‘Can’t you rid us of our commander’, begged General Heinz Lammerding, Himmler’s Chief-of-Staff.
This was what Guderian was determined to do. He drove straight to Hohenlychen, where he was surprised to find Himmler ‘apparently in robust health’, apart from a cold in the head. Guderian pointed out to him that he was obviously overworked as Reichsführer S.S., Head of the Reich Police, Minister of the Interior, Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army and Commander of the Army Group Vistula. Also, ‘he must have realized by now that a command of troops at the front is no easy matter’. He ought at least to give up his command in the east. Himmler hesitated.
‘I can’t go and say that to the Führer’, he said. ‘He wouldn’t approve of my making such a suggestion.’ Guderian saw his chance. ‘Then will you authorize me to say it for you?’ he demanded.30
Himmler had to agree, and so lost his command on 20 March. According to Guderian, one of the principal reasons he had retained it, apart from ambition for office, was a desire to win for himself a Knight’s Cross.
‘He completely underestimated the qualities that are necessary for a man to be a successful commander of troops. On the very first occasion when he had to undertake a task before the eyes of all the world — one that could not be carried out by means of backstairs intrigues and fishing in troubled waters — the man inevitably proved a failure. It was complete irresponsibility on his part to wish to hold such an appointment; it was equally irresponsible of Hitler to entrust him with it.’
Guderian had by now enjoyed the opportunity closely to observe Himmler’s character. He describes him as ‘the most impenetrable of all Hitler’s disciples’. He seemed ‘an inconspicuous man with all the marks of racial inferiority. The impression he made was one of simplicity. He went out of his way to be polite. In contrast to Goring, his private life might be described as positively spartan in its austerity.’ Yet he also seemed ‘like a man from some other planet’. His imagination was ‘vivid, and even fantastic … His attempt to educate the German people in National Socialism resulted only in the concentration camps.’ But Guderian sees fit to add that ‘the way the concentration camp methods were kept secret can only be described as masterly’.
The mask of resolution which Himmler chose to wear for the particular benefit of Hitler and the S.S. was dropped to a varying degree when he was faced by men equally determined to stop the war and save what life could be preserved before the final catastrophe. The concentration camps of the east were gradually falling into enemy hands, and Himmler was deeply disturbed by the conditions which the camps inside Germany would reveal should the Allied armies liberate them. Once the desperate task of stemming the Russian advance was removed from his hands by Guderian’s intervention, all that was left for him to do in his semi-retirement was to redeem his own personal situation as best he could. It was now that he came more fully under the influence of the peacemakers — Schellenberg, Kersten and the Swedish Count Bernadotte.
Bernadotte has left his own account of his dealings with Himmler from February to April 1945. He acted as a purely private ambassador on behalf of the International Red Cross. In his book The Fall of the Curtain he pays tribute to the devious Schellenberg, but never once makes reference to Kersten.31 Bernadotte was Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross and he had the distinction of being a relative of the King of Sweden. According to his own statement, he was anxious to intervene largely to rescue from the holocaust of Germany several thousand Scandinavian prisoners of war and a group of Scandinavian women who, although German by marriage, had been widowed during the war and wanted desperately to return to their native lands. Bernadotte was led, either through vanity or illusion, to represent himself in the light of a great saviour and peace-maker fearlessly challenging the leaders of Nazi Germany, and more especially Himmler. That he failed altogether to acknowledge the groundwork achieved in earlier and more difficult times by Kersten is a deliberate omission, and throws some suspicion on his assessment of his personal achievements during the last weeks of the regime.
Kersten, as we have seen, had managed to move his family to Stockholm in September 1943, and, once there, had inspired the tentative peace discussions which Schellenberg had undertaken with Abram Stevens Hewitt, Roosevelt’s special representative who was on a visit to Stockholm. He also initiated the first stage of the plan to evacuate Swedes and other Scandinavians who were prisoners of war from German-occupied territory, a plan on which he worked with the Swedish Foreign Minister, Christian Günther. Kersten was also working for the release of Dutch, French and Jewish prisoners. Moving constantly between Sweden and Germany, Kersten had worked on Himmler’s conscience with the same assiduous care with which he massaged his body. The initial proposal was that while neutral Swedes might be released, the Norwegian and Danish men and women in the concentration camps should be sent for internment in Sweden.
During the summer of 1944, Kersten had managed to persuade Himmler to consider placing the Scandinavian prisoners in camps where they would be free from the worst bombing and could receive help from the Swedish Red Cross. He also joined with Madame Immfeld to urge the release of 20,000 Jews for internment by the Swiss. In December, when Kersten was attending Himmler on his train in the Black Forest, the Reichsführer had gone further and agreed to release 1,000 Dutch women, together with Norwegian and Danish women and children and certain male prisoners, provided Sweden would organize the transport. He also agreed to transfer to Switzerland 800 French women, 400 Belgians, 500 Polish women and between 2,000 and 3,000 Jews. Before his return to Stockholm on 22 December, Kersten had written a letter confirming the arrangement and explaining that he had discussed the details with Kaltenbrunner in Berlin. He had also implored Himmler to release the Jewish prisoners to the Swiss.
As we have seen, Himmler had begun to transfer some groups of Jews to Switzerland when further evacuations were stopped by Hitler’s orders on 6 February. Before this, Himmler had even been negotiating with the Swiss for placing the concentration camps under International Red Cross inspection; Red Cross officials had visited Oranienburg on 2 February. But Hitler’s anger was always too much for Himmler; he collapsed like a spent balloon. After the fright he had received on 6 February, he retreated to Hohenlychen as the most peaceful place from which to conduct the military campaign in the east, which at that time was still nominally in his hands.
At Hohenlychen he received a number of important guests. On 14 February, the day after Himmler’s humiliation by Guderian in front of the Führer in Berlin, Goebbels arrived in Hohenlychen, having driven through the columns of German refugees from the east in order to visit the Reichsführer who, he gathered, was ill with tonsillitis. Semmler, Goebbels’s aide records Goebbels’s private remarks during this period about the man who seemed nearest to him now among the Nazi leaders.
‘Goebbels obviously disliked Himmler, although in their work they get along together… But Himmler’s extreme radical point of view and his use of brutal methods to get his own way make him attractive to Goebbels. Sometimes he thinks of the head of the S.S. as a rival… Goebbels would have liked the job of Minister of the Interior… But Himmler got in first, and since then he has felt prickings of jealousy… Except Hitler, no one is entirely without a secret fear of Himmler. Goebbels considers that Himmler has built up the greatest power organization that one can imagine.’32
The following day it was Ribbentrop who made contact with Himmler, and probably came to see him at Hohenlychen; Himmler apparently gave his approval to Ribbentrop’s plan to send Fritz Hesse to Stockholm on a fruitless peace mission. Hesse left on 17 February, the day after Bernadotte arrived on his mission to Germany.
Bernadotte’s principal intention was to visit Himmler and take over the various negotiations initiated by Kersten, whom he appears to have regarded as an interloper. On 18 February33 Bernadotte had his first meeting with Himmler at Hohenlychen after he had formally visited both Kaltenbrunner and Ribbentrop, whose lengthy speeches during the
interview he secretly timed with a stop-watch. Ribbentrop’s foreign policy, he observed, seemed to favour some kind of agreement with Stalin for the joint domination of Europe by the U.S.S.R. and Germany — the reverse, that is, of the policy Schellenberg and Kersten were advocating to Himmler, which aimed at linking Germany and the Western Allies in combined opposition to further encroachments by the Red Army into Western Europe. Accompanied by Schellenberg, Bernadotte drove to Hohenlychen, which he discovered to be filled with German refugees from the east. Contrary to what he had expected, he found Himmler in a lively mood. He was dressed in the green uniform of the Waffen S.S. and wore hornrimmed spectacles instead of the pince-nez which Bernadotte had seen in so many portraits of the Reichsführer. Bernadotte’s description of Himmler is of particular interest:
‘He had small, well-shaped and delicate hands, and they were carefully manicured, although this was forbidden in the S.S. He was also, to my great surprise, extremely affable. He gave evidence of a sense of humour, tending rather to the macabre… Certainly there was nothing diabolical in his appearance. Nor did I observe any sign of that icy hardness in his expression of which I had heard so much. Himmler… seemed a very vivacious personality, inclined to sentimentality where his relations with the Führer were concerned, and with a great capacity for enthusiasm.’
When Bernadotte, who was aware of Himmler’s interest in the Scandinavian countries, gave him a seventeenth-century Swedish book on Scandinavian runic inscriptions, he ‘seemed noticeably affected’.
Bernadotte’s specific request was for the release of some thousands of Norwegian and Danish prisoners for internment in Sweden; this Himmler refused, but agreed they should be moved to two specific camps, where they might be cared for by the Swedish Red Cross. He even agreed, after a discursive conversation about the dangers to Europe of a Russian victory, that ‘if the necessity should arise, he would allow interned Jews to be handed over to the Allied military authorities’. When they parted, he asked Schellenberg for an assurance that a good driver had been obtained to take Bernadotte back to Berlin. ‘Otherwise’, he added, ‘it might happen that the Swedish papers would announce in big headlines: War Criminal Himmler murders Count Bernadotte.’
According to Schellenberg, Himmler was annoyed by this intrusion into the negotiations which he wanted to keep as secret as possible. The fact that Bernadotte’s visit was known officially to Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner meant that Hitler also would know of it; however, he decided to put the whole matter on an official basis and instructed both Kaltenbrunner and Fegelein, his official representative at Hitler’s headquarters, to sound Hitler on the matter. Fegelein reported Hitler as saying: ‘You can’t get anywhere with this sort of nonsense in total war.’ Schellenberg, anxious as ever to put himself in the picture, claims to have advised Bernadotte on the journey out to Hohenlychen to compromise about the Danish and Norwegian prisoners and ask for their removal to a central camp in the north-west by Swedish Red Cross transport rather than their extradition to Sweden for internment. After the interview, he claims that Himmler ‘had been very favourably impressed’ by the Count, and wanted to maintain close contact with him. No doubt he was encouraged to seize this new lifeline to the future by the failure of the attack on the Russians which had just been carried out in his name by Guderian’s nominees.
A week later, Himmler ventured as far as Berlin to attend a reception given by Goebbels at his Ministry. They talked about peace negotiations, but Goebbels had renewed his faith in Hitler and refused to think of such things without the active support of Hitler himself. He even suggested that if such action were ever taken by the Führer, he would much prefer to look to Stalin in the east than the Allies in the west. ‘Madness,’ murmured Himmler, and walked away.34 Goebbels was preparing for his role as the stonewall defender of Berlin, the man who with his wife and children was to lay down his life for the Führer.
Kersten returned to Germany from Stockholm on 3 March after further consultations with Günther, the Swedish Foreign Minister, who feared that the Allies would force Sweden to break her neutrality and enter the war if Germany did not withdraw from Norway. He had also met Hilel Storch in Stockholm on 25 February. Storch was one of the leading men in the World Jewish Congress in New York, and he was anxious to use every possible means to secure the safety and the release of the remaining Jews imprisoned in Germany. He knew of Hitler’s orders, that both the prisoners and the camps should be destroyed rather than let them be liberated by the Allies. Kersten undertook to negotiate directly with Himmler for the relief of the Jews by the International Red Cross.
He began his new talks with Himmler on 5 March. ‘He was in a highly nervous condition,’ writes Kersten, ‘negotiations were difficult and stormy.’
During the following days Kersten fought to rouse Himmler’s conscience and the remnants of his humanity. Schellenberg did the same: ‘I wrestled for his soul’, he said. ‘I begged him to avail himself of the good offices of Sweden… I suggested that he should ask Count Bernadotte to fly to General Eisenhower and transmit to him his offer of capitulation.’ According to Schellenberg, Himmler gave in and agreed that Schellenberg should continue his sessions with Bernadotte, whom he was unwilling at this stage to meet himself because of his fear of Hitler and of the leadership group in Berlin, who he knew were hostile and had by now an easier access to the Führer than he had himself.
On the same day that Kersten began his desperate discussions with Himmler, Bernadotte arrived from Sweden to make final arrangements for the transportation of the Danish and Norwegian prisoners from camps all over Germany to a central camp at Neuenburg. These negotiations were conducted with Kaltenbrunner and Schellenberg. Difficulties developed on both sides. Bernadotte claims he had overcome Kaltenbrunner’s point blank refusal to co-operate. On the other hand, according to Professor Trevor-Roper, Bernadotte himself refused point-blank to accept non-Scandinavian prisoners on the Swedish transport, and wrote to Himmler accordingly.35 The matter had to be straightened out by Günther and Kersten, and the transportation took place during the last two weeks of March. Meanwhile, Kersten negotiated a further agreement with Himmler of the greatest importance, again working together with Günther. This agreement was signed by Himmler on 12 March, and in it the Reichsführer S.S. undertook to disregard Hitler’s orders that concentration camps were to be blown up before the arrival of Allied forces. He agreed to surrender them intact with their prisoners still alive, and to stop all further execution of Jews.
In making this decision, Himmler was no doubt influenced by his discovery on 10 March that a typhus epidemic had broken out in the huge camp at Belsen. The news had been kept from him by Kaltenbrunner, according to Kersten, who at once made use of this new threat to Germany to increase his pressure on Himmler. ‘I pointed out that he could not in any circumstances permit this camp to become a plague centre which would imperil all Germany.’ He sent orders at once to Kaltenbrunner in which, guided by Kersten, he demanded that drastic measures be taken to stamp out the epidemic. On 19 March Himmler sent further written orders to Kramer, the commandant of Belsen, saying that ‘not another Jew’ was to be killed and the death rate at the camp, which by now had some 60,000 prisoners, must be reduced at all costs. The state of Belsen was so appalling that even Hoess when he visited the camp was shocked at the sight of so many thousands of dead.
Kersten, who was to leave Germany for Stockholm on 22 March, had now worked Himmler into a pliant mood. In his very full diary for this period, written mainly at Hartzwalde, his old residence near Berlin, Kersten claims that he had managed to persuade Himmler to agree that there should be no fighting in Scandinavia, and also to countermand Hitler’s order that The Hague and other Dutch cities were to be blown up by means of V-2 rockets on the approach of the Allied armies, together with the Zuyder Zee dam. On 14 March Himmler had almost reluctantly signed the order that the cities and the dam were to be spared.
‘Once we had good intentions towards Holland’, said Him
mler. ‘For us Germanic peoples are not enemies to be destroyed… The Dutch have learnt nothing from history… They could have helped us and we could have helped them. They have done everything to undermine our victory over Bolshevism.’
Himmler also finally agreed on 17 March, the day before Guderian arrived at Hohenlychen and persuaded him to resign his army command, that he would meet in the strictest secrecy a representative of the World Jewish Congress at Hartzwalde. Kersten suggested that Storch should come to Germany, provided Himmler would guarantee his personal safety.
‘Nothing will happen to Herr Storch’, said Himmler. ‘I pledge my honour and my life on that.’
Kersten, as before, was careful to write Himmler a letter confirming everything that the Reichsführer S.S. had promised to do. Himmler, in his turn, sent an invitation to Storch in which he tried to make out that he had always from the start wanted to draft a helpful and humane approach to the Jewish problem, and had in fact shown his good intentions in recent weeks. He also confirmed his agreements with Kersten in writing, through his secretary Brandt.
On 22 March, the day Kersten flew back to Stockholm to report his various successes to Günther, Himmler received his successor on the battlefront, General Gotthard Heinrici, at Prenzlau, his military headquarters. He had thought fit the previous day to venture seeing Hitler in Berlin, and Guderian saw him walking with the Führer among the rubble in the Chancellery garden. Afterwards Guderian had told him that in his view the war was lost and the wasteful slaughter of men should be stopped at once.
‘Go with me to Hitler and urge him to arrange an armistice’, Guderian demanded.
This was too much for Himmler.
‘My dear Colonel-General’, said Himmler very precisely. ‘It is still too early for that.’ Guderian was disgusted. He could get no further with Himmler, however much he argued. ‘There was nothing to be done with the man’, he says in his memoirs. ‘He was afraid of Hitler.’
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