VI. The Miraculous Hands
The curious relationship between Kersten and Himmler lasted for six years and became the single most powerful influence in Himmler’s life after the death of Heydrich. Even the strongest man placed in a position of unique responsibility normally needs the support of advisers, though he may turn these men into shadows of his own personality, expecting from them confirmation of every opinion he happens to hold. Some men in positions of supreme authority need someone whom they respect to stay close to them and fulfil their need for a confessor who can help them purge their consciences when their ruthlessness has led them to take actions of which they are uncertain, if not ashamed.
Kersten, as we have seen, was forced against his will to become Himmler’s confessor as well as his masseur. The relationship which grew up between them was one which neither could have forecast. Kersten has been described by his biographer, Joseph Kessel, as ‘mild-mannered with kind eyes and the sensual mouth of one who loves the good things of life’. In his gentleness lay his great strength: to patients seized by pain, much of which was neurotic in its origin, he seemed like an angel sent to bring them swift relief. Their gratitude was profound, and was increased by the speed with which his treatments had their effect. His patients all idolized Kersten, making of him a kind of saint on whom they showered their gifts and bestowed their praises.
A patient suddenly relieved of pain often turns to the man who has cured him with an urge to ease his mind. The mood of relaxation that follows treatment acts as a solvent to confession. Kersten, mild-mannered though he was, appeared to Himmler as a saviour, an indispensable, reassuring worker of miracles on whom he relied and whom eventually, in his own peculiar way, he loved. It was Kersten, in fact, who enabled Himmler to carry the unnatural burden which eventually proved to be far beyond his limited strength of character.
Kersten has described the situation very clearly himself:
‘Anybody today who holds some very responsible position — political, administrative, industrial or in any other sphere of public life — is constantly obliged to impose on himself physical and psychic stresses which are not only unaccustomed, but may even be described as unnatural. The result is to be seen in the frightening increase of illnesses in these classes due to the wear and tear of civilization: today the term “occupational disease” has been coined… A practice extending over many years has convinced me that men who are obliged to make such inroads on their physical and psychic powers can nevertheless be maintained in health and happiness through a regular course of my physioneural therapy, so that they can be equal to the heavy tasks constantly imposed upon them. It was always my sincerest wish to be at hand, unremitting in helping and relieving pain.’1
Although Kersten used his growing influence over Himmler to save thousands of lives, his attendance on the head of the S.S. and the Gestapo during the worst years of his criminal career made him a controversial figure both during and after the war. Kersten began his treatments of Himmler unwillingly; he was, like everyone else, alarmed even at the thought of meeting him. But the needs of Himmler as a patient soon overcame Kersten’s initial antipathy, and almost immediately he sensed Himmler’s need for a confidant. The moment he was relieved of pain, Himmler began to unburden his mind. He wanted someone to whom he could talk. Who better than this Finn from Holland who looked at him with a calm and confident smile and seemed like some wise man — a ‘magic Buddha’, as Himmler once called him. The Reichsführer was deeply shamed of his illness, and the fact that only a few of his intimate staff knew of his suffering placed Kersten at once in a privileged position.
Kersten kept notes of everything that passed between Himmler and himself, as well as of the conversations he had had with other leaders of the S.S. His principal allies were Brandt, Hitler’s secretary, and later Walter Schellenberg. In Kersten’s memoirs we come nearest to understanding Himmler as a man and evaluating the peculiar views he acquired as a result of his scholarship. He talked to Kersten on every subject that occupied his thoughts. As far as his time permitted, Himmler was an assiduous reader, though, like Hitler, he used books only to confirm and develop his particular prejudices. Reading was for him a narrowing, not a widening experience. He saw himself as a teacher and reformer born to change the world.
The study of medicine along the lines he favoured was a constant subject for discussion with Kersten. He was against the conventional remedies put on the market by industry for private profit. He believed in herbal remedies that came straight from natural sources, and he had for long been a serious student of medieval herbalism. Kersten could not help being impressed by his knowledge, but scarcely by his conclusions. Himmler fancied himself as a medical adviser and he was always prepared to prescribe such natural remedies as applying a wet, cold stocking to the forehead to cure a headache. Kersten acknowledged that Himmler knew a certain amount about the subject, but the reforms he planned to introduce after the war would have staggered the medical profession had they known them. He intended to enroll in the S.S. the doctors who believed in homoeopathic remedies so that they might form effective shock troops to coerce the rest of the profession into seeing sense, while the German public were to be encouraged to grow their own health remedies in their back gardens. Meanwhile he experimented as far as he could with dietary and health practice in the S.S. and the Lebensborn movement.
It was natural for Himmler to see the future of society in terms of people of chosen blood. He believed that the healthiest and most intelligent and industrious stock originated from the land, and he wanted to found a vast European system of state farming to provide the right environment for the universal aristocracy of the future. Politicians, civil servants, scholars and industrialists alike would all be expected to keep in active contact with the land in addition to their urban professions. ‘Their children’, he said, ‘will go to the country as a horse to pasture.’ Kersten raised all the obvious objections to this, saying that the nation’s agriculture would be jeopardized by the ignorant activities of these amateur, weekend farmers. Himmler hoped to overcome this weakness by means of professional bailiffs, who would in the end be responsible for the maintenance of the farms. As for the industrial workers, they would have state allotments on which to dig and flourish, and all soldiers would automatically have the status of peasants. The S.S. would arrange everything, he said. ‘Villages inhabited by an armed peasantry will form the basis for the settlement in the East, the kernel of Europe’s defensive wall.’
The focus of Himmler’s political vision was centred in the past as he understood it. The vision had a deadly simplicity about it, taking no account of the organic growth of the many different peoples who had evolved the present divisions of Europe during centuries of war and political barter. Europe, he held, must be dominated either by the Germanic races or the Slavs; this was Himmler’s set belief. It always seemed to him utterly unreasonable for the Germanic English to side with the alien Slav against their racial brothers. As he put it to Kersten:
‘Our measures are not really so original. All great nations have used some degree of force or waged war in acquiring their status as a great power, in much the same way as ourselves; the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Poles, to a great extent, too, the English and the Americans. Centuries ago Charlemagne set us the example of resettling an entire people by his action with the Saxons and the Franks, the English with the Irish, the Spaniards with the Moors; and the American method of dealing with their Indians was to evacuate whole races… But we are certainly original in one important point: our measures are the expression of an idea, not the search for any personal advantage or ambition: we desire only the realization on a Germanic basis of a social ideal and the unity of the West. We will clarify the situation at whatever cost. It may take as many as three generations before the West gives its approval to this new order, for which the Waffen S.S. was created.’2
Had Nazi Germany won the war, this would have been the pattern of Europe which Himmler in
tended to impose by force had he succeeded Hitler as Führer; his aim was for Germany to set up a large economic confederation of European and North African states led by Germany and representing a total population and power three times greater than that of the United States. Kersten carefully recorded Himmler’s statements:
‘The European empire would form a confederation of free states, among which would be Greater Germany, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, Holland, Flanders, Wallonia, Luxemburg, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. These countries were to govern themselves. They would have in common a European currency, certain areas of the administration including the police, foreign policy and the army in which the various nations would be represented by national formations. Trade relations would be governed by special treaties, a sphere in which Germany as the economically strongest country would hold back in order to favour the development of the weaker ones. Free towns were also envisaged, having special functions of their own, among them the task of representing a nation’s culture …
‘When Bolshevism had been extirpated in Russia, the Western Territories would come under German administration modelled on the Marches which Charlemagne had instituted in the east of his empire; the methods followed would be those by which England had evolved her colonies into dominions. When peace and economic health were fully restored, these territories would be handed back to the Russian people, who would live there in complete freedom, and a twenty-five year peace and commercial treaty would be concluded with the new government.’3
The great expanse of Russia was to be partitioned and placed under the administrative control of Germany, Britain and the United States, after these nations had come to terms with Hitler. Germany would control the area up to the River Ob, while the English were to have the areas between the rivers Ob and Lena. The Americans would be allocated the region east of the Lena and including Kamschatka and the sea of Okhotsh. As Himmler told Kersten early in the war, Germany had no intention of weakening England’s position as a great power. On the contrary, England was to be one of the cornerstones in the new Germanic Europe. The British fleet would protect Europe at sea while the Germanic armies would protect the land. Himmler’s theories, geared only to the past, found difficulty in defining a creative future for America. As Kersten puts it, ‘The whole American way of thinking was so alien to him that he could not even begin to understand it.’
Once Europe had been stabilized as the political, economic and cultural centre of the world, governed by a landed aristocracy and policed by a soldier-peasantry, the spread of the pure Germanic stock by intensive breeding would begin. The germs for this brave Germanic world had already been established in the original S.S. marriage and breeding codes and in the conception of the Lebensborn movement. ‘I regard the S.S. as a tree that I have planted’, said Himmler to Kersten, ‘which has roots deep enough to defy all weathers.’ This élite must be established in every nation capable of producing a pureblooded Nordic stock; where this did not exist, it must be provided by settlements of Nordic immigrants.
Alongside the men, Nordic womanhood was to be developed, the ‘Chosen’, as Himmler called them, ‘the strong, purposeful type of women’, the best of them trained in Women’s Academies for Wisdom and Culture and acting as representatives of Germanic womanhood throughout the world. The true Nordic woman would be willing to be directed into a suitable marriage designed to promote the ideal growth of the human race. Himmler maintained ‘that men could be bred just as successfully as animals and that a race of men could be created possessing the highest spiritual, intellectual and physical qualities.’ When he saw blond children, says Kersten, ‘he became pale with emotion’.
As the best of Germany’s manhood was dying at the front, both Hitler and Himmler agreed that a stand must be made after the war to change the marriage laws and introduce legalized bigamy. The good stock so cruelly lost in war must at all costs be replaced.
‘My personal opinion’, said Himmler to Kersten in May 1943, ‘is that it would be a natural development for us to break with monogamy. Marriage in its existing form is the Catholic Church’s satanic achievement; marriage laws are in themselves immoral… . With bigamy each wife would act as a stimulus to the other so that both would try to be their husband’s dream-woman — no more untidy hair, no more slovenliness. Their models, which will intensify these reflections, will be the ideals of beauty projected by art and the cinema.’
Himmler’s open and happy relationship with Hedwig, who at the time he was talking to Kersten on this subject had already borne him one child and was soon to become pregnant with her second, no doubt encouraged him to regard bigamy in a favourable light, both personally and politically. He loved to enlarge on this dream of multiple family life:
‘The fact that a man has to spend his entire existence with one wife drives him first of all to deceive her and then makes him a hypocrite as he tries to cover it up. The result is indifference between the partners. They avoid each other’s embraces and the final consequence is that they don’t produce children. This is the reason why millions of children are never born, children whom the state urgently requires. On the other hand the husband never dares to have children by the woman with whom he is carrying on an affair, much though he would like to, simply because middle-class morality forbids it. Again it’s the state which loses, for it gets no children from the second woman either.’4
He attacked fiercely the fact that illegitimate children were denied the full rights due to them as their father’s offspring, and the social disgrace the unmarried mother had to endure seemed to him intolerable:
‘A man in this situation has no access to his child. He’s up against the law again if he wants to adopt the child, so long as he has children of his own or even has the possibility of having them. In other words, the law is in direct contradiction to our crying need — children and still more children. We must show courage and act decisively in this matter, even if it means arousing still greater opposition from the Church — a little more or less is of no consequence.’5
His rooted objection to homosexuality among S.S. men invariably led to habitual offenders being confined in concentration camps. The homosexual was only useful in a degenerate society where breeding was to be discouraged. A Nordic homosexual was ‘a traitor to his own people’, and he refused to listen to Kersten’s advocacy of psychiatric treatment for men with homosexual tendencies who were capable of redirection to normal sexual relations. Particular trouble arose over one dedicated officer who was discovered in 1940 to be advocating the formation of a homosexual élite within the S.S.; Himmler was horrified and prevailed on Kersten to interview the man and report on his case.
Himmler’s hostility to the Christian religion, and especially to the Catholic Church, led him to make his own particular form of study of other religions. This again drew him back into the past. He liked occasionally to entertain German scholars and challenge them with his ideas. He enjoyed discussion and friendly controversy, and he was not bigoted enough to refuse Gudrun, his daughter, her right to say Christian Grace before meals. He searched the sacred books of other faiths for ideas which would support his own acquired beliefs. He studied the Bhagavad-gita (which he particularly admired, observed Kersten, for its ‘great Aryan qualities’) and the books of the Hindu and Buddhist creeds, while his interest in astrology was well-known.
When Kersten, who was himself interested in comparative religion, asked him in the summer of 1942 whether he had any religious belief at all, Himmler was indignant that Kersten should even doubt that he had. It was only common sense, he said, to believe:
‘that some higher Being — whether you call it God or Providence or anything else you like — is behind nature and the marvellous order in the world of man and animals and plants. If we refused to recognize that we should be no better than the Marxists… I insist that members of the S.S. must believe in God. I’m not going to have men around me who refuse to recognize any higher Being or Providence or whatever you li
ke to call it.’
He longed, he said, to be Minister for Religious Matters and ‘dedicate myself to positive achievements only… Of course it’s pleasanter to concern yourself with flower-beds rather than political dust-heaps and refuse-dumps, but flowers themselves won’t thrive unless these things are seen to’. He spoke of the Gestapo as ‘the national charwoman’, cleaning up the state. Meanwhile, he took the Bhagavad-gita to bed with him; it gave him comfort to read this: ‘It is decreed that whenever men lose their respect for law and truth, and the world is given over to injustice, I will be born anew.’ That, he said, ‘was absolutely made for the Führer… It has been ordained by the Karma of the Germanic world that he should wage war against the East and save the Germanic peoples.’ In his more colourful and sentimental moments he saw Hitler, like the notorious picture postcard of the Führer, as a saint in armour whose head was haloed with light, a throw-back to the legendary Knights of the Holy Grail and the story of Parsifal. As for Himmler, he was proud to associate himself with the reincarnation of Henry the Fowler, on whom he tried to model himself. Yet in spite of his hostility to the Catholic Church, he foresaw the elevation of the Führers of the future through a system of election similar to that used in electing the Pope.6
Kersten studied Himmler’s character closely with the intention of controlling him in so far as he could, and began to introduce the question of the Jews into their discussions. Himmler was quite prepared to discuss this subject in the same way as he discussed any other, with an apparent rationality which soon became irrational. Just as the growth of freemasonry was obnoxious in a healthy nation because it represented a powerful, self-seeking secret society intent on spreading its own power and influence inside the State, so the development of powerful Jewish interests in Germany seemed to Himmler like a cancerous growth that had spread its parasitic network through the natural economy of the land. This conception of the alien Jew sapping the vitality of the German nation had become an obsession with Himmler, as with all the more bigoted Nazis. None of Kersten’s arguments, which Himmler was quite prepared to hear, moved him in the slightest from this predetermined and irrational obsession. He could not tolerate what he regarded as Jewish infiltration into the German economy and culture entirely for racial and political ends. The two races, the two worlds, he said, could never mingle; they must be separated by force before further irreparable harm was done.
Heinrich Himmler Page 24
