Gestapo

by Edward Crankshaw

  He went through life like this. In the middle of transacting arrangements for the extermination of whole peoples he pursued with no less care and far greater enthusiasm his own real interests. The activities of the Gestapo and the S.D., the building of gas chambers, the massacre of prisoners of war, were simply routine police matters: unpleasant chores in the life of a man who was devoted to making the world fit for Germans to live in. The development of the S.S. Institute for Anthropological Research, however, was something after his own heart. He was determined to discover the secret of Aryan origins, and rich men subscribed millions of marks to this project in order to be numbered among Himmler’s friends. For him the Russian war offered a glorious opportunity for comparative anatomy: while immense armies were maneuvring over the the frozen plains and smashing each other to pieces, Himmler set himself the urgent task of building up a collection of skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars: such things were impossible to come by in Germany.

  The story of this collection of skulls, with the Allies drawing closer to Strasbourg, where they were deposited, provided one of the few moments of farce in the grim drama of the trials of the war criminals. The instructions as to their collection and preservation, issued in all solemnity in the midst of a world toppling in ruins by a man who had not the faintest idea that he was doing anything out of the ordinary, illuminate very clearly the nature of Himmler’s lunacy. It is worth quoting in extenso the report of Professor Hirt, director of the Anatomical Institute of Strasbourg, who was also a departmental chief in Himmler’s Ahnenerbe:

  “Subject: Securing skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars for the purpose of scientific research at the Reich University at Strasbourg.

  “We have a large collection of skulls of almost all races and peoples at our disposal. Of the Jewish race, however, only very few specimen skulls are available. …The war in the East now presents us with the chance of overcoming this deficiency. By procuring the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars, who represent the prototype of the repulsive, but characteristic, subhuman, we have the chance now to obtain scientific material.”

  Professor Hirt then goes on to emphasize the necessity of catching the Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars alive, so that scientific measurements can be made by qualified persons before death:

  “The best practical method of obtaining and collecting this skull material is to direct the Wehrmacht to turn over alive all captured Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars to the Feldpolizei. The Feldpolizei, in turn, should be given special directives to inform a certain office at regular intervals of the numbers of these captured Jews and where they are detained, and to give them every attention and care until a special delegate arrives. This special delegate, who will be in charge of securing the material (a junior physician of the Wehrmacht or the Feldpolizei, or a medical student, equipped with a motorcar and driver), will be required to take a previously agreed series of photographs, make anthropological measurements, and, in addition, determine as far as possible ancestry, date of birth, and other personal data.”

  When that much has been accomplished the unfortunates can be put to death and the serious business proceeded with:

  “Following the subsequently induced death of the Jew, whose head should not be damaged, the physician will sever the head from the body and will forward it to its proper point of destination in a hermetically sealed tin can especially made for this purpose and filled with preservative fluid. Having arrived at the laboratory, the comparison tests and anatomical research on the skull, as well as the determination of the race membership and of pathological features of the skull form, the form and size of the brain, etc., can be undertaken by photographs, measurements, and other data supplied on the head and skull itself.”

  This was the world in which Himmler existed. He believed absolutely in the subhumanness of Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars. When foreign diplomats occasionally suggested that his conduct verged on the brutal, he was completely and sadly uncomprehending. “But they are animals,” he would say. And to him they were. He had no more qualms about cutting off the heads of Russian Jews and sending them in tin cans to Strasbourg than the trained pathologist has about killing animals for dissection. The Jews, like the animals, were to be well cared for until they were put to death.… Or perhaps that is an oversimplification. All the reports agree that Himmler suffered the most atrocious headaches, which on occasion nearly drove him frantic, that he was hesitant in arriving at decisions, that he did suffer and was sometimes appalled at the necessity of such wholesale slaughter. But from all descriptions of this conscientious man it seeems likely that the headaches came not from a battle with conscience so much as from a battle with his sense of responsibility. What was difficult was to decide what was necessary. Once that was decided, there were no more hesitations.

  It was in this spirit that he presided over the appalling experiments on living human beings carried out by a remarkable assortment of doctors in the concentration camps of the S.S. These experiments had nothing to do with the Gestapo, as such. The Gestapo delivered the prisoners as a routine matter, and the concentration camp commanders, on direct orders from Himmler, saw to the rest. Dachau was the principal center for this particular horror; but experiments of one kind or another went on in most of the camps. At Neuengamme, for example, Dr. Heisskeyer carried out a series of experiments on Jewish children, injecting them with T.B., and watching them die—until the advance of the Allies spoiled the beauty of the experiments, and the children had to be killed prematurely to remove all traces of Dr. Heisskeyer’s activities.

  The heroes of Dachau were Dr. Sigmund Rascher of the Luftwaffe, Dr. Schillings the malaria specialist, and Dr. Schutz, who was interested in blood poisoning. Dr. Rascher was the chief of these, and he was Himmler’s special favorite. A charming, well-spoken, and resourceful man, Rascher applied himself single-mindedly to experiments designed to save the lives of German Luftwaffe crews. Prisoners were used freely to discover what happened to pilots without oxygen at high altitudes and when immersed for varying periods in icy water. What happened was that they died. There was a special van, to hold twenty-five men, with an observation window in the side, from which air was progressively extracted until the prisoners in the van started dying of hemorrhage of lung or brain: those who survived were usually killed. There was a tank full of ice-cold water in which other prisoners were placed and kept until they became unconscious. Blood was taken from the neck each time the body temperature fell by one degree, and analyzed. One man was kept alive at nineteen degrees Centigrade, but most died at twenty-five or twenty-six degrees. One aspect of these experiments was the attempted resuscitation of men apparently dead. Sunlamps, hot-water bottles, electrotherapy were all tried in vain, until somebody had the brilliant idea that the application of animal warmth might do the trick—the animal warmth was to be provided by women. It was a new use for prostitutes, and a number of these unsuspecting females were earmarked for this purpose on Himmler’s direct instructions to Pohl, his deputy for concentration camps: his only proviso was that they had to be non-German prostitutes.

  At the trial of the doctors at Nuremberg nobody managed to sort out the question of complicity in these experiments. Goering and high-ranking officers in the Air Ministry were all involved. Respectable members of the German medical profession as well as cranks and scallywags had guilty knowledge. But the driving force was Himmler—Himmler the scientist manqué, the collector of the skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars. And we find him breaking out petulantly against what he called “Christian medical circles” who tried to obstruct him in his starry-eyed role as protector of science and seeker after truth.

  There was also Himmler the crusader and visionary, the man who built a romantic castle in a German forest where the knights of the S.S., many of whom could hardly read or write, were required to repair at intervals to contemplate the glory of their order and establish spiritual contact with the heroes of medieval Germany. We see the crusader in action in the notorious speech of Oct
ober 4th, 1943, to his S.S. Generals at Posen:

  “One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the S.S. men. We must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and nobody else. What happens to a Russian and a Czech does not interest me in the least. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture: otherwise it is of no interest to me. Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished. We shall never be rough and heartless where it is not necessary, that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude towards animals, will also assume a decent attitude towards these human animals. But it is a crime against our blood to worry about them and give them ideals, thus causing our sons and grandsons to have a more difficult time with them. When somebody comes up to me and says, ‘I cannot dig the antitank ditch with women and children, it is inhuman, for it would kill them,’ then I have to say, ‘You are the murderer of your own blood, because if the anti-tank ditch is not dug German soldiers will die, and they are the sons of German mothers. They are our own blood.…’ Our concern, our duty, is our people and our blood. We can be indifferent to everything else. I wish the S.S. to adopt this attitude towards the problem of all foreign, non-Germanic peoples, especially Russians.…”

  The S.S. did.

  And again, referring to the massacres of Jews:

  “Most of you know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out, and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history, which has never been written and is never to be written.… We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.”

  This was the tone set by Himmler for all the organizations under his command, including the Gestapo and the S.D. They obeyed it in the spirit and in the letter. Himmler was mad; but not all his many tens of thousands of subordinates were mad. Numbers of these to this day, still sane, hold responsible positions throughout the two Germanys.

  There was also Himmler the animal lover. We glimpse him in the Posen speech. Here he is again, in conversation with his masseur, Felix Kersten, of whom he made a confidant and who was able, in this commanding position, to save the lives of some who would have been put to death. According to Kersten, Himmler used to condemn all blood-sports as “cold-blooded murder of innocent and defenseless animals.” And he would fulminate against Goering, the huntsman (another animal lover):

  “Goering, that damned bloodhound, kills every animal he can shoot. Imagine, Herr Kersten, some poor deer is grazing peacefully, and up comes the hunter with his gun to shoot that poor animal.… Could that give you pleasure, Herr Kersten?”

  Himmler did not like blood at all; but he had his duty to do, and he did it unflinchingly. When he addressed his S.S. Generals at Posen referring to the terrible sights they had all seen, the spectacle of hundreds of men, women, and children lying side by side at the bottom of the trench they had been forced to dig with their own hands, and congratulated them on sticking it out, he was proudly speaking as one of them. Although his preoccupation with headquarters business made it unnecessary for him to be present at the massacres he was compelled to order, he was not one to ask others to do what he would not do himself; and in the very early days of the Russian campaign, in August, 1941, at Minsk, visiting one of Heydrich’s Action Groups (it was the one, incidentally, commanded by Artur Nebe, the friend of Hans Bernd Gisevius, whom we shall shortly encounter), he ordered Nebe to bring out a hundred prisoners for a sample execution in his presence. S.S. Lieutenant General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, Higher S.S. and Police Leader for the Central Russian front, was also there. In an affidavit he described how he watched Himmler closely and saw him stagger at the first volley and almost fall to the ground in a faint. When the execution squad failed to kill two Jewish women outright Himmler could not control himself and cried out—so that afterwards Bach-Zelewski had to reproach his chief for upsetting the firing squad and ruining its nerve. But, althought upset, Himmler, like his generals, had stuck it out. This was Himmler the hero and stoic.

  Himmler was also interested in power. Many people have queried Himmler’s capacity, unable to believe that a man so colorless and dreary should have either the will or the strength for power. It is also pointed out that for many years he was Hitler’s most devoted slave. But while some men are born to achieve power, others develop the taste for it as it is thrust upon them. It is improbable that Himmler, as a chicken farmer, dreamed of ruling Germany—as Hitler in his equal obscurity most certainly dreamed. It is improbable that when he took over the S.S. with its membership of three hundred professional thugs he saw in this modest institution the future janissaries of the New Order. It is improbable that when he created the Waffen S.S. to fight with the Reichswehr that he looked forward to the day when he would be virtual commander-in-chief under Hitler. But quite early in his political career he must have discovered that he was a born administrator with a marked capacity for intrigue.

  He was, in fact, one of those intriguers, not energetic and demonstrative, who, with a fixed idea, are ready to let affairs take their course until the moment to strike presents itself. In his later years he let many things take their course, including an active conspiracy against Hitler conducted in part by his own subordinates. He profited by them invariably, until the very end, when, as Commander-in-Chief of the Home Armies, he sought to assume the leadership of the Reich and make peace with the Western Allies. Then Hitler in his Bunker in Berlin, discovering the treachery of treuer Heinrich, finally broke him, as his last act. Then, too, Himmler rounded off his character, which had no center, by regarding himself unquestioningly and in all innocence as the sort of man the Western Allies would be prepared to do a deal with.

  As for his physicial appearance, it is familiar enough from photographs. It gave him great pain because it accorded so ill with the standard laid down for the knights of the S.S. But he had to put up with it; and, indeed, it served him well. It served others well, too. With very few exceptions surviving members of the S.S. have expressed pained surprise that Himmler should have done such terrible things. He was so benevolent, so diffident, so mild. They simply had no idea … though what passed through their minds when this old woman of a man spoke to them coldly of mass destruction, as at Posen, is not recorded. The best contemporary description so far comes from Major General Walter Dornberger, who did not belong to the S.S. but was responsible for the development of the V-2 at Peenemuende. Himmler visited the station, and afterwards made himself a great trouble:

  “He looked to me like an intelligent elementary school-teacher, 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 gray S.S. uniform. Under a brow of average height two gray-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 colorless 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.”

  Chapter 3

  Heydrich and the S.D.

  Willy hoettl, alias Walter Hagen, an intelligent but rather prolix Lieutenant Colonel in the S.D., a prosecutio
n witness at Nuremberg, and the author of a book on the German Secret Service, has contributed largely to the confused impression of Himmler by attributing all his remarkable achievements to Reinhard Heydrich. He makes the common mistake of confusing power with dynamism.

  Dynamism Heydrich had in plenty. It is scarcely open to doubt that he used Himmler’s inoffensive person and hesitant ways as a camouflage for his own highly purposeful activities. It is still less open to doubt that Himmler frequently used Heydrich when Heydrich thought he was using Himmler. This is not to say that superficially at least Heydrich was not a stronger man than Himmler, or that he did not conceive highly dangerous ambitions sooner than Himmler. But it is permissible to doubt very strongly indeed the assumption so often canvassed by surviving members of the S.S. that Heydrich, had he lived, would have one day become the new German Fuehrer. He would certainly have tried it on. But Himmler would as certainly have seen to it that before he succeeded he would have broken his neck.