Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  Nevertheless, Hitler felt Himmler was worth cultivating as a diplomat; he had been sent to Italy before in both 1936 and 1937 on goodwill visits, and had on each occasion taken Heydrich with him. Friendly relations had been established with Bocchini, Mussolini’s Minister of Police, and with Mussolini himself, who granted Heydrich a personal interview when Himmler fell ill during their first visit.

  From 1938 Himmler used against both the Foreign Office and the High Command exactly the same secret strategy he had used to undermine Goring’s initial authority over the police. He maintained his friendly relations with Ribbentrop while at the same time he encroached on the duties of the Foreign Office, or duplicated them through the S.D. spy-ring abroad. Following talks with Hitler, in which the possibility that the Western Powers might use North Africa to counter-attack Europe once Germany had overrun it, Schellenberg, the most intelligent agent on Heydrich’s staff, was sent in the autumn of 1938 on an adventurous mission to West Africa to spy on the harbour facilities, while the following January Himmler made a report for his staff on conversations he had had with the Japanese Ambassador about a treaty to consolidate the Tripartite Pact, and an attempt which the Japanese were making to send agents into Russia to assassinate Stalin. In May 1939, Ciano reports that Himmler advised him that the Italians should establish a protectorate in Croatia, a policy in opposition to that of Ribbentrop, who wanted Yugoslavia to remain untouched. The following month, Hitler assigned to Himmler the difficult task of negotiating with the Italian Ambassador, Bernardo Attolico, for the resettlement of the Tyrolean Germans in the Reich. This was the first of these wholesale movements of population on racial grounds which appealed so strongly to Himmler’s sense of ethnology.

  Meanwhile Himmler’s ambition in Czechoslovakia led him during 1938 to set up with Heydrich an organization of S.D. commandos who were to follow the German Army into the country ‘to secure the political life and national economy’, while inside the frontiers he hoped to gain personal control of the Free Corps organized by the Sudeten Germans, which Brauchitsch naturally expected to be the concern of the Army. Four days before the Munich Agreement, when it seemed certain Czechoslovakia would be invaded, he informed Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans, that he would come under his exclusive command, and he moved six battalions of his Death’s Head guards, two of them from Dachau, up to the frontier without authority from the High Command, who cancelled his orders to Henlein and gave a general instruction that the Death’s Head men were to be subject to military control. The order ended: ‘It is requested that all further arrangements be made between the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Reichsführer S.S.’

  The Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938 resolved this particular deadlock. Hitler, as usual, was not greatly upset to find Himmler trying to spike the Army’s guns; it satisfied his intuitive sense of security. He had in fact as recently as 17 August decreed that Himmler’s special armed forces, the future Waffen S.S., were to be regarded solely as a Party force under Himmler’s command, and outside the control of either the Army or the Police; on 26 August Himmler was among the group that accompanied Hitler on an inspection of the Western fortifications. Perhaps these attentions led Himmler to exaggerate his authority. The part he had been expected to play, had the campaign against Czechoslovakia developed into invasion, was merely to provoke border incidents and to establish an immediate police control of the occupied territory in the wake of the Army. His plans, however, had now to be abandoned. According to Ciano, an acute if malicious observer, Himmler was ‘in despair because an agreement had been reached and war seemed to be averted’. But Hitler was determined to keep the S.S. Command and the Army firmly separate. By September 1939, Himmler would have control of some 18,000 men trained for the field (the S.S. Verfügungstruppen, which were in 1940 to be re-named the Waffen S.S.) in addition to the men in his Death’s Head units and the various branches of the S.S. and the Gestapo.

  Himmler had caught the war-fever from Hitler, and joined with Ribbentrop in encouraging the Führer to go to any lengths to achieve the conquest of Europe. Goring and the High Command played the double game of appeasing Hitler by hastening the preparations for war, while at the same time doing everything in their power to postpone the outbreak of hostilities. In Göring’s case, he conducted the negotiations for both war and peace alongside each other, knowing full well that Germany was ill-prepared for campaigns which might well spread to both the Eastern and Western fronts. For Himmler, whose military sense was as small as his knowledge of strategy, war was merely an assertion of racial superiority, about which he had no doubts at all of the outcome. Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin at this period, wrote: ‘In September 1938, as well as in August 1939, Ribbentrop and Himmler were, in my opinion, his [Hitler’s] principal lieutenants in the war party,’28 and, according to Henderson, Hitler’s actions often sprang from their fabrication of situations which were calculated to urge him to make war. Lord Halifax endorsed this opinion in a report written in January 1939 for submission to Roosevelt and the French Government. Goerdeler, one of the most prominent men in the German resistance, writing at the time of Munich, again coupled Ribbentrop and Himmler as the principal agents driving Hitler into war. It was fitting, therefore, that Himmler should accompany Hitler and Ribbentrop to Prague on 15 March after the fearful scene during the hours after midnight at the Chancellery in Berlin, when Hitler, Ribbentrop and Goring had forced the aged Czech President in the midst of a heart attack to capitulate and give up what was left of his country to the savage encroachment of Germany. Himmler made Karl Hermann Frank, a leader of the Sudeten German Free Corps and a State Secretary under the new German Protector, von Neurath, Higher S.S. and Police Chief. Frank, though nominally responsible to Neurath, was in practice responsible only to Himmler. In this way the security administration of Czechoslovakia was directed from Berlin, and the arrests began again.

  The following June, Himmler was present at an important meeting of the Reich Defence Council at which high-ranking members from the civil and military authorities were present. Goring presided, and the subject was preparation for imminent war. Himmler pledged the use of the prisoners in his camps for war work.

  An operation that formed a part of Himmler’s initial contribution to Hitler’s plan for the attack on Poland was named after him. It is ironic that Operation Himmler should have been a cruel act of deception involving a revolting atrocity. The general plan to stage faked incidents along the Polish frontier in order to provide suitable provocation for the invading forces had already been in Himmler’s mind when he had hoped to take part in an attack on Czechoslovakia, but in that case his deceits were not needed. Now in the case of Poland, they were to be developed on a considerable scale, and Heinrich Mueller, the head of the Gestapo, was put in charge of these operations. It was part of the plan that a number of prisoners from concentration camps should be dressed in Polish uniforms, given fatal injections by a doctor and at the right moment shot at until they were bordering on death. These victims were to be brought in under the code-words ‘canned goods’. Their bodies were to be photographed for publication and shown to press representatives accompanying the German Army.

  The story of these faked attacks and of their attendant atrocities was revealed at Nuremberg after the war in an affidavit sworn by the S.D. man who led the principal raid on 31 August against the German radio-station at Gleiwitz, close to the Polish border.29 Having affirmed this story at Nuremberg, he escaped and was not heard of again until he re-appeared under his own name in 1964, and sold the story to Der Stern. At Nuremberg, he told how he raided the station, taking with him a Polish-speaking German who broadcast a provocative speech against the Reich, and how at the last minute he deposited a dying man on the scene whom the Poles were supposed to have killed. This was Operation Himmler, the first criminal act with which the Second World War began on 1 September 1939 with the invasion of Poland.

  IV. Secret Rivals

  The
subtle balances of power between the Nazi leaders at the beginning of the war are not easy to measure. After his successes in Austria and Czechoslovakia, Hitler withdrew himself from the others, becoming more arbitrary and autocratic in his procedure and less susceptible to advice or pressures designed to change his line of action. If Ribbentrop and Himmler rather than Goring or Goebbels were said to be in favour of war during 1938-9, this was due solely to their more ready response to Hitler’s will. They blindly supported and encouraged his advance towards war and had none of the reservations about Germany’s readiness for full-scale hostilities which occupied Göring’s mind. Goebbels after the summer of 1938 had been temporarily in disgrace with the Führer because he had asked to be relieved of his duties so that he might divorce his wife and marry the Czech actress, Lida Baarova. After his experiences with Roehm and Blomberg, and later with Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army who had had a troublesome divorce and married a young girl, Hitler was tired of seeing the love affairs of his subordinates interfere with their concentration on the grand strategy that he now had in mind. Himmler’s discreet liaison in Berlin with his secretary Hedwig was to be far less disruptive. According to Lina Heydrich, Himmler indeed became a different man as a result of his orderly love affair. Hedwig even led him to abandon the little chain which secured his pince-nez to his ear, and influenced him to wear his hair with a less severe cut.

  Himmler’s relationship with Heydrich during the first year of the war became deeply involved. When Himmler had first appointed Heydrich to the S.S., they had both been young men, Himmler thirty-one years old and Heydrich twenty-seven. Even now, at the beginning of the war, Himmler was still not yet forty and Heydrich thirty-five. The closer observers of these two very different men, such as Gisevius, Kersten and Höttl, differ very little in their assessment of Heydrich.1 To Höttl, who worked for Heydrich and later for Schellenberg on the forgery of passports and banknotes, Himmler was a mediocrity in comparison with Heydrich, who had little use for his commander’s obsessions, racial or otherwise, and rapidly learned how to exploit the power delegated to him. In the end, according to Höttl, he undermined Himmler’s position to such an extent that he achieved direct access to Hitler and, had he lived, might well in 1943 have been appointed Minister of the Interior by the Führer in order to break, or counterbalance, the power accumulated by Himmler. However, Heydrich’s position in relation to Himmler was weakened, not strengthened, when in September 1941 Hitler, without consulting Himmler, appointed him Deputy Reich Protector in Czechoslovakia. Heydrich was instructed to master that unhappy country, which was proving rebellious under the comparatively weak rule of Reich Protector Neurath, who had been Hitler’s Foreign Minister before the appointment of Ribbentrop. Neurath was forced to leave matters entirely in the hands of Heydrich.

  Heydrich’s gradual movement towards comparative independence came during the first two years of the war. Himmler, who was never a man for immediate action, delegated to him an increasing number of the monstrous tasks required by Hitler, and even tolerated a situation in which Heydrich reported direct to the Führer or to Goring. Himmler, it must always be remembered, was a sick man who from 1939 to the end of his life could only find relief from his physical and psychological tensions through Kersten’s expert massage.

  It is a profound mistake to underestimate Himmler, the very mistake, in fact, which allows such apparently insignificant men as he to win extensive power in politics or industry. Behind the rimless pince-nez, the trim and correct moustache, the receding, obstinate chin, and the narrow, sloping shoulders there was a man of passionate beliefs, whose attitude to power was not to luxuriate in it like Goring, or to fulfil the ambitions of an orator and political demagogue like Goebbels, but to realize a self-conceived, Messianic mission on behalf of the Germanic race.

  But with his particular temperament and poor physique, he never could become a man of action. There can be no doubt that he always wanted to prove himself in this way; he saw himself as a uniformed policeman and soldier, even as a commander in the field, but he lacked both the mental and physical stamina for these things, and in the end he only made himself ridiculous. But by that time Heydrich was dead. During the years preceding 1939, while the S.S. was being developed, and during the first two years of the war, it was Heydrich who was astute enough to supply Himmler with ideas and the means to carry them out, becoming his alter ego until the point was reached when he was able to break free and make his own bid for power, serving directly under Hitler.

  According to his long-suffering wife, Lina Heydrich, who was as ardently Nazi as Magda Goebbels and like her enjoyed attending smart parties given for smart Nazi wives, her husband would come home cursing the stupidity and waste of time which Himmler’s racial and other beliefs imposed on the administration of the S.S. Once he had seized power over Himmler, he did not fail to let him see the contempt he had for all this crazed mythology. For Heydrich it was not the theory but the practice that mattered; as he saw it, there was no need for elaborate theories on which to base the obvious necessity to persecute all those whose mere existence impeded ‘Aryan’ dominance. But whatever open differences there were between Heydrich and Himmler, Heydrich was always careful to keep their formal relationship unimpaired.

  According to Gisevius, who for a brief period worked under him, Heydrich was ‘diabolically clever’, keeping himself always in the background and using roundabout ways to achieve his aims. His methods of terrorism were kept as secret as possible. He had a ‘peculiarly murderous bent’, teaching his men ‘the by-laws of applied terror’, one of which was, as Gisevius put it, to ‘pass the buck’. He practised his oppression always in the name of discipline, justice, or the needs of being a good German, leaving it to Himmler to preach the more high-flown doctrines that in the end led to the same oppression of the same people. In all the Nazi leadership, as Gisevius points out, it was the experts in violence who rose to the top: ‘The dominant trait of all of them was brutality. Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich… thought and felt only in terms of violence.’ Schellenberg, who served Heydrich and Himmler for twelve years, has left the best description there is of Heydrich:

  ‘When I entered his office Heydrich was sitting behind his desk. He was a tall, impressive figure with a broad, unusually high forehead, small restless eyes as crafty as an animal’s and of uncanny power, a long, predatory nose, and a wide, full-lipped mouth. His hands were slender and rather too long — they made one think of the legs of a spider. His splendid figure was marred by the breadth of his hips, a disturbing feminine effect which made him appear even more sinister. His voice was much too high for so large a man and his speech was nervous and staccato, and though he scarcely ever finished a sentence, he always managed to express his meaning quite clearly.’

  According to Schellenberg, Heydrich became the ‘hidden pivot around which the Nazi regime revolved’, and his keen intelligence and forceful character guided the development of the whole nation:

  ‘He was far superior to all his political colleagues and controlled them as he controlled the vast intelligence machine of the S.D… . Heydrich had an incredibly acute perception of the moral, human, professional and political weaknesses of others, and… his unusual intellect was matched by the ever-watchful instincts of a predatory animal… He operated on the principle of “divide and rule,” and even applied this to his relations with Hitler and Himmler. The decisive thing for him was always to know more than others… and to use this knowledge and the weakness of others to render them completely dependent on him, from the highest to the lowest… Heydrich was in fact, the puppet-master of the Third Reich.’

  His only failing, according to Schellenberg, who both admired and feared Heydrich, was his ungovernable sexual appetite, which he indulged without caution or restraint.

  In 1940 he established his own high-class brothel, the notorious Salon Kitty, a mansion rented by the S.D. in the Giesebrechtstrasse, just off the Kurfürstendamm in the west end of Berlin.2
Salon Kitty had nine bedrooms, in all of which concealed microphones were installed connected to a monitoring room in the basement. This was a pleasant means of spying, primarily on diplomatic visitors to Germany. Schellenberg is careful to point out that his responsibilities ended with supervision of the recordings, while Artur Nebe, the Chief of the Criminal Police, controlled the women, because in the past he had been connected with the vice squad. Important diplomats, such as Ciano, were early induced to visit Salon Kitty by Heydrich and others who knew the establishment’s secret uses, and their conversation while drunk or making love was recorded on tape. In February 1941, Heydrich invited Kersten to visit the house, remarking that it had been opened in agreement with Ribbentrop to save their foreign guests from becoming the victims of the worst type of prostitutes; although it had to be subsidised, he believed it would soon become self-supporting. He was, he said, even contemplating opening a similar establishment for homosexuals. According to Schellenberg, Salon Kitty was established without the knowledge of Ribbentrop, and the Foreign Minister had visited it himself before he learned who was in control of the management.

  Kersten had the opportunity of seeing Heydrich primarily through Himmler’s eyes; though he had some direct dealings with Heydrich, he avoided him because he knew that he was under suspicion because of his growing intimacy with Himmler. Although, like Schellenberg, Kersten praises Heydrich’s striking Nordic appearance, the brilliance and polish of his speech ‘in the concise military manner’, and his remarkable ability to expound his arguments to Himmler in such a way as to force the decision he wanted from him, he also sees certain weaknesses of character that Schellenberg either overlooks or chooses to ignore. While Himmler treats Heydrich with ‘open friendliness’, Heydrich addresses his chief with ‘quite inexplicable servility’. ‘Yes, Reichsführer, certainly, Reichsführer, yes, yes, indeed,’ is his response once Himmler raises objections. Although Heydrich is ‘far more dynamic’, and outclasses Himmler every time in the way he can present his arguments, 'Himmler seems to possess some sort of secret power over Heydrich, before which Heydrich submits unconditionally.’ Himmler’s adjutants, Wolff and Brandt, both themselves in a position to exercise influence over Himmler, seemed to Kersten to have a poor opinion of Heydrich, whom they saw as a man operating entirely in a selfish vacuum, without a friend or supporter, either man or woman. No one trusted him: everyone tried to avoid him.3 Among his great weaknesses was his hatred of being beaten or unsuccessful in sport, and in order to prove his skill in action he joined the Luftwaffe and won the Iron Cross after making sixty operational flights.