by Bill Yenne
Though Himmler’s family was displeased that he was marrying a divorced woman seven years older than he, he wed Margarete (or Marga, for short), on July 3, 1928. Some sources have suggested that he entered the bed that night still a virgin, but there is no way of knowing.
As Himmler might have observed, though, this was actually not his first marriage. His first wedding had occurred 1,022 years earlier in 906, when, in his previous life as Heinrich I, he had married a woman named Hatheburg, whose Saxon father was Count Edwin of Merseburg. This marriage lasted just three years before ending in divorce—or possibly annulment, as Hatheburg had been married previously. Heinrich then promptly wed a noble teenager named Mathilde. Renowned for her beauty, she was the daughter of Count Dietrich of Westphalia, who was a descendent of the Saxon hero Widukind. Heinrich had one son with Hatheburg, and two daughters and three sons with Mathilde. Among the latter was Otto I, Heinrich’s successor and the first Holy Roman emperor. Heinrich Himmler was no doubt pleased to lay claim to such a majestic and most Aryan pedigree through his belief in reincarnation.
In 1928, Margarete Himmler sold her business, and her new husband bought them a farm near Waldtrudering, on the edge of Munich. Heinrich, the boy with an active imagination, had grown into Heinrich the husband and community organizer. But despite his living in the all-too-real world, he still inhabited a fantasyland. Like the flower children of the 1960s who raced off to rural communes, Himmler still imagined himself as a peasant, getting his hands dirty in the soil of rural Bavaria and getting in touch with his Völkisch side.
His views on the familiar theme of Blut und Boden, blood and soil, were influenced by the works of a South American, albeit ethnic German, author who would later play a key role in carrying out Himmler’s bizarre racial policies. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1895, Ricardo Walther Oscar Darré was the son of an expatriate German import-export executive who spent most of his youth studying abroad, in both England and Germany. Like Himmler, Darré had developed an interest in German farm life while still in his teens. Both he and Himmler had been members of the back-to-the-land Artamanen Gesellschaft (Artaman League).
Unlike Himmler, though, Darré was old enough for military service during World War I. As Richard Walther Darré, he served in the Imperial German Army and was wounded, though not severely, several times. Afer the war, as Himmler became a farm worker in southern Germany, Darré was a farm worker in eastern Germany, in Pomerania. As Himmler had studied agriculture in Munich, Darré studied the same at the University of Halle, where he finally earned his doctorate in 1929. In the meantime, he had joined the NSDAP and published his book, Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der Nordischen Rasse (Peasantry as the Life-Source of the Nordic Race). The book naturally appealed to Himmler, who was then in the wings with Hitler, waiting for their moment in the lights of the national stage. In her 1985 biography Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darré and Hitler’s “Green Party,” Anna Bramwell wrote that Darré “defined the German peasantry as a homogeneous racial group of Nordic antecedents, who formed the cultural and racial core of the German nation…. Since the Nordic birth-rate was lower than that of other races, the Nordic race was under a long-term threat of extinction.” The idea that the Aryan race might die out played into Himmler’s determination to help save it, just as the belief in the idealized German peasantry as the wellspring of the race fed his Völkisch obsession. As the Nazi party grew in strength, Darré rose with the tide, becoming a tool in the effort to move the real peasantry under the party’s big tent.
As for Himmler, he made an initial effort at becoming if not a real farmer, then at least a weekend peasant. A small home was built at the Himmlers’ Waldtrudering farm, and Himmler himself built the chicken house, imagining that one day his flock would evolve into a large egg business. It never happened. Heinrich’s dream became Margarete’s nightmare. She did wind up as a farmer and would spend the coming few years tending a handful of chickens, as he went off to tend a growing number of Nazis.
The only daughter of Heinrich and Margarete, named Gudrun, was born on August 8, 1929. She would see little of her father as she grew up. Half a year earlier, on January 6, he had been called from his rustic idyll to head the palace guard of the NSDAP, the Schutzstaffel, or “Protection Squad,” best known by its initials. The SS had been created in 1925, evolving out of Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the Stosstruppe (Shock Troop), formerly Stabswache (Staff Guard). Whereas the storm troopers of the Sturmabteilung (SA) had acted as a sort of freikorps to guard the party and its functions, the SS was created as a more elite and specialized unit to guard the Führer. Soon, however, its mandate expanded.
While Hitler was in prison and out of the picture, Ernst Röhm had spent 1924 building the SA into an army. When his 2,000-man SA was formally banned at the same time as the NSDAP itself, Röhm simply changed the name. Using the front name Frontbann, Röhm proceeded to build a freikorps of about 30,000 paramilitaries outside the shell of the Nazi Party.
When Hitler reestablished the Nazi Party, it would have been natural to assume that it would reabsorb its former freikorps, but Röhm had refused to let it be. With this refusal, the NSDAP and Röhm formally parted ways on April 30, 1925. Hitler smiled a benevolent smile that belied an “I’ll-get-you-in-due-time” sneer, and thanked his former underling for his valuable service. At that point, a conciliatory Röhm told Hitler that they were still friends, and that if he were needed, all Hitler had to do was call, and he would answer.
Röhm did not remain in Germany. Shortly thereafter, he was asked by the government of Bolivia, of all places, to come to South America and whip some Germanic discipline into its armed forces. He took the job.
As reported in the September 4, 1930, issue of the Müchener Post, Hitler decided that he needed a new freikorps, but one comprised of “men who enlisted unconditionally, ready to march against their own brothers. Rather a mere twenty men to a city (on condition that one could count on them absolutely) than an unreliable mass [such as Röhm’s army].”
Such was the mandate that Hitler had in mind for his SS.
As would usually be the case with his ideas, the Führer left it to others to put this plan into motion. The first commander of the SS was Julius Schreck, who had previously been Hitler’s chauffeur and head of his Stosstruppe bodyguard. He set about building the SS with tight-knit groups throughout Germany. He kept it elite. Men had to be physically fit party members, between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-five, and have two sponsors. He kept it small. Even Berlin had a contingent of only twenty men. Reportedly, the quality over quantity plan worked well. Communist rabble-rousers quickly learned the hard way that it was not a good idea to disrupt a Nazi Party event.
It was at this time that Hitler and his henchmen began organizing the NSDAP’s operational apparatus beyond their Bavarian birthplace and on a national scale. It is clear that they imagined this organization not just as a political-party apparatus, but also as a template for one day ruling Germany. The interest that the Nazis took in the medieval roots of the German nation are evident in the terminology used for positions within the party. In the early twentieth century, as now, the German states forming the basic building block of German political geography were known as lander. However, the Nazis returned to the distant days of the early Middle Ages, when the basic building block was the smaller gau, roughly equivalent to an American county. With meticulous detail, the Nazis established an NSDAP leader, called a gauleiter, for each of these small districts across the country.
In April 1926, a year after the SS was formed, Schreck handed off command to Joseph Berchtold, another former SA man who had headed the security detail at the Bürgerbräukeller during the putsch. Berchtold was the first to be given the important sounding title of “Reichsführer SS,” or national leader of the SS.
The all-black SS uniform came later. The party had earlier made a windfall purchase of brown shirts originally manufactured for the Imperial German Army’s colonial troops in Deut
sch-Ostafrika, Germany’s African colony in what are now parts of Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania. When the Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of colonies, the unneeded shirts were appropriated by the SA. While the brownshirts of the SA had also sported brown ties, the brownshirts of the SS wore black ones.
By 1926, Hitler was also ready to reconstitute the SA. The Frontbann had continued to exist, although it was essentially leaderless since Ernst Röhm was no longer involved. To head the newly reformed SA, the Führer picked Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, who had been an officer during World War I and now commanded a freikorps in northern Germany, an area into which Hitler was keen to extend NSDAP influence. Salomon, similarly, was keen to extend the influence of the SA over the SS.
Because the SA had less restrictive membership requirements than the SS, it quickly grew larger. Calls were made to have the SA absorb the small, elite SS, but Berchtold insisted that the SS should maintain a chain of command outside the SA—and even outside the main party apparatus—making it directly answerable only to Adolf Hitler himself.
Early in 1927, fed up with having to bicker with party and SA bureaucrats, Berchtold resigned, and his second in command, Erhard Heiden, became Reichsführer SS. He agreed with his predecessors that the SS should, by all means, remain as an elite corps, describing it as “perhaps super-efficient, but certainly arrogant.” Even more than his predecessors, he believed in strict discipline for the SS, ordering its members to maintain an imposing presence at meetings, but to keep silent. This silence, of course, made the tall, physically fit guards even more striking. However, under Heiden’s watch, the SS declined in both overall importance and in head count—from around a thousand members, it withered by more than two thirds. One person whom Heiden did bring on board was the young, unassuming gauleiter from Landshut.
In 1928, Heinrich Himmler looked like a clerk. (Arguably, he looked like a clerk all his adult life.) Perhaps Heiden made Himmler his deputy because he did not perceive him as a threat. Shortly after Himmler was hired, however, it came to Hitler’s attention that Heiden had used a Jewish tailor for some alterations to his uniform. One wonders how this information may have reached the Führer. Could the source have been the “born criminal” who had once spied on fellow students for his father, the malevolent schoolmaster?
However he found out about Heiden’s tailor, naturally, Hitler couldn’t abide a Reichsführer SS who wore a suit tailored by a such an untermenschen creature. Heiden was out, and Himmler was in.
The young clerk took to his new job as Reichsführer SS with unprecedented diligence, immediately crafting an ambitious plan to reverse the decline in size and prestige suffered by the SS under his predecessors. Although he relaxed the minimum height requirement for SS to 173 centimeters (five feet, eight inches)—how tall, does one suppose, was the slight Heinrich Himmler?—he also introduced more stringent requirements. Under Himmler, Ariosophist criteria was brought to bear in the selection process. Schreck had required SS candidates to have young, well-toned bodies, but Himmler insisted that they also have Aryan pedigrees. In other elite paramilitary organizations throughout history, there had been a requirement of noble blood, the idea being that the aristocracy should have a place among a select corps. With Himmler, one needed not be the son of a duke or prince. One could be the son of a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker—so long as the butcher, baker or candlestick maker was a pure Aryan who traced his blood line only into the Nordic past that Himmler imagined stretched all the way back to the Armanen.
Despite the strict requirements, Himmler built the SS back to about a thousand men by the end of 1929 and doubled that number a few months later. Even Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, heading the much larger SA, took notice. The SA had the reputation of taking anyone who could wield a baton in anger. It was filled with men whose questionable backgrounds included a variety of petty and serious crimes and even, heaven forbid, tainted blood. However, the SA also included men who qualified for the SS, and many of them were jumping ship to the more elite unit. Salomon complained to the Führer. Hitler responded by ordering Himmler to stop poaching from the SA, but he also ordered Salomon to refer qualified candidates to the SS rather than admitting them to SA membership. Nevertheless, the SS remained technically a subsidiary of the SA. By sheer numbers, the SA was still clearly the muscle of the Nazi Party. The SA was especially powerful in Berlin and the big cities of the north, while the SS remained a more Bavaria-centric organization. At the end of 1930, it boasted a membership of nearly 100,000, while the SS had fewer than 3,000. But it was only a matter of time before the rising SS would come out on top.
The NSDAP itself, still headquartered at its “Brown House” in Munich, had the image of being a Bavaria-centric party. However, the appointment of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels as the Nazi gauleiter for Berlin raised the party’s profile on the national scene. Goebbels, who had earned his PhD studying romantic Völkisch literature at the University of Heidelberg, was easily the second best orator in the Nazi party. He was also a tireless promoter and shrewd propagandist.
An SS officer candidate’s guidebook, marked “Class 2, Booklet 6, 1942.” Photo by Kris Simoens, used by permission
Recognizing the importance of the party’s profile in Berlin and his need for personal control, Hitler had gone so far as to transfer a Berlin SA leader named Kurt Daluege to the SS in 1930. He also allowed Daleuge—for a time—to run SS operations in the German capital autonomously, without Himmler’s operational control. Hitler himself was still ruling the NSDAP by finesse and by playing factions against one another. If he could see a day in the future when the SS would be his loyal analog to the Praetorian guard that had served as bodyguards to Roman emperors, he knew that day had not yet come. Instead, he could see that the immense army of the SA was for now the preeminent power, and that to control the party, he needed to control the SA.
The biggest SA thorn in Hitler’s side was Walther Stennes, head of the SA in Berlin. Stennes was among those who disagreed with Hitler’s ballot-box approach to seizing power. Many members had joined the SA for the reason many men joined any postwar freikorps (or any postmodern street gang): to get tough. They imagined that control of the German government would ultimately be decided by an armed clash with the communists. They saw the SA as the tip of the Nazi spear in this battle, and they were itching for a fight.
In August 1930, with a special election coming, Stennes even pushed Goebbels to allocate three Berlin-constituency Reichstag seats to the SA, threatening to pull the SA out of the party if his demands were not met. Salomon had made similar demands of Hitler, who had told him to shove it, but Stennes was ready to shove back. When push did come to shove, and the contention boiled over into a brawl, the SS came to the aid of Goebbels. SA fists had flown against SS fists.
Hitler then invoked the Führer principle and took over both organizations directly. Salomon, weary of the bickering, was only too willing to step aside. But Hitler had no interest in the hands-on management of freikorps. Ernst Röhm had offered to help if Hitler called, and now Hitler was calling.
Meanwhile, the times favored Hitler’s approach to politics. The economy, especially inflation and unemployment, was going from bad to worse, and recruitment to the National Socialist and Völkisch message was snowballing. In the 1928 national election, the NSDAP alone won just 12 seats in the Reichstag and less than 3 percent of the overall vote. However, when the government collapsed and the September 1930 special election was held, the NSDAP won 107 seats in the Reichstag and over 18 percent of the vote, becoming the second largest party in German government after the Social Democrats.
In November 1930, Hitler formally made the SS independent of the SA, declaring that no SA commander could issue orders to an SS man. Himmler instituted a formal, military rank system within the SS and was finally able to change the uniforms. Out went the brown shirts, and in came the black.
When Röhm returned to resume his role in the SA, he walked Hitler’s line assiduously. Early in 1931, h
e reorganized the SA hierarchy, making its regional units answerable to NSDAP gauleiters at every level. Stennes was bounced from the organization in April.
At the very moment that his old pal Röhm was appearing to curb the SA and bring it to heel for the Führer, Heinrich Himmler was at the threshold of recreating the SS as much more than just a freikorps or a palace guard. In his grand vision, the SS would become an order of Black Knights that would embody the purist Ariosophic ideals. He imagined their destiny was to be the greatest Nordic warrior caste since the Armanen elite had held their swords aloft to salute Wotan himself.
CHAPTER 5
The Old Crooked Cross
THE FLAG THAT HEINRICH HIMMLER had held so proudly in November 1923 was the red, black, and white standard of the Second Reich. He held it in defiance of the Weimar Republic and with nostalgia for the glorious past. Both reasons resonated strongly with many like-minded German nationalists in the turbulent days of the postwar political scene.
Hitler, too, was thinking of flags, but his idea was to go back to the future. He wanted to take the Nazi ideal forward by making a break with the recent past and going back into the remote corners of prehistory. Like Himmler, he saw the Nazi Party as more than a party. He imagined it deserving of an emblem that embodied simplicity and recognizability. He wanted a graphic symbol, a logo, to unify the iconography of this party that was more than just a party. In the case of an organization that would claim a link with primeval priests and heroes, the symbol must be ancient.