Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  Hoess represents himself as a simple, virtuous man who liked hard work and soldiering, and felt oppressed by the criminal underworld with which he was forced to associate.27 At Dachau he disliked the methods used by Eicke, and while confessing that his ‘sympathies lay too much with the prisoner’, he admits that he ‘had become too fond of the black uniform’ to admit his inadequacy and relinquish the work. ‘I wished to appear hard’, he writes, ‘lest I should appear weak.’ When he went to Sachsenhausen as an adjutant, he took charge of the execution of an S.S. officer who by an act of humanity had let a prisoner escape. ‘I was so agitated’, he recalls, ‘that I could hardly hold the pistol to his head when giving him the coup de grace.’ But executions became a matter of routine, and Hoess learned to hide his head in the sands of obedience. His exemplary conduct led to his promotion as Commandant of Auschwitz. Here, he says, ‘I lived only for my work… I was absorbed, I might say obsessed… Every fresh difficulty only increased my zeal.’ But this idealism was betrayed by the ‘general untrustworthiness that surrounded me’. His staff, he claimed, let him down, and he became powerless against the corruption and ill-will of his subordinates. He took discreetly to drink; his wife tried to help him by building up a social life in their home at the camp, but ‘all human emotions were forced into the background’.

  In November 1940 Hoess reported his plans for Auschwitz to Himmler, who brushed aside his Commandant’s fears and grievances, and only became interested when the discussion turned on making Auschwitz into an agricultural research station, with laboratories, plant nurseries and facilities for stock breeding. As for the prisoners and their welfare, Hoess was left to ‘improvise’ as best he could. It was not until March the following year that Himmler paid a visit to the camp, accompanied by his officials and some ‘high executives of I.G. Farben Industrie’. Glücks, the Inspector of Concentration Camps, arrived in advance and ‘constantly warned me against reporting anything disagreeable to the Reichsführer S.S.’ When Hoess tried to impress on him the desperate overcrowding and lack of drainage or water supply, Himmler merely replied that the camp was to be enlarged to take 100,000 prisoners, so as to supply labour contingents to I.G. Farben Industrie. As to Hoess, he must continue to improvise.

  This was the man to whom Himmler entrusted his special confidence in June 1941 when, as Hoess put it, he ‘gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place… By the will of the Reichsführer S.S., Auschwitz became the greatest human extermination centre of all time.’

  According to Hoess’s detailed account of this meeting, Himmler explained to him that he had chosen Auschwitz ‘because of its good position as regards communications and because the area can be easily isolated and camouflaged’. He told him that Eichmann would come to Auschwitz and give him secret instructions about the equipment that would have to be installed. Hoess has left a full and frank account of the experiments for which he and Eichmann were responsible and which had led to the construction of the gas-chambers during the following winter. By the spring of 1942 the organized killings were to begin as a routine operation at Auschwitz; Russian prisoners-of-war were used during the test period. ‘The killing… did not cause me much concern at the time’, wrote Hoess. ‘I must even admit that this gassing set my mind at rest.’ Hoess did not relish the violence of the blood-bath caused by other forms of killing, and Himmler had warned him that trainloads of deported Jews would soon be on their way.

  It has been suggested that Himmler deliberately chose a camp in Poland as the principal centre for genocide in order that German soil should not be contaminated by the destruction of so much impure flesh.28 Other subsidiary centres of mass extermination were also set up in Poland, such as Treblinka. Auschwitz, however, had the double task of providing forced labour for synthetic coal and rubber plants built in the district by I.G. Farben while at the same time preparing for human mass destruction. Hoess, far more anxious to fulfil his quota of death than to send slave labour to factories at some distance from the camp, went to visit the Commandant of Treblinka: ‘He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas and I did not think his methods were very efficient’, wrote Hoess after the war.

  A vast mass of documents — statements by innumerable witnesses, the endless records of the interrogations and the examinations conducted before and during the war crime trials — have become the basis for many studies of the extermination and concentration camps during the peak period of the war. What emerges from these terrible, pitiful stories, which few read except for scholars and research workers, is the sheer muddle in which this carnage was conducted. The administrators such as Eichmann and Hoess were in the end utterly unable to control the grafters and the sadists on whom they had to depend to carry out the work of the camps, the selection and destruction of the victims and the mass cremation of the bodies. The S.S. élite, living in their barracks or married quarters nearby, either took no part in the proceedings or remained as aloof as possible from the hell they had created and which it was their duty to maintain. The bodily control of the captives passed increasingly into the hands of the Kapos, who were hardened criminals or renegade prisoners; their conduct was in the end far more savage than that of the S.S., whose morale grew slack in the increasing chaos as the tide of the war turned against the Nazis. On top of this morass of suffering sat Himmler at his desk, doing what he conceived to be his duty in circumstances of increasing strain and difficulty.

  From September 1941, Eichmann took full charge of the extermination schedules, drafting orders for Heydrich, controlling the transportation of the Jewish population and organizing a succession of conferences at which the detailed administration of death was determined. But on 27 September Heydrich achieved a major promotion. He was appointed Acting Reich Protector in Czechoslovakia, displacing von Neurath, who was weak and ailing. He was promoted S.S. General, and gained in one step the rank and privileges of a Minister. After the comparative poverty of his position in Germany under Himmler, he could now live in luxury in Prague.

  It seems clear that Bormann, Heydrich’s principal ally among Hitler’s close advisers, had encouraged this appointment rather than Himmler who, according to Schellenberg, was ‘not enthusiastic about it’ but decided not to stand in the way because he did not want to offend Bormann. There could be no clearer indication than this of the ascendancy of Bormann at Hitler’s court since Hess’s sudden flight to Scotland the previous May; for Himmler himself was in high favour with the Führer, while Goring, owing to his growing self-indulgence and the failure of the Luftwaffe to maintain its aggressive reputation, was losing his former influence. In many respects Himmler was becoming the most powerful man in Germany under Hitler, though he never made a display of his position in public. Power for him was always a secret force.

  His attitude to the new appointment of Heydrich was therefore a mixed one. He was no doubt pleased to have provided the Führer with a distinguished servant, and the affectionate feelings that he always had for his Nordic model were satisfied by his success; at the same time he regretted the measure of independence that Heydrich had now won, and the loss of his daily advice, on which Himmler had come absolutely to rely. Heydrich, however, had no intention of severing himself from his duties in Berlin, for he retained his office as head of R.S.H.A. and he travelled constantly between Prague and Germany. The register of phone-calls between Himmler’s office in Berlin and Heydrich’s in Prague is a further measure of the dependence of the Reichsführer S.S. on his energetic and decisive officer. There is no doubt, too, that Himmler felt some dismay at the progress of a man who he was intelligent enough to recognize was in certain respects his superior. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, he kept in the closest touch, and Heydrich’s departure for Prague was preceded by several conferences with Himmler, mostly about the Eastern Front.

  The departure of Heydrich for Prague was the cue for Schellenberg to change his allegi
ance. Schellenberg both admired and hated Heydrich, who he had reason to believe disliked him. Applying his professional subtlety to his master, he had climbed within seven years from a youthful apprentice attached to the S.S. to become, on the day Russia was invaded, head of Amt. VI, the Foreign Intelligence Service of the S.D. A born intriguer, he saw that it would now be wise to reorientate his services in the direction of Himmler; he realized that in some respects he might perhaps be able to replace Heydrich as Himmler’s special confidant, in spite of the fact that he was so different in character. As he put it himself: ‘Many of my opponents spread the libel that I was really Heydrich’s “double”… However, in time this malevolent propaganda faded away, and a new myth was discovered in which Heydrich was replaced by Himmler.’ Schellenberg claims that he was given the responsibility of drafting Hitler’s proclamation to the German people about the war on Russia, working against time through the night while Himmler and Heydrich besieged him with ‘phone calls. ‘Himmler made me nervous’, wrote Schellenberg. ‘As soon as Hitler asked him a question or said something to him, he would run to the telephone and bombard me with questions and advice.’ Schellenberg was already beginning to enjoy the experience of Himmler’s dependence upon him, and his promotion followed rapidly.

  Appointed Acting Head of the S.D. Foreign Intelligence Service on 22 June, the day Russia was invaded, Schellenberg spent the next two months in preparing a memorandum on the Political Secret Service abroad which, when it was completed, apparently impressed the Reichsführer S.S. sufficiently for him to impose it on the leadership of the S.S. and the Party in the form of an order, thus, as Schellenberg puts it, ‘acting as a propagandist for my ideas’. During the next four years Schellenberg was to draw very close to Himmler and, in the guise of his special adviser, try to make him adopt policies and lines of action originating in his own devious brain.

  He enjoyed the fruits of office in forms which might even seem exaggerated for a secret agent in an American thriller. He describes with glowing excitement the luxurious carpets in his executive suite, the trolley-table holding his telephones and linking him direct to Hitler’s Chancellery, the microphones concealed at every point of the compass, in the walls and lamps and under the desk, the alarms controlled by photo-electric cells, the big mahogany desk with its built-in automatic guns which could spray the room with bullets. Guards could be summoned at the press of a button to surround the building and block the exits, while his car was equipped with a short-wave transmitter through which he could reach his office and dictate to his secretary. Even his own body was equipped for sudden death; when engaged on missions abroad, he wore an artificial tooth containing enough poison to kill him in thirty seconds.

  Since July Himmler had spent a considerable time during the summer at the Russian front. He had set up his headquarters in the Soviet Military Academy at Zhitomir in the Ukraine, a hundred miles north of Hitler’s headquarters known as Werwolf at Winnitsa. From Zhitomir, Himmler kept in touch with the work of the Action Groups and the Police and, to a lesser extent, with the Waffen S.S., whose four famous divisions, the Adolf Hitler (formerly the Leibstandarte), the Das Reich, the Death’s Head and the Viking, fought brilliantly during the campaign until the reverses of the winter led to serious losses. But what Himmler was primarily concerned with was the work of the Action Groups behind the front, whose massacres of Jews, gypsies and political commissars began as soon as prisoners fell into the hands of the advancing Germans.

  Heydrich, meanwhile, was dividing his attention between his duties in Berlin and in Prague, where, after initiating a brief, punitive reign of terror against the resistance movement immediately on his arrival in Czechoslovakia, he made it clear to the puppet government under President Hacha that he now expected maximum co-operation with Germany.29 Heydrich’s intentions in Czechoslovakia were in line with Himmler’s policy for Eastern Europe: the extermination of undesirable racial elements and the Germanisation of the rest of the Czechs and their territory; this policy had been determined in 1940, a year before Heydrich’s appointment, and approved by Hitler in full consultation with the Sudeten German Karl Hermann Frank, who was now S.S. commandant for Prague. On 2 October, Heydrich outlined his plans at a secret conference of Nazi administrators in Prague. Bohemia was by right German territory, and was to be re-settled by Germans; the Czech people of good race would be Germanized, the rest exterminated or sterilized. He then outlined the permanent racial plan for Europe, through which the Nordic races of Germanic origin would be federated under German control: ‘It is clear that we must find an entirely different way in which to treat these peoples from that used for peoples of other races, the Slavs and so on. The Germanic race must be seized firmly but justly; they must be humanely led in a similar way to our own people, if we want to keep them permanently in the Reich and to merge them with us.’

  In this, Heydrich was echoing the thoughts of Himmler. As the Germans moved east, he said, they would turn the inferior races they did not destroy into helot armies, stretching from the Atlantic seaboard to the Ural mountains, to protect the Greater Reich from the peoples of Asia. The East, with its slave labour, would produce the food for the Aryan West.

  In his dealings with the Czechs, Heydrich added, it would be wise to practise a certain tact now that the strong arm of the S.S. was being shown. ‘I personally, for example,’ he said, ‘shall maintain pleasant social relations with these Czechs, but I will be careful not to cross certain barriers.’ He then concluded with a careful reference to the Final Solution (Endlösung), warning his listeners to keep the matter to themselves; he would need, he said, a complete racial picture of the Czech people obtained by compiling under various guises a national register of the entire population:

  ‘For those of good race and well intentioned the matter will be very simple — they will be Germanized. The others — those of inferior racial origin with hostile intentions — these people I must get rid of. There is plenty of space in the East for them… During the short time I shall probably be here I shall be able to lay many foundation stones in the affairs of the nation.’

  Heydrich, less than a week after taking up his appointment, was already speaking like an established Nazi leader. Though the ideas he put forward were those familiar enough in Himmler’s mythology, he spoke now in the first person. In the signal he had sent by teleprinter to Hitler’s headquarters in Russia on 27 September notifying his arrival in Prague, he had ended by making it quite clear that ‘all political reports and messages will reach you by the hand of Reichsführer Bormann’. There was no longer any question that he would communicate with the Führer through Himmler; according to Schellenberg, who had been invited by Heydrich to celebrate the news of his appointment over a bottle of champagne, Bormann had told Heydrich the Führer had greater responsibilities in store for him if he were successful in Czechoslovakia. He believed, therefore, as he had said at the secret conference in Prague, that he would not be in Czechoslovakia for long. He was, after all, still head of R.S.H.A., and he had no intention of cutting himself off from Berlin. A ’plane stood by constantly to carry him to and from Germany, but he took his wife and children to Prague and installed them in the beautiful and luxurious country seat assigned to the Protector at Panenske-Breschen, twelve miles from the capital. As a bribe for good conduct he increased the rations of Czech workers and adopted the pose, once the initial purge was over, of being Czechoslovakia’s friend while attempting to increase the efficiency of her industry for the benefit of Germany. In spite of his ceaseless schedule of work, the regular journeys to Berlin, the frequent visits to Hitler in the Ukraine, he made a point of appearing to patronize the arts in Prague while subsidizing the performance of German opera.

  Reinhard Heydrich

  Walter Schellenberg

  Himmler was constantly in touch with him, and it was Heydrich, not Himmler, who controlled the lunch conference organized by Eichmann on 20 January 1942 at Wannsee, at which the various phases of the Final Solution wer
e debated with the usual cynical circumlocution. The various claims of death by overwork, deportation to the East, sterilization and extermination were gone over for the 11 million Jews and part-Jews whom Heydrich estimated lived in Europe both within and beyond the territories under Nazi rule. The only Jews to be spared temporarily were those engaged in war work, at the urgent request of Goring’s Ministry. Everyone present, leaders of the S.S. and government officials alike, pledged their assistance, and Thierack, the Minister of Justice, formally blessed the proposals and surrendered all jurisdiction over the Jews to the S.S. Cognac was served and the speakers grew loud and merry. Heydrich who, according to Eichmann when testifying in 1961 at Jerusalem, summoned the conference out of vanity and a desire to consolidate his power over the fate of the Jews, then left for Prague, where on 4 February he called another secret conference of his assistants in order to explain his long-term plan for Czechoslovakia; mass deportations of the millions who were not selected for Germanization. Under guise of a nation-wide check for tuberculosis conducted by racial specialists, the first steps in the national racial survey were begun.

  With equal speed, Eichmann set about his work. On 6 March he held a conference to resolve the difficult transport problems connected with the evacuation of the Jews to the east and to debate the problem of organizing the sterilization of Jews involved in mixed marriages and their offspring. Heydrich, confined now for longer periods in Prague, left R.S.H.A. matters to Eichmann and his staff. In the spring, when Schellenberg was visiting him, he seemed more than ordinarily worried. Hitler, he said, ‘was relying more and more on Himmler, who… could exploit his present influence with the Führer.’ He no longer seemed willing to accept Heydrich’s advice, and Bormann, he now felt, was jealous of him and hostile. ‘Apparently there had been differences between him and Himmler, who had become jealous.’ Both Bormann and Himmler resented the fact that Hitler had been prepared to confer with Heydrich alone, and Heydrich was certain by now that Bormann, his former supporter, was starting an intrigue against him.