Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  While Heydrich had sprung once more into his Luftwaffe aircraft to enjoy aggression in the field — from which he sent Himmler a postcard on 5 May promising to be back at his desk within eight days — the Reichsführer S.S. trundled west in his armoured train, once more following in the wake of Hitler. He managed to send a letter to ‘Mein lieber Heydrich’ on 15 May explaining that he had spent some days at the Führer’s headquarters and adding, with an ironic reference to the Polish campaign, ‘the only difference is that we are at a different place’. The close of the letter throws some light on his feelings for Heydrich. ‘I think about you very much. I hope everything is going well. And I wish you renewed success, happiness — and everything good. Love from Wölfchen and Haschen. Yours, Heinrich Himmler.’ Then he placed a formal order that Heydrich was to send a daily report by telephone stating what he had done and how he was. Heydrich was to fly with the Luftwaffe until the end of the campaign in June, and be present to enjoy all the fruits of victory in Montmartre. He spent July in the urgent preparation of plans for the control of Britain by the Gestapo and S.D. after the conquest in the autumn. On 27 September S.S. Colonel Professor Dr Franz Six, former head of the faculty of economics in the University of Berlin, was appointed to head the Action Group activities in Britain which would follow immediately upon the invasion.

  Meanwhile Himmler was facing certain difficulties in extending his wartime powers. Hitler was determined to restrict the members of the Waffen S.S. to some four divisions (at most about 5 per cent of the armed forces), while Himmler himself was personally committed to such high standards of selection that the average recruit to the German Army fell far below his Nordic ideal. It was during 1940 that Himmler and his sport-and-nature-loving Chief of Staff for the Waffen S.S., Gottlieb Berger, decided that all men of Nordic race might qualify for admission to their forces, whether they were German or not. By the end of 1940 there was a so-called Viking Division in the Waffen S.S. under the German divisional Commander, Felix Steiner, and volunteers from Holland, Denmark, Norway and Finland had begun to join. By the closing months of the war, in 1945, there were thirty-five Waffen S.S. divisions, most of them substantially recruited from the occupied countries. Himmler made his racial theories work in his favour, and they enabled him to fulfil his ambitions of commanding on his own account a substantial body of men separate from the regular Army, over which he exercised no influence except for a few disastrous months during 1944 — 5. In a private memorandum that survives, dated 13 April 1942, Himmler insists that all the German leaders and sub-leaders of these foreign S.S. units must receive special ideological training and report to him personally before taking up their duties. They must, he says, have ‘a firm faith in our ideal’.

  On 7 September 1940, Himmler went to France to address the officers of the S.S. Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler at Metz. Only a month before, on 6 August, Hitler had told the S.S. in a speech that their future role was to be that of a volunteer élite force whose duties would be strictly those of a political police, while three weeks before that, from the public platform of the Reichstag, the Führer had shown his favour to the victorious Army by creating twelve new field-marshals. Himmler felt aggrieved and made insidious remarks about the attitude of the Army to the S.S. during the course of a speech in September, the chief aim of which was to state in no uncertain terms the importance of the S.S. to the welfare and advacement of the State, and of the S.D. to its internal security. He knew that many men in the wartime S.S. did not understand the ideals for which he had struggled since 1929, and he realized that the forcible deportations, ‘the very difficult task out there performed by the Security Police supported by your men’, seemed distasteful to some of them. So he went on to tell them why this must be done:

  ‘Exactly the same thing happened in Poland in weather forty degrees below zero, where we had to haul away thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, where we had to have the toughness — you should hear this but also forget it again immediately — to shoot thousands of leading Poles, otherwise revenge would have been taken on us later,… all duties where the proud soldier says: “My God, why do I have to do that, this ridiculous job here!” — It is much easier to go into combat with a company than to suppress an obstructive population of low cultural level, or to carry out executions, or to haul away people, or to evict crying and hysterical women, or to return our German racial brethren across the border from Russia and to take care of them … You have to consider the work of the S.D. man or of the man of the Security Police as a vital part of our whole work just like the fact that you can carry arms. You are the men to be envied because… if a unit achieves fame… it can be decorated. It is much more difficult in other positions… in this silent compulsion work, this silent activity.’16

  Himmler talked next about the necessity to improve political education in the Waffen S.S., so that the activities of the S.D. would be better understood; they must realize, he said, that the duties of the S.D. man were ‘very, very difficult’, and ‘very, very valuable’. Then he began to tell them of his vision of the future, his dreams of S.S. garrisons ‘safe-guarding the race’ by establishing settlements outside Germany and extending ‘our Lebensraum’ into colonies set up, for example, in South Africa, in the Arctic, and in the West. ‘The first two years of peace will be decisive for our future’, he said. ‘Peace begun with an iron hand… We must start an unheard-of education of ourselves. It is necessary that obedience be granite-like.’ What is done after the war, ‘during Adolf Hitler’s life, will live on for centuries to come… If we make a mistake, the mistake too will live on for centuries.’

  Even guard duty in the camps over ‘the scum of mankind’, said Himmler, will form ‘the best indoctrination on inferior beings and the inferior races. This activity is necessary, as I said, to eliminate these negative beings from the German people, to exploit them for the great folk community by having them break stones and bake bricks so that the Führer can erect his grand buildings. If the good blood is not reproduced’, he went on, ‘we will not be able to rule the world … A nation which has an average of four sons per family can venture a war; if two of them die, two live to transplant the name.’ Then he concluded: ‘The ultimate aim for these eleven years during which I have been the Reichsführer S.S. has been invariably the same: to create an order of good blood which is able to inspire Germany… an order which will spread the idea of Nordic blood so far and wide that we will attract all the Nordic strain in the world, and take away that blood from our adversaries, absorb it so that never again… will Nordic people fight against us.’ This, he said, was the ‘great common goal’ for which the S.S. was ‘a means to an end — always the Reich, the ideology, created by the Führer, the Reich, created by him, the Reich of all Teutons.’

  Himmler’s absence from the victory celebrations in France was largely due to his continued ill-health. From the time of the first treatment he had been given by Felix Kersten, the masseur, he had experienced a relief that seemed magical to his strained nerves. Kersten was two years older than Himmler, and very different from him in temperament. After a hard life in his youth, he was determined to enjoy the wealth and position that his highly specialized and lucrative practice among the European aristocracy had brought him. According to his own account, he was born in the Baltic provinces, in Estonia, had studied agriculture in Holstein, managed a farm in Anhalt, served in the Finnish Army during the war against Russia in 1919, becoming as a result a Finnish citizen, and had then entered the Veteran Hospital of Helsinki suffering from rheumatic fever. It was here that his outstanding gift for massage had been discovered. He had determined to make healing through massage his career, labouring, he claimed, as a longshoreman and dishwasher in order to pay for his medical studies. He had first gone to Berlin in 1922; there he had studied at the University and then trained under the celebrated Chinese physician, Dr Ko. Kersten claimed that Dr Ko ‘declared he had never met anyone with hands like mine. He said my sense of touch was nothing
short of miraculous.’ So great was the Chinese doctor’s confidence in Kersten that he allowed him to take over his practice in Berlin when he returned to China in 1925.

  Kersten delighted in attending the distinguished patients who sought him out, and had established himself at The Hague at the personal invitation of Prince Henry of the Netherlands, who had become one of his patients in 1928. In 1934 he had bought his German estate of Hartzwalde some forty miles north of Berlin, intending eventually to return and become a ‘gentleman farmer’. In 1937 he had married a beautiful girl from Silesia who was barely half his age.

  This was the man who on 10 March 1939 had first met Himmler, and had been more than surprised to find him a ‘narrow-chested, weak-chinned, spectacled man with an ingratiating smile’. Left for a few minutes among Himmler’s books, he had seen many volumes on German and medieval history, on Henry the Fowler and Genghis Khan, and on Mohammed and the Mohammedan faith. In his bedroom, he saw that Himmler was reading the Koran in a German translation, a book he kept constantly by him. Kersten, a man of the world, had thought him at the time ‘a pedant, a mystic, and bookish’. Moreover, ‘his hands were soft’.

  At the first examination they discussed his symptoms, the immediate cause of which appeared to be ptomaine poisoning that had excited an old nervous complaint originating from severe typhoid fever contracted during the First World War. As a child, Kersten learned, Himmler had suffered from paratyphoid, and as a youth from dysentery and jaundice. Kersten turned back Himmler’s shirt and felt the sensitive area round his stomach. His touch, Himmler said, was ‘like balm’, and he urged Kersten to treat him. Kersten realized he could bring Himmler temporary relief, but never cure him.

  Kersten was a man who combined a profound dedication to his unique skill as a masseur with a desire for wealth and social success. He was a fortunate man, whose great gift of healing brought him the gratitude of many people who were in a position to give him the kind of life the more worldly side of his nature enjoyed. His successful treatment of Rosterg, a German potash magnate, had enabled him to acquire his estate of Hartzwalde when Rosterg had given him 100,000 marks. It was at Rosterg’s earnest request that he had first agreed to examine Himmler in 1939.

  Before the war began, Kersten had attended him both in Berlin and at Gmund and had grown familiar with the weak and opinionated nature of his patient. He knew that Himmler wanted war as much as Hitler, and he had already learnt how to argue with him on such subjects unscathed. Kersten was, however, notoriously without interest in politics; but he was, after all, not German, and therefore immune from German law and discipline. He could still have withdrawn from treating Himmler when war began, as his wife and friends begged him to do. But when he sought the advice of his contacts in the diplomatic corps at the Finnish Embassy in Berlin, they urged him to stay with Himmler, whose conversation after treatment, free from any sense of discretion, might well prove of the greatest value if what he revealed were passed on to the Embassy. Irmgard Kersten, who was German, liked best to live at Hartzwalde, and when Stalin overran Estonia, Kersten’s native land, and declared war on Finland, the country whose nationality he had taken, it was to Hartzwalde that Kersten brought his father, who was approaching ninety, to live out his life in Germany.

  Himmler was not in a position to force Kersten to attend him until the spring of 1940, when he confined him to Hartzwalde and refused him a visa to return to his patients in Holland. A few days later it was Himmler who broke the news to him that Germany had invaded Holland; he had been refused his visa to protect him from the consequences of the invasion. Again the officials at the Finnish Embassy urged him to stay with Himmler rather than leave Germany. This contact with Himmler, they said, was work that could be of the greatest national importance.

  On 15 May 1940 Kersten had received his first order to join Himmler’s armoured train and attend the Reichsführer as his official staff doctor. Here he had treated Brandt, Himmler’s secretary, as well as Himmler, and begun another association at headquarters of which he was later to make full use. But from the summer of 1940 until the autumn of 1943, when he managed to persuade Himmler to let him live in Stockholm, he was in effect at the Reichsführer’s complete disposal, though he treated such other patients as he could reach in Germany. Himmler demanded that he give up his home and contacts in The Hague. His services even became a point of barter between Ciano and Himmler, and Kersten won from Himmler the most unusual privilege of using the Reichsführer’s own postal channel for private correspondence, an arrangement supposed to be connected with his love affairs. In fact he used it for keeping in touch with his underground contacts in Holland.

  It was in August 1940 that he obtained his first release for a man in a concentration camp — one of Rosterg’s servants who had been imprisoned solely for political reasons. Later, before leaving Holland, he had secured the release of one of his friends, an antiquarian called Bignell, on the strength of a telephone call to Himmler, who was at the time in urgent need of treatment. Kersten soon learned the technique of flattering Himmler and appealing to the right side of his vanity in these moments when, through the relief he could bring, he had the upper hand. The requests gradually became habitual; as Himmler put it himself: ‘Kersten massages a life out of me with every rub.’ Heydrich and the leaders of the S.S. grew jealous of this alien influence in Himmler’s private life. Only Kersten’s special place in Himmler’s favour spared him from interrogation and arrest by the Gestapo; Heydrich’s suspicions of him never relaxed.

  The concentration camps remained directly under Himmler’s control. At the beginning of the war, according to Kogon, there were more than a hundred camps with their numerous satellites, though Dachau remained the symbol for all. Other large camps included Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, Flossenbürg, Ravensbrück for women, and Mauthausen near Linz, in Austria. At the height of the war there were some thirty principal camps, some being nominally more rigorous than others. After the war had begun, new camps were set up in the occupied territories, such as Auschwitz and Lublin in Poland and Natzweiler in the Vosges, while others, such as Bergen-Belsen, were established in Germany. Kogon estimates that not less than a million people were held in the camps at any one time during the war, with an increasing flow both in and out as the exterminators developed the pace of their work.

  Discipline was constantly tightened. Hoess was still at Sachsenhausen when Himmler paid a visit unannounced during January 1940. He complained bitterly that a working party of prisoners and their guards had failed either to recognize him or salute when he had passed them in his car, and as a result of this incident the Commandant was dismissed. Six months later, in June 1940, Hoess was to be promoted Commandant of Himmler’s new camp at Auschwitz.

  The fact that a million men and women existed in the camps at Himmler’s mercy led in the first place to the organized medical experiments which, though practised on a relatively limited scale, seem more horrifying than the act of extermination itself. That some 350 qualified doctors (one doctor in every 300 then practising in Germany) should have been prepared to take active part in this fearful misuse of the bodies of helpless men and women seems a greater degradation of humanity than the spectacle of Hoess, the ex-criminal Commandant of Auschwitz, faithfully obeying his orders beside the gas-chambers.

  At a trial known as the Doctors’ Case and held before a Military Tribunal in Nuremberg from December 1946 to July 1947, twenty-three of these doctors were permitted to defend themselves before the court. The majority of the experiments undertaken by the doctors at the direct instigation of Himmler were in fact calculated murder under the guise of collecting medical data, and most of them meant the infliction of indescribable agonies on the patients. At their trial, the representative doctors who were accused of having done these things mustered their great excuse — the doctrine of obedience: ‘At that time I was Rascher’s subordinate. He was a staff surgeon of the Luftwaffe’ — and the doctrine of war, ‘the absolute necessity of vi
ctory in order to eliminate evil elements’. A professor who worked on the typhus vaccine experiments at Natzweiler defended his actions through which ninety-seven prisoners died by citing a single loss of life that had occurred among a group of men under sentence of death who had volunteered in America to assist in experiments to trace the cause of beri-beri fever.

  Himmler’s direct participation in this most cruel work is proved by surviving letters and memoranda.17 The principal experiments occurred during the period 1941—4. They began, as we have seen, with Himmler giving his consent as early as 1939 for the use of prisoners to test mustard gas and phosgene, tests which were later to be conducted by a Professor of Anatomy who held an officer’s rank in the S.S. These experiments were directly associated with Himmler’s Institute for Research and Study of Heredity, the Ahnenerbe, which was directed by Wolfram Sievers, a former bookseller, who on Himmler’s orders in July 1942 set up an Institute for Practical Research in Military Science as a department of Ahnenerbe. Sievers wrote to Hirt: ‘The Reichsführer S.S. would like to hear more details from you at an early date about your mustard-gas experiments … Could you not some day write a brief, secret report?’ These tests involved the infliction of burns on the victim’s body which spread from day to day and often led to blindness and death. Post-mortem examination revealed that the intestines and lungs were eaten away.

  Dr Sigmund Rascher, a former staff surgeon of the Luftwaffe and an officer in the S.S., had no difficulty in May 1941 in obtaining from Himmler, who had sent him flowers on the birth of his second son, the favour of having certain prisoners put at his disposal for his low-pressure, high-altitude experiments which, as he warned the Reichsführer S.S., would involve the risk of death. ‘I can inform you that prisoners will, of course, be gladly made available for the highflight researches’, wrote Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s secretary. There were additional reasons for Himmler’s interest in the doctor. Rascher’s mistress, who was fifteen years older than her lover, claimed she had given birth to three children after her forty-eighth year; she was also a personal friend of Marga Himmler. There were, it is true, certain racial difficulties in her ancestry which had prevented her marriage until Himmler intervened to clear the way for her, and he willingly became the godfather of Rascher’s remarkable offspring.