Meanwhile, Bormann and Goebbels, without any reference to their new Führer, were trying during the night of 30 April to make favourable terms with the Russian commanders. Bormann sent another evasive signal to Doenitz saying he would try to join him at Ploen and adding that ‘the testament is in force’. It was Goebbels who finally sent Doenitz an explicit signal at 3.15 in the afternoon of 1 May, telling him of Hitler’s death twenty-four hours after it had happened. He named the principal ministers in the new government, but made no mention of Himmler, or of the fact that he and his wife were preparing to die that night after killing their sleeping children.
Himmler no longer found himself welcome at Ploen. His exclusion from any form of office was a severe shock to him, and Doenitz did not hide his disapproval of Himmler’s attempts to negotiate with the Allies. Schellenberg travelled through the night of 30 April along the roads blocked with army transport and refugees only to find Himmler at his new headquarters at the castle of Kalkhorst, near Travemunde. He had just gone to bed. It was then four o‘clock in the morning of 1 May. He learned from Brandt what had happened and of Himmler’s despair after a late-night conference with Doenitz, during which he had proposed himself as second Minister of State.11 Doenitz had evaded this offer, though he was still afraid Himmler might use his police escort to regain his lost power. Himmler, says Schellenberg, was ‘playing with the idea of resigning, and even talking of suicide’.
At breakfast the following morning he was ‘nervous and distracted’, and in the afternoon they went together to Ploen. Schellenberg by now was solely concerned to please Bernadotte. He planned to use Himmler’s remaining influence to secure from Doenitz a peaceful solution to the German occupation of the Scandinavian countries. By this means he felt he would earn the gratitude of the Allies and secure his own future when he took refuge in Sweden. Himmler, anxious to be present at the conferences called by Doenitz, was prepared to support the peaceful withdrawal of German forces from Norway. He also admitted to Doenitz that he had in fact been attempting to secure peace through Sweden. This finally discredited him in the eyes of the Grand Admiral.12
May Day saw the beginning of the surrender of Germany. Mohnke, the commander of Himmler’s S.S. regiment which he had sent to cordon Berlin, was captured by the Russians while attempting to escape from the Bunker; at ten o’clock that night a broadcast from Berlin proclaimed officially that Hitler was dead. Kesselring surrendered in north Italy and, on 2 May Doenitz began the first stages of his own surrender to Montgomery without any further consultation with Himmler. Kaufmann, the Gauleiter of Hamburg, in spite of the order he had received, opened up the city to the British forces.
Meanwhile Himmler maintained the façade of power, and it was still formidable. Accompanied by his escort of S.S. men, he moved around in his Mercedes like some medieval warlord. While he was preparing to follow Doenitz on 1 May to Flensburg, on the borders of Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark, he received an unexpected offer from Léon Degrelle, the renegade commander of the Belgian and French fascists enrolled in the Waffen S.S., who had retreated from the Russian front with what was left of his men.13
Degrelle was determined to make a bold finish to his fighting career in the eyes of Himmler, who no longer wanted to see him, though he was quite prepared to add his men to the diminishing forces at his command. He sent word to Degrelle to join him at Malente, near Kiel, and on the way the Belgian commander in his Volkswagen powered by potato schnapps caught up with the Reichsführer S.S. driving at the head of his column of Mercedes and lorries. Himmler, wearing a crash-helmet, was driving his own car, and they broke the journey at Malente. By now Degrelle had little to offer his leader; the Belgian S.S. units had scattered to Denmark. Himmler’s sole concern was to keep up with Doenitz, and Degrelle followed the fleet of cars and lorries on the journey north to Flensburg.
As they were approaching Kiel, a daylight raid began. Himmler kept calm and shouted, ‘Discipline, gentlemen, discipline’, as his staff, both men and women, dived for safety in the mud, in which the girls had the shoes sucked from their feet. Degrelle left the scene as the officers and their aides struggled back with their vehicles after the raiding planes had gone. He went directly north through Kiel while Himmler’s convoy retreated in search of some less hazardous route to Flensburg.
That night Himmler was joined on his journey by Werner Best from Denmark.14 They sat together in the Mercedes which Himmler still drove, and they spent the tedious hours of travel in talk. They were frequently held up by air-raids and did not reach Flensburg until early in the morning of 3 May.
Himmler, as always, was careful what he said. Hitler had not been quite himself, he admitted, during the past six months, and Bormann had increased his hold over him. He had issued Himmler with impossible commands on the Russian front and had refused even to discuss the idea of peace. On the other hand, Himmler said he was certain that if he had been allowed to have only half-anhour’s conference with Eisenhower he could have convinced him of the necessity of joining forces with the Germans to drive back the Russian invaders. Before they parted in the morning, Best said he was going back across the Danish border before his appointment with Doenitz later that day.
‘But what are you going to do yourself, Reichsführer?’ asked Best.
‘I don’t yet know’, was all Himmler could find to say, but he asked Best to take the S.S. women staff with him over the nearby border into Denmark, where they would be able to wash and get themselves food before returning to their duties.
Himmler’s indecision was shown even more in a conversation he had with Schwerin-Krosigk, who had become Foreign Minister in the place of Ribbentrop and therefore retired to Flensburg.15 He discovered Himmler in a mood of despair, an unwanted adviser at the headquarters of the new Führer.
‘Graf Schwerin, what ever is to become of me?’ he asked.
Schwerin-Krosigk did not know what was to become of anyone; Germany scarcely had need of a Foreign Minister. It seemed to him that to help organize the evacuation of Germans from the east was the only practical thing they could do for the moment. But he tried to give a serious answer to Himmler’s question.
‘As I see it, there are three courses open to you’, he said. ‘The first is to shave off your moustache, disguise yourself in a wig and dark glasses, and try to disappear altogether. I expect, even so, you would soon be discovered, and your end would scarcely be glorious. The second course is to shoot yourself, though as a Christian I can’t advise you to do this; you would have to decide such a thing for yourself. What I really recommend is the third course: drive straight to Montgomery’s headquarters and say, ‘I am Heinrich Himmler, I want to take full responsibility for everything the S.S. has done.” As to what will happen then, who can say? But if it proves the end for you, it will at least be the most honourable way out.’
Himmler decided to act as a kind of elder statesman in Doenitz’s cabinet at Ploen for as long as he could. He was plainly unable to accept the fact that he no longer held the offices to which he had been formerly attached. His immediate retinue still amounted to some 150 staff officers and assistants. But neither Doenitz nor Himmler knew the full terms of Himmler’s rejection by Hitler. The messenger from the Bunker had failed in his mission of bringing the Führer’s testament to his successor, and Bormann, as everyone then believed, had been killed while trying to escape from the Bunker on the night of 30 April. Had they been able to read the carefully typed terms of Hitler’s denunciation they would at least have known what the Führer had felt about his former Minister: ‘Goering and Himmler, by their secret negotiations with the enemy, without my knowledge or approval, and by their illegal attempts to seize power in the State, quite apart from their treachery to my person, have brought irreparable shame on the country and the whole people.’ All they knew in fact was what Greim, the wounded leader of the Luftwaffe, and his devoted pilot, Hanna Reitsch, may have told them of Hitler’s paroxysms of anger, and what Goebbels’s signal indicated about the di
stribution of the principal offices of state, which neither Bormann nor Goebbels had arrived to take up. Doenitz, concerned only to rid himself of the past and surrender in a manner becoming an Admiral of the Fleet, was most unwilling to have a man of Himmler’s reputation serving in any cabinet of his own making. Yet he dared not in the circumstances entirely disregard him, so he put up with his presence at the council table without confirming him in any office.
When on 4 May Montgomery’s terms for unconditional surrender were discussed, Himmler’s views were aired along with those of Doenitz’s other advisers. He felt that the troops in Norway should be surrendered to Sweden to save them from captivity in Russia, and that some concessions might be gained if an offer were made to surrender peaceably the many places outside Germany still held by German troops. Schellenberg, resolutely travelling between Sweden, Denmark and Germany in his efforts to obtain agreement to a peaceful resolution of the German occupation of the Scandinavian countries, turned not to Himmler but to Doenitz and Schwerin-Krosigk when he at length arrived at five o’clock that afternoon after a fearful journey from Copenhagen. The following day, 5 May, he left again for Denmark, saying goodbye to Himmler, in whom he was by now no longer interested.
On 5 May Himmler gathered his own leaders and advisers around him, including S.S. Obergruppenführer Ohlendorff of the Security Office, S.S. Obergruppenführer von Weyrsch of the Secret Police and S.S. Obergruppenführer von Herff, a general of the Waffen S.S.; Brandt was also there, as was Gebhardt, who had left his patients at Hohenlychen in the care of the Russians. To them and their colleagues he solemnly recited policies so utterly out of keeping with the situation they can scarcely be credited; only a prolonged blindness to reality through shock can account for them. He, for one, was not going to give up and commit suicide. He would, he said, establish his own S.S. government in Schleswig-Holstein in order to conduct independent peace negotiations with the Western Powers. He then began to distribute new titles to his followers as his partners in founding an entirely new Nazi regime.
Himmler’s rejection by Hitler, however, was followed on 6 May by his rejection at the hands of Doenitz, who personally gave Himmler his formal dismissal in writing:
‘Dear Herr Reich Minister,
In view of the present situation, I have decided to dispense with your further assistance as Reich Minister of the Interior and member of the Reich Government, as Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, and as chief of the Police. I now regard all your offices as abolished. I thank you for the service which you have given to the Reich.’
Along with Himmler, Doenitz dismissed Goebbels, who was dead, and other Nazi ministers who still remained like ghosts from an horrific and evil past.16 He also forbade the continuation of resistance by diehard Nazis of the S.S.
But Himmler would not leave. After 6 May he haunted Flensburg along with his staff, his guards and his equipment, a monstrous survivor without a domain. He told Schwerin-Krosigk he would carefully consider his advice, but he still had obstinate dreams of maintaining his individual power. He went to the Nazi Commander of the German forces in Schleswig and Denmark, Field-Marshal Ernst Busch, in the vain hope of finding in him an ally. But Busch only wanted to get the arrangements for his own surrender concluded. So Himmler returned to the headquarters he had set up in Flensburg from which, one by one, his retinue were melting away.
On 8 May he reduced his fleet of cars to four and made a first gesture of self-abrogation by shaving off his moustache. He wondered where he could go in order to escape unwelcome attention. While Ohlendorff advised him to surrender and answer the world’s outcry against himself and the S.S., he considered, naturally without reaching any firm decision, whether he should take refuge with his friend the Prince of Waldeck, an autocratic general who had charge of the S.S. establishment on his estate at Arolsen.17
At length, on 10 May, Himmler and his remaining entourage left Flensburg and set out for Marne at the Dicksander Koog on the east coast of Schleswig-Holstein.18 It took them two days to get there, and they slept either out in the open or inside railway stations during the remaining days of their flight to the south. Himmler could think of only two things, how he could have saved his position and bargained with the Western Allies, and what was happening now to his two families in the south.
Eventually four cars reached the mouth of the Elbe, and it proved impossible to take them further; the distance across the water was about five miles. Reluctantly the little group of S.S. refugees, no better off now than hundreds of thousands of Germans wandering homeless on the roads, abandoned their vehicles and crossed the Elbe; they were ferried over the estuary unrecognized in a fishing boat with other refugees for the price of 500 Marks. There was nothing for them to do now but walk, passing the nights in peasant farmsteads and covering a few miles each day on foot. During the next five days they tramped slowly south through Neuhaus to Bremervorde, which they reached on the morning of 21 May. They had travelled in all little more than a hundred miles from Flensburg.
They were a strange contingent. In addition to Kiermaier, the group still included Brandt, Ohlendorf, Karl Gebhardt, Waffen S.S. Colonel Werner Grothmann and Major Macher. They had removed the insignia from their uniforms and pretended to be members of the Secret Field Police, a branch of the Gestapo, making their way to Bavaria. Himmler wore a patch over his eye like a pirate and carried a pass that had once belonged to Heinrich Hitzinger, a man whose identity papers Himmler had kept by him after he had been condemned to death by the Peoples’ Court in case they might prove useful.
At Bremervörde they realized they needed travel documents to pass through the check-point set up by the British Military Authority. Kiermaier confirmed this with the local District Councillor. They then decided that Kiermaier should apply to the British for these travel permits while another member of their party stood outside to watch the result and warn Himmler if Kiermaier were arrested. Since the Secret Field Police were in any case on the British Army’s black list, Kiermaier was kept in custody. When he did not reappear, Himmler and his companions slipped away.
Captain Tom Selvester was in command of 031 Civilian Interrogation Camp, which was based near Lüneburg.19 Since large numbers of German troops were trying to make their way home, they were constantly being stopped at check-points set up by the British and held as prisoners-of-war while their documents were examined. If there was any doubt about their identities, they were sent on for further questioning to an Interrogation Camp of the kind Captain Selvester controlled. Here they were paraded outside the Commandant’s office, and then sent in singly to account for themselves. After this they were searched, and their possessions carefully listed.
It was at two o’clock in the afternoon of 23 May that a convoy arrived at the 031 Interrogation Camp with a party of suspects who had been arrested earlier on at a check-point on a bridge near Bremervörde. After a while the men were paraded as usual, but around four o’clock Captain Selvester was told there were three men in the party who were giving some trouble and were insisting on seeing the officer in charge without delay. Since the prisoners were usually very docile and only too anxious to create a good impression, Captain Selvester’s curiosity was immediately aroused, and he ordered these three men to be sent to him one by one. Captain Selvester has described what followed:
‘The first man to enter my office was small, ill-looking and shabbily dressed, but he was immediately followed by two other men, both of whom were tall and soldierly looking, one slim, and one well-built. The well-built man walked with a limp. I sensed something unusual, and ordered one of my sergeants to place the two men in close custody, and not to allow anyone to speak to them without my authority. They were then removed from my office, whereupon the small man, who was wearing a black patch over his left eye, removed the patch and put on a pair of spectacles. His identity was at once obvious, and he said, “Heinrich Himmler” in a very quiet voice.’
Captain Selvester immediately placed his office under armed guar
d, and sent for an officer from the Intelligence Corps to help him. After he had arrived, the two officers asked Himmler to sign his name in order to compare it with a signature they had in their records. Himmler, thinking he was being asked to present them with a souvenir, appeared very reluctant to write his name, but eventually he agreed to do so provided the paper was destroyed immediately after it had been examined.
The next stage was to search the prisoner; in Captain Selvester’s own words:
‘This I carried out personally, handing each item of clothing as it was removed to my sergeant, who re-examined it. Himmler was carrying documents bearing the name of Heinrich Hitzinger, who I think was described as a postman. In his jacket I found a small brass case, similar to a cartridge case, which contained a small glass phial. I recognized it for what it was, but asked Himmler what it contained, and he said, “That is my medicine. It cures stomach cramp.” I also found a similar brass case, but without the phial, and came to the conclusion that the phial was hidden somewhere on the prisoner’s person. When all Himmler’s clothing had been removed and searched, all the orifices of his body were searched, also his hair combed and any likely hiding place examined, but no trace of the phial was found. At this stage he was not asked to open his mouth, as I considered that if the phial was hidden in his mouth and we tried to remove it, it might precipitate some action that would be regretted. I did however send for thick bread and cheese sandwiches and tea, which I offered to Himmler, hoping that I would see if he removed anything from his mouth. I watched him closely, whilst he was eating, but did not notice anything unusual.’
Meanwhile, word had been sent to 2nd Army Headquarters about Himmler’s arrest. While Captain Selvester was waiting for senior Intelligence officers to arrive from Luneburg, he offered Himmler a British Army uniform in exchange for the clothes that had been taken from him. This was all that was available, but when Himmler saw what he was required to put on, he refused; it seemed he was afraid he would be photographed in the uniform of the enemy and that the picture would be published. The only clothing he later accepted were a shirt, underpants and socks; so he was given an Army blanket to wrap round his half-clothed body.
Heinrich Himmler Page 32
