Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  ‘It is outrageous’, said Himmler to Bernadotte, ‘that this camp which in my opinion was in model shape should have become the subject of these shameless accounts. Nothing has upset me so much as what the Allied press has published about this business.’

  Bernadotte noted how tired and nervous Himmler was. He looked ‘spent and weary’, and said he had not slept for several nights. ‘He gave the impression of being unable to remain long in one spot and of darting from place to place as an outlet for his anxiety and restlessness.’ Nevertheless, he ate hungrily and as he talked tapped his front teeth with his fingernails—a sign of nerves, as Schellenberg explained in an aside to Bernadotte. He agreed to the women being evacuated from Ravensbrück, and to the Red Cross moving the Scandinavians as far as Denmark, where they must remain under the control of the Gestapo. This was to begin the following day, arranged by the Danes at the request of Bernadotte.

  Himmler, worn out, left it to Schellenberg to ask Bernadotte whether he would take a message to Eisenhower. Bernadotte refused. ‘He should have taken Germany’s affairs into his own hands after my first visit’, he said. Schellenberg, who had travelled with Bernadotte part of the way to the airport, returned to Hohenlychen ‘filled with a deep sadness’, and had scarcely gone to bed to make up his lost sleep when Himmler summoned him. The Reichsführer was lying in bed looking utterly miserable and saying he felt ill. But he decided to drive to Wustrow, the car weaving its way through the columns of troops and refugees that filled the roads. ‘I dread what is to come’, he said. Just before getting to Wustrow they were attacked by low-flying aircraft, but they escaped uninjured. They dined and then talked far into the night. Himmler dreamed of founding a new National Unity Party unencumbered by the presence of Hitler.

  Sunday, 22 April was the day when Hitler, immured in his Bunker and marshalling imaginary troops on territory already lost, finally decided he would stay in Berlin. The Russians had now entered the outskirts of the city. Goebbels and his wife with their six children were all summoned to join him in his concrete grave. Like an angry god in a paroxysm of self-pity, Hitler stormed at the world that had failed him and the traitors at his gates. Let them scatter to the south; he would die in the capital, he and his faithful friends.

  Himmler was not among them. He had hurried away from Wustrow, which was also threatened by the Russians. He had gone back to Hohenlychen, where he had heard from Fegelein by telephone of Hitler’s intransigent decision. Hitler, he was told, was raving that the S.S. had left him in the lurch.

  Gottlieb Berger was with him, as well as Gebhardt. The message touched Himmler’s loyalty on the raw, and Schellenberg, who had now gone north to join Bernadotte, was not there to protect him with his subtle advice.

  ‘Everyone in Berlin is mad’, he cried. ‘I still have my escort battalion — 600 men, most of them wounded or convalescent. What am I to do?’

  Berger, a simple man, said outright that the Reichsführer should go with his remaining forces to Berlin and join the Führer. Himmler knew that Schellenberg would oppose this. He telephoned the Bunker again and, after discussion, compromised by agreeing to meet Fegelein at Nauen, a half-way point to Berlin, where the matter could be discussed more fully. This was action of a sort. Had he not said at lunch to Schellenberg before he had gone, ‘I must act one way or the other. What do you suggest?’

  Himmler and Gebhardt in two separate cars; Gebhardt wanted to go to Berlin to be confirmed personally by Hitler in a new appointment of some value in the approaching times, that of head of the German Red Cross. For Himmler, Berlin was a place to be avoided, though he still wanted to court the affections of Hitler by offering to send him his escort to die as martyrs among the rubble. But Fegelein failed to meet him at Nauen; he never arrived. The two cars waited at the cross-roads in the darkness of the Sunday night for two hours, while Himmler nursed his uncertainties. Eventually they agreed that Gebhardt should continue the journey to see Hitler in Berlin, taking with him a message from Himmler, who would meanwhile return to the shelter of the nursing-home. So loyalty was satisfied. Gebhardt was received by Hitler late that night and confirmed in his appointment, while Hitler accepted Himmler’s generous offer of the blood of his men. It was very simple. Gebhardt asked if there were any message he might take from the Führer to Himmler. ‘Yes,’ said Hitler, ‘give him my love.’

  He was followed by Berger, who was about to fly south to keep watch for Himmler on the behaviour of Kaltenbrunner. Berger’s simple loyalty was expressed so tactlessly that he had to witness another paroxysm of the Führer’s rage — the shouting, the face flushed purple, the trembling limbs, the semi-paralysis of the left side of his body. It was an experience he was not to forget as he flew south along with many others, officials, staff officers, members of the household and secretariat, all hurrying from Berlin with the sound of the Russian guns in their ears. Everyone who possibly could was getting out of the capital through the narrowing territory which still offered an escape-route to the south.

  Himmler retired to the comparative safety of Hohenlychen, and turned his mind once more from the Führer to Bernadotte. According to Schellenberg, Himmler had sent him north with a definite message of surrender to the Western Powers offered in his own name. Schellenberg eventually met Bernadotte at Flensburg the following day, 23 April, the day on which Goebbels announced on the radio that Hitler would lead the defence of Berlin and Goring in Obersalzberg was pondering over the best form of words for the message he was to send Hitler, offering to take over the total leadership of the Reich.

  It was arranged that Bernadotte and Himmler should meet that night in Lübeck. The conference began by candlelight in the Swedish consulate; the electricity supply had failed, and an air-raid delayed the discussions. They went down to the public air-raid shelter, where Himmler, Minister of the Interior and commander of the Gestapo and the S.S., talked unrecognized to the small group of Germans who came in from the street for protection against the attack. Bernadotte watched him. ‘He struck me as being utterly exhausted and at a nervous extremity’, he wrote subsequently. ‘He looked as if he were mustering all his will power to preserve outward calm.’

  When they went upstairs sometime after midnight, Himmler gave his view of the situation. Hitler might already be dead; the capital in any case could not last much longer, and it was only a matter of days before Hitler would be gone. ‘I admit that Germany is defeated’, declared Himmler. Bernadotte has left a record of the next part of their conversation:

  HIMMLER: In the situation that has now arisen I consider my hands free. In order to save as great a part of Germany as possible from a Russian invasion I am willing to capitulate on the Western front in order to enable the Western Allies to advance rapidly towards the East. But I am not prepared to capitulate on the Eastern front. I have always been, and I shall always remain, a sworn enemy of Bolshevism. At the beginning of the World War, I fought tooth and nail against the Russo-German pact. Are you willing to forward a communique on these lines to the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, so that he can inform the Western Powers of my proposal?

  BERNADOTTE: It is in my opinion quite impossible to carry out a surrender on the Western front and to continue to fight on the Eastern front. It can be looked upon as quite certain that England and America will not make any separate settlement.

  HIMMLER: I am well aware how extremely difficult this is, but all the same I want to make the attempt to save millions of Germans from Russian occupation.

  BERNADOTTE: I am not willing to forward your communique to the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs unless you promise that Denmark and Norway shall be included in the surrender.

  At the end of their discussions, Bernadotte asked Himmler what he would do if his proposals were rejected.

  ‘In that event’, he replied. ‘I shall take over the command of the Eastern Front and be killed in battle.’

  Himmler set down his proposals in a letter for which Bernadotte had asked so that he might have them
in writing to hand to Günther, the Swedish Minister. The letter was carefully drafted by candlelight. This day, said Himmler as he handed the letter to Bernadotte, was the most bitter in his life. Schellenberg and Bernadotte then prepared to return to Flensburg, leaving Himmler to ponder (as Schellenberg told Bernadotte later) whether he should shake hands or not with the Allied Supreme Commander, or merely offer him a formal bow.5

  In the Bunker, Hitler had received Goring’s carefully worded signal as a brutal affront. He called him a traitor and dispossessed him of his rank and offices, ordering his arrest by the S.S. in the south. This sudden defection by Goring, as Hitler was led to see it by Bormann, who was still anxious to destroy his rivals even during these last moments of the regime, left wide open the problem of a successor. Though he knew nothing of this, Himmler regarded himself by now as the only possible claimant. 6 Hitler is recorded as saying in March that Himmler was not on sufficiently good terms with the Party to succeed him, and ‘was anyway useless, since he is so inartistic’, a view that echoes the opinion of Goebbels. Himmler, however, was already dreaming of the shadow government with which he might continue as head of state under the Western Allies, and most of the remaining Nazi ministers and war leaders, including Doenitz, Speer and Schwerin von Krosigk, feared that Himmler would usurp the succession.

  The next three days, 24 to 26 April, were days of waiting. Fearing that he might be cut off by the Russians at Hohenlychen, Himmler moved to Schwerin, where Doenitz had set up his headquarters for the defence of the north. Each day the front closing round Berlin moved forward on the map like ink seeping through blotting paper, but Hitler stayed on in the Bunker directing forces which were no longer capable of either attack or resistance.

  On 27 April, Schellenberg received a message that sent him hurrying to meet Bernadotte at Odense airport in Jutland, where he arrived late because of the bad weather; he had gathered in any case that Himmler’s proposals had not been well received in Britain and America, but had decided not to pass this on in case Himmler might relapse once again into faint-heartedness. Bernadotte offered to drive with him to Lübeck to see the Reichsführer. As soon as Himmler heard that his offer had not been eagerly received, he ordered Schellenberg to report to him. With all his subtle plans in a state of collapse, Schellenberg drove south in fear of his life. He took the strange precaution of telephoning Hamburg and arranging to take the astrologer Wilhelm Wulff with him to this dangerous interview. It always calmed Himmler to have his horoscope read.

  But it needed more than an astrologer to know what the fates were preparing for Himmler on the other side of the world. The story of the leak to the international press of Himmler’s discussions with Count Bernadotte has only recently been told in a detailed statement by Jack Winocaur, at that time director of the British Information Services in Washington.7 Winocaur was on the staff attending the three-month session of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, starting in April 1945 at San Francisco. The British delegation included Anthony Eden, the then Foreign Secretary, who at a private delegation meeting on 27 April is reported by Winocaur to have said quite casually: ‘By the way … we’ve heard from Stockholm that Himmler has made an offer through Bernadotte to surrender Germany unconditionally to the Americans and ourselves. Of course, we are letting the Russians know about it.’ The British and American Ministers in Washington had reported the offer during the early hours of 25 April to Churchill and Truman, both of whom regarded it as an attempt by Germany to split the Allies, and they arranged at once for Stalin to be informed. A reply was sent that surrender could only be acceptable if it were offered to all the Allies simultaneously.

  Winocaur, who was one of the men in charge of British press relations at the conference, knew nothing of this background at the time, but felt that Eden’s momentous statement to the delegates should be passed on to the press. After some hesitation, entirely on his own initiative, he gave the news overnight to his friend Paul Scott Rankine of Reuters on the strict understanding that the source should not be revealed. Rankine sent a press cable to London breaking the news in an exclusive statement soon after one o’clock in the morning of 28 April.

  While Schellenberg was during the morning of 28 April successfully calming Himmler with the aid of his favourite astrologer, the Allied press was pouring out the news of the Reichsführer’s independent attempt at negotiations. Completely unaware of this, Himmler attended a military conference in Rheinsberg convened by Keitel. At this meeting Himmler presided, which showed that he regarded himself as Hitler’s deputy and successor.

  In the late afternoon Bernadotte heard the news of the negotiations on the clandestine radio, and realized that Himmler was finished as a negotiator. Doenitz also heard the report and telephoned enquiries to Himmler, who immediately denied the story as it had been put in the broadcast, but added that he had no intention of issuing any public statement himself. According to Schellenberg, he then spent part of the day deciding how best to order the evacuation of German troops from Norway and Denmark.

  It was not until nine o‘clock that night that a monitor report on a broadcast put out by the B.B.C. gave Himmler away to the Führer in the bowels of the Bunker. According to one observer, Hitler’s ‘colour rose to a heated red, and his face became virtually unrecognizable’.8 Then he began to rage at this treacherous betrayal by the man he had trusted most of all. The men and women hemmed in the Bunker were convulsed with emotion, and ‘everyone looked to his poison’. Himmler’s arrest was ordered; he followed Goring into the limbo of the dispossessed. ‘A traitor must never succeed as Führer’, screamed Hitler.9 He took his revenge on the only associate of Himmler he had in his power. This was Fegelein, the brother-in-law of the woman he was about to marry and Himmler’s unfaithful subordinate at Hitler’s headquarters. He had tried to desert, but he was dragged back, taken upstairs into the Chancellery garden and shot around midnight on the barest suspicion that he had known something of Himmler’s treachery.

  Hitler ordered Göring’s successor as head of the Luftwaffe, Field-Marshal von Greim, to leave the Bunker and fly during the night under Russian fire to Doenitz’s headquarters, which were now at Ploen. Greim, who had been wounded in the foot during his hazardous flight into Berlin in a light aircraft, flew north in the same ’plane piloted by Hanna Reitsch, who was a dedicated Nazi. They took off from the avenue leading up to the Brandenburg Gate. This strange pair did not arrive at Ploen, which was on the Baltic coast some 200 miles north-west of Berlin, until the afternoon of 29 April, having landed in the early hours of the morning at Rechlin.

  At Ploen they found an uneasy balance of power in force between Doenitz, Commander-in-Chief of the northern armies, and Himmler, Commander of the S.S. and the police. According to Schwerin von Krosigk, Doenitz and Himmler had talked the matter over and agreed that each of them was ready to serve under the Führer’s acknowledged successor. Doenitz imagined this must be Himmler, and so, for that matter, did the Reichsführer himself.

  During 29 April no official statement reached Doenitz that Himmler had been dispossessed of his rank and power by Hitler, although an ambiguous signal arrived from Bormann at 3.15 on the morning of 30 April: Doenitz was to ‘proceed at once and mercilessly against all traitors’. Only Greim had received a definite instruction to arrest Himmler, an order which he was powerless to carry out unaided by Doenitz, who was still certain Himmler would at any moment become his Führer. There is no record of when Greim met Doenitz or what exactly he said to him. Neither of them knew that Hitler’s testament was already composed and signed, or that Doenitz was to be appointed Führer with Karl Hanke, Gauleiter of Breslau, as Reichsführer S.S. and Paul Giesler, Gauleiter of Munich, as Minister of the Interior.

  The isolation of Hitler in Berlin was now complete. His final craving for vengeance against Goring and Himmler, the men who had served him in their own way for the best part of two decades, was frustrated by the confusion that surrounded the last days of his life. While Gor
ing was kept in nominal confinement in the south by an embarrassed unit of S.S. men, Himmler remained free in the north, a political buccaneer who did not even know until after Hitler’s death that his authority had been swept from beneath his feet. With his remaining staff, his escort of S.S. men, and his fleet of cars, he moved in uneasy orbit round the Grand Admiral’s headquarters at Ploen with no particular duties to occupy his time except the maintenance of his position and the salvage of his power.10 It was not until late in the afternoon of 30 April that Doenitz learned in a signal sent by Bormann from the Bunker in Berlin of his unwanted elevation to Führer of a Germany on the verge of disintegration. Bormann’s signal was worded evasively and did not even reveal that Hitler had died by his own hand at 3.30 that afternoon: Doenitz merely knew that he, and not Himmler, had been nominated Hitler’s successor: ‘In place of the former Reich Marshal Goring the Führer appoints you, Herr Grand Admiral, as his successor. Written authority is on its way. You will immediately take all such measures as the situation requires.’

  Doenitz, surprised and alarmed, sent a loyal message back to the Leader he did not know was dead. ‘If Fate… compels me to rule the Reich as your appointed successor, I shall continue this war to an end worthy of the unique, heroic struggle of the German people’, he said in the stifled language of loyalty. One of the three copies of Hitler’s testament, signed at four o’clock in the morning of the previous day and witnessed by both Goebbels, the new Reich Chancellor, and Bormann, was already on its way. A special messenger had left the Bunker at noon on 29 April, but was, in fact, never to reach Doenitz at Ploen.