Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  Meanwhile, Himmler had not been inactive in the north and west. In July 1942, at the height of the war, he paid a personal visit to Finland to try to enforce the deportation of more Jews. At the same time he visited Reval in Estonia, and from there sent a firm directive to Berger, his liaison officer at Rosenberg’s ministry controlling affairs in the eastern territories, in order to stop the publication of a decree which would give the ultimate authority to decide who was and who was not a Jew to Rosenberg’s Commissar-General and not to Himmler’s Security Police. Himmler wrote to Berger: ‘Do not publish the decree defining Jews. Such foolish precision ties our hands. The Eastern Territories will be freed of all Jews. I alone am responsible to the Führer and do not want any discussion.’

  In the west Himmler’s powers were far weaker; the principal German authority in France remained the Wehrmacht, through which the deportation of Jews had to be ordered. Although Jewish refugees rounded up in France were sent east, according to Reitlinger little more than one-sixth of the Jews with French nationality were deported during the years of occupation, though their persecution by other means was as intensive as Himmler’s, Heydrich’s and Eichmann’s agents could make it, particularly during the period of the round-up of 1942, which was undertaken nominally as reprisals for attacks on German soldiers. When the Germans occupied the Free Zone in November 1942, negotiations for handling the Jewish question had to be undertaken with the Italians, into whose area in the South of France the Jews poured from the north, and Eichmann’s attempts to secure them ended in almost total failure.

  In Holland, Himmler’s deportation orders worked more smoothly and almost three-quarters of the Jewish population were removed. On a report sent him by the S.S. Chief, Hans Rauter, about his deportation measures in September 1943, Himmler was able to scribble an approving Sehr gut. In Belgium, the impact of the S.S. was considerably lessened by the opposition to their extremism shown by General von Falkenhausen, the German Military Governor until his arrest in July 1944. In Denmark, Himmler’s anti-Jewish pressures were resisted with almost entire success; he attempted during 1943 to make Werner Best, formerly on Heydrich’s staff, then in Paris and now Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark, understand that the ‘final solution’ applied equally to Jews in the semi-neutral territory of Denmark as to those in the east. His persuasion, however, did not reach the point of action until the period in August 1943 when martial law had to be proclaimed following riots in the docks of Odense, action by the resistance movement in Copenhagen and the revolt of the small Danish fleet. Himmler, who had by this time become Minister of the Interior, used this unrest to insist throngh Ribbentrop that Best start at once to seize the Danish Jews and deport them to the east. There then followed the usual unseemly evasions of responsibility in which so many administrators became expert during the latter years of the war, when the possibilities of defeat and future reprisals began increasingly to influence their actions; the round-up of Jews became, in effect, a token affair that provided ample opportunities for saving Jewish life in a country which did everything it could to protect the Jews or evacuate them to Sweden. Himmler was finally persuaded that Denmark was ‘Jew-free’ only after Best had done everything he could to encourage the Jews to escape. In Norway, where conditions were far less favourable for diplomatic hedging than in Denmark, two-thirds of the small Jewish population managed to elude Himmler, many escaping over the border into Sweden.

  The main resistance to Himmler’s obsessions occurred in the south, for the Italians were never won over to anti-Semitism; in any case there were barely 50,000 Jews living in Italy. The Italians had refused to co-operate in the South of France, and Eichmann was forced to complain once more of their ‘sabotage’ in Greece and Yugoslavia. Although Mussolini had created his own anti-Jewish laws in 1938 under the influence of Hitler, he did not want to become implicated in genocide. Himmler, as we have seen, was regarded by Hitler as a suitable envoy to negotiate with Mussolini, and he paid several state visits to the Duce, the last being in October 1942, of which no record survives that includes discussion of Jewish deportation. 14 Only when the Germans occupied Italy in September 1943 did Himmler gain direct access to those Jews who, having taken refuge in Rome, failed to escape the successive round-ups that followed in the capital and the north. In Yugoslavia and Greece, the proportion of Jewish losses by deportation were, in sharp contrast to Italy, extremely heavy.

  ‘In the spring of 1942 the first transports of Jews, all earmarked for extermination, arrived from Upper Silesia’, wrote Hoess.15 They were taken across the meadows to Hoess’s new gas-chambers, told to undress because they were to be disinfected, then sealed in and killed:

  ‘There was no doubt in the mind of any of us that Hitler’s order had to be obeyed regardless, and that it was the duty of the S.S. to carry it out. Nevertheless we were all tormented by secret doubts… I had to exercise intense self-control in order to prevent my innermost doubts and feelings of oppression from becoming apparent… I had to watch coldly while the mothers with laughing or crying children went into the gas-chambers… My pity was so great that I longed to vanish from the scene: yet I might not show the slightest trace of emotion.’

  Hoess sat drinking deeply with Eichmann, trying to discover whether similar anxieties were to be found in him, but:

  ‘he showed that he was completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew on whom he could lay his hands … If I was deeply affected by some incident, I found it impossible to go back to my home and my family. I would mount my horse and ride until I had chased the terrible picture away. Often at night I would walk through the stables and seek relief among my beloved animals.’

  What is more revealing than these expressions of self-pity is the inability of Hoess to conceive the magnitude of the crime to which he was committed. His emotionalism, so evident throughout his writing, constantly falls ludicrously short of the nature of the tragedy which he is trying to describe, if not excuse. ‘I truly had no reason to complain that I was bored’, he says. ‘My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers… The prisoners never missed an opportunity to do some little act of kindness for my wife or children, thus attracting their attention. No former prisoner can ever say that he was in any way or at any time badly treated in our house.’ When offered the chance of moving to Sachsenhausen he says, ‘At first I felt unhappy at the prospect of uprooting myself,… but then I was glad to be free from it all.’ As his excuse for what he did he quotes the British saying, ‘My country, right or wrong’, but he lays the blame squarely on the desk of Heinrich Himmler, whom he calls ‘the crudest representative of the leadership principle’. ‘I was never cruel’, he declares, though he admits that his subordinates frequently were so; but he was, he claims, unable to stop them. The nature of these cruelties, practised by the sadists of the S.S. and the Kapos who enjoyed their absolute authority over the prisoners, has been described in detail by Kogon and many others who survived imprisonment in the camps.

  It is perhaps not surprising that after his initial visit in March 1941, Himmler saw the camp at Auschwitz only once more. This was in the summer of 1942, when he came to inspect constructional developments. According to Hoess, his interest lay solely in the agricultural and industrial plant. Nevertheless, he was shown something of the fearful living conditions of the prisoners and their subjection to disease and overcrowding. He was furious: ‘I want to hear no more about difficulties’, he said to Hoess. ‘An S.S. officer does not recognize difficulties; when they arise, his task is to remove them at once by his own efforts! How this is to be done is your worry and not mine!’ He contrasted the progress made by I.G. Farben in their structures; from the point of view of Hoess, Farben had the use of all the skilled labour and had priority over him for building materials.

  Then Himmler turned to other matters:

  ‘He watched the whole process of destruction of a transport of Jews which had just arrived. He also spent a short time watching the selection of the able-bodied Jews
, without making any objection. He made no remark about the process of extermination, but remained quite silent. While it was going on he unobtrusively observed the officers and junior officers engaged in the proceedings, including myself. He then went in to look at the synthetic rubber factory.’

  Hoess used every opportunity to voice his complaints, although he knew that ‘Himmler always found it more interesting and more pleasant to hear positives than negatives.’ At dinner, when Hoess told him many of his officers were utterly inadequate, Himmler merely replied that he must use more dogs. At a late-night party in the house of the local Gauleiter, with whom Himmler was staying, he became more amiable and talkative, ‘especially towards the ladies’. He even drank a few glasses of red wine. The following day he watched a female prisoner whipped in the women’s camp; he had in fact only the previous April personally ordered ‘intensified’ beatings of undisciplined prisoners. The beatings were administered on the naked buttocks of male and female alike, their bodies strapped down on wooden racks. Then, says Hoess, he ‘talked with some female Jehovah’s Witnesses and discussed with them their fanatical beliefs’.16 At a final conference with Hoess he told him he could do nothing to alleviate his difficulties; he would have to manage as best he could. Auschwitz must expand, work must be increased, prisoners who could not labour must be killed. Eichmann’s programme was to be intensified. He then promoted Hoess an S.S. Lieutenant-Colonel and flew back to Berlin. He would not see Auschwitz again.

  Though Auschwitz was Himmler’s principal death camp, there were others in Poland and Russia at which the organized gassing and shooting of Jews, Slavs and gypsies took place during the years 1942—4.

  In Auschwitz and its satellite, Auschwitz II at Birkenau, the massacres began in March 1942 and did not end until October 1944; the gas-chambers and crematoria, meticulously destroyed by Himmler in November 1944 in the face of the Russian advance, were buildings constructed in an area separated from the camp itself. The human destruction was held back by the limited capacity of these buildings and their equipment; the limit at Auschwitz, even after the construction of four new combined gas-chamber-crematoria in 1943 by Heinz Kammler, who was later to design the sites for the V-rockets, seems, according to Reitlinger, not to have exceeded some 6,000 prisoners a day. Another growing limitation was transport; the trains, their airless vans packed tight with prisoners, were shunted into sidings to avoid delay to rolling-stock with a higher war priority. Himmler and Eichmann might rage at the delays that impeded the purification of Europe, but Auschwitz before its closure consumed some two million people. Himmler’s mechanized massacres far exceeded those of his hero Genghis Khan.

  Himmler’s off-hand treatment of Hoess is evidence that by 1942 his positive interests lay elsewhere. This was the first year of reverses for Germany, both in North Africa and on the Russian front, while at home the intensity of the Allied bombing grew even greater.

  In July 1943 came the collapse of Italy and the arrest of Mussolini, and there were hasty conferences summoned by the Führer at Rastenburg, his East Prussian headquarters. Only a few days before, Hitler had met the Duce at Feltre in Northern Italy. News of Badoglio’s arrest of Mussolini on 25 July reached Rastenburg in time for an all-night session, during which Hitler planned to occupy Italy and reinstate Mussolini; at the same time on the following day, when all the Nazi leaders had arrived, according to Goebbels the Führer ‘ordered Himmler to see to it that most severe police measures be applied in case such a danger seemed imminent here’.

  There followed a period of great confusion in Italy; the armistice with the Allies, who landed in Southern Italy early on 3 September, was not announced until 8 September, and the strategy adopted by the Allies in fact saved Kesselring’s modest forces in Southern Italy from what seemed certain destruction from the combined threat of the Allied and the Italian divisions. Himmler meanwhile had been told to find Mussolini and organize his rescue, while Badoglio prevented any immediate relief of his prisoner by moving him from island to island until it was finally decided what should be done with him. In the end, early in September, when Mussolini was due by the terms of the Armistice to be handed over to the Allies, he was suddenly rescued from his final place of imprisonment on the heights of a ski resort on the Abruzzi Apennines in a brilliant operation carried out by an S.S. officer, Otto Skorzeny, after Himmler had briefed him. Skorzeny’s commando party was landed by glider on the mountain top; after Mussolini had been taken from the hotel where he was held prisoner, he was flown to Vienna with Skorzeny in a small aircraft which only just managed to take off from the mountainside.

  Himmler had had no illusions about Mussolini; he had been kept well informed of the situation by his agents in Rome, and Skorzeny records how much Himmler seemed to know of the position. However, once Mussolini was under arrest, the reports of his agents no longer sufficed. Himmler is said by both Schellenberg and Höttl to have consulted a group of astrologers in an effort to divine where Mussolini was hidden. They were confined, says Schellenberg, in a country house by the Wannsee and there, after the seers had consumed great quantities of food, drink and tobacco, one of their number, a Master of the Sidereal Pendulum, located Mussolini on an island west of Naples. Since Mussolini had actually been taken for a while to Ponza, this no doubt more than justified in Himmler’s eyes the expenditure of S.S. time and money on the occult.

  With Heydrich dead, Himmler was left to carry the full burden of his policies alone. He exercised, like Hitler himself, the leadership principle in the control of a situation of such growing complexity that, even in a dictator-state, consultation between the ministries and the co-ordination of policy with the High Command responsible for the conduct of the war would seem essential if Germany were to resolve the problems which Hitler’s ambitions had brought about.

  But in the place of consultation and co-ordination, Hitler chose to govern by personal decisions which were less and less affected by the advice he received. With Goring in decline and Goebbels still chafing to extend his growing influence outside the restricted field of propaganda, Hitler was surrounded by nonentities whose place in his favour still depended on their ability to support him in his fantasies of war. His strength was still great and he had not lost his cunning, but he was already in these mid-years of the war using at their limit his vast quantities of men and equipment. He weakened his fighting forces by extending them on a front that stretched two thousand miles in a curve from north to south, leaving the heart of Germany exposed to the Allied bombers from the west, which the Luftwaffe could no longer successfully oppose. For Hitler, his ultimate failure was always inconceivable, and his instinctive response to all reverses was to turn his attention from them and withdraw into the delusions of his mind. Himmler was present with both Goring and Goebbels when, at a conference held in December 1941, Hitler proclaimed himself his own Commander-in-Chief in order that he might more readily override the Army High Command. From 1942, he shut himself away from the German people and from the parading soldiers, whose saluting and massive cheers had once fed his pride and purpose. Now he saw himself as the solitary genius waging war from a succession of headquarters that lay remote from the battlefronts, first of all at Vinnitza in the Ukraine, then either at Rastenburg in East Prussia, at Zossen near Berlin itself, or in the retirement of Berchtesgaden, where the mountains reflected the peace and perfection that he craved.

  Below him in the Nazi hierarchy lived Himmler, a lesser spirit but one created in the image of the man he worshipped. In place of Hitler’s perverted genius, he could only offer his insatiable obsessions and his pedantic attention to detail; in place of Hitler’s mesmeric leadership, his absolute devotion to his duty and his rigid insistence on a similar dedication in his subordinates. His power was based on fear; yet fear was the experience he endured himself, and it grew directly out of his dependence on others and his personal inadequacy. His nervous condition had become chronic, and only Kersten could relieve him from these disabling bouts of pain. His anxie
ty to destroy the Jews and Slavs and place himself at the head of a Nordic Europe brash with health was a compensation for the weakly body, the sloping shoulders, the poor sight and the knockknees to which he was tied. His mistress and her children had renewed his sexual confidence, but sexual prowess was not his strongest point. He wore the élite black uniform of the S.S. or the field-grey of his fighting forces, but his private army, even in 1942, was still kept in severe check by Hitler, and his schemes for independent arms production in the camps were equally frustrated.

  Hitler’s reserve on recruitment for the S.S. was not to be removed till March 1943; the armoured train and the remote headquarters in Zhitomir, to which Himmler travelled so often during the years 1941—3, were a centre for directing persecution behind the lines and not for the exercise of military powers.17

  Zhitomir, in the Ukraine, some 700 miles south-east from Berlin, was situated about sixty miles north of Hitler’s headquarters at Vinnitsa. An officers’ training college, set in beautiful surroundings, had been requisitioned for the Reichsführer and his staff. It was equipped, according to Schellenberg who was a frequent visitor and appreciated elaborate installations, with short-wave and telephone communications linking him to every part of German-occupied Europe. There was even a tennis court on which Himmler attempted now and then to keep himself fit. During the period Hitler was in Vinnitza, from July to October 1942, Himmler made a point of seeing him on every occasion possible, driving south in his armoured car along the Rollbahn connecting the two centres.