Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  CHAPTER VI

  The references in this chapter are all to Kersten’s Memoirs (Hutchinson, London, 1956). The many sheets from Himmler’s desk diary that survive in the Federal Archive at Koblenz show how much time Himmler spent in the care of his captive masseur; he normally set aside as much as two hours at a time, morning or afternoon, for the treatment that became increasingly essential to him. It should be remembered that Kersten was by no means popular with such men as Müller and Kaltenbrunner; he was, too, regarded as ‘interfering’ by some of those who were seeking to bring about peace through neutral Sweden. There was, no doubt, a certain element of vanity in Kersten’s nature. His negotiations were bitterly resented by Count Bernadotte, who wanted to keep all the credit for the attempts to bring about peace for himself. Since the war, Kersten’s leading protagonists have included his biographer Kessel, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper and Achim Besgen, who published a book on Kersten, Der Stille Befehl, in 1960. At one stage after the war, Kersten was being actively considered in Sweden for the Nobel Peace Prize.

  1

  Memoirs, pp. 311-12.

  2

  Memoirs, pp. 256-7.

  3

  Memoirs, pp. 257-8.

  4

  Memoirs, p. 177.

  5

  Memoirs, p, 178.

  6

  Himmler did not want to be considered an agnostic. He invented a special term for the form of belief he favoured — gottgläubig, implying belief in a form of godhead distinct from anything Christian. Himmler was against priesthood as a profession. He did not want, he said, a new form of ‘popery’ to grow up in the S.S.

  7

  Memoirs, p. 120.

  8

  Memoirs, pp. 306-7.

  CHAPTER VII

  1

  The full story of the attempt on Hitler’s life and of the failure of the military coup d’état on 20 July 1944 is told in the authors’ book The July Plot.

  2

  Himmler said this to von Krosigk, who later repeated it to H.F.

  3

  The list of 161 proven victims who were executed is given in Wheeler-Bennett’s Nemesis, p. 744.

  4

  See The S.S., pp. 300-1.

  5

  See The S.S., p. 268. According to evidence submitted at the I.M.T., Himmler formally witnessed the execution of Russian officers at Mauthausen during September 1944. See I.M.T. V, pp. 170, 174, 231.

  6

  See Dulles, Germany’s Underground, p. 163.

  7

  The evidence at Koblenz, Amsterdam and Warsaw (which H.F. visited during 1963) in particular carries innumerable documents which testify to the commercialization of the Jewish persecution. These include the sale of emigration permits which in Amsterdam, for example, goes back to April 1942. Elderly Jews were favoured who represented no security risk and who were willing to hand over money, securities or industrial plants. Other documents list in painstaking detail the disposal of looted treasure which was to be distributed among various Army, Navy and S.S. units.

  8

  See Schellenberg’s Memoirs, p. 430.

  9

  See The Final Solution, p. 462. Becher’s affidavit was produced during the hearing of Case XI at Nuremberg, Doc. No. N.G. 2675.

  10

  Eichmann refused to obey orders received from Himmler by telephone to stop the deportations; he claimed he must have them in wirting. See The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, p. 170.

  11

  See I.M.T. XI, p. 306.

  12

  See The S.S., p. 385.

  13

  Quoted by Milton Shulman in Defeat in the West, p. 218.

  14

  See Domberger, V.2, pp. 187-201.

  15

  See Guderian, Panzer Leader, p. 355.

  16

  For the dispute surrounding this episode, see The S.S., p. 377.

  17

  For Vlassov and the significance of Himmler’s refusal to make use of him, see above, Chapter V, note 22.

  18

  Werwolf, the so-called German resistance movement against the Allies, was largely a propaganda device prepared by Goebbels and Himmler.

  19

  See The S.S., p. 381.

  20

  According to von Oven, Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende (Vol. II, p. 161) Goebbels proposed to Hitler that Himmler should be made officially Minister of War.

  21

  For quotations, see The Bormann Letters.

  22

  Fegelein and Burgdorff, these men with whom Bormann seems so friendly, have their modest place in history. Fegelein, Himmler’s uncertain representative at Hitler’s headquarters, was married to Eva Braun’s sister, but nevertheless was executed by Hitler for desertion during the last days of the war. Burgdorff’s claims to distinction include the sinister fact that it was he who handed Rommel the poison with which he was required to kill himself.

  23

  See Westphal, The German Army in the West, p. 172.

  24

  Westphal, op. cit., p. 188.

  25

  Guderian, op. cit., p. 403.

  26

  An interesting picture of Himmler as commander-in-the-field is given by the well-known German journalist, Jürgen Thorwald, in his two books, one on the Vistula campaign, Es begann an der Weichsel, and the other on the Elbe campaign, Das Ende an der Elbe.

  27

  man synthetic oil industry had suffered severely from Allied bombing. Hitler believed that at all costs he must preserve the Austrian and Hungarian oil wells which were still in his hands.

  28

  Guderian, op. cit., p. 413.

  29

  See The S.S., p. 406.

  30

  See Guderian, op. cit., p. 422.

  31

  Count Bernadotte, in The Fall of the Curtain, a book largely ghost-written by Schellenberg who took refuge with him after the collapse of Germany, deleted all Schellenberg’s references to Kersten. Nor are there any references to the work of the Swedish Foreign Minister, Christian Günther, who had planned the negotiations which Kersten so resolutely carried through with Himmler. See the attack on Bernadotte’s attitude to Kersten made by Trevor-Roper in his Introduction to The Kersten Memoirs. Dr de Jong, director of the Rijksinstituut in Amsterdam and a distinguished historian, who knew Kersten personally, assures us that while Kersten undoubtedly did good, he was a man of great vanity who tended to exaggerate his influence, an example being his claim that he practically saved the entire Dutch nation from evacuation to the East. Kersten and Bernadotte were unable to tolerate each other.

  32

  See Semmler, Goebbels, the Man next to Hitler, pp. 178-9.

  33

  In The Fall of the Curtain, the date of the final meeting with Himmler is given on p. 41 as 12 February. This is plainly an oversight, since on page 20 Bernadotte states he flew to Berlin on 16 February. Schellenberg states (p. 435) that he took Bernadotte to see Himmler two days after the meeting with Kaltenbrunner. In The Last Days of Hitler, Prof. Trevor-Roper wrongly accepts 12 February as the date of the meeting, and Reitlinger variously gives it as 17 February in The Final Solution, p. 462 and 18 February in The S.S., p. 415.

  34

  See The S.S., p. 414. The source is von Oven, op. cit. II, pp. 252-4.

  35

  See Prof Trevor-Roper’s Introduction to Kersten Memoirs, pp. 15-16, and The S.S., p. 416.

  36

  See Thorwald, Das Ende an der Elbe, p. 25, and The S.S., p. 413.

  37

  See I.M.T. XIV, p. 374, and The Final Solution, p. 446.

  38

  Quoted by Shulman, Defeat in the West, p. 280.

  39

  During the course of this talk, Count Schwerin-Krosigk said that he felt the only justification for the sacrifices which Hitler had imposed on the German people would be to break the alliance between the Western Allies and the Russians. Himmler agreed and, according to Schwerin-Krosigk, openly admitted th
at great mistakes had been made. As for the Jews, they had now become very important as ‘barter in all future negotiations’. Himmler was not prepared to say anything disloyal about Hitler; he merely said that ‘the Führer had a different conception’. Speaking of himself, Himmler added that ‘while his reputation was that of a gay and godless person, in the depths of his heart he was really a believer in Providence and in God’. It was God who had spared the Führer on 20 July last; it was God who had brought a thaw to the frozen waters of the Oder and delayed the Russian crossing at the moment when he had been in despair about the collapse of their defence; it was God who had taken Roosevelt’s life at the very moment when the Russians were closing in on Berlin. (See Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary, p. 197 et seq.)

  Additional Note

  Frau Heydrich has given us a striking picture of Himmler at the turn of the years 1944-5. She was still living in the castle near Prague, but by now she was sheltering many refugee German women and their children from East Prussia, all of them connected in one way or another with the S.S. Himmler visited her unannounced some time after she had written to him for advice on what she should do. He was evasive, as usual, about the situation, and referred vaguely to Hitler’s miracle weapons (Wunderwaffen). When he stroked her son’s blond hair and said with a sigh, ‘Ach, Heider’, she sensed there was nothing to be done but resign herself to her fate. When she spoke to him about the problems of evacuation, all he said was that there were plenty of edible mushrooms in Bavaria. He shook hands with the women at her request, and after he had gone (it was the last time she was to see him), Frau Heydrich organized the evacuation of her household and the refugees in three lorries.

  CHAPTER VIII

  In this chapter we are specially indebted to Colonel Michael Murphy and Captain Tom Selvester, the British officers who had charge of Himmler, to Josef Kiermaier, Himmler’s bodyguard, and to Dr Werner Best, for the special evidence they have given us concerning the last days of Himmler’s life.

  1

  ‘Let bygones be bygones’, he is reported to have said to Masur.

  2

  Kersten Memoirs, p. 288.

  3

  Kersten managed to get a flight from Tempelhof to Copenhagen the following day, 22 April; after this he travelled surface to Stockholm and reported to Günther on the evening of 23 April.

  4

  The account of this meeting between Himmler and Bernadotte is taken primarily from Bernadotte’s own account in The Fall of the Curtain.

  5

  Himmler was so pre-occupied that, according to Bernadotte, he drove his car straight into some barbed wire. He frequently preferred to drive himself rather than be driven, even during these last days of strain.

  6

  For the various opinions on Himmler’s claim to the succession, see Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, pp. 101, 182-3; Semmler, op. cit., p. 178, Alan Bullock, Hitler, pp. 705, 709, and, for Schwerin-Krosigk, Shirer’s End of a Berlin Diary, p. 203.

  7

  This statement by Winocaur was published for the first time in 1963 in Amateur Agent, by Ewan Butler. Ewan Butler also tells the story (pp. 157 et seq.) of the forged German stamps printed in London and valued at 20 pfennigs; they bore the effigy of Himmler instead of Hitler, and agents were instructed to put them into use in Germany during the last months of the war. American collectors after the war were offering $10,000 for cancelled copies of these stamps. Ewan Butler himself ‘borrowed’ through an agent 150 pages of typescript of Schellenberg’s diary, items for which he posted daily from Germany for safe-keeping in Sweden. The sheets were microfilmed, and Butler translated the diary for the Foreign Office in London. (See pp. 182—3).

  8

  Hanna Reitsch. See Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary, p. 168-9.

  9

  In the will he dictated and signed during the small hours of 29 April, Hitler referred expressly to Himmler’s treachery: ‘Before my death I expel from the Party and from all his offices the former Reichsführer S.S. and Reich Minister of the Interior, Heinrich Himmler. In his stead I appoint Gauleiter Karl Hanke as Reichsführer S.S. and Chief of the German Police, and Gauleiter Paul Giesler as Reich Minister of the Interior.’

  10

  Doenitz and Himmler met during the morning of 30 April to consider the best action to take to prevent Kaufmann, the Gauleiter of Hamburg, from surrendering the city to the British. Doenitz in the end sent his own messages to Kaufmann, considering Himmler’s too pathetic and impractical. Doenitz’s own guarded account of his dealings with Himmler is given in his autobiography, Zehn Jahre und Zwanzig Tage (1958), p. 439 et seq. He refers first of all to a meeting with Himmler on 28 April at Rheinsberg, at which Himmler openly asked him if he would be ‘available’ in case Himmler were appointed Hitler’s successor; Doenitz replied he would be for any legal government out to stop bloodshed. He also claims that he received a signal from Bormann on 30 April which referred to Himmler directly: ‘New treason afoot. According enemy broadcasts Himmler offered capitulation via Sweden. Führer expects you to deal with all traitors fast as lightning and hard as steel. Bormann.’ Doenitz observes that he was in no position to cope with Himmler, who was still surrounded by S.S. men and police. He says that he met Himmler again on 30 April at a police station in Lübeck, because, he says, ‘I wanted to know what he was up to’. Himmler kept him waiting and seemed to behave as if he were already the Führer. But the meeting remained friendly; Himmler denied that he had had any dealings with the Allies. Only after this meeting was concluded did Doenitz learn from Bormann that he was to succeed as Führer.

  11

  This meeting, according to Doenitz, took place at Ploen at midnight. Himmler arrived with six armed officers. Doenitz claims to have received him with a loaded gun hidden under his papers. Himmler was appalled at the news that he had been displaced.

  12

  Hanna Reitsch records a conversation she had with Himmler after the news of Hitler’s death in which she claims she challenged him to his face with high treason. Himmler seems to have made no attempt to deny that he had undertaken the negotiations; on the contrary, she says that he stated Hitler was insane and that history would interpret the negotiations as an attempt to save Germany from further bloodshed. See Shirer’s End of a Berlin Diary, pp. 171-2.

  13

  Degrelle has left his own account of this meeting in his book, Die Verlorene Legion. See also The S.S., pp. 442-3.

  14

  Best gave his own account of this meeting in conversation with H.F. Himmler’s act of thoughtfulness on behalf of his women secretaries was confirmed to H.F. by Doris Mähner. She also recalls the moment when he said goodbye a few days later. He thanked her, and told her to go back to Bavaria and rest. Soon, he said, they would meet again, and then there would be a great deal of work to do.

  15

  Schwerin-Krosigk in conversation with H.F.

  16

  The copy of this note was found in one of Doenitz’s files. According to Prof. Trevor-Roper, it remains uncertain whether the original was actually delivered to Himmler, or whether Doenitz told him of his dismissal personally. (See The Last Days of Hitler, p. 246, note.) Doenitz does not clarify this point in his memoirs, but he claims that had he known about the atrocities in the concentration camps he would never have let Himmler go free. (See pp. 466~8) ‘Now, most clearly’, he writes, ‘I recognized the evil side of National Socialism and so changed my attitude to the form of state created by it.’

  17

  Arolsen has now become the headquarters of the International Red Cross Tracing Service financed by the Bonn government.

  18

  For details of this journey we are grateful to Josef Kiermaier, who accompanied Himmler almost up to the time of his arrest by the British. Kiermaier recalls suggesting to Himmler that they fly south while they still had an aircraft at their disposal; then at least, said Kiermaier, they could see their womenfolk before the end came. Himmler turned this suggestion down on the g
rounds that in times as adverse as these, no man should indulge his personal desires.

  19

  Information on the following events from Colonel Michael Murphy and Captain Tom Selvester.

  20

  The following account is taken from the B.B.C. broadcast by Sergeant-Major Austin in a programme introduced by Chester Wilmot from Luneberg on May 24 1945, shortly after Himmler’s death.

  21

  Colonel Murphy writes that as part of the effort to keep Himmler alive he ‘shouted for a needle and cotton, which arrived with remarkable speed. I pierced the tongue and with the cotton threaded through held the tongue out.’ There seems no doubt that, since the normal action of cyanide produces a quick death, Himmler’s long death agony was caused by the interference with the penetration of the poison into his system. After Himmler’s death, Colonel Murphy says that it was some twenty-four hours before the Russians sent their representatives to view the body and agree, ‘grudgingly’, that ‘it might be Himmler’. Only after this examination was Himmler’s body buried. Gebhard Himmler, who was in the south, was not brought in to identify the body, as Frischauer claims in his book, p. 257. Gebhard Himmler, in conversation with H.F., has confirmed this.

  Colonel Murphy has some interesting comments to make on the poison capsule. Himmler, he said, had not eaten in his presence, ‘and there is no doubt in my mind that from the time I met him to the time of his death the capsule was in his mouth. So far as I can remember from the one taken from his clothes, this was of thin metal — strong enough to withstand careful mastication and liquids, especially if the other side of the mouth was used, but not strong enough to withstand a decision to break it. I think the time of death was midnight May 23—4, but I cannot be sure. Himmler was sure of himself and arrogant to the end. He was quite convinced that he would be taken to see Montgomery and was surprised at the firm treatment I gave him in getting rid of the bodyguards and searching him. I should have received a German General with more courtesy’!

  Additional Notes

  1 We are grateful to Karl Kaufmann, the former Gauleiter of Hamburg, for giving us an account of his own observation of Himmler’s arrest. During the morning of 23 May, Kaufmann, along with Brandt and other prisoners stood at the barbed-wire fence of Camp 031 at Kolkhagen, near Nienburg on the river Weser. They were watching lorries from Fellingbosdel Camp (Lüneberg Heath) driving up. Among those who got out was Himmler, minus his moustache and with a patch over one eye. He stood in the right wing of the group, wearing boots, field grey trousers and some sort of civilian jacket. He did not recognize Kaufmann and the others, but they saw him suddenly disappear behind a nearby rhododendron bush, where he removed the eye-patch. He reappeared almost instantly putting on his glasses; he was immediately recognizable. This was the time he decided to give himself up, in Kaufmann’s opinion. A few minutes later there was quite a commotion; extra guards with tommy-guns and machine guns appeared; extra sentries were posted at the gate. Soon the cause of the excitement was being passed through the grapevine of the camp. The British soldiers seemed overjoyed that Himmler was among their prisoners.