Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  Himmler’s differences with the other leaders, particularly with Göring and Ribbentrop, were caused by his encroachments on what they regarded as their privileged territory. Himmler’s information services were in some ways superior to those of either Goring or Ribbentrop because the men he employed, such as Schellenberg, were often of superior skill and intelligence. At the time of the Battle of Britain, Himmler’s assessment of British aircraft production was over double that of Goring, whose easy optimism that he could destroy the Royal Air Force in a matter of days was partly based on his estimate that the output of planes in Britain was only some 300 a month. Goring did not welcome the challenge of such contradicting figures, nor did Ribbentrop approve of Himmler’s interference in foreign affairs. They differed in 1940 over policy in Rumania, and in October Himmler was sent by Hitler on a further mission to Spain to try to involve Franco in the war. During the same period he went to Norway to strengthen the campaign against the growing resistance movement; he introduced the fearful system of persecuting men and women opposed to Germany by arresting their dependent kinsfolk and children and holding them as hostages.

  Ribbentrop equally resented the extension of Himmler’s Intelligence services abroad under Schellenberg, and his attempts to influence German policy in the occupied countries. The breach in the relations between the two ministers came to a head in the winter of 1941-2, when, according to Frau von Ribbentrop, Himmler even ‘tried to enlist my husband in his personal intrigues… My husband considered it impossible from the point of view of foreign relations that Himmler should succeed Hitler’. Ribbentrop in his Memoirs summarized his points of difference with Himmler at the time, including among them Himmler’s uncompromising attitude to freemasonry and the Church, his treatment of the Jews, and his evil influence in such countries as France, Denmark and Hungary. He complained that his ambassadors were kept under surveillance by the S.D., and that secret reports on them were sent direct to the Führer. Ribbentrop bitterly resented the fact that this was done behind his back, especially when these reports led Hitler to take decisions based on what he called ‘false information’. He complains that in Rumania, for example, Himmler supported Horia Sima after he had decided in conference with Hitler that the man they should support was Antonescu.18

  In an attempt to force Ribbentrop’s hand, Schellenberg contrived one of those Machiavellian tricks in which he took such delight in order to discredit Ribbentrop’s own secret service. He was, he claimed, under instruction from Himmler ‘to do my best to destroy this organization.’ He succeeded in feeding certain of Ribbentrop’s agents with false information about the Polish Government in exile in London, and then sat back to count the days until the erroneous reports arrived on Ribbentrop’s desk and were duly forwarded to the Führer. Such tactics were hardly calculated to bring Ribbentrop and Himmler closer in their personal relations.

  In January 1941, Himmler made an effort to extend his power and that of Heydrich over the German Courts of Justice by asking Hitler to hand over their control from the Ministry of Justice to Frick’s Ministry of the Interior, where the Secretary of State, Wilhelm Stuckart, was a member of the S.S. and under Himmler’s influence. Hitler, wary as ever when asked to dispose of power, failed to respond, and the courts themselves remained outside the control of the Gestapo until the end of the war.

  Himmler’s control of criminals and political police affairs was, however, complete. Each Gau, or administrative province in Germany, had its Higher S.S. Leader, the counterpart of the Nazi Gauleiter himself but directly responsible to Himmler and Heydrich. As the rule of the Reich spread, these S.S. Leaders were appointed in places as far apart as Oslo and Athens, Warsaw and The Hague. In Russia they were attached to each of the Army Groups. These men were supreme in all matters which they were able to call criminal and political, and answerable only to their headquarters in Berlin.

  More complicated by now were his relations with Heydrich, who, when he had left his desk in May 1940 to fly with the Luftwaffe over the stricken people of France, had only himself two years left to live. Of these the first fifteen months were to be spent in preparing the Action Groups for the war against Russia in the summer of 1941 and in perfecting the extermination system in the camps set aside for that purpose by Himmler, while the last nine months were spent in his duties as Reich Protector in Czechoslovakia, where he was to be assassinated in May 1942. During this time it is plain that he considered himself Hitler’s favourite, ear-marked for promotion to a ministerial level, outflanking Himmler in the movement to the top of the hierarchy. Meanwhile Himmler was treated as an ally by his most powerful subordinate, and they worked closely together on the plans to take control of Russia.

  On 13 March 1941 Hitler issued a directive signed by Keitel concerning the coming campaign in the East. This directive disturbed the High Command; it stated that ‘in the area of operations the Reichsführer S.S. is entrusted, on behalf of the Führer, with special tasks for the preparation of the political administration, tasks which result from the struggle which has to be carried out between two opposing political systems. Within the scope of these tasks, the Reichsführer S.S. shall act independently and under his own responsibility.’19 Not content with giving Himmlerthe task of purging Communism from Russia, and Goring, as plenipotentiary of the Four Year Economic Plan, responsibility for stripping individual territories of food and other products valuable to Germany, Hitler the following month suddenly salvaged Alfred Rosenberg, the old-time Party intellectual, and appointed him Minister for the future occupied territories of the East, an appointment so ludicrous that it can only be explained as a formal attempt to counter the combined and growing power of Himmler and Heydrich or the potential greed of Goring’s agents.

  During the period of intense preparations for the invasion of Russia, which were developed at the same time as those for the mass extermination of the unwanted peoples, Himmler and Heydrich had to establish plans for the Action Groups which would be acceptable on the one hand to the Army and, nominally at least, to Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg constantly tried to intervene in the plans that Heydrich was preparing, though Himmler contemptuously ignored his existence. These differences brought Heydrich and Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful aide, closer together, for Bormann disapproved of Rosenberg, who had wild ideas of playing the part of a Baltic-German liberator of the Russian people from Soviet tyranny. As for the Army, Schellenberg was required in June to use his legal diplomacy in order to negotiate suitable terms with General Wagner, representing the High Command; the plan he devised and which was finally signed released the Security Police and the S.D. from Army control outside the immediate fighting area, leaving them free to conduct the campaign in their own way. The Army, in fact, was expected to assist them in carrying out their atrocities.

  When the invasion, after much postponement, finally came on 22 June 1941, Heydrich once more disappeared in order to fly with the Luftwaffe, and his plane on one occasion was seriously damaged by Russian flak. He managed to bring the aircraft back near the German lines, and landed it, crawling to safety with his leg injured. This exploit won him the Iron Cross, First Class, from Hitler, but Himmler must have been distraught at the news of the danger he had been in. While Heydrich flew on his missions over Soviet territory, his Action Groups began their fearful massacres, shooting, hanging and terrorizing prisoners, Communist officials and partisans, as well as whole Jewish and gypsy communities.

  After the war, Otto Ohlendorf, one of Himmler’s intellectuals and an officer in charge of an Action Group, made a sworn statement which reveals in terrible detail how these commando security squadrons went to work:

  ‘In June 1941 I was appointed by Himmler to lead one of the special action groups which were then being formed to accompany the German armies in the Russian campaign… Himmler stated that an important part of our task consisted in the extermination of Jews — women, men and children — and of communist functionaries. I was informed of the attack on Russia about four week
s in advance… When the German army invaded Russia, I was leader of the Action Group D in the Southern Sector;… it liquidated approximately 90,000 men, women and children… in the implementation of this extermination programme… The unit selected… would enter a village or city and order the prominent Jewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of resettlement. They were requested to hand over their valuables … and shortly before execution to surrender their outer clothing. The men, women and children were led to a place of execution which in most cases was located next to a more deeply excavated anti-tank ditch. Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, and the corpses thrown into the ditch… In the spring of 1942 we received gas vehicles from the Chief of the Security Police and the S.D. in Berlin… We had received orders to use the vans for the killing of women and children. Whenever a unit had collected a sufficient number of victims, a van was sent for their liquidation.’20

  Later in his statement, Ohlendorf said that he was prepared to confirm the affidavit given by another Action Group commander that he had been responsible for the deaths of 135,000 Jews and Communists during ‘the first four months of the programme’.

  The ferocity with which Hitler, Goring and Himmler planned their assault on Russia is unique in history. Goring, in a directive to his agents dated 23 May 1941, the first of the series that were to make up the notorious Green File on the economic exploitation of Russia, spoke of ‘the famine which undoubtedly will take place’, and accepted as inevitable that ‘many tens of millions of people in this area will become redundant’. So enthusiastic was Himmler to equip his men for Russia that as early as February he had made a special journey to Norway, where he travelled to the northern areas to visit his police units and to survey the needs for campaigning during the Russian winter. When he came back, he ordered Pohl to obtain the currency to buy stoves and furs in Norway for his men.

  In March, the following month, Himmler summoned Heydrich, Daluege, Berger and a number of senior officers to his retreat at Wewelsburg. Wolff was also present, and so was Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, an expert on partisan warfare who was later to be called as a witness for the prosecution before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. According to Bach-Zelewski, Himmler declared at this secret conference that one of the aims of the Russian campaign was ‘to decimate the Slav population by thirty millions’.21 Wolff prefers to remember this statement in another form, namely that Himmler considered war with Russia would result in millions of dead.

  The decision to adopt genocide as an active and fully organized policy in the purification of Europe for the ‘Aryan’ race was undoubtedly reached in 1941. There is a fundamental distinction between the practice of genocide and the callous and deliberate cruelties that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of unwanted people from the time of the occupation of Poland and the exchanges of population that followed. Wolff declares that Himmler was deeply oppressed by the decision that he was to be ultimately responsible for this crime, the greatest that any one man has ever committed in recorded history against his fellows. Kersten confirms this.22 The decision in favour of genocide was preceded by a vaguely conceived ‘final solution’ in the form of despatching millions of the European ‘sub-humans’ to Madagascar, following an enforced agreement with the French to use the island for this purpose; this idea had sprung from the early policy of encouraging Jewish emigration from Germany during the middle ’thirties. The Madagascar project, first discussed openly in 1938, was kept alive (in theory, at least) until the end of 1940, since during that year Eichmann himself was detailed to prepare a plan to set up an autonomous Jewish reserve under a German police-governor on the island, to which some four million Jews should be sent. Both Heydrich and Himmler approved the plan, but according to the Dutch edition of Kersten’s Memoirs, Hitler had already abandoned this idea shortly after the capitulation of France, and had told Himmler he would have to undertake the progressive extermination of European Jewry.23 It was not, however, until February 1942 that what was by then the fiction of the Madagascar project was officially abandoned in a memorandum sent by Hitler to the Foreign Office.

  The decision to practise organized mass extermination, a national policy of genocide, seems to have been arrived at only after secret discussions which were inevitably dominated by Hitler. According to both Wolff and Kersten, Himmler was often very disturbed during this period, as if absorbed in a problem he was unable to discuss with anyone around him.

  During the summer a firm decision was reached. On 31 July 1941, Goring sent his carefully worded directive to Heydrich, who was entrusted with the administrative planning for the extermination.

  ‘Supplementing the task that was assigned to you on 24 January 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions, I herewith instruct you to make all necessary preparations as regards organizational, financial and material matters for a total solution [Gesamtlösung] of the Jewish question within the area of German influence in Europe… I instruct you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan showing the measure for organization and for action necessary to carry out the desired final solution [Endlösung] of the Jewish question.’24

  According to Lammers, Head of the Reich Chancellery, while giving evidence at the Nuremberg Trial, the nature of the final as distinct from the total solution was made known to Heydrich by Goring verbally. There can be little doubt that Heydrich knew it in any case, and he appointed Adolf Eichmann his principal deputy in the matter. Eichmann was also responsible to Himmler, who had retained his direct control over the concentration camps, some of which were to be set aside as centres for extermination. Giving evidence at his trial in Israel in 1961, Eichmann claimed that even as late as November 1941 he ‘did not know any details of the plan’, but that he ‘knew one was being drawn’.25

  Heydrich’s assistant, Wisliceny, gave evidence at Nuremberg in January 1946 which implied that Eichmann received definite orders from Himmler during the spring of 1942. At a meeting in Eichmann’s office at the ‘end of July or the beginning of August’, the killing of Jews in Poland was discussed:

  ‘Eichmann told me he could show me this order in writing if it would soothe my conscience. He took a small volume of documents from his safe, turned over the pages and showed me a letter from Himmler to the Chief of the Security Police and the S.D. The gist of the letter was something as follows: the Führer had ordered the “final solution” of the Jewish question; the Chief of the Security Police and the S.D., and the Inspector of the Concentration Camps were entrusted with carrying out this so-called “final solution”. All Jewish men and women who were able to work were to be temporarily exempted from the so-called “final solution” and used for work in the concentration camps. This letter was signed by Himmler in person. I could not possibly be mistaken, since Himmler’s signature was well known to me.’26

  This order, said Wisliceny, was sent by Himmler to Heydrich and to the Inspector of the Concentration Camps; it was classified top secret and dated April 1942. Eichmann went on to explain that ‘the planned biological destruction of the Jewish race in the Eastern territories was disguised by the wording “final solution”…’ and that he personally ‘was entrusted with the execution of this order’.

  Long after the final decision had been taken, Himmler remained deeply oppressed. During a period of treatment by Kersten in Berlin, he admitted on 11 November after considerable pressure that the destruction of the Jews was being planned. When Kersten expressed his horror, Himmler became defensive — the Jews had to be finally eradicated, he said, since they had been and would always be the cause of intolerable strife in Europe. Just as the Americans had exterminated the Indians, so the Germans must wipe out the Jews. But in spite of his arguments, Himmler could not hide the disturbance of his conscience, and a few days later he admitted that ‘the extermination of people is unGermanic’.

  Auschwitz, near Cracow in Poland, became the principa
l centre for Himmler’s extermination plan. It had once been the site of an Austrian military encampment built on marshy ground, where winter fog rose from the damp earth. Himmler transformed this military establishment into a concentration camp for the Poles, and it was officially opened on 14 June 1940, with Lieutenant Rudolf Hoess as its first Commandant. Joseph Kramer, who later had charge of Belsen, was his adjutant.

  Hoess, who became one of Himmler’s most closely trusted agents, was to survive the collapse of Germany. Although held prisoner in May 1945, his true identity was not suspected until some months after his initial release. When he was once more taken into custody, he admitted his identity and signed a statement on 16 March in which he declared: ‘I personally arranged on orders received from Himmler in May 1941 the gassing of 2 million persons between June-July 1941 and the end of 1943, during which time I was Commandant of Auschwitz.’ He was very frank and co-operative, giving his lethal evidence at Nuremberg with all the impersonal self-confidence of a good and modest steward. Later he was handed over to the Polish authorities and while waiting his trial wrote in longhand his autobiography, perhaps the most incredible document to come from any Nazi agent. While, for example, Schellenberg relishes his intricate acts of espionage for Heydrich and Himmler, writing his story as if it were a thriller, Hoess is perpetually modest, melancholy and moralizing. The spirit of his Catholic upbringing taught him the supreme virtue of obedience.