by Bill Yenne
Meanwhile, members of the Czech government in exile, sitting in London and waiting one day to return, were troubled. They had been prepared for more upon more Nazi sticks—but not Nazi carrots. It was decided that Reinhard Heydrich must go.
Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) was one of many forerunners to modern covert special-operations organizations that had its roots in World War II. (The American Office of Strategic Services [OSS] was the operational predecessor to the postwar Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]. The U.S. Army’s Rangers were the predecessors of modern U.S. Special Forces, just as the U.S. Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams [UDT] preceded today’s Sea-Air-Land [SEAL] forces.) The SOE was formed in 1940 to train for and facilitate covert actions behind enemy lines. During World War II, it was active throughout occupied Europe, either sending in its own personnel or training indigenous nationals to carry out actions inside their own countries. The latter was the case with regard to a covert mission designed to remove Reinhard Heydrich.
To make a long story short, the SOE trained two members of the Czech army in exile to be assassins and had them infiltrate back into occupied Bohemia. After several planned attacks that they were not able to effect, Jan Kubiš and Josef Gabčík struck on the morning of May 27, 1942. Intercepting Heydrich’s convertible as it slowed to make a hairpin turn on a suburban Prague street, Gabčík attempted to open fire with his Sten submachine gun, but the weapon jammed. As Heydrich stood up to return fire, Kubiš tossed a grenade. Heydrich appeared to be uninjured as he continued firing at the two men with his pistol. However, his body had been pierced by shrapnel.
The operation to remove the shrapnel seemed to go well, and Himmler sent Dr. Karl Gebhardt, his own personal doctor, to look after Heydrich’s convalescence. The Reichsführer SS even came to Heydrich’s bedside himself. Just as it seemed that the patient was about to recover, he went into shock. He died on June 4, ironically from infection, although the conspiracy theory that Himmler had him killed has lived on.
Adolf Hitler’s brutality toward the Czechs in response to the assassination is legendary. After a quick, incomplete investigation, he fixated on the town of Lidice, a short distance from Prague, though neither of the assassins had a connection to it. He ordered that the town should be destroyed. It was leveled, and every male citizen over the age of sixteen was killed. Himmler, meanwhile, ordered more than 12,000 people arrested in retaliation. They were in turn jailed or executed. Cornered in a Prague church, the actual assassins committed suicide to avoid what they knew would be meted out at the hands of the SS.
Himmler’s prewar nemesis for control of the SS, Kurt Daluege, was named to succeed Heydrich as Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. He served only until May 1943, when he suffered a heart attack. Himmler himself wryly told his SS officers a few months later, “Our old friend Daluege has such serious heart disease that he must go through cures and probably will be gone from active service for a year and a half or two years. We have hope that Daluege is again restored to health, and then take his place at the table.” But Daluege never returned to duty.
Meanwhile, Ernst Kaltenbrunner was brought in to succeed Heydrich as head of the RSHA. An Austrian lawyer, he was a longtime SS member and a member of the Reichstag after Austria was absorbed into the Third Reich in 1938. Walther Schellenberg became head of the SD.
Kaltenbrunner never wielded power on anywhere the same scale as Heydrich. Heinz Höhne in The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS writes that Kaltenbrunner was “a second-rater selected by Himmler to head the Prinz Albrechtstrasse solely in order to ensure that there should not be another Heydrich…. When he was appointed in January 1943 after Heydrich’s death, hardly anyone knew him; he had been in charge of SS Oberabschnitt Danube and gossip had it that he owed his career to the fact that by 1938 the semi-Fascist Austrian police had eliminated all his predecessors. In addition Himmler ensured that Kaltenbrunner did not possess the power of his predecessor, Heydrich.”
Höhne adds that “when Kaltenbrunner took over the RSHA he found that his Heads of Division had more authority than their new master.”
Kaltenbrunner often complained to his old classmate, SS Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, that he was bypassed by the SS division heads, who felt autonomous in the absence of Heydrich. Kaltenbrunner told Skorzeny that he was out of the loop and “learnt many things only when they were over.”
No mention of special operations in the same chapter with the SS is complete without a nod to Skorzeny, who was Heinrich Himmler’s own special-operations genius. Like Kaltenbrunner, he was born in Austria, but unlike Kaltenbrunner, who got the “dueling scars” on his face in an automobile accident, Skorzeny had actually been a champion fencer. In 1931, at age twenty-three, he joined the Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei (DNSAP), the Austrian Nazi party, but it was not until after the start of World War II that he joined the Waffen SS, specifically the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. As an officer with the Waffen SS, he fought in the invasions of the Netherlands, France, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. While recovering from injuries in 1943, he became a student of unconventional warfare, and in April of that year, he pitched his idea for an SS special-operations component to Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Walther Schellenberg. They like what they heard and put Skorzeny in command of a unit that would be known as SS Jagdverbände 502.
Heinrich Himmler and his daughter, Gudrun, whom he affectionately called “Puppi.” Though she lived with her mother in Bavaria, Himmler would occasionally have her flown up to Berlin for well-orchestrated photo opportunities. “The Reichsführer is a family man,” read the resulting photo captions. U.S. National Archives
Skorzeny’s commando group, which would eventually grow to five battalions, was involved in a number of daring operations, most of them at the personal direction of Adolf Hitler. The most spectacular was the successful rescue in July 1943 of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who had been overthrown and imprisoned when the Italian government surrendered to the Allies. The least publicized Skorzeny operation was a supersecret infiltration of Iran in 1943, which might have put him in a position to assassinate the Allied “Big Three”—Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin—at the Tehran Conference. Only an intelligence failure prevented Skorzeny from attempting this brazen coup.
The mission with the biggest stakes came in October 1944, when Skorzeny’s relatively small team, supported by a few tanks, overthrew the government of Hungary, a German Axis partner that was on the verge of surrendering to the Soviets. Operation Panzerfaust, as it was called, removed Admiral Miklós Horthy, the regent of Hungary. Four years earlier, he had begged to join the Axis, but now Soviet forces were on his doorstep, and he wanted out. Skorzeny kidnapped Horthy’s son, forced the admiral to resign as regent, and installed Ferenc Szálasi of the fascist Arrow Cross Party to run the country as Hitler’s puppet. It was the last great international coup staged by the Third Reich.
The most controversial thing that Skorzeny did was in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, when his men infiltrated American lines while wearing American uniforms—itself a violation of the Hague Convention of 1907—and some of his men may have been involved in the infamous Malmedy Massacre, gunning down American prisoners.
Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny was an SS warrior that matched the type of man whom Heinrich Himmler craved. He was audacious and fearless, he thought outside the box, and he operated with ruthless efficiency. As he demonstrated in Budapest, he was a man who could get done things, with a small team, that most officers would consider impossible. He was, however, much more at home in a fight or on a mission impossible than he was attending a seance at Wewelsburg.
In the Paderborn hills, the SS Schule Haus Wewelsburg, Himmler’s Black Camelot, continued to serve as he had intended, as a pagan seminary for the study of Germanic mysticism and as an SS ritual clubhouse. If Number 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin was the most feared address in Europe, Schloss Wewelsburg was one
of the strangest. Wewelsburg continued to be one of the most secret of the important sites in Himmler’s pagan fantasy world. Taking photographs inside the walls was forbidden, but Himmler’s favorite photographer, Friedrich Franz Bauer of Munich, took some of the exterior, including one that shows the Reichsführer appearing to be handing out summer-solstice gifts to children with the castle in the background. Summer solstice and other rituals continued to be held at Schloss Wewelsburg, even as World War II raged. Indeed, a conference of all senior SS leadership was scheduled there each year. Because of the cloak of secrecy, documentation of these mysterious ceremonies is scarce, except for some paperwork left over from a meeting held here in June 1941.
Through the late 1930s and the early years of World War II, prehistoric and medieval artifacts collected by the Ahnenerbe expeditions were housed and displayed at Wewelsburg, as was Heinrich Himmler’s personal collection of weaponry.
An August 1942 inter-SS memo to Rudolf Brandt, chief of Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff, from Wolfram Sievers. Note that the Ahenenerbe business manager typed it on the letterhead of the Burghauptmann (commandant) of Wewelsburg, the SS Camelot. Note also that the SS runic logo was one key of the typewriter. Author’s collection
While Siegfried Taubert officially remained as commandant, or Burghauptmann, at Wewelsburg, as World War II dragged on, he was spending most of his time at Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, attending to other tasks. It is interesting to find in Heinrich Himmler’s own files memoranda written in 1942 on “Der Burghauptmann von Wewelsburg” letterhead and signed by SS Gruppenführer Wolfram Sievers, the business manager of the Ahnenerbe. Indeed, it is probably appropriate that the pseudoscientists of the SS “mystic side” were running the SS clubhouse.
Meanwhile, work continued on the renovation project at the Wewelsburg castle under the direction of the bombastic architect Hermann Bartels. Himmler still imagined this activity as only just the first step in the immense undertaking that would involve construction of his vast Zentrum der Neuen Welt (Center of the New World) after the war. However, in 1938, the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD) crews were taken off the job, moved to what were considered more important tasks, specifically construction of the Siegfried Line, or West Wall, the fortifications on Germany’s western border. Undaunted, Himmler turned to his slaves. If there was one thing that Himmler had in growing abundance, it was very inexpensive labor. Beginning in 1939, he began importing inmates from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to continue the work at Wewelsburg.
In June 1940, a small concentration camp was completed in the Niederhagen Forest, a short distance from Wewelsburg. In the beginning, the camp housed fewer than 500 persons, mainly Jehovah’s Witnesses previously imprisoned at Sachsenhausen. It must have been particularly bizarre for workers from one small religious minority to be helping to build a shrine for another religious minority, the pagans of the SS. Over the next four years, the small Niederhagen concentration camp grew to a population of around 1,200 with the addition of Soviet prisoners of war and Polish civilians. Through the years, close to 4,000 people passed through the camp.
Work on the castle came to a halt in January 1943, when construction projects across the Reich not directly related to the war effort were officially put on hold—until final victory. The Niederhagen camp was closed, and its prisoners transferred to other facilities—for the Final Solution. Thereafter, the SS leaders who gathered at their Schule Haus Wewelsburg did so without the sounds of hammering in the background.
By this time, Karl Maria Wiligut had ceased to be seen around Wewelsburg and at Himmler’s elbow as he moved about the halls of Prinz-Albrechtstrasse. The old mystic, who had been promoted to SS Brigadeführer and assigned to Himmler’s personal staff, had faded away as World War II had begun. The tide had begun to turn for Wiligut as early as 1937, when Himmler—who, through Heydrich, heard everything—heard something embarrassing. The Reichsführer SS had learned a secret about the old master of secrets whose pseudonym, Weisthor, can be translated as “Thor knows.” He learned about Wiligut’s wife beating and about his three years in the rubber room back in the 1920s.
In November 1938, Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, the chief of Himmler’s personal staff, under whom Wiligut was assigned at Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, was sent to the Austrian Tyrol to personally check out the allegations. He spoke to Wiligut’s estranged wife, Malwine, and heard the stories of the god-king gone crazy. Presumably, he also made inquiries at the hospital where Wiligut had been held.
On August 28, 1939, as Himmler was preparing for the opening salvos of World War II, which would be fired just four days later, he ordered Wolff to take care of some old business. It was announced that effective on that date, the “request for retirement” submitted by seventy-two-year-old Brigadeführer Karl Maria Wiligut was approved. The reasons given were age and poor health. If he hadn’t been sick before his retirement, the former center of Himmler’s attention certainly was increasingly ill after he sank into the oblivion of retirement. In fact, his retirement was like the hospital years of 1924 to 1927 all over again. Wiligut was exiled from Prinz-Albrechtstrasse and essentially put under house arrest. He had no choice. He had run out of options, there was nowhere else to go other than the Irminsul inside his own head.
Elsa Baltrusch, from the Reichsführer SS’s personal staff, was detailed by Himmler and Wolff to function as Wiligut’s chaperon and jailer. She took him into exile in the remote village of Aufkirchen, located in the South Tyrol, not far from where he had lived before his earlier hospitalization. In May 1940, however, as his health continued its decline, Baltrusch moved her charge to Goslar in Lower Saxony, near where Wiligut had long believed there had once been an Irminen holy city.
Meanwhile, Heinrich Himmler’s own personal life was growing complicated. His only daughter, whom her father had lovingly nicknamed “Puppi,” turned thirteen on August 8, 1942, as the Wehrmacht closed in for the milestone fight at Stalingrad and as her father roamed his eastern dominions, watching the Völksdeutsche settlers flow in to replace the untermensch Slavs. Occasionally, she would join her father on his inspection tours, even tours of his concentration camps. As time would tell, she believed in him and his mission to rid the world of the undesirables and to manufacture a heroic place for Germans to live as Wotan had wanted. Most of the time, however, Puppi bided her time with her mother, in peaceful isolation.
Marga Himmler still remained in her chateau overlooking the Tegernsee. As he had done with Wiligut, Himmler had exiled her to the shadows. Though they apparently never seriously took steps toward a divorce, they both understood that their marriage existed in name only. As the story goes, Himmler had good reason to keep his wife at arm’s length. Described as shrewish and bitter, Marga had a tendency to be domineering toward the little man seven years her junior, whom she still thought of as a clerk, even after he became the Third Reich’s top cop.
According to Heinz Höhne in his The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS, Lina von Osten Heydrich once described Margarete by saying, “Size 50 knickers…. That’s all there was to her … that narrow-minded, humorless blonde female, always worrying about protocol; she ruled her husband and could twist him round her little finger—at least until 1936.”
After 1936, Himmler had kept this woman, whom Lina Heydrich cynically called “Madame Reichsführer,” out of Berlin. Himmler, who had once wanted to be a chicken farmer, now rubbed shoulders with the beautiful people of the Berlin social scene. Though most of his evenings were spent beneath a desk lamp at Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, no party in Berlin was given without his name on the guest list. The unglamorous Marga would not have fit in, even if given the opportunity.
Like so many lonely politicians and captains of industry with wives whom they perceive as being as shrewish and bitter, Heinrich Himmler found physical love in the only place he could—at his office. Hedwig Potthast was twenty-five when she went to work as a secretary at Prinz-Albrechtstrasse in 1937. She is described as having been an at
tractive young woman from Cologne, the daughter of a businessman. She learned her secretarial skills at the Industrial College in Mannheim before moving to Berlin to get a job in the mushrooming bureaucracy of the Third Reich. She was hired by the SS and wound up on the personal staff of the Reichsführer SS. Himmler’s affair with Potthast began in 1940, during the year of German ascendancy, when the Wehrmacht was blitzkrieging from success to success and as it looked as though all Himmler’s dreams would come true. In Potthast, apparently, many of his dreams did come true.
Heinz Höhne writes that she had “a humanizing and relaxing influence on the stiff prim Himmler.” Reportedly, she convinced him to trade in his pincenez for less pretentious glasses. As often occurs between a married man and his mistress, there was talk of Himmler getting a divorce from Marga, but he never went through with it. Nevertheless, as often occurs between a married man and his mistress, there would be complications. By the end of 1941, as Himmler was admiring his new territories in the East, Potthas let him know that she was pregnant.
“For your parents sake I would wish to see you married as soon as possible,” Potthast’s war-widow sister-in-law, Hilde, wrote in a letter obtained by Heinz Höhne. She continued:
I fear, Hedwig, that there can never be a reconciliation with [your] parents. They would forgive everything at any time if you would give him up or if he would make himself a free man for your sake. What they cannot swallow is that you should go on living with him…. He is after all married and your parents regard your relationship as dishonest towards his wife and disrespectful towards you. Your mother asked me whether his wife knew about it and unfortunately I had to tell her that as far as I knew this was not yet the case. She regarded this as proof of cold feet. Your parents are quite terribly distressed about it all.