Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  It was this obsession, combined with his academic passion for ‘neatness’, that converted Himmler from the idea of the expulsion of the Jews from the Germanic territories and made him favour their absolute destruction through genocide.

  Himmler was a man of violence, not by nature, but by conviction. Although, like Kersten, he took part in hunting as a manly sport, he was a poor shot, and he could never understand Kersten’s passion for deer-stalking. ‘How can you find any pleasure, Herr Kersten,’ said Himmler, ‘in shooting from behind cover at poor creatures browsing on the edge of a wood… Properly considered, it’s pure murder.’

  He practised hunting, however, because it was a traditional Germanic sport, and because the game must be ‘kept within bounds’. But he despised the theatrical sportsman, like Goring, who turned hunting into an egotistical cult. Children, he believed, should be brought up to love animals, not to kill them merely for sport.

  The destruction of human beings, who were themselves so much more destructive than the animals, was in fact forced on Himmler, and he accepted this fearful task because he believed it to be the only, as well as the ‘final’, solution to the problem of securing the racial purification of Germany which remained his deep-rooted ideal. Belief in the maintenance of racial purity in the modern world, if it is to be carried to its logical conclusion, must lead either to complete segregation or to genocide. Himmler, in the circumstances of total war, came to accept genocide as the only solution. The primitive hatred and fear from which such absolute ideas originate forced Himmler, who was neither primitive nor passionate by nature, to take the supreme crime of mass murder upon his uneasy conscience.

  Kersten discovered what was affecting his patient as early as November 1941: ‘After much pressure… he told me that the destruction of the Jews is being planned.’

  The admission put Kersten himself in a position of responsibility for which he was utterly unprepared. So far he had managed to persuade Himmler to release a few men from imprisonment as a personal favour to himself. The problem which he faced now was crime on a scale he did not know how to approach; he could only react at once against the raw fact that Himmler had unwillingly revealed to him:

  ‘Filled with horror, I emphatically begged Himmler to give up this idea and the plan to be discerned behind it. The suffering and counter-suffering were not to be contemplated. To this Himmler answered that he knew it would mean much suffering for the Jews. But what had the Americans done earlier? They had exterminated the Indians — who only wanted to go on living in their native land — in the most abominable way. “It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life. Yet we must create new life, we must cleanse the soil or it will never bear fruit. It will be a great burden for me to bear.”’7

  Himmler spoke of the Jewish concept of ‘atonement’ and the Jewish saying of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. Had not the Jews been responsible, he argued, for millions of dead in building up their empire?

  Himmler took his own time to adjust the necessity for genocide to his code of morality. He did so deliberately and painfully. As he said to Kersten, ‘It’s the old tragic conflict between will and obligation. At this moment I am learning how terrible it can be… The extermination of people is unGermanic. You can demand everything from me, even pity. But you cannot demand protection for organized nihilism. That would be suicide.’

  As he watched Himmler absorb the necessity to commit this crime into the niceties of his conscience, Kersten got ready to use his increasing influence over the Reichsführer S.S. to keep his mind uneasy. This, he knew, was the only weapon he possessed with which to fight this man, whose soft but obstinate nature was only too familiar to him. He used every device he could to keep his patient pliable. But for the next two years the momentum of the war overcame him; he was able to ease a few individuals out of Himmler’s prison-camps, but not a whole race. Only in 1944, when the prospect of Germany’s defeat became evident to Himmler’s unwilling eyes, did Kersten’s struggle to turn the liberation of single individuals into that of large numbers begin to succeed.

  The accuracy of his understanding of Himmler was therefore of the highest importance to his ultimate success. The superficial judgment passed on by Himmler to so many people, that he was like a teacher misplaced in a position of political power, was right only if the conception of a teacher is limited to an instructor and not an educator. Himmler was a born instructor, lucid and, within the limits he imposed on himself, well-informed. But in spite of his abundant and wide-ranging interests he was an informed not an educated man. He was always, as Kersten observed, using his knowledge to produce a set doctrine about which he loved to lecture any audience he could reach. Yet Kersten found him ‘not at all overbearing in these lectures of his, but quite amiable and not without a touch of humour’. In fact he encouraged his subordinates to express their opinions and argue respectfully with him, much as a headmaster whose opinions were hidebound might encourage his sixth-formers to debate with him so that he might have a good excuse to express his own opinions.

  Fundamentally, however, Himmler’s character was deadly serious, in the direst meaning of these words. Like many men, he learned how to strengthen the weakness of his nature by fostering obsessions on which he could constantly lean for protection against his conscience and his reason. He used prejudice to lighten his burdens; if he needed an excuse for the exercise of kindness to a prisoner he would ask for a photograph and let clemency rule if the prisoner proved to be blond and Nordic. He could not tolerate his own physical weakness and ill-health, and yet he increasingly gave way to it in the refuge of Hohenlychen, to which in the end he would retire to recuperate from a cold. Kersten learnt exactly how to insert his subtly devised wedges with the grain of Himmler’s conscience, and he often gained concessions from him which might seem impossible. For Himmler lacked by nature the ruthless barbarity that his reason admired and that he extolled in the notorious speeches he made when the public image of the Reichsführer S.S. had to be maintained. His family background and training taught him only the meticulous honesty, industry and sense of public service expected of the German teacher, the subordinate soldier and the civil servant. As a man of action Himmler was quite useless; as a soldier disastrous; as an administrator industrious, pedantic and obsessed by the desire to surround himself with the protective cover of administration.

  Like all Nazis, he was an authoritarian who derived his inflexibility from obedience to his chosen leader. On the belts of the S.S. he had the phrase inscribed: ‘My honour is my loyalty.’ Hitler’s influence over him was paramount, and he anxiously fulfilled every task the Führer gave him until the utter impossibility of doing so shattered the narrow energies of his spirit. In this, as Kersten observed, he confused statesmanship with the obedience of a bodyguard. In no essential matter did he ever dare to contradict Hitler to his face, and the difficulties both Kersten and Schellenberg encountered in their pursuit of Himmler’s weakness were due to the deep doubts he entertained of how best to reconcile loyalty to Hitler with loyalty to the fulfilment of the future of the German race. This conflict built up in him to fearful proportions when he realized that the Führer was a sick man who might have to be dispossessed for his own ultimate good and that of Germany. The increasing rage of the Führer as his sickness took possession of him only induced in Himmler the nervous condition which brought on the agonies of cramp. His subservience was complete, and as his tasks became more impossible to fulfil he dreaded the very thought of entering Hitler’s presence, where as like as not he would be reduced to a tongue-tied inability to speak at all.

  In his private life he was simple and as kind as he knew how. He was considerate to his wife, in love with his mistress, and devoted to his children. He despised money and did his best, as far as wholly private expenditure was concerned, to eke out his living on his small official salary of some £3,000 a year in the values of the time. It is significant that when, during 1943, Kersten o
btained an inexpensive watch for Himmler in Sweden, the Reichsführer S.S. thanked him, gave him M. 50 on account and promised to settle the rest of his debt when he received his next salary cheque. Although Himmler liked food, he ate and drank and smoked with extreme moderation, and expected all those in his service to do the same. He loved a life of hard labour and devotion to a narrow ideal which seemed to him moral and which was partly inherited from others and partly of his own creation.

  He no more understood the evil he was generating through the S.S. and the Gestapo than a rigid Victorian moralist understood the repressive cruelty he must be imposing on the innocent members of his family. To the last he failed to understand why his name became so hated. He believed he was a good man who, if he had made mistakes, had made them in a noble cause. He dictated his memoranda from his various headquarters without any human consideration for the moral degeneration of his agents or the suffering of his victims. His efficiency was in his mind, and the chaos he caused was the result of enforcing what was at once both utterly cruel and administratively impossible.

  As a man he was at the same time mediocre and extraordinary. Had he stayed in his rightful place in society he could have been an over-efficient and priggish executive, a small-time official or minor educationalist. But Himmler was not altogether mediocre. He possessed a fanatical vision and energy and an image of himself as a figure in power politics which made him in ten years one of the masters of Europe. A nonentity could not have become one of the most feared men in the history of modern times. Yet he failed utterly to develop a personality to match the scale of his office. He remained to the end a small, middle-class man, a petty bourgeois figure whose appearance made men laugh, a minister so utterly servile to his leader that he could not bear the thought of an ill-word or a reprimand.

  If he did not consciously recognize this deep division in his nature, the nervous condition of his body did. This Kersten knew, and it gave him access to a certain degree of power over his patient which he tried to explain after the war:

  ‘His severe stomach-convulsions were not, as he supposed, simply due to a poor constitution or to overwork; they were rather the expression of this psychic division which extended over his whole life. I soon realized that while I could bring him momentary relief and even help over longer periods, I could never achieve a fundamental cure… When he was ill I first came into contact with the human side of Himmler’s character. When he was in good health, this was so overlaid with the rules and regulations which he invented or which were imposed upon him that nobody, not even his closest relations, could have got anything out of him which ran counter to them. In the event of any conflict arising he would have behaved, even to his own relations, exactly as the law demanded. His blind obedience was rooted in a part of his character which was quite inaccessible to other emotions.

  ‘As this obedience to law and order was, however, really based on something quite different, namely on Himmler’s ordinary middle-class feelings, it was possible for anybody who knew how to penetrate to those feelings to come to an understanding with him — even to the point of negotiating agreements with him which ran counter to the Führer’s orders. Because he was utterly cut off from his natural roots and needed somebody on whom to lean, he was happy to have a man beside him who had no connection with the Party hierarchy, somebody who was simply a human being. At such moments I was able to appeal to him successfully.’8

  Himmler, therefore, behind the mask of secrecy and power, was a man dominated as much by fear as by ambition. He tried hard to live in accordance with an image for which he was utterly unfitted. Few men in human history have shown to the extent that Himmler did what terrible crimes can be committed through a blind conviction that such deeds were both moral and inevitable.

  VII. Slave of Power

  News of the Allied landings in Normandy in the small hours of the morning of 6 June, two days after the liberation of Rome, came as a surprise to the Nazi leaders. Hitler was in Berchtesgaden, and Rommel, who was in command of the Army Group controlling Holland, Belgium and Northern France, was spending the night at his home in Ulm. Goring was resting at Veldenstein, one of his castles in the south, when he received the telephone call from his aide Brauchitsch that hurried him by road to a situation conference held during the afternoon at Klessheim, a baroque palace near Salzburg where Hitler had acted as host to Mussolini and Ciano in 1942, and bullied Horthy in 1944. The conference was attended by Himmler, who came from his special train stationed near Berchtesgaden which he was using as his headquarters during the times Hitler was on the Obersalzburg, while Ribbentrop travelled from Fuschl, his summer palace near Salzburg where, according to Schellenberg, he had been brooding on the idea of shooting Stalin with a revolver disguised as a fountain-pen. Meanwhile, Hitler had gone to bed after hearing the news from France, leaving an order that he was not to be disturbed.

  No record survives of what Himmler, Goring and Ribbentrop discussed at this meeting. Only the circumstance of an invasion could have brought these three together without the master-presence of Hitler, who did not emerge from his retirement to face his generals in France until 17 June, when he summoned Rundstedt and Rommel to a conference at Margival, near Soissons, the day after the first V-weapon had been launched against London. According to General Speidel who was present, Hitler looked ‘pale and sleepless’; his restless fingers played with coloured pencils and, when they ate, he swallowed a sequence of pills and medicines after bolting down a plate of rice and vegetables. He broke his promise to visit Rommel’s Group headquarters two days later, returning to Berchtesgaden the same night that a stray V-bomb turned off course to London and exploded near his bunker. Instead, he received Rundstedt and Rommel on the Obersalzburg on 29 June, a week after the Russians had begun their major offensive; he rejected their appeal to end the war and lectured them on his miracle weapon. On 1 July Rundstedt was replaced by Kluge. Rommel, left alone, warned Hitler in a letter dated 15 July that defeat in France was now inevitable; two days later he was severely wounded in his staff car by a low-flying aircraft.

  The situation could scarcely be worse on both fronts. By early July the Russians had reached Polish territory and were threatening East Prussia. Himmler continued in the south, where Hitler remained brooding until 14 July, when he transferred his headquarters to the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg in East Prussia. Himmler followed him north, but was not present at his first staff conference on 15 July, the day Hitler authorized him to form fifteen new S.S. divisions to replace the losses on the Eastern front, an order that in fact anticipated by five days his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, a post from which General Fromm was to be dismissed on 20 July. It was here, too, on 20 July that the group of senior officers in the Reserve Army almost succeeded in killing Hitler at his mid-day conference and achieving a coup d’état in Germany.1

  A briefcase holding a time-bomb was planted by Colonel the Count von Stauffenberg, Fromm’s Chief of Staff, under the Führer’s conference-table. At 12.42 the bomb exploded, ten minutes after Stauffenberg had broken the capsule holding the acid which ate through the wire controlling the firing-pin. But the briefcase under the table had been inadvertently pushed by another officer to a position which shielded Hitler from the worst effects of the blast. Two minutes later Stauffenberg passed successfully through the first check-point at Rastenburg on his way to the aircraft which was to fly him back to his fellow-conspirators at the Bendlerstrasse, the War Office in Berlin. He believed Hitler was dead.

  Neither Himmler, Goring nor Ribbentrop were at the conference at the time of the explosion, and Goebbels was in Berlin. Goring was at his headquarters fifty miles away. Himmler’s centre in East Prussia was the villa Hagewald-Hochwald, at Birkenwald, on the Maursee lake; his official train was stationed nearby. Kersten had given him treatment during the morning; Himmler told him that he believed the whole course of the war would be affected by the troubles developing between the Americans and the Russians. Kersten then went f
or a long walk, lunched in the peaceful setting of the villa and later slept in his compartment on the train.

  Felix Kersten

  Kersten with Himmler

  Himmler was at Birkenwald at the time of the explosion; he was summoned immediately by ’phone, and his bodyguard Kiermaier remembers the rough journey they made at speed over the uneven country roads, covering the twenty-five kilometres in about half an hour.

  It had been arranged that General Fellgiebel, the Army Chief of Signals, who was one of the conspirators, should send a signal in code to the generals at Army headquarters at the Bendlerstrasse in Berlin immediately after Hitler’s death, so that the complex operation of the coup d’état could be put in motion; after this he was to sever Rastenburg’s communications with the outside world for as long as he could. After seeing the bomb explode, Stauffenberg had jumped into his car and left for the airport in the full belief that Hitler was dead. But a few moments later Hitler, Keitel and the other survivors emerged dazed, shocked and wounded from the shattered building, and Fellgiebel, not knowing what to do for the best, joined the running men who rushed to help the Führer and tend the injured officers. By Hitler’s express orders no news of the explosion was to be given to the outside world, and the S.S. took charge of the area. Fellgiebel found it impossible to report what had happened to the Bendlerstrasse.