Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts

by Bill Yenne

  It was a job that just had to be done, Himmler felt. He was, after all, doing it for the good of the German people and the purity of their Völkisch blood. As he told Kersten, “You oughtn’t to look at things from such a limited and egotistical point of view; you have to consider the Germanic world as a whole…. [A] man has to sacrifice himself.”

  He considered the task of murdering millions to be a daunting task, but not because it was emotionally hard to kill. The difficulty was only in the massive logistics effort involved. Repeatedly, we get the sense that Himmler sincerely believed that it was he who was making a sacrifice.

  In the nineteenth century, Social Darwinist cranks had sat around their comfortable drawing rooms, not just in Germany, but also in many “advanced” Western nations, discussing their racial hierarchies. Madame Helena Blavatsky was among those who had turned such hierarchies into a religion. There were many who had contributed to making the doctrine of a racial hierarchy into a pseudoscience, but it was Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels who created Theozoology and proposed the sterilization of lesser, anthropozoa, races, especially the Jews. Could Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels ever have conceived, even in his most Ariosophistically passionate moment, of vast factories of death—not one such factory, but many?

  It was Adolf Hitler, the down-and-out art student, who read Lanz’s magazine, Ostara, visited him, and drew from his words the idea that these “apelings” whom Lanz so pseudoscientifically despised could be eliminated. Hitler was not alone in theorizing that the apelings, the untermenschen, should simply be cleansed from German society. It was Heinrich Himmler and his Thule-cold understudy, Reinhard Heydrich, who heard their Führer speak of the “should” and methodically and meticulously craft the “would.”

  Hitler had turned Lanz’s bizarre dreams into the rallying cry of a nation, but it was Heinrich Himmler’s SS that coldly planned, constructed, maintained, and used industrial-strength gas chambers and crematoria of almost unimaginable capacity to make these dreams—or, for the millions who died and the millions more who survived with firsthand knowledge that such things existed, nightmares—come true.

  Even Satan himself might cringe at the sight of the places where the SS Totenkopfverbände labored so tirelessly to kill every untermenschen west of the Urals. The camps of Heinrich Himmler’s SS were nothing short of a bloody hell.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Most Feared Address in Europe

  THE NEXUS OF FEAR in the Third Reich and in occupied Europe was at Number 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse, Berlin, SW 11. Merely the mention of the street name, “Prinz Albrechtstrasse,” was enough to make a person break into a cold sweat. Number 8 was the Geheime Staatspolizeihauptamt (Secret State Police Principal Office) headquarters. Within it was the man whose letterhead bore the title Reichsführer SS und Chef der Deutschen Polizei. The Reichsführer SS was also chief of Germany’s secret police, the Geheime Staatspolizei, or the Gestapo.

  Heinrich Himmler was the most feared man in not just in Germany, but in all of Europe, holding forth from the most feared address in Europe.

  Even Alfred Rosenberg, who had Adolf Hitler’s ear and had framed the philosophical grounding of the Third Reich, felt beads of sweat forming in Himmler’s presence.

  “I had never been able to look Heinrich Himmler straight in the eye,” Rosenberg admitted. “His eyes were always hooded, blinking behind his pince-nez. Now, however, when I could see them gazing at me from the photograph and I thought I could detect one thing in them—malice.”

  During the years from 1941 through most of 1944, Heinrich Himmler was at the apogee of his power. Between the initial successes of Operation Barbarossa and the Wehrmacht’s overall reversal of fortune after losing over a million men in the Battle of Stalingrad less than two years later, Himmler was the master of the universe of his dreams.

  As he was happily anticipating the tide of Völksdeutsche settlement in the East, Himmler sent in the archaeologists from his Ahnenerbe. He wanted them to unearth the artifacts that proved a Germanic link with the East, especially the Völkisch Ukraine. As the German legions swept through Ukraine and into the Crimean peninsula north of the Black Sea in July 1942, the Ahnenerbe’s Dr. Herbert Jankuhn led a team to locate those artifacts the fast and easy way: supported by Einsatzgruppe thugs and Waffen SS panzers, they started hitting the museums. The Ahnenerbe team also explored the ancient cliff dwellings and monasteries in the vicinity of Chufut-Kale, Eski-Kermen, Manhup-Kale, and Tepe-Kermen that date back to around the eighth century (and remain favorites of twenty-first century backpackers). Jankuhn was reportedly unable to find any Germanic artifacts, but many Greek and older items were gathered up and shipped to Germany.

  Despite his preoccupation with his schemes that involved the future of Lebensraum in the East, Himmler was apparently quite excited about his Ahnenerbe expeditions deep into the Soviet Union and into the mountains of the Caucuses. Was it possible that the Mountain of Tongues was indeed out there in the Caucasus, as medieval Arabic geographers hypothesized? Was it possible that the Ahnenerbe might find such a place? Then, too, there were the “Secret Masters of the Caucasus,” whom anthropologist and folklorist C. Scott Littleton mentioned in connection with alleged human sacrifices at Schloss Wewelsburg. Perhaps Himmler hoped to make contact with these individuals.

  Himmler ordered Walther Wüst of the Ahnenerbe to organize a Caucasus expedition, and in turn, he turned to SS Obersturmbannführer Ernst Schäfer, the hardy young mountaineer who had led the Ahnenerbe’s 1938–1939 expedition to Tibet. Bruno Beger, also late of the Tibet trip, wanted to come along to measure skulls of “mountain Jews.” Who better for this job than Schäfer and Beger, together again at last?

  The Schäfer expedition into the Caucasus was the subject of intense planning, but the complexity of the plans and the realities of war eventually strangled the ambitious scheme. Schäfer never made it, but a group of Wehrmacht mountain troops climbed 18,510-foot Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in the Caucuses. Counterintuitively, Adolf Hitler angrily condemned this feat by his young Aryan troopers as a waste of time.

  Heinrich Himmler held court at Number 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. Though this wartime magazine picture belies an affable demeanor on the part of the Reichsführer SS, his office came to be regarded as the most feared address in Europe. Author’s collection

  As for Himmler, nothing could interrupt his enjoyment of his new domain. Through his Einsatzgruppe enforcers, Heinrich Himmler was the lord not merely of both a real and conceptual Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, but also of the vast, wide-open spaces of the East, an area larger than the prewar Reich. It was the Lebensraum of Mein Kampf. Even if he didn’t care about conquering Elbrus, these vast steppes were Hitler’s at last, and Hitler had given it over to Himmler to depopulate and repopulate, to destroy and rebuild as the long awaited Völkisch paradise. It was the “sublime idea” Himmler had once described to Felix Kersten, the bulwark against the evil tides from the East about which Karl Maria Wiligut had warned him. It was, according to Kersten’s recollection, Himmler’s idea of the “greatest piece of colonization the world will ever have seen.”

  Himmler took a personal and zealous interest in the newly conquered lands. He established a field headquarters, an “Eastern Prinz-Albrechtstrasse,” called Hegewald, outside the town of Zhytomyr, eighty miles west of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. It was here that Himmler had the idea of beginning his “great piece of colonization” with a sort of human experimental farm. The idea was to create a model Völksdeutsche settlement to serve as a prototype of what he planned for Ukraine and for that 100,000-square-mile swath of western Russia between Bryansk and Leningrad. After finally getting the authorization from Hitler for this experiment in July 1942, Himmler ordered the SS to sweep 10,000 Slavic and Jewish men, women, and children from the best farmland in the Zhytomyr/Hegewald area, load them in rail cars, and ship them somewhere else. Having done this, the SS uprooted Ukrainian Völksdeutsche from the north of the country and brought them in to the Hege
wald colony. Here they were given tracts of farmland—and production quotas—as Himmler’s own Blut und Boden pioneers.

  Through 1941, and into 1942 and 1943, Himmler would travel the endless eastern miles in his armored train, his mobile Prinz-Albrechtstrasse. As he rambled through Russia and Ukraine, he would frequently order the train to stop so that he could get out and gaze at what may have seemed to him as limitless horizons. Hanns Johst, the poet and playwright who became the darling of the Nazis and the defacto poet laureate of the Third Reich, accompanied Himmler on at least one of his many inspection tours of the eastern territories. He observed that Himmler would often bend down, snatch a fistful of earth, and sniff it. He would then sigh dramatically and wax about how wonderful it was to look out at all this land, which was now German soil.

  Parenthetically, it was Johst who penned the famous line, often credited to Joseph Goebbels, “Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning!” (“Whenever I hear of culture … I release the safety catch of my Browning!”). It appeared in Johst’s 1933 play Schlageter, about Albert Leo Schlageter, who became a Nazi martyr when he was executed for sabotage in the French-occupied Rhineland.

  Back in Berlin, at the real Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, Heinrich Himmler’s power was absolute. He was the lord of the castle at the only castle that really mattered within wartime Germany. He was the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, or Reich Main Security Office or Reich Security Main Office). The RSHA was the umbrella organization for both the Gestapo and the Kriminalpolizei (or Kripo), the criminal-investigation police, as well as the much feared Sicherheitsdienst (SD), which was integrated with the Sicherheitspolizei (or Sipo), the security police, in 1939.

  After January 1944, even the Abwehr, the German military-intelligence apparatus, was taken out of Wehrmacht control and brought under the SS as a component of the RSHA. Through the Abwehr, Himmler had control of a vast network of human intel operatives outside the Reich and German-occupied territories. Under its former director, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the Abwehr had even run agents within the United States, although with minimal success.

  Himmler’s full title as Third Reich police chief was Chef der Deutschen Polizei im Reichsministerium des Innern (Chief of German Police in the Interior Ministry), meaning that in addition to the SS and the Gestapo, he also headed the regular police, the Ordnungspolizei (or Orpo). Though they were part of Wilhelm Frick’s Interior Ministry, they had long since answered only to Himmler’s chain of command.

  Though police professionals grumbled about it when they knew that no one was listening, they were well aware that Himmler’s postwar plan was to consolidate all of the RSHA and Orpo personnel and functions into the SS. Just as the police forces of the individual lander had been consolidated and then finally incorporated into the single national Ordnungspolizei in 1936, Himmler imagined the SS being the super police force for the entire Third Reich and beyond.

  The Orpo were also nicknamed the Grüne Polizei because of their green uniforms. It was to the Orpo that Himmler’s old rival from the early 1930s, Kurt Daluege, had been exiled. While Himmler was the unrivalled master of the Black Knights of the SS, Daluege was his subordinate, an assistant police chief of the regular cops in their green jackets. Within the Orpo, Himmler, through Daluege, controlled every facet of the day-to-day lives of the German people. There was the Schutzpolizei, the regular municipal police, which included the Schutzpolizei des Reiches, regular cops on the beat in major cities, as well as the Schutzpolizei der Gemeinden in small towns and the Gendarmerie in rural areas and along the borders. There were also the riot squads, the Kasernierte Polizei. The Orpo’s Verkehrspolizei were the equivalent of the highway patrol, and the Wasserschutzpolizei, or water police, were like a highway patrol on rivers and in harbors. The Bahnschutzpolizei worked the passenger trains of the national railroad, the Reichsbahn, and the Postschutz guarded the mail and the phone lines. Meanwhile, the Funkschutz guarded radio stations and attempted to jam Allied radio stations. (It was illegal for German citizens to listen to Allied broadcasts, but that didn’t stop them.) Factory guards and night watchmen were given uniforms and called Werkschutzpolizei, but they remained civilians with Orpo bosses.

  These two men, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, seen shaking hands circa 1943, became the two most hated and most feared men in Europe. Because of his direct and iron-fisted control of both the SS and the Gestapo, Himmler was perhaps the most dangerous to the lives of most average individual Europeans—especially those who were candidates for his hellish interment camps. U.S. National Archives

  As individual police departments were absorbed into the Orpo, so too were fire departments. They became the Feuerschutzpolizei, a national “fire police” who “policed” fires, not people. When the Allied bombing campaigns against major German cities ramped up in 1943 and 1944 to a near daily regularity, the Orpo’s Feuerschutzpolizei and its Luftschutzpolizei, or air-raid wardens, had plenty to do.

  While the Orpo had Daluege, the components of Third Reich state security within the ever-expanding power of the RSHA were the bailiwick of SS Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s evil understudy.

  Himmler and Heydrich were an odd couple. Both were manic in their attention to detail, and they could not have been more alike in their ruthless visions of an omnipotent SS and of a Europe devoid of Jewry. At that point, however, their similarities diverged. Though both had been born Catholic, Heydrich’s only religion was now the Führerprinzip of the Third Reich, while Himmler dabbled incessantly in mystic creeds, scampering through the Irminist pagan grottos of the Externsteine, dreaming of the conquests of the Ahnenerbe, or pouring over ancient runic manuscripts—all of which Heydrich considered to be a waste of time. Himmler and Heydrich disliked and distrusted one another, although their professional relationship was highly symbiotic. Each needed the other.

  Himmler was shrewd and cunning. He was the magus.

  Heydrich was cruel and arrogant. He was the enforcer.

  Himmler was the brain behind the pince nez. He was the thinker.

  Heydrich was the former fencing champ who earned an Iron Cross while flying missions with the Luftwaffe. He even flew a strike mission on the first day of Operation Barbarossa, during which he was injured. He was the athlete, the man of action.

  Heydrich was the second most feared man in the Third Reich. He knew the secrets of every man in the German government, every authority figure in the Third Reich. Whatever humiliating document or evidence he didn’t have, he could easily forge. He had the tape recordings of embarrassing secrets and confidential admissions whispered by the elite at Salon Kitty.

  However, somehow word reached Adolf Hitler’s ears that Reinhard Heydrich, the Aryan’s Aryan, was tainted with Jewish blood. Could this accusation have come from the whisper of the “born criminal” who had once spied on fellow students for his father, the malevolent schoolmaster? Though there was never any evidence that Heydrich actually had a Jewish ancestor, Hitler and Himmler kept it over Heydrich’s head. They helped to bury this malicious rumor, but they always remembered where it was buried. Heydrich himself was devastated by the accusation. He would reportedly stare into the mirror and sob at the sight of what he feared might be construed as “Jewish” facial features. His wife, Lina von Osten Heydrich, quoted by Heinz Höhne in his The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS, said that the king of the SD would scream at his reflection, “Just look at his face, his nose—typically Jewish. A real Jewish lout!”

  Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945), the Reich propaganda minister, accepts a bouquet at a Kulturtagens (cultural meeting) in March 1941. His silly expression belies the sinister inner workings of a master manipulator. While Himmler crafted the mythic image of the heroic German people, Goebbels crafted the mythic image—and the personality cult—of the Führer. U.S. National Archives

  If there was ever any doubt during the Third Reich as to which facial features might constitute
“typically Jewish” characteristics, one did not have to look far. Countless illustrated posters and pamphlets—many of which still crop up in memorabilia shops—were published under the auspices of the men at Prinz-Albrechtstrasse. These contained pictures that could best be described as caricatures of ugliness. The people depicted were labeled “Juden,” “untermenschen,” or less kind appellations. The idea was that these notices were a public service, so that people could recognize Jews or Slavs in their midst and turn them in to the appropriate authorities.

  It has been theorized that the rumor made Heydrich even more savagely prone to untermensch persecution than he might otherwise have been. He was a man on a mission, a man with something to prove.

  Hitler ranted about “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

  Himmler dutifully scribbled “Jewish Question—like partisans to be exterminated” in his notebook.

  Heydrich called the meeting at Wannsee that began planning for industrial-strength gas chambers. It was as though by eradicating the Jews in Europe, he could eradicate the Jew within himself.

  Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler gets some work done while on the road. While the Germans occupied vast tracts of the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1943, Himmler traveled far and wide by air and rail, inspecting this great empire that he intended to become a Völkisch utopia ruled by the SS. U.S. National Archives

  Since September 1941, Heydrich had been dividing his time between his RSHA desk in Berlin and his office at the castle in Prague where he was serving as the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. Having brutally crushed dissent in the former Czech states, Heydrich had backed off on the violence and began “protecting” his “subjects” with a light touch. This fragment of the former Czechoslovakia was an important industrial center, and Heydrich’s mandate from Hitler when he was given the job was to increase production. This he succeeded in doing by first showing the Czechs how harsh he could be and then by showing how benevolent he could be. He increased rations and wages as industrial output increased. He had brought peace to a troubled corner of Hitler’s empire by wielding first a stick and then a bunch of carrots.