Hitler’s policy of divide and rule was extended now by Himmler to the administration of the camps. He had been careful in 1936 not to give Heydrich the entire control; both Eicke’s inspectorate office and Pohl’s business administration, the Verwaltungsamt, were from Heydrich’s point of view intrusive elements which directly interfered with his own free hand in the management of the prisoners. Since the destruction of ‘sub-human’ racial elements and of the enemies of the State was Heydrich’s aim, it conflicted with any interest, however low in character, which would lengthen the lives of the prisoners and give them any kind of encouragement through the provision of extra food. The attempt to commercialize the camps, which until the middle years of the war was to be a failure, was sabotaged from the start as a result of various rivalries that developed between those administering the camps. The supervision of their victims’ labour gave the Kapos, the habitual criminals placed by the S.S. in the camps and employed as bullies and watch-dogs, new opportunities for exploiting and torturing the prisoners.

  At the notorious conference over which Goring presided after the November pogrom in 1938, Göring’s interest lay solely in preventing further loss to the Reich economy by the looting of property which, though occupied by Jews, was not always actually owned by them and was in any case insured against damage and theft. Heydrich’s interest lay solely in the statistics of destruction and in the avoidance of paying any compensation. He boasted that already in a few months 50,000 Jews had left Austria, while only 19,000 had left Germany. He wanted the Jews segregated and expelled from the German community as soon as possible. Heydrich had in fact done what he could in advance to make the pogrom effective; after consulting Himmler, who was in Munich, he had issued detailed instructions to the Chiefs of State Police on how their men should c
ontrol the anti-Jewish demonstrations so as to prevent damage to German-owned property, and he followed the pogrom with further arrests of Jews whose presence in Germany offended his sense of decency and order.

  Hoess, who by 1938 had been promoted adjutant to the commander of Sachsenhausen, recalls an inspection of the camp by Himmler during the summer of 1938. He brought with him Frick, the Minister of the Interior, who was paying his first visit to a concentration camp. Himmler was ‘in the best of humour and obviously pleased that he was at last able to show the Minister of the Interior and his officials one of the secret and notorious concentration camps’. He answered questions ‘calmly and amiably although often sarcastically’. Afterwards his colleagues were entertained to dinner.

  His successful intrusion into Austria had given Himmler a taste for foreign affairs, and like Goring Himmler was to be used by Hitler, though in a minor capacity, to carry out his less formal diplomacy alongside the formal negotiations of the Foreign Office, which Ribbentrop had taken over early in 1938. Himmler had become one of Hitler’s close and more trusted subordinates. Though their relations remained punctilious, Himmler became to some extent a recognized companion who, unlike the generals who were doing their best to edge Hitler away from grandiose schemes for war, always supported Hitler’s policy without question and, when asked to do so, gave advice on how best to carry this policy out. It was Himmler who had led the delegation that received the Führer at Linz, and a few weeks later, in May, he was among those chosen to accompany Hitler on his state visit to Italy, where he had to stay along with the Führer in the Quirinal, the Palace of the King. ‘Here one breathes the air of the catacombs’, Himmler was heard to remark, and his observation was passed on to the King.