The Face Of The Third Reich
Practitioners And
Technicians Of Totalitarian Rule
by Joachim C Fest
I know that there are many people in Germany who
feel sick when they see this black tunic; we can understand
that.
~ Heinrich Himmler
It really makes no odds to us if we kill
someone.
- Heinrich Himmler
Two death
masks were made of Heinrich Himmler after he had hastily swallowed the
cyanide capsule that ended his life within a few minutes while he was
undergoing a medical examination by a British military doctor on 23rd
May 1945. One of them shows a face twisted into a grotesque grimace,
brutal, curiously impudent, its diabolical structure emphasized by the
contortions of the death struggle, particularly by the pinched mouth.
The other is an inexpressive, rather calm face with nothing
frightening about it. It is as though death itself were trying, yet
again, to demonstrate the strange combination to which it owed one of
its most terrible and diligent servants in this world. (1)
The
features of the first mask are more in keeping with the popular idea
of the man. Widely identified with the SS state and the extermination
factories, Heinrich Himmler seems like the civilized, or at least
contemporary, reincarnation of a mythical monster. The feeling of
menace, of omnipresent yet intangible terror, which once emanated from
him has become attached to his name and to his personality, which is
all the more sinister for its lack of personal colour. Even in his
life-time there was a Himmler 'myth', which distorted the features of
the Reichsführer of the SS in a way that made him all the more
terrifying and turned into an abstract principle the man who was
unrecognizable as a human being. Entirely in this sense Himmler said
of himself that he would be 'a merciless sword of justice'.(2)The
methods of his terrorism, based upon modern principles of
organization, and the rationalised, 'industrial' extermination
processes which he employed, the whole businesslike practicality of
his fanaticism, have curiously intensified the aura of terror
surrounding his person, beyond all actual experience.
However,
as soon as we peel off a few layers from the demonized image we lay
bare the far simpler features of a romantically eccentric petty
bourgeois who, under the specific conditions of a totalitarian system
of government, attained exceptional power and hence found himself in a
position to put his idiocies into bloody practice. Those who met him
personally are unanimous in describing him as utterly mediocre,
indistinguishable from the commonplace by any special trait of
character. A British diplomat commented that he had never been able to
draw from the Reichsführer of the SS 'a remark of even the most
fleeting interest', and Speer's judgement, 'half schoolmaster, half
crank', neatly sums up what many people have said.(3)
Walter
Dornberger, who was in charge of the rocket centre at Peenemünde,
graphically described Himmler's appearance:
He
looked to me like an intelligent elementary schoolteacher, certainly
not a man of violence. I could not for the life of me see anything
outstanding or extraordinary about this middle-sized, youthfully
slender man in grey SS uniform. Under a brow of average height two
grey-blue eyes looked out at me, behind glittering pince-nez, with
an air of peaceful interrogation. The trimmed moustache below the
straight, well-shaped nose traced a dark line on his unhealthy, pale
features. The lips were colourless and very thin. Only the
inconspicuous, receding chin surprised me. The skin of his neck was
flaccid and wrinkled. With a broadening of his constant, set smile,
faintly mocking and sometimes contemptuous about the corners of the
mouth, two rows of excellent white teeth appeared between the thin
lips. His slender, pale and almost girlishly soft hands, covered
with blue veins, lay motionless on the table throughout our
conversation. (4)
In fact,
anyone who tried to see behind the slightly bloated smoothness of this
face the disruption of a monstrous character was deluding himself. In
the light of the million-fold terrors he inspired, there was a
temptation to search for 'abysses' in which at least a pale gleam of
some 'human' reaction might be visible, and it was that that misled
people. In reality Heinrich Himmler was exactly what his appearance
suggested: an insecure, vacillating character, the colour of whose
personality was grey. His lack of independence was concealed by a
desperate and stupid over zealousness. What looked like malignity or
brutality was merely the conscienceless efficiency of a man whose life
substance was so thinly spread that he had to borrow from outside. No
emotion either carried him away or inhibited him; His very coldness
was a negative element, not glacial, but bloodless.' (5) A capable
organizer and administrator, he possessed that inhuman mixture of
diligence, subservience and fanatical will to carry things through
that casts aside humane considerations as irrelevant, and whose secret
idols are closed files of reports of tasks completed; a man at
freezing-point. Hence it required great psychological perspicacity to
discover a personal contact - before the hasty construction of
imaginary psychic abysses - the true basis of his existence, to find
him sinister, more sinister than Hitler himself, as an observer wrote,
'through the degree of concentrated subservience, through a certain
narrow-minded conscientiousness, an inhuman methodicalness about which
there was something of the automaton'. (6)
It was
these qualities which, more than anything, laid the foundations for
his rise and saved him from sharing the fate of the sectarians within
the movement. For this character, almost abstract in its colourless
impersonality, gained a certain individuality from Himmler's eccentric
views, which opposed to a world heading for destruction a crude
mixture of racial theories, runic beliefs and sundry doctrines of
natural healing. With naive certainty Himmler considered himself the
reincarnation of Heinrich I, who had done battle with the Hungarians
and Slavs. He recommended a breakfast of leeks and mineral water for
his SS, would have only twelve people as guests at his table,
following the example of the Round Table of King Arthur, and was
occasionally to be found in the company of high SS officers all
staring fixedly into space in an attempt to compel a person in the
next room to confess the truth by their 'exercises in concentration'.
(7) His pleasant superstitions naturally, after the fashion of the
time, had pseudo-scientific trimmings. He had archaeological
excavations carried out in search of the original pure Aryan race and
studies made of the skulls of 'Jewish-Bolshevik commissars', in order
to arrive at a typological definition of the 'subhuman'. It was this
same side of his personality that was reflected in the almost
religious ceremonial practised in the SS.
Hitler undoubtedly
watched these efforts with the greatest misgiving. In
Mein Kampf
he had already come out against pseudo-academic folkish occultism,(8)
and finally at the cultural conference during the Reich Party Congress
of 1938 he publicly repudiated all such goings-on, which 'could not be
tolerated in the movement':
At
the pinnacle of our programme stands not mysterious premonition, but
clear knowledge and hence open avowal. But woe if, through the
insinuation of obscure mystical elements, the movement or the state
should give unclear orders. And it is enough if this unclarity is
contained merely in words. There is already a danger if orders are
given for the setting up of so-called 'cult places', because this
alone will give birth to the necessity subsequently to devise
so-called cult games and cult rituals. Our 'cult' is exclusively
cultivation of that which is natural and hence willed by God.
(9)
Possibly
these declarations were also directed against Himmler. Albert Speer,
in any case, said Hitler was in the habit of 'criticizing and mocking'
the ideology of the SS; (10) but obviously he recognized and valued
the skill in handling power that lay behind it. And if Himmler himself
would have liked to give free play to his eccentric longings, the
example of the SS shows more clearly than anything else how fully
irrational tendencies could at any time be checked by a purposeful
sense of reality. 'In calculations I have always been sober,' he
stated. (11) For the liturgy of self-presentation practised by the SS
was never just show, a solemn but faded accessory. It was something
that held them together, and one of the most effective means for
establishing a sworn brotherhood of the elect. Participation in the
mystic ritual not only conferred a special distinction but also placed
them under a special obligation. Without a doubt the rituals which
Himmler staged on the Wevelsburg, and at other places dictated by his
faith, had the additional purpose of overwhelming those present with a
melancholic shudder at his innate demonism. Over and above this, they
were intended to inspire those states of rapture which are so easily
transformed into brutal and merciless violence. But none of this
belies the initiatory character of these solemn hours, which amounted
to a repeated act of consecration and total commitment to a community
above all traditional ties, one that seriously demanded 'unconditional
liberation from the old social world of caste, class and family' and
'proclaimed its own "law" as springing unconditionally from the mere
fact of belonging to the new community'. (12) In its aims the SS went
far beyond all the overt considerations of militant political
groupings. Leading SS officers appeared not merely as instruments of
domination within the 'internal battleground', but as the nucleus of a
new state apparatus. The goal of the SS was to permeate and dissolve
the old order, and it was also to be the hard core of an imperial
dominion aiming at 'organizing Europe economically and politically on
a basis that would destroy all pre-existing boundaries, with the Order
in the background'. (13)
The
setting of these tasks and the first steps towards their achievement
once more reflected the dual character of unreal fantasy and rational
planning which was Himmler's most personal contribution to the regime.
It was his conviction that by systematically pursuing his policy, 'on
the basis of Menders Law', the German people could in 120 years once
more become 'authentically German in appearance'. (14) To this end he
put forward and partially implemented an alteration in the marriage
laws to do away with monogamy. He had various plans for establishing a
privileged SS caste, eliminating traditional standards of value and
working out a system of graduated educational and developmental
opportunities for subjugated peoples. Within national frontiers pushed
three hundred miles to the east, towns were to be pulled down and that
'paradise of the Germanic race' created, of which splendid visions
were continually conjured up by the Reichsführer of the SS, and those
of his followers who enjoyed his special confidence. A widespread
network of defensive villages was also envisaged, not merely to make
it possible for the members of the Order, the 'New Nobility', to
maintain their dominant position by force and government, but also to
re-establish the ancient contact with the soil. The police functions
which in actual fact the SS largely assumed paled beside these
romantic visions of the future. These latter were the 'Holy of
Holies', and Himmler described as the 'happiest day of my life' the
day on which Hitler gave his consent to the plan for the creation of
soldier-peasants (Wehrbauern). (15)
Crazy
ideas of this sort exist on the lunatic fringe of every society in
almost every epoch, exercising varying degrees of practical influence.
Stable social orders absorb those who hold them relatively unharmed
and allow them a certain limited field of activity as founders of
sects, quack doctors or pamphleteers. It is only in a hopelessly
disrupted society that a figure like Heinrich Himmler can acquire
political influence; and only under a totalitarian form of government
offering universal salvation could he come to hold the power that
offered some prospect of putting his ideas into practice. His sobriety
and apparent common sense, which deceived outsiders, were precisely
what made his career possible. 'I am convinced that nobody I met in
Germany is more normal,' an English observer wrote in 1929. (16) The
basic pathological characteristic of the National Socialist movement,
so often and so erroneously sought in clinically obvious psychopaths
like Julius Streicher, showed itself rather in the curious amalgam of
crankiness and 'normality', of insanity and sober administrative
ability. Thus Streicher was pushed further and further to the
sidelines, while Heinrich Himmler, who possessed the 'arcanum imperil'
of this system of government, quickly reached the highest power, a
calculating man of faith who without doubt or challenge trampled over
millions, leaving behind him a trail of blood and tears, the most
dreadful combination of crackpot and manipulator of power, of quack
and inquisitor, that history has ever known. Concentration camps and
herb gardens, such as he had planted at Dachau and elsewhere: these
are still the most apt symbols of his personality.
His
loquacity has left behind a wealth of documents that all support this
analysis. In his speech to the SS Group Leaders on 4th October 1943 in
Poznan, one of the most horrifying testaments in the German language,
he declared:
It
is absolutely wrong to project your own harmless soul with its deep
feelings, our kind-heartedness, our idealism, upon alien peoples.
This is true, beginning with Herder, who must have been drunk when
he wrote the Voices of the Peoples, thereby bringing such
immeasurable suffering and misery upon us who came after him. This
is true, beginning with the Czechs and Slovenes, to whom we brought
their sense of nationhood. They themselves were incapable of it, but
we invented it for them.
One
principle must be absolute for the SS man: we must be honest,
decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to no
one else. What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs,
is a matter of utter indifference to me. Such good blood of our own
kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for
ourselves, if necessary by taking away the children and bringing
them up among us. Whether the other peoples live in comfort or
perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as
slaves for our culture; apart from that it does not interest me.
Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while
digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch
is completed for Germany. We shall never be rough or heartless where
it is not necessary; that is clear. We Germans, who are the only
people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also
adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime
against our own blood to worry about them and to bring them ideals.
I
shall speak to you here with an frankness of a very serious subject.
We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves,
nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the
evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It
is one of those things which it is easy to say. 'The Jewish people
is to be exterminated,' says every party member. 'That's clear, it's
part of our programme, elimination of the Jews, extermination,
right, we'll do it.' And then they all come along, the eighty
million good Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the
others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew. Of all those
who talk like this, not one has watched, not one has stood up to it.
Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying
together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and
yet - apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness - to
have remained decent, this has made us hard. This is a glorious page
in our history that has never been written and never shall be
written. (17)
The man
who wrote some of the most terrible chapters in German history was
born in Munich on 7th October 1900. His family atmosphere and all the
main impressions of his years of development were evidently decisively
influenced by the personality of his father, who, as the son of a
police president, a former tutor to the princes at the Bavarian court,
and a head-master, also applied authoritarian principles in his own
household. He was austere, precise and pious. No doubt it would be
going too far to see in the son's early interest in Teutonic sagas,
criminology and military affairs the beginnings of his later
development, but the family milieu, with its combination of
'officialdom, police work and teaching', (18) manifestly had a lasting
effect on him. His opposition to his father's discipline and
upbringing may have engendered a kind of dependence that later
expressed itself as a complex need to look up to someone and surrender
himself to that person. His fanatical concern with education, which
led him continually to try to teach and impart axioms for living, was
doubtless also largely the outcome of his early years. The doctor
Felix Kersten, who treated him continuously from 1939 onwards and
enjoyed his confidence, has asserted that Himmler himself would rather
have educated foreign peoples than exterminate them.(19) During the
war he spoke enthusiastically - looking ahead to peace - of
establishing military units who were 'educated and trained, once
education and training can be practised again'. (20)*
It was at
first intended that Himmler should become a farmer, and this was the
source of the peasant ideas which later infused his ideological
conceptions, especially in relation to the SS. But his poor physical
constitution would in any case have made him unfit for a farmer's
life. During the celebrations which he organized in Quedlinburg
Cathedral in July 1936 to the accompaniment of ancient German horns,
to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the death of Heinrich I, he
extolled the latter as a 'noble peasant of his people'; in a speech
the same year he described himself as 'a peasant by ancestry, blood
and nature'. (21) But after the First World War, in which he had taken
part at the very end as an ensign, he came via a rightist-radical
soldiers' association to Hitler's party. A photograph of the November
Putsch of 1923 shows him as a standard-bearer at the side of Ernst Röhm.
Soon he emerged as a colleague of Gregor Strasser in the
social-revolutionary wing of the NSDAP; undoubtedly this association
sprang not so much from ideological motives as from the fact that he
and Strasser were compatriots. In fact his ideological position, which
later seemed so resolute, remained for a long time vague and
indefinite. In 1926 he met Margarete Boden, the daughter of a West
Prussian landowner. She had served as a nurse in the war and later had
built up a modest private nursing home with her father's money. She
was seven years older than Himmler, fair-haired and blue-eyed in
complete conformity with the supposed Germanic type. Two years later
he married her, and it was she, it was revealed later, who aroused his
interest in homeopathy, mesmerism, oat-straw baths and herbalism. (22)
On 6th
January 1929 Himmler, at the same time running a chicken farm at
Waldtrudering near Munich, was appointed head of the then barely
three-hundred-man-strong SS. He proved his abilities as an organizer
by expanding the force to over 50,000 men by 1933. He was still a
marginal figure in the top leadership; it was only during the seizure
of power that, along with his superior assistant Reinhard Heydrich, he
methodically and patiently worked his way up and gained control of the
Political Police. (23) 30th June 1934 was the crucial day of his
career. After he had worked in the background on the construction of
the scenery before which the clumsy Röhm,
for whom he had once carried the banner, advanced to his own
execution, his SS units provided the murder commandos for the
three-day massacre. From the rivalry between the Reichswehr and the SA
he emerged alongside Hitler as the true victor. Only three weeks later
the SS, hitherto subordinate to the SA, was raised to the status of an
independent organization. (24) When on 17th June 1936 Himmler was
finally appointed head of the now unified police forces of the Reich
and confirmed as Reichsf ührer
of the SS, he seemed to have reached the peak of an astounding career.
He now controlled a substantial portion of the real power and also,
thanks to the terror that he spread, an even greater part of the
psychological power.
This
appointment provided him, in fact, with a spring-board for a process
of expansion which largely determined the future face and history of
the Third Reich, and in the course of which the real power visibly
shifted towards himself and the SS. What he had been secretly
preparing for a long time, egged on by Heydrich restlessly working in
the background, now took shape step by step as the conquest of
positions of solid power. The SS mobile troops, the economic and
administrative head office of the SS, the concentration camps, the SS
security service, the Head Office for Race and Settlement, and finally
the Waffen SS soon grew from small institutions with limited functions
into powerful organisations. The economic empire of the SS, which
eventually spread over Europe, and the Waffen SS with almost forty
divisions were merely particularly striking sides of an expansionist
urge which must be seen as a whole, an urge which revealed not simply
an insatiable desire for office but rather the structural law of the
National Socialist regime in transition to the SS state. This process
is not to be understood merely by considering the SS state from its
most obvious side, the police empire or the system of concentration
camps and extermination factories.
In fact,
the aims of the enormous SS apparatus were far more comprehensive and
concerned not so much with controlling the state as with becoming a
state itself. The occupants of the chief positions in the SS developed
step by step into the holders of power in an authentic 'collateral
state', which gradually penetrated existing institutions, undermined
them, and finally began to dissolve them. Fundamentally there was no
sphere of public life upon which the SS did not make its competing
demands: the economic, ideological, military, scientific and technical
spheres, as well as those of agrarian and population policies,
legislation and general administration. This development found its
most unmistakable expression in the hierarchy of the Senior SS and
Police Commanders, specially in the Eastern zones; the considerable
independence that Himmler's corps of leaders enjoyed vis-à-vis the
civil or military administration was a working model for a shift of
power planned for the whole area of the Greater German Reich after the
war. This process received its initial impetus following the so-called
Röhm Putsch, and it moved towards its completion after the attempted
revolt of 20th July 1944. The SS now pushed its way into 'the centre
of the organisational fabric of the Wehrmacht', and Himmler, who had
meanwhile also become Reich Minister of the Interior, now in addition
became chief of the Replacement Army. On top of his many other
functions he was thus in charge 'of all military transport, military
censorship, the intelligence service, surveillance of the troops, the
supply of food, clothing and pay to the troops, and care of the
wounded'. (25)
Within
this picture of consistent and soberly planned extensions of power,
individual eccentricities were not lacking. While the majority of
Himmler's organisations, foundations and acquisitions served realistic
power aims, others merely satisfied his private fantasies - like the
Mattoni mineral-water factory, the Lebensborn eV (the state-registered
organization for the promotion of human propagation), the Nordland
Publishing Company, the cultivation of Kog-Sagy's roots, or the SS
Association for Research and Teaching on Heredity, whose task it was
'to investigate the geographical distribution, spirit, deeds and
heritage of the Nordic Indo-Germanic race'.(26)
Himmler's
comprehensive and unitary organization provided the totalitarian
government with the systematic control that now enabled it to operate
to its full extent. No sooner had Himmler, in the course of capturing
power, seized control of the police than a perceptible tightening of
the regime could be felt. The spontaneous acts of violence that had
marked the initial phases of the Third Reich lessened and then ceased
altogether with the final removal of power from the SA. The
'emotional' terrorism practised by Ernst Rohm's shock troops with a
blend of political and criminal techniques gave way to its rational
counterpart, a central bureaucracy systematically employing terrorism
as an institution. The new type of man of violence recruited by
Himmler was concerned with the dispassionate extermination of real or
possible opponents, not with the primitive release of sadistic
impulses. Whatever sadism occurred, particularly in the concentration
camps, was included by Himmler among those 'exceptional cases of human
weakness' of which he had spoken in his Poznan speech quoted above;
they occurred in contradiction of the 'idea' of the type. His
perpetually reiterated moral admonishments are in no way a merely
feigned moral austerity not 'meant seriously'; they are founded in the
principle of rational terrorism. He took ruthless measures in cases
where corruption, brutality or any other personal motives were
apparent, and even trusted henchmen were not spared. (27) As he once
emphasized:
The
wealth which they [the Jews] had, we have taken from them. We
ourselves have taken none of it. Individuals who have offended
against this principle will be punished according to an order which
I issued at the beginning and which threatens: He who takes so much
as a mark shall die. A certain number of SS men - not very many -
disobeyed this order and they will die, without mercy. We had the
moral right, we had the duty to our own people, to kill this people
that wanted to kill us. But we have no right to enrich ourselves by
so much as a fur, a watch, a mark, or a cigarette or any thing else.
I shall never stand by and watch the slightest rot develop or
establish itself here. Wherever it forms, we shall burn it out
together. By and large, however, we can say that we have performed
this task in love of our people. And we have suffered no damage from
it in our inner self, in our soul, in our character. (28)
It was
not so much a sign of moral callousness when the numerous members of
the SS leadership who were present failed to be repelled by the terms
of this speech; rather, it was that they felt confirmed in their
hopelessly perverted idealism. If the system of concentration camps
mainly served the purpose of destroying opponents, it also and to an
increasing extent fulfilled the task of educating the members of the
Order according to the ideal of the new aristocracy of the Germanic
Herrenvolk, of training them above all in hardness towards themselves.
(29) Unlike the SA, rightly described as recruited from the urban
labour exchanges, (30) the elite SS succeeded, at least to begin with,
in attracting a type who sought scope for his idealism, his readiness
to serve, and his vague need for faith. According to Himmler's ideas
its 'inner values' comprised loyalty, honesty, obedience, hardness,
decency, poverty and courage. But this ethos, though ceaselessly
preached and reinforced by torchlight celebrations, lacked genuine
ethical roots and therefore ended by being a scantly romanticized call
to murder, addressed to a mentality that had ceased to ask questions
but silently and obediently killed, and actually compared the justice
of mass murder with the injustice of a stolen cigarette. With its
principles of behaviour removed from any system of moral standards and
linked to the aims of power, it ceased to be an ethos. It became an
instrument of total domination aimed directly at a man's inner being
and wearing the mask of morality, though misconstrued by some of the
rank and file as a 'new morality' and not infrequently - at the cost
of individual conflict - put in the place of traditional values.
Precisely
the effort that it cost the non-criminal, 'idealistic'-minded type of
SS man to achieve total lack of feeling, the ability literally to walk
unmoved over corpses, often enabled him to delude himself into
thinking that he was engaged in an ethical struggle, from which he
then drew a sense of self. justification. In the hopeless confusion of
all criteria under the influence of a totalitarian ethic, harshness
towards the victims was held justified by the harshness practised
towards oneself. 'To be harsh towards ourselves and others, to give
death and to take it', was one of the mottoes of the SS repeatedly
emphasized by Himmler. Because murder was difficult, it was good, and
justified. By the same reasoning he was always able to point proudly,
as though to a Roll of Honour, to the fact that the Order had suffered
'no inner damage' from its murderous activity and had remained
'decent'. It was entirely consistent that the moral status of the SS
rose with the number of its victims. As Himmler declared to the
officer corps of the 'Adolf Hitler' SS Bodyguard on 7th September
1940:
Exactly the same thing happened at forty degrees below zero in
Poland when we had to carry off thousands and tens of thousands and
hundreds of thousands when we had to be so hard - as to shoot
thousands of leading Poles. When we had to be so hard, because
otherwise vengeance would have fallen upon us later. It is a great
deal easier in many cases to go with a company into battle than to
operate with a company in some region suppressing a rebellious
population at a low level of culture, carrying out executions,
transporting people away, taking away howling and weeping women.
(31)
However,
it was not merely the ethos of hardness that gave such utterances by
Himmler their decisive twist, but rather the vulgar and calculating
pride in his own capacity for inhumanity with which the pedant and the
former model pupil of the King Wilhelm Gymnasium in Munich sought to
establish his leadership among his murder-and-battle-hardened
subordinates. In fact it is difficult even now to understand to what
individual qualities and advantage he owed his relatively uncontested
position within the SS. He was the most colourless personality in the
inner circle of the leaders of the Third Reich; he possessed no
natural authority and his 'charisma' was that of a head teacher. The
long years of screening by Heydrich, and Hitler's personal trust,
which lasted to the end and which he paid for with extreme docility,
clearly assisted him greatly. In addition, the Order's stringent
principle of obedience and duty helped to keep his position
uncontested, and its members were always being involved in new tasks
imposed by its continuous expansionist drive, which gave them
sufficient goals to exercise their rivalry outside the SS. But
independently of this, he himself was always concerned to re-inforce
his influence, not merely institutionally but also psychologically, by
proving both to those above him and those below him that he was the
most extreme SS man among the Führer's
followers. Indeed, totalitarian systems in general owe their
inhumanity more to competition between rivals jealously striving for
power than to the principle of contempt for human beings as such.
It is
true that from the time when the SS became more and more exclusively
engaged in mass murder and extermination, Himmler's extremist
protestations frequently took on strained undertones. 'We must
forswear and renounce false comradeship, falsely conceived compassion,
false softness, and a false excuse to ourselves,' he once cried out
almost passionately to his listeners. (32) The observation that in his
purposeful coldness he was beyond reach of all feeling is undoubtedly
correct. (33) All feelings of guilt, of individual responsibility,
were warded off and 'dealt with' partly by his pseudo-moral values,
partly by interposing those bureaucratic mechanisms that gave his
character its specific stamp, so that they did not reach the
foundations of his personality. Nevertheless we may surmise that the
ever louder admonishments to harshness and ruthlessness were intended
to drown elements of unrest which in the end he could not fail to
hear. The scope of the terrorist activity made it inevitable that
occasionally he should face the consequences of what he had
thoughtlessly set in motion at the conference table or by putting his
signature to documents. But he himself did not have the hardness he
demanded from his subordinates, any more than he had the rest of the
elite characteristics of the SS man, the external racial features, the
physical height, the hair colour, or the so-called Great Family Tree
(Grosser Ahnennachweis) going back to 1750. (34)
There is no evidence that he was conscious of these problems or
suffered from them. Only once does he seem to have submitted himself
to the sight of what he demanded from others. SS Obergruppenführer
von dem Bach-Zelewski has attested that in 1941 in Minsk, Himmler
ordered a hundred prisoners to be assembled for a model execution. At
the first salvo, however, he almost fainted, and he screamed when the
execution squad failed to kill two women outright. (35) In significant
contrast to his abstract readiness to commit murder was the heartfelt
emotion, described elsewhere, which overcame him at the sight of blond
children, (36) and his positively hysterical opposition to hunting.
His lunch was ruined if he was reminded that animals had been
slaughtered. He once protested to his doctor:
How
can you find pleasure, Herr Kersten, in shooting from behind cover
at poor creatures browsing on the edge of a wood, innocent,
defenceless. and unsuspecting? It's really pure murder. Nature is so
marvellously beautiful and every animal has a right to live. It's
just this point of view that I admire so much in our forefathers.
They, for instance, formally declared war on rats and mice, which
were required to stop their depredations and leave a fixed area with
a definite time limit, before beginning a war of annihilation
against them. You will find this respect for animals in all
Indo-Germanic peoples. It was of extraordinary interest to me to
hear recently that even today Buddhist monks, when they pass through
a wood in the evening, carry a bell with them, to make any woodland
animals they might meet keep away, so that no harm will come to
them. But with us every slug is trampled on, every worm destroyed.
(37)
The
almost incomprehensible distortion of all standards of judgement
revealed when this observation is set beside what he said about
experiments on living prisoners or the 'treatment of other races in
the East' (38) can be understood only in the context of his utopian
fanaticism, which in its narrow-minded obsessionalism undoubtedly
contained an element of insanity, and in the context of his world of
ideas that was totally divorced from human reality. At an early stage
he had shown that he could attribute idealistic motives to his
behaviour. In 1921, when he was active in student self-government, he
wrote in his diary: 'In actual fact I did not originally do it for
idealistic reasons. Now that I have done it, I shall do it
idealistically.' (39) This ability to make 'decent' motives seem
plausible according to changing needs prepared the way for a further
abstraction of all activity from categories of individual guilt and
made possible, not only for him but for a large number of his
subordinates, a clouding of all personal responsibility.
The human
experiments in the laboratories of the concentration camps, which
displayed a horrifying amateurism, yielded not the slightest useful
result because their real purpose was merely to act as a blind; in the
words of one of the doctors involved, Himmler wanted to prove 'that he
was not a murderer but a patron of science'.(40) Any remaining
feelings of guilt were removed by the assertion, delivered with the
pseudo-tragic pose of provincial demonism, that it was 'the curse of
the great to have to walk over corpses'. (41) Behind this, conjured up
more zealously than ever, lay that concept of a Greater German
post-war empire which, beyond the extermination which he carried out
with routine conscientiousness, he was planning and preparing. The
nature of these plans is disclosed by the terms in which he expressed
himself on this 'theme of his life', by means of which he hoped to
escape from the constraints of his dry and colourless existence to a
position of leadership in idealized territories. Herrenmenschen were
contrasted with 'working peoples'; there was talk of 'fields of racial
experiment', 'nordification', 'aids to procreation', 'the foundations
of our blood', 'fundamental biological laws', 'the ruination of our
blood', 'the breeding of a new human type', or 'the botanical garden
of Germanic blood' - truly the visions of a poultry farmer from
Waldtrudering! Meanwhile Himmler devised plans for an SS State of
Burgundy, which was to enjoy a certain autonomy as a racially and
ideologically model state under his personal leadership, to be a sort
of gigantic Nordic boarding school; this idea gave his narrow-minded
pedagogic temperament the cold happiness for which it longed. (42) *
As it has been said of the spokesmen of the French Revolution that
they confused politics with a novel, so it may be said of Himmler that
he confused politics with the obscure and fanciful tracts that had
been the first stage in the educational career of his Führer.
The
ultimate indissoluble residue of Himmler's make-up rests upon his
devotion to the person of Hitler, to whom he subordinated himself in a
positively pathological manner. His dependent nature and need of
emotional support, demonstrated both by his choice of a wife seven
years older than himself and by the dogmatic pedantry of his beliefs,
culminated in an exaggerated loyalty towards the 'Führer of the
Greater Germanic Reich', as he liked to call Hitler in anticipation of
the future. Once when Felix Kersten was treating Himmler, Kersten
answered the telephone; Himmler turned to him, his eyes shining, and
said, 'You have been listening to the voice of the Führer,
you're a very lucky man.' (43) The head of the German Intelligence
Service, Walter Schellenberg, who was his adviser towards the end of
the war, reports that after every conversation with his F ührer,
Himmler used to imitate his speech and mode of expression. (44)
Kersten says that Himmler saw in Hitler's orders 'the binding
decisions of the Germanic race's Führer,
pronouncements from a world transcending this one', which 'possessed a
divine power':
"He
[Hitler] rose up out of our deepest need, when the German people had
come to a dead end. He is one of those brilliant figures which always
appear in the Germanic world when it has reached a final crisis in
body, mind and soul. Goethe was one such figure in the intellectual
sphere, Bismarck in the political - the Fuhrer in the political,
cultural, and military combined. It has been ordained by the Karma of
the Germanic world that he should wage war against the East and save
the Germanic peoples - a figure of the greatest brilliance has become
incarnate in his person." (45)
Kersten
himself adds: 'Himmler uttered these words with great solemnity and
effect. Now it became clear to me why Himmler had sometimes pointed to
Hitler as a person whom men would regard in centuries to come with the
same reverence that they accorded to Christ.'
If the
devoutly exaggerated absoluteness of his loyalty towards the Führer-god
corresponded to a deep need on Himmler's part for security and
something to hold on to, it is also understandable that his faith
barely stood up to the strain of the final phase of the regime. For
when, with the turn of the tide in the war and Hitler's increasingly
obvious failure, the first cracks and fissures began to show on the
idol, he instantly relapsed into his fundamental vacillation. Today we
may take it as proved that from 1943 onwards he had loose, informative
contacts with the Resistance Movement and even played a still
unclarified but unquestionably dubious role in the events of 20th
July, (46) before entering in the spring of 1945 into secret
negotiations with a representative of the World Jewish Congress and
finally with Count Folke Bernadotte. In so far as he was not forced
into these negotiations against his will it remains questionable
whether he ever intended to commit an act of conscious disloyalty. It
is more probable that in a corner of his pathologically adoring heart
he maintained the altars of his idol-worship to the last and that this
was why his actions were irresolute and unplanned. But the inherent
weight of the enormous power which he had gathered together during the
last few years - not least with an eye on the succession to Hitler now
forced him to act.
The steps
he took, however, indicate an almost incredible divorce from reality.
He greeted the representative of the World Jewish Congress, who came
to see him on 21st April 1945, with the unbelievable words: 'Welcome
to Germany, Herr Masur. It is time you Jews and we National Socialists
buried the hatchet.' (47) He indulged in speculation upon what he
would do as soon as he came to power, and seriously hoped, up to the
day of his arrest, that the Western Allies would greet him as a
partner in negotiations and even as an ally against Soviet Russia.
When he visited Grand Admiral Dönitz,
who had just been appointed Hitler's successor, on 1st May, he spoke
of his 'widespread reputation' abroad. (48) Having bid farewell to D önitz
he was still planning on 5th May to create a National Socialist
government under his personal leadership in Schleswig-Holstein, to
provide him with the legal right to negotiate with the Western Allies.
In the
last analysis it was this stupendous lack of realism which determined
this man's life and character. Once, in the panic turbulence of those
days when, after shattered hopes, he became aware of reality in the
shape of the approaching disaster, he told one of his colleagues, 'I
shudder at the thought of everything that is going to happen now.
'(49* And if it was only fear that he felt now, this too was something
he had obviously never considered, because it had never appeared
either in documents or reports, or in his daydreams of future
projects. They did not mention the fact that man is afraid of death.
Indeed,
during these weeks of the collapse of the Third Reich the SS Reichsführer
Heinrich Himmler was an opportunist fighting stubbornly to delay the
end. In vain did those around him press him to declare himself and
assume responsibility for the SS. (50) on 19th March he was still
conjuring up apocalyptic visions of a last-ditch stand to the last man
'like the Ostrogoths on Vesuvius'; (51) now he thought only of
disguise and flight. 'One thing can never be forgiven among us
Germans: that is treachery,' he had assured his followers a few months
earlier. No small number of the SS, especially members of the elite
groups, committed suicide when they realized Heinrich Himmler's
treachery. In Bohemia, in May 1945, according to a contemporary
report, SS officers lit a fire one night, stood in a circle around it
singing the SS oath song 'Wenn alle untreu werden' (When all become
untrue), and thereafter all took their own lives. What caused their
disillusionment so suddenly and with such shock was not so much the
betrayal to which Hitler was referring when he repudiated Himmler in
his testament and stripped him of all his offices because of his
independent peace feelers with the Western powers. In so far as their
motives related to the SS leader's actions, it was rather his betrayal
of the shared 'idea of the SS', in which they had believed through all
battles, all victories, defeats, and crimes. Its collapse left only a
senseless, filthy, barbaric murder industry, for which there could be
no defence. Rudolf H öss,
for many years commandant of Auschwitz, became 'quite mute' when
Himmler, 'radiant and in the best of spirits', advised him to go
underground. (52) *
Evidently
the mechanism that produced illusion did not break down even now. On
21st May 1945, when Himmler left Flensburg under the name of Heinrich
Hitzinger, his moustache shaved off and a black patch over his left
eye, he had chosen for his disguise the uniform of a sergeant-major of
the Secret Military Police, a subdivision of the Gestapo. Not grasping
the terrifying reputation of all organisations associated with his
name, he had no idea that he had thereby laid himself open to
automatic arrest. The very same day he was taken prisoner by a British
control post.
He put an
appropriate end to his life. Suicide erased whatever justification he
had advanced for the sufferings he had caused. 'My behaviour is more
important than what I say,' he had declared in his Poznan speech, and
added, 'This Germanic Reich needs the Order of the SS. It needs it at
least for the next few Centuries.(53) Now his behaviour contradicted
it all. There is no legend.
Footnotes
Where
an English language edition exists of a foreign work quoted in
this book, the English title is given in the notes. However, the
exact wording of the English text has not invariably been used.
Abbreviations used in these notes:
IfZ
Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich
IMT
Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military
Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1947 1949
VJHfZ.
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte
Ausgewählte Dokumente - Ausgewählte Dokumente zur Geschichte des
Nationalsozialismus by Hans-Adolf Jacobsen and Werner Jochmann
1933 - Das Deutsche Reich von 1918 bis Heute. Das Jahr 1933 by
Cuno Horkenbach.
Tischgespräche - Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier
1941 1942 by Henry Picker
Der
Angriff - Aufsätze aus der Kampfzeit by Josef Göbbels.
Die
Geschichte eines Hochverräters - the autobiography of Ernst Röhm,
published in Munich in 1928.
1 One of the two death masks appeared in Time
magazine in the summer of 1945.
2 Heinrich Himmler, Die Schutzstaffel als antibolschewistische
Kampforganisation (Munich, 1936). Gnadelos (merciless) was
apparently one of Himmler's favourite words, for it appears in
many of his speeches, often several times over.
3 Speer's judgement is reported by Alexander Dallin, German
Rule in Russia 1941-1945. Walter Schellenberg notes in
Labyrinth that Himmler in fact used to give marks. Friedrich
Hossbach, Zwischen Wehrmacht und Hitler, and Graf Folke
Bernadotte, The Curtain Falls (British title: The Fall of
the Curtain; New York and London, 1945), make similar remarks. See
also the various assessments collected by Gerald Reitlinger in his
book The SS, Alibi of a Nation. Actually, one would
suspect that a person of stronger susceptibility than Himmler
would probably have been incapable of perfecting this type of
extermination system. See Conrad-Martius, Utopien der
Menschenzüchtung.
4
Walter Dornberger, "V2" (London and New York, 1954), quoted by
Edward Crankshaw, The Gestapo. The Englishman Stephen H.
Roberts described Himmler as 'a man of exquisite courtesy and
still interested in the simple things of life. He has none of the
pose of those Nazis who act as demigods . . . No man looks less
like his job than this police dictator of Germany...' (quoted by
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism).
5
Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler.
6
Burckhardt, Meine Danziger Mission 1937-1939.
7
Schellenberg, Labyrinth. For more details of these
conceptual complexes see particularly Felix Kersten, Memoirs.
8
Mein Kampf.
9
Domarus, Hitler , Vol. I.
10
Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler.
11
Himmler's speech to the SS Group Leaders' Conference in Poznan on
4th October 1943; IMT, XXIX, I919-PS.
12
Karl O. Paetel, Die SS. Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie des
Nationalsozialismus, VJHfZ, 1954, No. 1.
13
VJHfZ, 1954, No. 1.
14
Kersten, Memoirs.
15
Kersten, Memoirs.
16
Stephen H. Roberts, quoted by Arendt, Origins of
Totalitarianism.
17
IMT, XXIX, I919-PS. This text is by no means exceptional in
character. Many of the themes which appear here, from his
conceptions of harshness to his child-kidnapping complex, appear
in other speeches too. See Himmler's speech to a conference of
commanding officers in Bad Schachen on 14th October 1943, IMT,
XXXVII, 070-L, or his memorandum of May 1940 on the treatment of
racial aliens in the East, reprinted in VJHfZ, 1957, No. 2. The
reference to Herder's pernicious influence is also found in the
speech which Himmler gave to the field headquarters at Hegewald on
16th September 1942; see Jacobsen and Jochmann, "Ausgewählte
Dokumente".
18 Kersten, Memoirs. See also
Schellenberg, The Labyrinth. Dr Karl Gebhardt, a friend
of Himmler's youth and head of Hohenlychen sanatorium, explained
at the Nuremberg doctors' trial (Report S.3991): 'Himmler came
from Landshut, the same town as myself . . . If my parents' house
was an extraordinarily liberal, free, quiet one, then the Himmler
house was that of a strong orthodox Catholic schoolmaster whose
son was brought up very strictly and kept very short of money.'
See further George W. F. Hallgarten, Mein Mitschüler Heinrich
Himmler. Eine Jugenderinnerung', Germania-Judaica.
Bulletin der Kölner
Bibliothek zur Geschichte des deutschen Judentums,
No. 2, 1960/61
19
Kersten, Memoirs.
20
Himmler's speech to the NSDAP Reichsleiters and Gauleiters in
Poznan on 3rd August 1944, in VJHfZ, 1953, No. 4.
21
For the Quedlinburg speech, see Das Archiv, Nachschlagewerk fur
Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur, July 1936 the other quotation comes
from Himmler, Die Schutzstaffel.
22 At
any rate, according to Joseph Wulf, Heinrich Himmler, Eine
biographische Studie (Berlin, 1960).
23 See the chapter 'Reinhard Heydrich - The
Successor;' The reference to the SS having 52,000 members on 30th
January 1933 is found in Günther
d'Alquen, Die SS. Geschichte, Aufgabe und Organisation der
Schutzstaffeln der NSDAP (Berlin, 1939).
24
See Dokumente der deutschen Politik, Vol. IV. Actually
30th June 1934 is one of the most crucial dates in the history of
National Socialism, certainly not much less far-reaching than, for
example, 30th January 1933; for it not only marked the elimination
of all oppositional stirrings, whether within the SA, the
Wehrmacht or the bourgeoisie, and swept away the last guarantees
of the due- process of law by Hitlers appointment of himself as
supreme judge, but also opened to the SS the way to their later
power. At the end of the 1930s Himmler was in actual fact the most
powerful man of the regime after Hitler. Stalin, at the signing of
the Moscow Agreement, proposed in addition to a toast to Hitler a
toast to Himmler as the 'guarantor of order in Germany'; see
Rosenberg, Politisches Tagebuch, entry for 5th October
1959.
25
Paetel, Die SS.
26
From the statutes of the Association, composed by Himmler; see IMT,
XXVI, 488-PS.
27 See Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of
Hell. Kogon believes, however, that 'in the quagmire of SS
corruption... it is very seldom that anyone was destroyed' and
points out that here too the candid phrase only concealed the
truth. Thus Himmler, in the most famous case of corruption in the
history of the SS, had tried for a long time to defend Koch, the
commandant of Buchenwald and chief accused, against the charges of
SS Obergruppenführer
Prinz Waldeck, who finally succeeded, in his capacity as supreme
SS and police chief of the regional division to which Buchenwald
was attached, in setting proceedings in motion. But this was only
after Koch had become 'a public burden on the SS'. See also IMT,
XLII Affidavits SS-64 and SS-65.
28
IMT, XXIX, 1919-PS. 29
29
This point was made particularly by Kogon, The Theory and
Practice of Hell, and subsequently by Hannah Arendt as part
of her analysis of totalitarianism.
30
Paetel, Die SS. See also the chapter Ernst Röhm and the Lost
Generation.
31
IMT, XXIX, 1918-PS. From the same speech comes the remark: 'He
[the Russian] only counts because of his numbers, and these
numbers have to be trampled to death, killed, butchered. To use
for once a brutal example, it is as with a pig that is being
killed and must gradually bleed to death.'
32
Speech in Bad Schachen, IMT. XXXVII, 070-L
33
Schwerin von Krosigk, Es geschah in Deutschland
34
Himmler in his Poznan speech: 'We have developed according to the
law of selection. We have chosen the elite from among a
cross-section of our people... We have gone partly by external
appearance and then have ..-. tested appearance against
continually new requirements, continually new tests, physical and
mental, of character and of spirit. We have again and again sought
out and cast off what doesn't meet these requirements... We are
pledged whenever we come together to remind ourselves of our
fundamentals, race, selection, hardness' (IMT, XXIX, 1919-PS).
35
See Aufbau, No. 34 (New York, 1946).
36
Kersten, Memoirs.
37
Kersten, Memoirs.
38
Kogon, Theory and Practice of Hell; VJHfZ, 1957, No. 2.
39
Werner T. Angress and Bradley F. Smith, Diaries of Heinrich
Himmler's Early Years, quoted by Wolfgang Sauer in Bracher,
Sauer and Schulz, Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung.
40
Like Dr Kurt Schilling, who sought to develop a malaria serum in
Dachau by experimenting on prisoners; see Gilbert, Nuremberg
Diary. Moreover, this research was part of that far-reaching
endeavour to build a 'special SS science'; see Mitscherlich and
Mielke, Doctors of Infamy. Mention here must also be made
of the so-called Freundeskreis Himmler, a gathering of
predominantly industrial patrons of the SS. Several members of
this circle apparently passed on to Himmler and the quacks who
surrounded him a few concrete suggestions in consideration of the
fact that human research in the concentration camps presented an
unrivalled opportunity to shorten protracted and costly tests; see
Mitscherlich and Mielke, Doctors; also the analytically
cliche-ridden but factually informative article by Klaus Drobisch,
'Der Freundeskreis Himmler. Ein Beispiel fur die Unterordnung der
Nazipartei und des faschistischen Staatsapparats durch die
Finanzoligarchie', Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenchaft,
No. 2 (East Berlin, 1960).
41
Kersten, Memoirs; Himmler also used to enjoy identifying
himself with history, which he believed to be 'unsentimental'; see
VJHfZ, 1953, No. 4.
42
Himmler's statements on the SS State of Burgundy appear in the
English but not the German edition of Kersten's Memoirs.
Here the text mentioned by Paetel in Die SS is taken as a
basis. Besgen's book Der stille Befehl contains still
other material than the German or English edition of Kersten's
Memoirs. Alsace-Lorraine too played a significant part in the
SS concept of the future, particularly as a settlement area; see
Paul Kluke, 'Nationalsozialistische Europaideologie, VJHfZ, 1955,
No. 3.
43 Kersten, Memoirs; on the other hand
Himmler was reduced to a state of utmost distress by every
critical remark made by Hitler, which, as Kersten notes, to some
extent caused violent reactions. For him as for most of his
leading colleagues, each visit to the Führer's
headquarters was like sitting an examination.
44
Schellenberg, Labyrinth. Similarly Burckhardt, Meine
Danziger Mission 1937-1939, notes that Himmler tried at times
to transform his gaze 'into a stiff, hypnotic stare in imitation
of certain distinguished persons'.
45
Kersten, Memoirs.
46
See among others Allen Welsh Dulles, Germany's Underground;
also Reitlinger, The SS, Alibi of a Nation. The long
vindication passage in the speech Himmler gave to the
Reichsleiters and Gauleiters on 4th August 1944 (VJHfZ, 1953, No.
4) also has a suspect ring.
47
Quoted by Wulf, Heinrich Himmler. Masur answered Himmler's
greeting: 'There is too much blood between us for that. But I
thank you for authorizing me to come and I hope that our meeting
will save the lives of many men.' In fact Masur succeeded in
freeing several thousand prisoners.
48
Walter Lüdde-Neurath, Regierung Dönitz. Die letzten Tage des
Dritten Reiches (Göttingen, 1953); On the remaining details
of Himmler's last weeks see the previously cited works by
Schellenberg, Reitlinger, Wulf and Folke Bernadotte and the
memoirs and statements of those involved. Possibly Himmler's lack
of realism and his indecision at the end were due also to
Heydrich's death. That this incident had a lasting effect on him
and his position is incontestable, and Göring said that after the
death of Heydrich 'anything was possible against Himmler'; see
Haensel.
49
Noted by Schellenberg; see Bernadotte, The Curtain Falls.
50
Statement by Ohlendorf, quoted by Reitlinger, Final Solution.
Also, Schwerin von Krosigk sought to make it clear to the
Reichsführer of the SS that the only honourable course was for him
to declare himself and take responsibility for the SS. But Himmler
refused. See Reitlinger, The SS, Alibi of a Nation.
Albert Speer also tried to get Himmler to do this; see IMT,
Speer-49, W. Baumbach's statement.
51
Kersten, Memoirs.
52 Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz.
In fact, in the last phase Himmler completely abandoned his
ideological justifications. To Masur he sought to justify the
extermination measures with the argument that they had been
necessitated by the danger of contagious infection to German
troops: 'The Jewish masses were infected with terrible epidemics;
in particular, spotted typhus raged. I myself have lost thousands
of my best SS men through these epidemics. Moreover the Jews
helped the partisans... In order to put a stop to the epidemics we
were forced to burn the bodies of incalculable numbers of people
who had been destroyed by disease. We were therefore forced to
build crematoria, and on this account they are knotting a noose
for us' (quoted by Reitlinger, The Final Solution)
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