Meanwhile Himmler attempted to keep the S.S. in sound moral order. Reproving letters poured out from his headquarters: ‘I note your daughter is working in your office. You should have asked me first’; ‘you had better look at the Germanization files giving you evidence of intercourse between German women and incriminated Poles and other aliens’; ‘I do not want you to travel round as much as you do, showing off as a great commander’; ‘the Reichsführer S.S. considers it inexcusable for S.S. leaders in the fourth year of the war to get drunk’; ‘Dietrich told me today that the Leibstandarte during its stay in France had 200 cases of gonorrhea. The men really cannot be blamed. The unit came from the Eastern front and must have been completely starved sexually… All units of the Waffen S.S. are to be provided with brothels for whose flawless medical control the unit is responsible.’ At the same time unit leaders must see that the seventeen and eighteen-year-olds ‘do not waste their health and strength on harlots’, and arrange for ‘meetings between married S.S. men and their wives, since otherwise we cannot expect these marriages to produce the required and desirable number of children’. A list of suitable hotels and inns near training camps was to be drawn up, and the expenses of visiting wives met from S.S. funds. In addition lectures on the healthy procreation of children were to be given to the men.
Himmler’s thought and strategy during the middle years of the war must be understood in the light of the document he showed to Kersten at his field headquarters in December 1942, the twenty-sixpage report on Hitler’s state of health. He took the report, contained in a black portfolio, from a safe and gave it to Kersten under terms of the utmost secrecy. The report went into Hitler’s medical history, how he had suffered from the effects of poison gas in the First World War and had been for a while in danger of blindness, and how he had certain symptoms associated with the syphilis he had contracted in his youth and which had never been cured. After lying dormant, these symptoms had re-appeared in 1937 and again at the beginning of 1942; they included insomnia, dizziness and severe headaches, and revealed that Hitler was suffering from progressive paralysis which must sooner or later affect his mind. The only treatment he was receiving was that devised by his full-time physician, Professor Theodor Morell, a former ship’s doctor who had run a somewhat shady clinic for venereal diseases in Berlin until he had been discovered by Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, and introduced to the Führer. Hitler, as unorthodox in his attitude to medical treatment as Himmler, had taken Morell into his intimate circle in 1936, and given up his body to him for endless experiments in drugs and injections, many of which Morell patented and manufactured for his personal profit.
Orthodox treatment in a mental institution, of course, was out of the question for the Führer. ‘You realize now what anxieties I have’, said Himmler, ‘The world regards Adolf Hitler as a strong man — and that’s how his name must go down in history. The greater German Reich will stretch from the Urals to the North Sea after the war. That will be the Führer’s greatest achievement. He’s the greatest man who ever lived and without him it would never have been possible. So what does it matter that he should be ill now, when his work is almost accomplished.’
Only sheer anxiety had forced Himmler to reveal the report to Kersten, on whom he had come to rely, but the advice Kersten gave was unacceptable — that Hitler should retire at once and place himself in medical care, while his successor brought the war to a close. Himmler at once responded with a flood of arguments prepared for the answer he had obviously expected Kersten would give. There was no provision for a successor; the Party would be at loggerheads with the High Command; his own motives would be suspected, since it would appear he himself wanted to succeed; the symptoms observed in Hitler might well prove the result of mental and physical fatigue and not of paralysis.
‘What will you do, then?’ asked Kersten. ‘Will you simply let the matter alone and wait for Hitler’s condition to get worse and worse? Can you endure the idea that the German people have at their head a man who is very probably suffering from progressive paralysis?’
Himmler’s answer was in character. ‘It has still not gone far enough; I’ll watch carefully and it will be time enough to act once it’s established that the report is correct.’
According to Schellenberg, Heydrich had gathered together every detail about Hitler’s health and habits, including the diagnoses made by his doctors; these reports had been transferred to Himmler’s office after the death of Heydrich. What had no doubt led to scintillating speculation on the part of the head of the S.D. and Reich Protector in Prague, only filled Himmler with acute anxiety. Later Kersten gathered that the report about him had been specially compiled for Himmler from the files by an unnamed medical adviser of absolute integrity. Although there had always been rumours circulating about Hitler’s ill-health and psychological peculiarities, the detailed facts of his case were known only to a very few persons, among whom, Kersten gathered, were Bormann and, possibly, Göring.18
A week later, on 16 December, Himmler discussed the situation once more with Kersten. This conversation was most significant. Kersten argued that Hitler must, for Germany’s sake, retire for proper treatment; as long as he was in supreme power, it was possible at any time that his judgment would fail, and his mind become clouded by delusions and megalomania. He would suffer from loss of muscular control, and paralysis of the speech and limbs would follow. He might issue the most damaging orders while under the influence of his disease. He was a very sick man, and should be treated accordingly.
Himmler remained silent. Kersten continued his argument that Hitler should be induced to hand over his authority to a successor, and that peace negotiations should follow. To this Himmler replied that Hitler’s will only decreed a successor in the event of his death, and that ‘fierce quarrels over the succession’ would break out between the Army and the Party if Hitler during his lifetime did not remain in absolute power. As for himself, he could never be the first to make any move against the Führer; as he put it, ‘everybody would think that my motives were selfish, and that I was trying to seize power for myself.’ The medical evidence, in the face of Hitler’s still infallible personality, would be regarded as a fake. He must, said Himmler, be left where he was; untold harm would follow his departure. He believed that Hitler’s resources of health were such that he might well overcome the disease; the symptoms he was showing were very possibly those of sheer exhaustion. All he could do for the moment was watch the Führer’s condition more carefully. Kersten realized then the inherent weakness that lay behind Himmler’s apparent strength.
It was during 1943 that Hitler’s health suffered grave deterioration; all those who met him constantly acknowledged this. It is not clear how much Schellenberg knew of what was on the secret file; he may well have known more than he reveals. He merely remarks: ‘from the end of 1943, he showed progressive symptoms of Parkinson’s disease…; a chronic degeneration of the nervous system had set in’. As early as March, Goring expressed his concern to Goebbels about the Führer who, he remarked, had aged fifteen years during the three and a half years of war. Goebbels agreed, and comments on how Hitler never relaxed, but ‘sits in his bunker, worries and broods’. He suffered now from a trembling of the left arm and leg, and he was receiving from Morell a drug compounded of strychnine and belladonna for his chronic stomach pains which, according to a later medical report, could only have harmed him and caused the discoloration of his skin that was becoming more noticeable. When not on the Obersalzburg, where his mistress Eva Braun lived her isolated life, he spent most of his time at the various remote centres from which he conducted his war, and especially at the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg, hidden in the dark forests of East Prussia, where in the summer of 1941 he had a suite of rooms constructed in concrete and buried in the ground beneath the heavily guarded enclosure of chalets. The Wolf’s Lair became a strange mixture, as General Jodl said, ‘of cloister and concentration camp’.
In these concrete r
ooms Hitler held his incessant conferences. He ate and slept as his mood dictated, taking no exercise and seeking no entertainment except the endless repetition of his reminiscences. This helped to keep his ego in a state of ferment.
These were the conditions in which he normally received his Ministers, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Speer and Bormann, when they travelled east to meet him and weave their jealous webs round what was left of his attention. It was here, for instance, that on one occasion he gave an emotional discourse on Wagner to Himmler and the members of his staff. Himmler, like the others, was drawn to him as the ultimate source of the power he had gathered over the years; each of these men was torn with doubts and anxieties. How, they all wondered, were they to retain and enlarge these powers at each other’s expense? On the surface they were colleagues, bound together by their devotion to the Führer; underneath they were imperialists interested only in expanding their rival spheres of influence against the time when one or other would succeed to Hitler’s place. At no time did they form an integral cabinet of executive ministers; the dangers of such organized, co-ordinated power was always instinctively realized by Hitler, the preservation of whose authority lay to a large extent in the disorganization that existed immediately beneath him, the wasteful consequences of the policy of divide and rule. When some essential matter was broached, he preferred to see his Ministers singly; when they met collectively the time was passed in trivialities or in the undiscussed reception of Hitler’s long-winded commands.
Reitlinger has pointed out that Himmler’s senior officers were never encouraged by him to meet and discuss their collective responsibilities. They, too, were the rivals for his favour whom he dealt with singly and separately to prevent their making common cause against him. Like Hitler, he surrounded himself with junior officers, aides whom he could replace at will, but who, by virtue of their closeness to him, achieved a power far greater than their standing. Kersten was quick to recognize the influence of men like S.S. Colonel (later General) Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s principal aide, a former male typist through whom it was necessary to pass to reach the ear of the Reichsführer S.S. Schellenberg describes Brandt as a small man of plain appearance, who tried as far as possible to look and behave like Himmler. He had a phenomenal memory for facts and began work at seven in the morning, hurrying to his master with his files and papers so that work could start while Himmler shaved. If there was bad news, Brandt would begin with the word, ‘Pardon’, and Himmler would stop shaving. ‘He was Himmler’s living notebook… I believe he was the only person in whom Himmler had complete confidence… He was the eyes and ears of his master, and the manner in which he presented a matter to Himmler was often of decisive importance.’ Both Schellenberg and Kersten kept on good terms with him.19
Himmler’s senior officers remained in their separate orbits, planets to Himmler’s sun — S.S. General Ernst Kaltenbrunner, appointed head of the Reich Security Office in 1943, S.S. General Mueller, head of the Gestapo, S.S. General Pohl, head of the economic administration of the S.S. and inspector of the concentration camps, and S.S. Lieutenant-General Schellenberg, Chief of Foreign Intelligence, who was now to become Himmler’s closest political adviser. He also had his retinue of specialized advisers, such as Korherr, who combined the handling of statistics with the provision of secret reports on the other S.S. leaders. This led to his being beatenup in August 1943.
In appointing Kaltenbrunner head of the Reich Security Office on 30 January 1943, Himmler made a grave error. Apparently he brought him from Vienna, where he had been Higher S.S. Police Leader for several years, because he thought a stranger would be more tractable than one of his nearer subordinates. Kaltenbrunner, though a stupid man, was sensible enough to share the S.S. view that the war was lost and seek the quickest possible means to power, one of which was to form a working alliance with Bormann when he became Hitler’s personal secretary the following April. Himmler could scarcely have foreseen this danger any more than that offered by his other principal opponent on the staff; this was Mueller, head of the Gestapo who, according to Schellenberg, was also quick to establish good relations with Bormann. Both Mueller and Bormann looked rather to Russia than to the West as the place where peace negotiations should be developed. Schellenberg regarded both Kaltenbrunner and Mueller as his enemies, only too anxious to outwit and discredit both him and probably Himmler as well. He describes Kaltenbrunner as ‘a giant in stature, heavy in his movements, a real lumberjack… his small, penetrating brown eyes were unpleasant; they looked at one fixedly, like the eyes of a viper seeking to petrify its prey’. His hands were small, like ‘the hands of an old gorilla’; his fingers were stained with chain-smoking and he drank heavily. He spoke with a pronounced Austrian accent, just as Mueller spoke broad Bavarian.
Heinrich Mueller, who had been on Himmler’s staff since 1933, was a reserved, obscure man, a professional police official with piercing eyes but no marked personality. He had been described by Captain Payne Best as good-looking, though he attempted to overawe him by shouting in his face and staring at him with ‘funny eyes which he could flicker from side to side with the greatest rapidity’ in an attempt to mesmerize his victims. In spite of his position he would, like Hitler and Himmler, spend endless time on details, conducting individual interrogations himself because he enjoyed doing so. Schellenberg describes with disdain his squarish skull, jutting forehead, narrow lips, twitching eyelids and massive hands. At the end of the war he completely disappeared, taking refuge perhaps with the Russians, whose police methods he had always professed to admire.20
The first stirrings of a rumour that Himmler might be in favour at least of a separate peace with Britain is mentioned in von Hassell’s diaries as early as May 1941, in the period immediately preceding the attack on Russia. Hassell had been German Ambassador to Italy from 1932—7; he was a career diplomat of right-wing views whose firm belief in friendship with Britain and the United States had brought him into conflict with Ribbentrop. He was retired from the foreign service in 1937 while he was still an active man well under sixty, and he became what Allen Dulles, America’s wartime agent in Switzerland, describes as ‘the diplomatic adviser of the secret opposition to Hitler’. He carried out his resistance activities under the cover of a post in economic research that he held for the German Government and which enabled him to travel in Europe with relative freedom. His acquaintance with members of the resistance, more particularly on the civilian side, was wide and the diary that he kept from September 1938 until July 1944, when he was arrested after the failure of the attempt on Hitler’s life, is one of the most valuable documents that has survived from Nazi Germany.
The rumours Hassell records about the possibilities of Himmler’s defection from Hitler afford the first tenuous links in a submerged chain that brought Himmler into direct contact with a section of the German resistance movement.
Carl Langbehn, a Berlin lawyer whose work took him to many countries and who at the time of the Reichstag Fire Trial in 1933 had offered to defend the Communist deputy Ernst Torgler, was a neighbour of Himmler’s both in Gmund and Dahlem; they had met socially before the war through their daughters, who went to school together. Langbehn was a friendly, genial man and an excellent linguist; he became a member of Canaris’s Abwehr; he also began at Himmler’s invitation to act as an independent observer for him when he was abroad on business. At the same time, he became a channel through which a certain amount of information about Himmler reached those connected in one way or another with certain sections of the growing resistance movement. Langbehn was a friend of that extraordinary man, Professor Albrecht Haushofer, son of the notorious geo-politician who had inspired Hitler’s dreams of expansion, and the man who planned Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941.
Haushofer acted as a contact-man for Hess with Karl Burckhardt, President of the International Red Cross in Switzerland, who was a friend of the Hassells. In May, just before the flight, Burckhardt told Frau von Hassell that in April h
e had had a visit from ‘an agent of Himmler’ who, during a visit to Zurich, had asked Burckhardt’s opinion as to whether the British would be willing to discuss possible terms for peace with Himmler instead of Hitler. This agent was undoubtedly Langbehn, who was to make the acquaintance of the Hassells later that year, in August, and become one of their valued friends.
This circuitous series of relationships may well seem to imply that Himmler, and possibly even Hitler, knew in advance of Hess’s mission to Britain. In any event Haushofer, whose part in Hess’s flight was known to the Gestapo, was released on Hitler’s order after only a brief detention, and he was to enjoy Himmler’s protection until the end of the war. However that may be, Langbehn became a source of rumour surrounding Himmler during the darker days of the Russian campaign; from 1941 to his arrest by the Gestapo in September 1943, he had at least the temporary protection of Himmler and a calculated measure of his confidence, while at the same time, through Popitz and von Hassell, he also enjoyed direct contact with one of the principal arteries of the resistance movement. Even as early as 1938, Langbehn’s influence on Himmler was sufficient to secure the release from a concentration camp of Fritz Pringsheim, the Jewish professor who had taught him law. Pringsheim was released and even allowed to leave the country.
After the initial reference to Langbehn’s activities on behalf of Himmler given by Hassell in May 1941, any occasional signs of disaffection in the S.S. are noted down with wishful determination during the long period of frustration that followed the invasion of Russia. After receiving certain evidence from a discontented junior officer in the S.S., Hassell wrote in September 1941: ‘it was apparent that in Himmler’s outfit they were seriously worried and looking for a way out’. In December, Langbehn told Hassell he ‘had been busy trying to get people out of Himmler’s concentration camps’, and that this often meant arranging the payment of large sums of money. He spoke also of ‘the fluid state of mind existing within the S.S.’, which he felt was a strange combination of the ‘barbaric Party soul’ and a ‘misunderstood, aristocratic soul’. S.S. leaders often made wild remarks critical of the Party, the outcome of the war, and of Hitler himself. In March 1942, Langbehn according to Hassell ‘still suspects all sorts of things are being planned around Himmler’, and these were no doubt the rumours that reached Ciano’s lengthy ears in Rome the following month, when he noted in his diary that Himmler ‘who was an extremist in the past but who now feels the real pulse of the country, wants a compromise peace’. In May Ciano added that the rumour was being spread from Prince Otto von Bismarck at the German Embassy in Rome that ‘Himmler is playing his own game by inciting people to grumble.’
Heinrich Himmler Page 21
