Heinrich Himmler

by Roger Manvell

  This was the plan that led to the dispute with Hitler, which Schellenberg claims was deliberately fostered by Kaltenbrunner: ‘Hitler immediately issued two orders: that any German who helped a Jew, or a British or an American prisoner to escape would be executed instantly.’

  Hitler summoned Himmler, told him what he thought of his action in terms that Himmler was never to forget and, according to Kurt Becher, Himmler’s agent in the commercial negotiations over the Jews, gave his notorious order that ‘no camp inmate in the southern half of Germany must fall into enemy hands alive’.9

  Meanwhile, with Hungary in the autumn on the eve of capitulation to Russia, the deportations began once more. Himmler employed Hoess, now Deputy-Inspector of Concentration Camps, to act as one of the supervisors who were supposed to ensure reasonable humanity. Budapest fell in December with a considerable Jewish population still left there alive.10 Himmler had permitted an International Red Cross Mission to make a highly restricted inspection of Auschwitz in September, and in October and November there is evidence that he was trying to halt the massacres, or at any rate shift the responsibility for them onto the shoulders of his subordinates. He began, according to Becher, by issuing an order to Pohl and Kaltenbrunner ‘between the middle of September and the middle of October’: ‘By this order, which becomes immediately operative, I forbid any liquidation of Jews and order that on the contrary, care should be given to weak and sick persons. I hold you personally responsible even if this order should be not strictly adhered to by the subordinate officers.’11 This was followed on 26 November by an order which Becher is also responsible for recording: ‘The crematoria at Auschwitz are to be dismantled, the Jews working in the Reich are to get normal Eastern workers’ rations. In the absence of Jewish hospitals they may be treated with Aryan patients.’

  The Red Army were not to reach Auschwitz and its associate camps until the end of January 1945; when they arrived they found that the evacuation of the vast body of prisoners to the west, which had begun as early as the previous September, had been all but completed, and there were less than 3,000 invalids left for them to tend. According to Reitlinger, the central camps and their satellites inside Germany numbered over a hundred at the beginning of 1945, and still held, in conditions which were now deteriorating beyond all control, 500,000 ‘Aryans’ and 200,000 Jews. Their fate remained now in the balance; Himmler wanted to use them as his bargaining point with the Allies, while Hitler and Kaltenbrunner seemed equally determined they should die before there was any chance of their final liberation.

  Himmler had always covered his weakness of character and indecision by assuming a mask of strength. The rank and uniform of an Army Commander fulfilled his need to prove to himself that he was a resolute man of action. Just as he had forced his inadequate body to reach the required standard in athletics, he braced himself now to become a general in the field of battle.

  He was completely unsuited either in mind or body for such a task. But he had a purblind faith in himself, and the doubts that always welled up from hidden sources in his mind and conscience were quelled by his able advisers. If Kersten was at his side to convince him of his humanity and Schellenberg always ready to persuade him he was a diplomat, Skorzeny, the genius in commando tactics, was there in his service to make him feel a general. His instinctive need was to compensate for anything that might go wrong — the death or derangement of Hitler, the machination of the generals, the collapse of the German Army, the chicanery of Goebbels or of Goring, the uncertain powers of Bormann as the controller of Hitler’s court; he tried to allow for everything in the process of keeping himself at the centre of the spiders’ web of Nazi intrigue. No wonder his head ached and the nerves of his stomach were knotted with cramp. But Kersten was there to relieve him. In the Nazi hierarchy, the man whom Germany feared most after Hitler was himself the greatest victim of chronic doubts and fears.

  At this moment he needed the reassurance of some new and active occupation which would release him from the constraint of his own nature. He would become a field commander. In July, as we have seen, Hitler in a moment of great national insecurity had impulsively given him the doubtful command of the Reserve Army, a melting-pot of units mainly composed of the older age-groups still in uniform, of men who had been wounded but not released from service and army trainees who had never seen action at all. For Himmler command of such forces spread over Germany was a beginning but not an end. He needed far more than this to consolidate his power and secure his ego. Nevertheless, he set out to make the men of his new command observers of National Socialism by increasing the number of National Socialist Control Officers, and he initiated new Army divisions to be called by such names as the Peoples’ Grenadiers (Volksgrenadier) and the Peoples’ Artillery (Volksartillerie ).

  The Party Control Officers, of whom Lieutenant Hagen had proved so notable an example when he had brought the Bendlerstrasse conspiracy to Goebbels’ notice on 20 July, were in effect commissars attached to the Army to ensure the political education of the men. Himmler addressed a group of these political commissars a few days after the attempt, spurring them on to take violent action against all defeatists and deserters: ‘I give you the authority to seize every man who turns back, if necessary to tie him up and throw him on a supply wagon… Put the best, the most energetic and the most brutal officer of the division in charge. They will soon round up such rabble. They will put up against a wall anyone who answers back.’12 Such talk as this prepared Himmler to issue his notorious decree of 10 September that the families of those who deserted to the enemy would be shot:

  ‘Certain unreliable elements seem to believe that the war will be over for them as soon as they surrender to the enemy. Against this belief it must be pointed out that every deserter will be prosecuted and will find his just punishment. Furthermore, his ignominious behaviour will entail the most severe consequences for his family. Upon examination of the circumstances they will be summarily shot.’13

  During August Himmler finally gained control of the V-weapons.14 According to General Dornberger, the head of the project at Peenemünde, Himmler had in September 1943 appointed S.S. Brigadier Dr Kammler, who was in charge of building projects for the S.S., to supervise any buildings needed for the development of the V-weapons. Kammler was there, says Dornberger, to act as a spy, and he is described as an energetic, Machiavellian figure, handsome and utterly without conscience. Kammler’s purpose was to supersede Dornberger as controller of the project, nominally taking over on behalf of Himmler. Dornberger worked under Fromm, the Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, and Himmler naturally saw his opportunity to take action after his appointment to succeed Fromm following the attempt on Hitler’s life. On 4 August he formally took over at Peenemünde and appointed Kammler his Special Commissioner in charge of the entire programme. The development of the secret weapons continued to be seriously retarded by the constant intrigue to which it had all along been subject.

  Himmler’s second bid for power on the fighting front was won in the teeth of opposition from Guderian, Hitler’s new Chief of Staff, barely two weeks after the explosion at Rastenburg, when the Poles in Warsaw revolted on what seemed to be the eve of liberation by the Russians. As Guderian himself describes it: ‘I requested that Warsaw be included in the military zone of operation; but the ambitions of Governor-General Frank and the S.S. national leader Himmler prevailed with Hitler… The Reichsführer S.S. was made responsible for crushing the uprising… The battle which lasted for weeks was fought with great brutality.’15

  Himmler sent S.S. Group-Leader von dem Bach-Zelewski with S.S. and police formations to fight in the streets of Warsaw, reinforced by the White Russian officer Kaminski and his S.S.brigade of some 6,500 Russian prisoners-of-war. These men were sent on the mission because their hatred of the Poles was well known. The Russians committed atrocities of such a nature that Guderian stated after the war that he had felt forced to persuade Hitler to withdraw them from Warsaw, while Bach-Zelewski clai
med later that he had had Kaminski executed.16 Hitler, with memories of the revolt in the Ghetto during 1942, ordered Himmler to raze Warsaw to the ground, but the tragic and futile revolt continued until the beginning of October without any assistance from the Russian armies stationed on the Vistula, which flowed right through the heart of Warsaw. In his speech at Posen on 3 August, Himmler went so far as to praise the Kaminski brigade for its resource in looting German Army supplies that had been abandoned. Later, in the autumn, Himmler proposed that Budapest should be treated like Warsaw when the Russians were approaching the city. Himmler declared Budapest to be a centre of partisan warfare in order to keep the campaign within his jurisdiction and that of his favourite commander, Bach-Zelewski.

  The use of these Russian forces did not in fact appeal to Himmler. He was bitterly hostile to the renegade Russian general Andrei Vlassov, who as a Ukrainian was ready to fight against Stalin. The Army was anxious to exploit this disillusioned Red general, who had been captured in the spring of 1942, and use him to recruit the Cossacks to fight against the Red Army. In April 1943 Vlassov became in effect the organizer of so-called Free Russian forces in Smolensk. Himmler was outraged. In his speech at Posen on 4 October he attacked Vlassov for his boasts that only Russians could defeat Russians and that he could muster an army of 650,000 deserters to fight alongside the Germans.17 Later, in the more informal but also more revealing talk he gave to the group of Gauleiters and senior officials at Posen on 25 May 1944, he described how Fegelein made fun of a Russian general by treating him as an equal and calling him ‘Herr General’, praising him until he had managed to get all the information he needed from him. ‘We were well aware of the Slav’s racial characteristic that he particularly likes to hear himself talk’, sneered Himmler:

  ‘All of which proves you can have that sort of man quite cheaply, very cheaply indeed… All that fuss about Vlassov has really frightened me. You know I’m never pessimistic and not easily excitable. But this thing seemed to me downright dangerous… There were fools among us who would give that shifty character the arms and equipment which he is meant to turn against his own people, but quite possibly, when the occasion comes, he will turn against us.’

  After the attempt on Hitler’s life, Himmler commissioned Gunter d’Alquen, who was now Head of Army Propaganda, to organize the Russian deserters under Vlassov, but in the end only two divisions were formed in place of the twenty-five divisions of which Vlassov spoke, and the German Army kept its own Cossack divisions intact. Himmler was only induced to support Vlassov’s claim to be a Ukrainian de Gaulle because he was ready to claim jurisdiction over these Free Russian forces if ever they were brought up to full strength, incorporating them into the Waffen S.S. This, however, never happened. By the time Vlassov went into action Himmler was wholly absorbed in the task of survival. Vlassov was eventually captured by the Red Army and hanged.

  With his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, Himmler also founded with Bormann the Volkssturm, the German Home Guard, which was to act as a civilian defence force in the case of invasion. This was followed in November by plans for the Werwolf,18 the future resistance force which Himmler hoped would operate if Germany were ever occupied. In so far as Himmler drew near to anyone, it was to Goebbels, whom Hitler had made Plenipotentiary for Total War when he had visited him to see the sacred bombed-site at the Wolf’s Lair. With the Army High Command in disgrace, the two men, one a life-long civilian and the other a chief of the secret police who had never commanded a platoon on the battlefield, planned to share out the war effort between them. Goebbels’s aide von Oven claims that Goebbels said in November, ‘The army for Himmler, and for me the civilian direction of the war! That is a combination which could rekindle the power of our war leadership.’19 Between them they planned the redistribution of German civilian labour and the recruitment of a million men, half of them from Göring’s Luftwaffe, who would be drafted and trained in the ranks of Himmler’s Reserve Army. In effect, Himmler became Minister of War, though Hitler did not grant him the title.20 But he permitted him the particular honour of delivering the annual speech of Party commemoration in Munich on 9 November, which showed that in Hitler’s eyes Himmler was fully established in the forefront of the Nazi leadership.

  Goebbels’s vicious ruthlessness in the exercise of power appealed to Himmler, whose nature craved for a similar measure of courage and decision. Once Goebbels had decided what he wanted, neither fear nor scruples deterred him. If von Oven is to be believed, Goebbels too was considering who best might govern Germany along with himself if Hitler were no longer in power — not Goring, certainly, who neglected his duties so shamefully; not Bormann, that second-rate climber, but Himmler? Here Goebbels paused before reaching the inevitable negative. Recently, he decided, Himmler had become too arbitrary (eigenwillig). But while treasonable thoughts were to nibble uneasily at Himmler’s conscience until the day Hitler died, they were firmly rejected by Goebbels, if they were ever entertained at all, as untenable. Goebbels realized what Himmler was incapable of grasping, that there could be no place at all for such a man as himself in a Germany without Hitler.

  Himmler also managed to keep on what appear to be easy terms with Bormann, whom Guderian described as the ‘thick-set, heavyjointed, disagreeable, conceited and bad-mannered’ éminence grise of the Third Reich. Himmler’s mistress Hedwig, whose pet name was Häschen, had become friendly with Bormann’s wife, Gerda, the mother of their eight children and the apple of her husband’s sentimental eye. Himmler appears as ‘Uncle Heinrich’ in the letters Bormann dutifully sent home during this period, and Gerda writes in September to say how happy Häschen and her children Helge and Gertrud are in their new home in the Obersalzberg.21 Now that Häschen is a neighbour the older children can play together. ‘Helge is a lot taller than our Hartmut’, writes Gerda, ‘but much slimmer and thinner. In his movements and general build he is as much like Heinrich as Hartmut is like you, but I can’t see the facial likeness any more. The little girl, however, is ridiculously like her father. Häschen has some photos from Heinrich’s childhood where he looks exactly the same. The baby has grown big and sturdy, and is so sweet…’

  In October we get a domestic glimpse of Himmler from Bormann: ‘Heinrich told me that yesterday he had been hanging pictures, doing things about the house, and playing with the children the whole day long. He didn’t accept any telephone calls either, but devoted himself quite comfortably to his family for once.’ According to Bormann: ‘Uncle Heinrich apparently is very pleased at the way Helge bosses everybody; he regards this as a sure sign of a leader of the future.’

  Gerda sees Himmler and her husband as an affectionate team of disciples serving their master. ‘Oh, Daddy,’ she writes to Bormann at the end of September, ‘it doesn’t bear imagining what would happen if you and Heinrich didn’t see to everything. The Führer would never be able to do it all alone. So you two must keep well and take care of yourselves, because the Führer is Germany, but you are his selfless comrades-in-arms…’ Her view of these two men must remain unique in Nazi history, but Bormann’s terms of endearment for his wife (beloved mummy-girl, sweetheart mine, dearest heart, all-beloved) only encouraged her to dream of the roses round the door of Hitler’s headquarters, especially when he describes the fun he and Himmler have together in Berlin:

  ‘Last night Himmler andI — Himmler had his evening meal with me together with Fegelein and Burgdorff — laughed till we cried at those two funny birds — they are like a pair of naughty boys. And Burgdorff is 49, and will soon be made a General in the Infantry. Fegelein told his boss what it was like to be shouted at by him over the telephone: just, Fegelein felt, as if white steam were puffing from his ears… You can imagine what fun we had.’22

  Other references to Himmler in Bormann’s letters home show the new-born general in action. On 3 September: ‘Heinrich H. drove to the West Wall yesterday; we are in daily communication by telephone. He is tackling his task of C.-in-C. of the Rese
rve Army with magnificent energy.’ Gerda sent Himmler an encouraging message through her husband. On 9 September: ‘I have told H.H., who telephones once a day, that you are glad to know he’s there, because you think this will solve the problem. It gladdened his heart, and he sends you his warmest regards…’ However, Hitler’s irregular hours of work did not suit Himmler. Bormann is amused: ‘Himmler is always quite shocked at our unhealthy way of living. He says he has to be in bed by midnight, at least as a rule. And we go on working till four in the morning, though we do stay in bed a little longer. But this is just the old, old story…’

  Then, on 31 October, Bormann writes: ‘At my request, Uncle Heinrich is going to the Ruhr on 3 November … to put things in order.’

  This forecast Himmler’s ineffectual intervention on the Western Front. On 10 December Hitler appointed him Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Rhine. The reason why he was ever appointed at all has been the subject of many and varied speculations. Guderian’s view is typical: the command was given at Bormann’s suggestion in order to ruin Himmler by putting him in a position which would expose his incompetence. Another view was that it was the only way to move Himmler’s Reserve Army to the battlefront. There is also the most obvious explanation, that Hitler thought this loyal and energetic man would be successful where the generals had failed. Hitler always distrusted the experts.

  Hedwig

  Death of Himmler

  Strangely enough, the appointment deprived Himmler of immediate authority over the counter-offensive in the Ardennes planned by Hitler in October to be carried out by the S.S. General Sepp Dietrich, to whom Hitler gave the command of the Sixth Army, a special Panzer formation under Rundstedt, the Commander-in-Chief in the West. It has been suggested that Himmler’s command was given him in order to divert any attempts he might make to interfere with Dietrich’s strategy. Rundstedt was particularly sensitive to interference from Himmler, who had been tactless enough during one of his tours of inspection to send Rundstedt orders which he signed as ‘Supreme Commander in the West.’ As General Westphal, Rundstedt’s Chief of Staff, puts it, ‘Although we never discovered whether Hitler had in fact appointed him as such for a time, his rival authority was speedily eliminated.’23