Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts

by Bill Yenne

  On May 23, the day that Führer Dönitz finally surrendered his provisional “Flensberg Government” to the Allies and became just another prisoner himself, Himmler’s little band of scruffy men reached a British checkpoint on a bridge near Bremervörde. Such checkpoints had been set up all across Germany for the expressed purpose of checking IDs, issuing Allied paperwork to genuine refugees, and snagging just such persons as the Reichsführer SS. Without Allied papers, refugees couldn’t travel far, and to apply for papers at a checkpoint was to place yourself under Allied scrutiny. Himmler and his entourage submitted to the scrutiny, but instead of papers, they got a free ride to the civilian interrogation camp at Lüneburg.

  “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,” recalled Captain Tom Selvester, the camp commandant, in his official after-action report, obtained by Manvell and Fränkel in the 1960s. “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 [he was] ‘Heinrich Himmler’ in a very quiet voice.”

  At this point, Selvester immediately put his office under armed guard and called in an intelligence officer. They proceeded to get a signature sample from Himmler, who refused at first because he erroneously thought they were asking for his autograph!

  Next the British officers proceeded to strip-search the Reichsführer, looking for anything that their prisoner might be able to use to commit suicide.

  “Himmler was carrying documents bearing the name of Heinrich Hitzinger, who I think was described as a postman,” Selvester wrote.

  In his jacket I found a small brass case, similar to a cartridge case, which contained a small glass phial [vial]. 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.

  When his clothes were taken away, Himmler was offered a British uniform, which was the only thing available, but he refused, claiming he feared being photographed in “enemy uniform.” At last, he relented, but for some reason, refused to wear pants. As he sat there in shirt and underwear, someone offered him a blanket. Who wants to have to stare at a Reichsführer in his underwear, especially when you don’t want to take your eyes off him because a vial of poison is missing?

  Despite Selvester’s concerns, Himmler did not appear suicidal.

  “During the time Himmler was in my custody he behaved perfectly correctly, and gave me the impression that he realized things had caught up with him,” the British captain wrote. “He was quite prepared to talk, and indeed at times appeared almost jovial. He looked ill when I first saw him, but improved tremendously after a meal and a wash (he was not permitted to shave). He was in my custody for approximately eight hours, and during that time, whilst not being interrogated, asked repeatedly about the whereabouts of his ‘adjutants,’ appearing genuinely worried over their welfare. I found it impossible to believe that he could be the arrogant man portrayed by the press before and during the war.”

  A cigarette butt and the body of the Reichsführer grow cold on the floor of the British interrogation room on May 23, 1945. Shortly after 8 p.m., Heinrich Himmler bit down on a tiny, blue-glass potassium cyanide capsule that he had hidden in his mouth. He is seen here wrapped in the blanket that he had been given after he had been strip-searched and then refused to wear pants. U.S. National Archives

  Colonel Michael Murphy, the chief of intelligence on General Montgomery’s staff, arrived around 8 p.m. to escort the prisoner to Second Army Headquarters for interrogation. It was here that Heinrich Himmler bit down on the tiny, blue-glass potassium-cyanide capsule, which had been in his mouth the whole time. It was one of the capsules that had been developed by Dr. Sigmund Rascher, the zealous researcher from the Institut für Wehrwissenschaftliche Zweckforschung whose main stock in trade had been freezing people to death in the name of science.

  Attempts to get Himmler to spit or vomit the poison were unsuccessful, as was the stomach pump that was brought in.

  Heinrich Himmler himself was the last victim of the mad scientists of his own Ahnenerbe.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Sands of Time

  “ON THE FLOOR of an unfurnished room in a two-story brick house here there lay today the stark cold body of Heinrich Himmler, one of the arch criminals of Nazi Germany, chief of the SS,” wrote correspondent James MacDonald in Heinrich Himmler’s New York Times obituary, submitted “by wireless” and printed on the front page on May 25, 1945.

  Two days later, the Sunday New York Times reported his funeral, saying simply, “The body of Heinrich Himmler was returned unceremoniously today to the soil of Germany that he stained with the blood of thousands of victims of his Gestapo.”

  Heinrich had died on July 2, 936. Heinrich died again, 1,008 years, ten months and twenty-one days later—for the last time.

  On June 4, 1945, Time magazine, whose cover he had graced in February, wrote that “wherever he had travelled, death followed him like a shadow—and the shadow fell on many, at Maidanek, Oswiecim [Aushwitz], Buchenwald. ‘You find people there,’ he once said of his concentration camps, ‘with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed and deformed ones … a lot of cheap trash…. [T]he prisoners are made up of slave souls.’ On his last trip, from Berlin to Flensburg to the north German moors, his shadow caught up with him. Heinrich Himmler, whom his fellow Nazis had ironically nicknamed ‘gentle Heinrich,’ had shaved his Hitlerian mustache, replaced his scholarly pince-nez with a black eye patch. He had become Herr Hitzinger. His papers were in perfect order. He loved order.”

  The only problem with this orderliness was the papers were not his.

  The man with the purloined papers was buried in the bloody soil, along with the fearsome hallucination that he had fabricated out of strange dreams of warrior-heroes turned into god-men.

  It was reported that British army medical personnel removed his brain and took plaster casts of his skull. What an irony that this was so much like the work that Dr. August Hirt had been doing under Ahnenerbe auspices at the Reichsuniversität Strassburg.

  Time went on to relate that “a British Army detail, sworn to secrecy, buried the unembalmed body in a grave on the heath near Lüneburg. There was no coffin, no marking on the grave. The shifting sand would soon obliterate the last sign; there would be no site for a martyr’s monument. The only words spoken at the graveside came from a British Tommy: ‘Let the worm go to the worms.’”

  As her husband was wandering across northern Germany, Marga Himmler and her teenaged daughter, Gudrun, were also on the move. When they abandoned their chateau overlooking the Tegernsee to escape the U.S. Third Army that spring, they had not seen Himmler in months. Mother and daughter headed south, hoping to reach Italy, and made it as far as the former Austrian city of Bozen, which had become the Italian city of Bolzano after the Italians helped win World War I. Here, they were among the civilians processed by the American 88th Infantry Division. As had happened with the family
patriarch, they were identified.

  Interviewed a few days before her husband committed suicide, Marga was asked how it felt to be married to Europe’s most feared man. Her answer was a laconic “Nobody loves a policeman.” When she learned of his death, she said simply, “I’m proud of him.” She didn’t say that she would miss him. She had moved beyond that.

  In Berlin, the charred remnants of the feared Number 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse were pulled down by the Soviets after the war. In 1951, the street itself was renamed as Niederkirchnerstrasse, after Käthe Niederkirchner, a Third Reich–era communist who was killed by the Nazis in 1944. In 1961, the communists bisected the street with their Berlin Wall. When this wall finally came down three decades later, a small section remained at the site of Number 8.

  Marga and Gudrun Himmler, the wife and daughter of the Reichsführer SS, after they were picked up by the American 88th Infantry Division in Bolzano, Italy. When asked how it felt to be married to Europe’s most feared man, Marga’s answer was a terse “Nobody loves a policeman.” U.S. National Archives

  To hold the captured Nazi leadership accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity, the Allies formed the International Military Tribunal and proceeded with a series of trials known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. These took place over eleven months beginning in November 1945, and were held in the city of Nuremberg, because this was the city where the Nazis had once celebrated themselves with immense torchlit rallies. With Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler having all sentenced themselves to death before the trials, the biggest fish at Nuremberg was Hermann Göring. Convicted and sentenced to death, he cheated the hangman by committing suicide the night before his scheduled institution.

  Among those sentenced to death and executed were Keitel and Jodl, the old generals who surrendered the Reich, as well as Joachim von Ribbentrop and Alfred Rosenberg, the intense Völksdeutscher from Estonia, whose racial theories legally defined the difference between Aryans and untermenschen, paving the way for the Final Solution and the reign of the Einsatzgruppen.

  Karl Dönitz, the second Führer, was convicted of war crimes—unrestricted submarine warfare—served ten years in Berlin’s Spandau Prison, never repented, and wrote a bestselling autobiography. Albert Speer, whose Reich Armaments Ministry ran the biggest slave-labor operation in modern history, served twenty years, repented, and wrote his own bestselling autobiography.

  Rudolf Hess, the enigmatic deputy Führer, who had been in British custody since his strange 1941 flight to Scotland, was sentenced to life in Spandau, where he was the only prisoner for the final two decades before his death in 1987. He never said a word, much less an entire autobiography, and died without telling anyone why he had gone to Scotland.

  Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei und Waffen-SS Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Reinhard Heydrich’s successor, was the highest-ranking SS officer tried at Nuremberg. With Rudolf Hess, the commandant of Auschwitz, giving evidence against him, Kaltenbrunner was convicted of crimes against humanity, and he met the hangman on October 16, 1946. When asked for any last words, he said, “I have done my duty by the laws of my people and I am sorry this time my people were led by men who were not soldiers, and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge. Germany, good luck.”

  Kurt Daluege, Himmler’s old rival, whom he had marginalized with the posting as Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, spent the last two years of the war recovering from a heart attack, only to be arrested by the Czechs whom he had brutalized. Convicted of war crimes, he was executed in Prague on October 26, 1946.

  The SS men, especially officers, had reason to be wary. Their infamy had preceded them. Because of the reputation of the SS for being the most fervent of Nazis, and the fact that they ran the concentration camps, the Allied tribunals were especially diligent in rounding up and evaluating everyone who had worn the totenkopf uniform.

  SS Brigadeführer Walther Schellenberg, the SD boss who was with Himmler off and on near the end, was in Denmark when he was apprehended by the Allies in June 1945. He turned on his fellow Nazis, one of many who gave evidence at Nuremberg in exchange for leniency. Not sentenced until 1949, he served only two years of a six-year stretch, during which time he penned his memoirs. Released for health reasons, he eventually settled in Italy, where he died of cancer on March 31, 1952.

  Master Sergeant Charles Dickey of the 101st Airborne Division smiles after discovering Himmler’s “rainy-day fund.” Searching a barn near the villa occupied by Himmler’s wife in Bavaria, American troops discovered sacks of money hidden by the Reichsführer. Located on May 27, 1945, four days after Hitler’s death, the hoard included an estimated $4 million worth of currency from twenty-six nations. U.S. National Archives

  After the principal War Crimes Trials, the United States held a series of additional trials, notably the so-called “Doctor’s Trial,” in which nearly two dozen Nazis, mainly SS doctors, were tried for crimes against humanity, including the experiments on living humans. Also in this trial were Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s aide, and Wolfram Sievers, the Ahnenerbe’s managing director, about whose work a mountain of evidence—mainly their own records and correspondence—was presented. Both were convicted and executed in 1948.

  Dr. Sigmund Rascher, who froze people to death for the Luftwaffe and who created Heinrich Himmler’s exit strategy, was executed as well, but not by the Allies. He and his wife, Nini Diehl, Himmler’s old nightclub-singer friend, had been involved in a bizarre case of fraud. The doctor had cooked up a scheme to fake the results of fertility-enhancing experiments. On the face of it, Rascher’s “treatments” had allowed Nini to get pregnant in her forties three times, something that was not always possible with the state-of-the-art science in the 1940s. Instead, it turned out that they had kidnapped three babies. The doctor was executed at Dachau, by the SS, on April 26, 1945, less than a month before Himmler bit into one of his blue-glass vials.

  Dr. August Hirt, the Ahnenerbe’s skeleton collector at Strassburg, who anguished about the destruction of his grisly collection of human bodies, was another good candidate for the Doctor’s Trial, but never made it to Nuremberg. Hirt committed suicide in Schönenbach in the Black Forest on June 2, 1945.

  Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, was on the list for the trials, but no trace of him could be found. The Allies thought he was dead. In fact, he was one of a number of SS officers who managed to escape to South America after the war. Rumors that he was still alive surfaced in the 1950s, but he was never apprehended. After spending time in Argentina and Paraguay, he was living in Brazil at the time of his death on February 7, 1979. Buried under an assumed name, he was later exhumed, and his identity was confirmed.

  Another one that got away was SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, the man who tried to negotiate a prewar homeland in Palestine for Germany’s Jews, but who later masterminded the logistical apparatus that took them to the death camps. He escaped to Argentina, but was nabbed by the Israeli Mossad and taken back to Israel to stand trial for crimes against humanity. He was executed on May 31, 1962.

  During the 1960s and 1970s, the subject of escaped Nazis was a staple of conspiracy theories and adventure fiction. A widely held belief was that the Organization der Ehemaligen SS Angehörigen (Organization of Former SS Members), better known by the acronym ODESSA, had facilitated the escape of many SS personnel. In fact, both Mengele and Eichmann made use not of a secret “underground railroad,” but rather of the general chaos of early postwar Europe to make good their exit.

  Felix Kersten, Himmler’s Estonian-born, Völksdeutsche masseur, who was at the Reichsführer’s side more or less constantly, escaped prosecution altogether because documentary evidence showed that he had played an important role in helping Folke Bernadotte evacuate thousands of concentration-camp inmates to neutral Sweden in white buses marked with red crosses. In his own memoirs—first published in 1947—Kersten also claimed credit for foiling an SS scheme to dep
ort the entire population of the Netherlands. He became a Swedish citizen in 1953 and died in Stockholm on April 16, 1960, at the age of sixty-one.

  The SS required its officers to prove a purely Aryan pedigree through all generations back to 1750. The resulting genealogical data was kept in an individual’s Sippenbuch, a kinship or clan book, not unlike the sort of stud book that owners keep for racehorses. It was also kept by the SS in meticulously detailed files. Here, a group of Allied intelligence officers begin to open the first 450,000 of those files at Fürstenhagen on November 15, 1945. U.S. National Archives

  As for Bernadotte himself, he was appointed as the first United Nations mediator in Palestine in 1948, after the announcement of the unpopular United Nations Partition Plan. He brokered a truce following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and helped set up a United Nations refugee-relief apparatus for the Middle East. Israelis were upset with Bernadotte’s apparent favoritism toward Arabs, and the militant Zionist organization Lehi, also known as the “Stern gang,” marked him for assassination. One of those ordering the hit was Yitzhak Shamir, who served as prime minister of Israel in from 1983 to 1984 and 1986 to 1992. The man who had saved thousands of European Jews was gunned down in Jerusalem on September 17, 1948.

  Back in Nuremberg, the trials and executions reached deep into the ranks of the SS Totenkopfverbände concentration-camp guards. Among them were many women from the SS Aufseherinnen. Irma Grese, the young sadist with the pack of dogs, was convicted of crimes against humanity and was executed in 1945.

  However, Ilse Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald, escaped the death penalty. Both she and her husband, Buchenwald commandant Karl Otto Koch, had been arrested in 1943 for embezzling SS funds. He was convicted of disgracing the SS and was executed in April 1945, but she was released. Free for two months within the imploding Reich, she was picked up in June 1945 by the Allies and charged with crimes against humanity. Sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947, she had her sentence commuted by General Lucius Clay, the interim military governor of the American zone in Germany. Rearrested by the new government of West Germany in 1949, she was convicted on over a hundred murder counts and sent back inside for life in 1951. Sixteen years later, she hanged herself in prison.