Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  Kersten observed that Himmler had his own methods of resisting the resolute personality of Heydrich. He records that he had seen Himmler ‘quite overwhelmed’ by Heydrich’s powerful arguments, but nevertheless he had also seen him telephone Heydrich’s office afterwards and leave instructions with the subordinates to hold up any measure to which he had been led to acquiesce in Heydrich’s presence, using now the need to consult Hitler as his reason for delay. In this way Himmler preserved his superior position and postponed making decisions, a habit which was to increase with him during the war to such an extent that it helped destroy him.

  It was not until after the death of Heydrich that Himmler, still carefully shielding himself behind Hitler, admitted to Kersten that the hold they had on Heydrich was knowledge that there was Jewish blood in his family; Hitler had decided that the knowledge and ability Heydrich possessed were best kept active in the service of the Party, while the need to atone in their eyes for the taint in his blood would make this Nordic officer a more valiant persecutor of the Jews than any so-called pure-blooded Aryan. It pleased both Hitler and Himmler to make Heydrich their principal agent against the race to which in some part they imagined he belonged. Read Machiavelli, said Himmler in conclusion. A few days later he added that Heydrich had always suffered from a sense of inferiority, that he had been ‘an unhappy man, completely divided against himself, as often happened with those of mixed race’.

  ‘He wanted to prove the Germanic elements in his blood were dominant’, said Himmler. ‘He never really found peace.’

  Himmler lit a cigar, and gazed at the receding veils of smoke.

  ‘In one respect he was irreplaceable,’ he added. ‘He possessed an infallible nose for men. Because he was divided himself, he was sure to sense such divisions in others. They were right to fear him. For the rest, he was a very good violinist. He once played a serenade in my honour. It was excellent.’

  But Heydrich was dead, and it was easy, therefore, for Himmler to be either cynical or sentimental about him. There was no doubt about the tension and perhaps even the jealous possessiveness in their relationship; they had risen together as self-made men who had used their wits to gain advancement, and each had been and indeed still was dependent on the other. Those around them, trained to be watchful for weakness, were only too ready to dramatize what they observed in the behaviour of their superiors. To Schellenberg Himmler appeared, as to so many others, like an exacting headmaster, insisting on precision, industry and loyalty with a ‘finicky exactitude’, yet fearing to express an opinion of his own in case he should be proved wrong. He preferred others to take the responsibility off his shoulders, and receive the blame. ‘This system’, wrote Schellenberg, ‘gave Himmler an air of aloofness, of being above ordinary conflicts. It made him the final arbiter.’ But it also revealed a grave weakness of character in a man so prone to accumulating power.

  This weakness was shown in his lifelong subservience to Hitler. ‘Look at Heini — he’ll crawl into the old man’s ear in a minute’, Schellenberg heard one of the adjutants whisper when Hitler was talking endlessly to Himmler, who listened with rapt attention. When Kersten asked him whether he would kill himself if Hitler ordered him to do so, Himmler replied, ‘Yes, certainly! At once! For if the Führer orders anything like that, he has his reasons. And it’s not for me as an obedient soldier to question those reasons. I only recognize unconditional obedience.’ One of the characteristics of Himmler’s nature was that, having gained power, he was most loath to use it except when he was certain no risk was involved. The death of Heydrich only intensified his isolation and his weakness of character in the face of Hitler.

  Matters had been very different three years earlier, when Hitler’s troops poured into Poland after the devastating raids inflicted by Goring’s Luftwaffe. The S.S. fighting formations, some 18,000 men, took part in the war which was virtually over by 18 September. Himmler, travelling in his special armoured train known as Heinrich, left for the north on 13 September, taking Ribbentrop with him. They followed Hitler’s own train and another housing the High Command up to the Danzig area. Himmler was for long to resent having no control over the use of the S.S. formations, and it seems that their casualties were heavy. All the Reichsführer S.S. was able to do was accompany Hitler on formal inspections of the battlefronts, and he followed him back to Berlin on 26 September.

  Heydrich did not travel with Himmler in this vain pursuit of military command; the S.D. was represented on the train by Schellenberg, who was at first received rather coldly by both Himmler and Wolff, Himmler’s Chief of Staff. Schellenberg seized the opportunity to gain Himmler’s favour, and at the same time to study the atmosphere and character of the men at the top. On the way back from a flight over the burning city of Warsaw, Schellenberg’s efforts to impress Himmler at length succeeded; he was invited to take supper with the Reichsführer S.S. and given confidential information about the secret agreement between Germany and Russia for the partition of Poland. They also decided to investigate Hitler’s private physician, Dr Morrell, whose panic while accompanying the Führer to the battlefronts had not impressed the Reichsführer.

  Walter Schellenberg was, as we have seen, one of the intellectuals of the S.S. He had been educated in a Jesuit school; his university training in law and medicine at Bonn was over by the time he was twenty-two. His alert intelligence and quickness of observation fitted him for the various missions of espionage which he describes with such zest and self-satisfaction in his memoirs. As he gained the confidence of Heydrich and Himmler, he advanced his position in their service, and his value to us includes not only his detailed accounts of the more entertaining activities he undertook for the S.D., but the descriptive analyses he has left of his colleagues and, in particular, of Heydrich and Himmler. In the various departments into which Heydrich divided the S.D., Schellenberg worked in A.M.T., or Department IV, specializing in counter-espionage inside Germany and the occupied countries. Later, in June 1941, he was to take over Department VI, which co-ordinated Foreign Intelligence, and when Canaris’s Intelligence Service for the High Command was disbanded in 1944, Schellenberg’s responsibilities were expanded to include this work as well. At the height of his career after Heydrich’s death, he was to become one of the closest of Himmler’s advisers, and he worked hard for some action independent of Hitler to end the war and to ease the situation in the concentration camps.

  Schellenberg was soft-spoken, even ingratiating in his manner; he wanted his superiors to like him. He claims he was for a brief period attracted to Heydrich’s neglected wife, Lina.4 For him intrigue was a profession, and his pride in it survived the war and is present in every chapter of his fascinating and exciting autobiography. In the use of intrigue he was as guilty as any of his associates, but he remains a far more engaging rascal than they.

  Meanwhile Heydrich had achieved his private ambition by flying sorties with the Luftwaffe. Later in September he visited Himmler in his train, and he took charge of security arrangements for the victory celebration in Warsaw. On 27 September, he was rewarded by being made head of the Reichsicherheitshauptamt, the Reich Chief Security Office (R.S.H.A.).5 This was to give him a far greater measure of independence in his relations with Himmler, and opened up for him the means of direct access to Hitler. R.S.H.A. gave Heydrich control of Mueller’s Gestapo, Nebe’s Criminal Police or Kripo, the German C.I.D., and the S.D., which now became an official organization of the State as distinct from the Party. It was R.S.H.A., still nominally under Himmler, that moved into action in Poland, using special formations of S.S. men and police known as the Einsatz, or Action Groups, to carry out the duties assigned them. 6

  On 6 October, the day following his victory parade among the ruins of Warsaw, Hitler made the notorious speech in the Reichstag in which he attacked Poland and challenged her allies: ‘The Poland of the Versailles Treaty will never rise again’, he declared. The mass movement of population was forecast in order to knit the German peoples together an
d sever them from contamination by the Jews, of whom large numbers living in Poland were already at the mercy of Heydrich’s raiding groups. On 7 October, Himmler’s fortieth birthday, Hitler appointed him head of a new organization, the Reich Commissariat for the Consolidation of German Nationhood (R.K.F.D.V.), with the essential task of creating colonies of Germans in areas from which Jews and other alien and unwanted people had been expelled. Himmler’s friends celebrated the day by dedicating to him a handsome volume published in his honour — Festgabe zum 40 Geburtstage des Reichsführers S.S. (A Memorial Address to the Reichsführer S.S. on the Occasion of his Fortieth Birthday) — in which he was singled out as the man primarily responsible for building a new order in Europe to meet the needs of German expansion.

  Himmler was himself to describe what happened less than a year later, after the fall of France. Notes in Himmler’s handwriting survive for a lecture given to the Supreme Army Commanders on 13 March 1940. In this speech he made his policy for Poland absolutely clear — that the Slavs were to be dominated by the Germanic leadership, that their living space was to be appropriated so that they might never again attack Germany in time of weakness, that their inferior blood meant there must be no mixing of the races. ‘Executions of all potential leaders of resistance’, scribbled Himmler in his angular, spidery hand. ‘Very hard, but necessary. Have seen to it personally… No underhand cruelties… Severe penalties when necessary… Dirty linen to be washed at home… We must stay hard, our responsibility to God… A million workslaves and how to deal with them.’

  The fearful winter of 1939—40 saw whole communities of men and women uprooted from their homes in order to fulfil a compulsory emigration plan for which no proper provision had been made. The chain of callous orders passed down the line from Himmler’s and Heydrich’s offices until they reached the local Action Groups, who had been trained to carry out orders without consideration for the consequences to the human beings they evicted. Over 250,000 people of German origin living in Russian-occupied Poland and the Baltic States were by agreement to be transferred to German-occupied Poland, while as the result of an order made by Himmler on 9 October, double that number of Jews and rejected Slavs had to be moved away east to make room for them. Later, by 1943, the numbers exchanged were increased to 566,000 racial Germans brought in from the eastern and south-eastern areas and 1,500,000 Poles and Jews expelled.7 In November Darré, Reich Minister of Agriculture, was given by Himmler at his own request the task of re-settling the German immigrants on confiscated Polish farms. He wanted to play his part in the great racial migrations which were the outcome of the theories he had taught Himmler ten years before. That he failed in this self-appointed task was perhaps inevitable in view of the vast, complex, overlapping and rival administrations imposed on the torn body of Poland by Hans Frank’s cruel administration, and the mutually antagonistic organizations of the military and of Himmler’s and Heydrich’s police. The S.S. commanders were Friedrich Krueger, a former expert in street-fighting and gun-running, and the peculiar alcoholic sadist whom the S.S. had first enlisted in Austria, Odilo Globocnik, whom Himmler had finally to remove because of his persistent thieving.

  Historians have been at pains to find some date for the original conception of genocide in the minds of the Nazi leadership. The casual massacre of Jewish people by the S.S. or the Action Groups began with the war itself, but by January the mass evacuation of Jews from the western provinces had reached proportions which made a high death rate inevitable in the chaos of overloaded and unheated wagons that were shunted around in railway sidings, until the bodies of adults and children alike fell frozen to the ground when the doors were finally thrust open. In December Eichmann was ordered by Heydrich to try to bring some order into the handling of the deportation. The migration of Jews from Germany itself was about to begin when Goring interposed, as President of the Reich Defence Council, to stop the movement because of the rumours of death and suffering which were circulating among the diplomatic corps in Berlin. Meanwhile, Hitler accepted a plan presented to him by Himmler to enslave those Poles in the west who could not be evacuated, depriving them of their property and their children of education, unless they were racially suitable for removal and integration into Germany through Lebensborn, which first tested them and then placed them with foster-parents.

  The formal acceptance of genocide as Nazi policy did not happen until early in 1941, and was then directly linked in Himmler’s mind with the coming invasion of Russia. But by that time his racial prejudice had found outlets which prepared both him and his agents for the supreme test with which they would be faced in 1941. In October 1939 he was required by Hitler to assist in a nation-wide euthanasia programme for the insane, which by 1941 had led to the ‘mercy-killing’ of some 60,000 German patients in mental institutions. 8 Though the idea was Hitler’s, originating in a scribbled note to Philip Bouhler, the head of the Führer’s Chancellery, the S.S. was responsible for supplying doctors to carry out the task, while Viktor Brack, a friend of the Himmler family and Bouhler’s liaison officer with the Department of Health, was put in charge of the administration. The relatives of the people selected for destruction knew nothing of what was happening, and the notification of the cause of death was falsified. Extermination centres were set up under strict guard, and the S.S. doctors and their nursing and ambulance staff underwent their initial experience of selecting, transporting, gassing and cremating large numbers of helpless people.

  The first extermination programme, which was under the medical direction of Karl Brandt, was therefore an arbitrary act by Hitler against the Germans themselves, and was only brought to an end by a telephone call in August 1941 from Hitler to Bouhler after public protests had been made, more particularly by the Churches.9 For once the Führer had been made to think again as the result of public pressure. Himmler himself became increasingly uneasy about the reaction against the mercy-killings, and in December 1940 he expressed this view to Brack. But the euthanasia programme was not stopped until August 1941, when other work was planned for Himmler’s selected medical teams. A much larger extermination programme was beginning by then in Russia. The euthanasia centres were not closed down, but used for the destruction of mental patients from the concentration camps or from among the large numbers of foreign workers brought into Germany. Brack was perfectly prepared to extend the work of euthanasia to extermination of prisoners who were listed as defectives when the point was reached at which there was no difference whatsoever between the operations.

  Brandt, questioned in connection with his part in the extermination of the insane at the Doctors’ Trial after the war, said:

  ‘It may seem to have been inhuman… The underlying motive was the desire to help individuals who could not help themselves… Such considerations cannot be regarded as inhuman. Nor did I ever feel it to be in any degree unethical or immoral… I am convinced that if Hippocrates were alive today he would change the wording of his Oath… in which a doctor is forbidden to administer poison to an invalid even upon demand. He was not in favour of the preservation of life under any circumstances… I do not feel myself to blame. I have a perfectly clear conscience about the part I played in the affair.’10

  A second form of experience for Himmler’s doctors began in 1939 when the first recorded medical tests were made involving the use of men in the concentration camps. Liquid war gases, mustard and phosgene, were applied to the skin of selected prisoners and their symptoms were observed and photographed up to the time of death. Reports on their observations were sent by the doctors to Himmler, who ordered further experiments to be carried out on a larger scale. Later, in 1942, there was even to be argument as to whether or not payment should be made for prisoners used in these experiments. One doctor, insulted by this idea, wrote in a report: ‘When I think of our military research work conducted at the concentration camp Dachau, I must praise and call special attention to the generous and understanding way in which our task was furthered there and the co-oper
ation we were given. Payment for prisoners was never discussed. It seems as if at Natzweiler camp they are trying to make as much money as possible out of this matter.’ According to one witness, the subjects suffered such appalling pain ‘one could hardly bear to be near them’. Nevertheless to show their goodwill to the Reichsführer S.S., the prisoners at Buchenwald sent him a valuable Christmas present of a green marble desk set made in the camp sculpture shop, where objets d’art were produced by artist-prisoners for the S.S.

  In Himmler’s mind the preservation of life and the administration of death were indivisible. In the same month when the eviction of the Jews started in Poland and the S.S. doctors began killing the insane in Germany, Himmler issued his Lebensborn decree of 28 October 1939, in which he said:

  ‘Beyond the boundaries of bourgeois laws and customs which may in themselves be necessary, it will now become the great task, even outside the marriage bond, for German women and girls of good blood, not in frivolity but in deep moral earnestness, to become mothers of the children of soldiers going off to war… On the men and women whose place remains at home by order of the state, these times likewise impose more than ever the sacred obligation to become again fathers and mothers of children.’11