On 22 March Himmler’s last act as a soldier was to assemble both his chiefs of staff and his stenographers at Prenzlau and dictate in the presence of Heinrici his summary of what had happened during the period of his command. As he went on talking, this grandiloquent scene of farewell became increasingly absurd. Heinrici’s professional opinion was that ‘in four months Himmler had failed to grasp the basic elements of generalship’. After two hours’ dictation he became so incoherent that the stenographers could no longer make sense of what he had said and, together with the staff officers, they excused themselves from further work. Heinrici, impatient to get to the front, was finally released from this ordeal by the telephone: General Busse, one of the commanders in the field, was in grave difficulties and wanted to report to his Commander-in-Chief. Himmler straightaway handed the receiver to Heinrici.
‘You are in command now’, he said. ‘You give him the necessary orders.’36
Before the meeting broke up, Heinrici, like Guderian, tried to sound Himmler on the possibilities of initiating peace negotiations with the Western Allies. Himmler tried to sound inconclusive, but admitted cautiously that he had caused certain steps to be taken.
In the chaos of the last month of the war, many men were salving their consciences by attempting to conduct negotiations with the Allies which might, once the war was over, present them in a more favourable light. Among these was General Wolff, who had been Himmler’s liaison officer at Hitler’s headquarters until 1943, when he was appointed Military Governor in Northern Italy. Early in March he went to Switzerland and attempted through Allen Dulles to negotiate the surrender of German forces in Italy. However, he failed to meet the emissaries sent by General Alexander to Zurich to discuss terms with him because he dared not admit to Himmler the full nature of his self-appointed mission. He pretended that his sole interest in holding these meetings lay in the exchange of prisoners, a matter which Himmler declared was the concern of Kaltenbrunner. For the moment there was stalemate, but Wolff was only waiting his chance to challenge Kaltenbrunner’s growing authority and act again on his own behalf.
It is often difficult to make any sense of the rival negotiations that were taking place behind Hitler’s back from motives which were a mixture of desperation and self-interest. According to the evidence given at the Nuremberg Trial by Baldur von Schirach, who was the Nazi Gauleiter of Vienna during the war, Himmler came to Vienna at the end of March to organize the evacuation of Jews from Vienna to the camps at Linz and Mauthausen.
‘I want the Jews now employed in industry’, Schirach reported him to have said, ‘to be taken by boat or by bus, if possible, under the most favourable conditions and with the best medical care to Linz or Mauthausen. Please take every care of these Jews. They are my soundest capital investment.’ Schirach gained the impression that Himmler wanted to ‘redeem himself with this good treatment of the Jews’.37 It seems, however, that such Jews as survived were in fact marched on foot to Mauthausen.
During the first part of April Himmler was frequently at Hohenlychen, and it was here on 2 April that he met Bernadotte for the second time, along with Schellenberg. Himmler appeared nervous and depressed, but he insisted that the war must still go on. He agreed, however, to the partial release of the Scandinavian prisoners, though he said they were not to be released all at once because, as he put it, ‘it would attract too much attention’. Himmler seemed to be almost completely under the distant control of Hitler, but later he sent messages through Schellenberg that, should Hitler’s position change, he hoped Bernadotte would get in touch with Allied headquarters on his behalf. Bernadotte warned Schellenberg to get rid of any illusions either he or Himmler might have that the Allies would ever enter into negotiations with the head of the S.S., the man whom the world regarded as a mass murderer.
Goebbels realized by the beginning of April that the concentration camps were the worst evidence possible for the Allies to discover. ‘I fear that the concentration camps have grown a bit above Himmler’s head’, he said, and von Oven duly wrote down this observation: ‘Just suppose that these camps should be overrun by the enemy in their present condition. What an outcry will be heard.’ It was in fact during April that the first contingent of Allied soldiers liberated Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau. Himmler believed he had acted with exemplary humanity in allowing these camps, in which conditions had never been worse, to be entered by the Allies without their inhabitants first being blown up in the blockhouses where they lay. The massed overcrowding left both the guards and their prisoners equally helpless to relieve the barest needs of the dying. An appalling, hopeless state of inertia faced the Allied units entering these camps and seeing for the first time what man in the twentieth century could do to man in the name of racial purity. The first British entered Belsen on 15 April, after arranging a truce with the S.S. guards three days before. According to Schellenberg, Kaltenbrunner had ordered the wholesale evacuation of Buchenwald which began, probably without Himmler’s knowledge, on 3 April; Himmler, says Schellenberg, stopped the evacuation on 10 April as soon as he learned of it from the son of the Swiss President, Jean-Marie Musi, to whom on 7 April he had given his word that Buchenwald should be left intact for the Allied liberation, a promise intended to impress General Eisenhower in Himmler’s favour.
Himmler was still nominally a soldier, commander of the Waffen S.S. and Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, though in the turmoil of these last weeks such troops as there were left in action came under the direct orders of Hitler. Nevertheless, Himmler saw fit to issue a stern order dated 12 April decreeing the death penalty for commanders who failed to hold the towns for which they were responsible. ‘Battle commanders appointed for each town are personally held responsible for compliance with this order. Neglect of this duty by the battle commander, or the attempt on the part of any civil servant to induce such neglect, is punishable by death.’38
Kersten meanwhile had been waiting in Stockholm expecting to receive the formal permit for Storch to visit Germany. Bernadotte returned on 10 April, bringing with him a letter for Kersten from Brandt which, although no date was fixed for the appointment, revealed that Himmler had not forgotten his promises. He was, in fact, still very uneasy about the project. On 13 April he said to Schellenberg: ‘How am I going to do that with Kaltenbrunner about? I shall be completely at his mercy.’ This was one of the occasions when Schellenberg had to wrestle for Himmler’s soul; secret arrangements had been made with Professor de Crinis for a detailed report from Hitler’s doctor on the Fuhrer’s state of health, but this had not yet arrived to help or hinder the Reichsführer S.S. in making up his mind. Himmler took Schellenberg for a walk in the forest near the country house in Wustrow where he was staying, and unburdened himself of his worries:
‘Schellenberg,’ he said, ‘I believe that nothing more can be done with Hitler.’
‘Everything he has done lately’, urged Schellenberg, ‘seems to show that now is the time for you to act.’
Schellenberg goes on to describe their conversation:
‘Himmler said to me that I was the only one, apart from Brandt, whom he could trust completely. What should he do? He could not shoot Hitler; he could not give him poison; he could not arrest him in the Reich Chancellery, for then the whole military machine would come to a standstill. I told him that all this did not matter; only two possibilities existed for him: either he should go to Hitler and tell him frankly all that had happened during the last years and force him to resign; or else he should remove him by force. Himmler objected that if he spoke to Hitler like that the Führer would fall in a violent rage and shoot him out of hand. I said, “That is just what you must protect yourself against — you still have enough higher S.S. leaders, and you are still in a strong enough position to arrest him. If there is no other way, then the doctors will have to intervene.”’
Eventually Himmler took Schellenberg’s advice and arranged a date for Storch to come to Germany on 19 April, during a period when Kaltenbrunne
r was known to be going to Austria. The message reached Kersten on 17 April, but by this time Storch was unable to go to Germany. He delegated the formidable task of being the first Jew to negotiate direct with Himmler on more or less equal terms to Norbert Masur, director of the Swedish section of the World Jewish Congress in New York. He was to travel incognito in the care of Kersten. On 19 April they flew by the regular service to Tempelhof airport, the only passengers on a plane full of Red Cross parcels. When they arrived, an S.S. guard stood ready to receive them; the S.S. clicked their heels and cried, ‘Heil Hitler’, but Masur calmly raised his hat to them and said, ‘Good evening’. They then drove to Hartzwalde in an S.S. staff car to wait for Himmler, who had spent the day in Berlin conferring with Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the Minister of Finance, an interview at the Count’s house arranged by Schellenberg because he hoped the Minister might influence Himmler to take the action they all wanted him to take, ‘with or without Hitler’.39
Himmler could not meet Masur on 20 April because it was Hitler’s birthday. He sent Schellenberg to Hartzwalde during the night of the 19th to prepare the ground for their conversations, which he was ready to begin the moment the birthday celebrations were over. Himmler, according to Schellenberg, had ordered champagne with which to toast the Führer.
But 20 April was no day for celebrations. By now, the Americans were across the Elbe and in Nuremberg; British patrols were approaching Berlin from the west and the full Russian forces were marching in from the east. The American and Russian armies were almost on the point of meeting. Hitler decided to receive his guests in the great Bunker constructed fifty feet under the Chancellery buildings and extending out under the garden. Although Himmler, against Schellenberg’s advice, had decided he had better appear and shake Hitler by the hand, he was not invited to confer in private with the Führer along with the service chiefs. Relations were cold by now. He lined up with the rest below ground to congratulate the man he had served as Reichsführer S.S. for fifteen years. Goring, Goebbels, Ribbentrop and Speer were there; so were Doenitz, Keitel and Jodl, all under the watchful eyes of Bormann. It was expected Hitler would now move south and head the great German Resistance which was due to be organized from the Obersalzberg; Himmler joined with the others in urging him to do so. But Hitler reserved his decision, only declaring that if Germany should be cut in two by the forward drive of the armies from the east and the west, then Doenitz should take charge of the defences in the north. The narrow escape route to the south was still open, and once the conference was over the great dispersal took place. Goring travelling with a fleet of cars departed importantly for the safety of Obersalzberg; Speer hurried to Hamburg intent on preserving as much of German industry from destruction as possible; Ribbentrop still hung around Berlin, his advice no longer wanted. Only Goebbels and Bormann remained fast by the side of Hitler, waiting for his decision whether they were to stay and die in Berlin or escape to the south and fight a while longer for survival.
Himmler said goodbye and set off for Wustrow, where Schellenberg was anxiously waiting for him. He was never to see Hitler again.
VIII. Self-Betrayal
Himmler climbed the curved steps from the lower levels of Hitler’s bunker and passed through the passageways and corridors flanked by heavy bulkheads to protect the Führer during the final defence of Berlin. Outside these sealed cells the earth trembled with blast that was slowly disintegrating the remains of the city.
Schellenberg, anxious as ever, had been vainly trying to make contact with Himmler who, after leaving the Bunker, was confined in Berlin by the heavy air attacks which were felling more buildings around him. He did not reach Wustrow, where Schellenberg was waiting for him, until the middle of the night. After some persuasion, he agreed to drive to Hartzwalde, where they arrived between two and three o’clock on the morning of 21 April.
Kersten met him outside the house and urged him to be both friendly and magnanimous with Masur; this was his greatest chance to redeem the honour of Germany and show the world while there was still time that a new and humane policy had at last replaced the repressions and cruelties of the past. Kersten knew that an argument such as this would raise some response from Himmler’s professed humanitarianism. As they went in, Himmler assured Kersten that all he wanted now was some agreement with the Jews.
This was the first time since he had come to power that Himmler had met a Jew on equal terms. He greeted Masur formally and said how glad he was that he had come.1 They sat down, and immediately Himmler began to make a long, defensive statement about the attitude of the regime to the Jews as aliens in Germany, and how the emigration policy he had devised, which, as he said, ‘could have been very advantageous to the Jews,’ had been sabotaged by the other nations who would not receive them.
Masur was an experienced negotiator and he had come to achieve a particular object. He remained very calm and interposed a few occasional remarks to refute the more extreme of Himmler’s arguments. Only when Himmler said that the concentration camps were really training centres where if the work was hard the treatment had always been just, did Masur lose some measure of his patience and refer to the crimes that had been committed in them.
‘I concede that these things have happened occasionally’, Himmler agreed mildly, ‘but I have also punished those responsible.’
He complained bitterly of the false atrocity propaganda that the Allies were making out of the conditions at Belsen and Buchenwald, which he had ‘handed over as agreed’. He said:
‘When I let 2,700 Jews go into Switzerland, this was made the subject of a personal campaign against me in the Press, asserting that I had only released these men in order to construct an alibi for myself. But I have no need of an alibi! I have always done only what I considered just, what was essential for my people. I will also answer for that. Nobody has had so much mud slung at him in the last ten years as I have. I have never bothered myself about that. Even in Germany any man can say about me what he pleases. Newspapers abroad have started a campaign against me which is no encouragement to me to continue handing over the camps.’2
Masur urged that all the Jews left alive in Germany should be released at once, and that a stop should be put to the evacuations. But as soon as he was faced with hard facts and terms of agreement, Himmler began to hesitate and avoided committing himself. Masur had to retire with Schellenberg to another room to determine the details of what should be done; since they had met the previous day, Schellenberg knew what Masur wanted. It was easier to reach such agreements apart from Himmler; he only gave way when he was alone with Kersten, who made him promise to implement the agreement he had already made the previous month to release from Ravensbrück for evacuation to Sweden a thousand Jewish women under the cover of their being of Polish origin. Himmler was still openly afraid that Hitler might discover what he was doing.
To the end of the conversation, Himmler attempted to justify what had been done both in Germany and in the occupied countries. Crime had been reduced, he said; no one had gone hungry; everyone had work. Hitler alone had the resolution to resist the Communists; his defeat would bring chaos to Europe. Only then would the Americans discover the terrible thing that they had done. With the help of Schellenberg and Brandt, who was also present, Kersten achieved the best measure of agreement he could about the number of Jews to be released and the strict observation of what had already been accepted by Himmler in the past for the relief of the Jews still left in captivity. Worried and irresolute, Himmler stayed on the edge of the conversation, resorting to generalizations about the situation and the humane things he had done; he withdrew himself from any discussion of the arrangements that were being undertaken on his behalf by Schellenberg and Brandt. At about five o’clock in the morning the meeting broke up, and Kersten took Himmler outside for a more private conversation.
It was then that Himmler suddenly asked him, ‘Have you any access to General Eisenhower or the Western Allies?’
When Kersten said he
had none, Himmler went on to ask if he would be willing to act as his ambassador to Eisenhower, and go to him with the suggestion that hostilities against Germany should be stopped so that war on a single front against Russia could be undertaken.
‘I am ready to concede victory to the Western Allies’, he said. ‘They have only to give me time to throw back the Russians. If they would let me have the equipment, I can still do it.’
Himmler could not give up the image of himself as the Supreme Commander in the German Army. Kersten said he should talk to Bernadotte about peace negotiations. That was more in his province. Then having reassured himself that the Dutch cities and the dam were still intact and that Himmler would do all he could to prevent further bloodshed in Scandinavia, Kersten finally let him go. By sheer persistence he had won from him everything he could, and Schellenberg was anxious now to take Himmler on to see Bernadotte at Hohenlychen; the Count was anxious to talk to him before leaving that morning for the north.
They went down to the car together; Himmler offered his hand to Kersten and thanked him for all he had done. It was as if he knew they would not meet again, and he spoke formally:
‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the years in which you have given me the benefit of your medical skill. My last thoughts are for my poor family’, he added, as he said goodbye and drove away with Schellenberg.3
They arrived at Hohenlychen at six o‘clock and had breakfast with Bernadotte, who had driven to the nursing home from Berlin the previous evening in order to meet Himmler.4 Bernadotte was in a hurry to leave and only anxious to get Himmler’s consent for the release of the Scandinavian prisoners who had been gathered by the Red Cross in Neuengamme. But Himmler would not give way; he said angrily that the ‘tissue of lies’ about Belsen and Buchenwald had made him think again about the whole situation, and he ordered the total evacuation of Neuengamme.
Heinrich Himmler Page 30
