by Bill Yenne
As gentlemen did in those days, Himmler needed to build a home for his pregnant mistress, whom, like his estranged wife, couldn’t actually live with him. Unfortunately for the Reichsführer SS, however, he found himself a bit short. He found himself having to borrow 80,000 reichsmarks from the NSDAP coffers, where the gatekeeper was Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler’s personal assistant and Himmler’s biggest rival for access to the Führer. Bormann generously facilitated the loan, and a home that Himmler bought for Hedwig was an Alpine lodge-looking house called Haus Schneewinkellehen in the Obersalzburg in Bavaria. It was close to Schönau and to snowy Berchtesgaden, where Adolf Hitler’s famous Berghof retreat was. The building still exists, and a wing has been added with a three-car garage. According to Geoff Walden, who has been there, Haus Schneewinkellehen had belonged to the erotic psychologist Sigmund Freud in the nineteenth century.
Perhaps the reason that Borman steered Himmler to this home was that he had a place nearby. As Potthast took up residence in the Obersalzburg, she and Bormann’s wife, Gerda, became friends.
Potthast and Himmler had their first child, Helge Himmler, early in 1942, and Helge’s sister, Nanette Dorothea Himmler, was born in 1944. Neither would ever see much of their father.
However, as Himmler roamed his Völkisch playground in the East, he thought often of Potthast and his children. On August 9, 1942, when he was at Hegewald, he scrounged a few small gifts, picked up his black fountain pen, and dashed off a quick missive.
“My dear little bunny!” Himmler wrote. “I’m about to drive over [to a place with a field telephone] and will call you and hear your dear voice. Quickly just a few lines regarding the parcel, they are all without value but chosen with love; perhaps you can use them! An illustrated magazine is also enclosed and I’ll be with you in spirit when you look at it. Say hello to our sweet one…. The barometer is for you. Thank you for your dear letter! Write again soon! I love you forever.” He signed the note with his typical runic “HH.”
Potthast kept the letter close to her heart and still had it when she was grabbed by the U.S. Army in the summer of 1945. It recently showed up at auction.
CHAPTER 17
Burdens Borne of Black Knighthood
THE WARMTH OF HIMMLER’S sweet note to his mistress, Hedwig Potthast, sharply contrasts the words of most of the memoranda that originated from his desk at Number 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse and his words to his Black Knights.
His words to the SS, both in written memoranda or telegrams and in chilling sound recordings, show a man who was single-minded about the burden borne by the SS to defeat the enemies, both military and ethnic, of the Aryan. This burden, which he regarded as a sacred burden, was to destroy Bolshevism, carry out the Final Solution, and forge the type of German and European purity that would fulfill the Ariosophist dreams of Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels.
While much of the SS paper trail was destroyed—both purposely and through the fires of war—much still remains. Having been captured by Allied forces at the end of World War II, it is now in the public domain. In the United States National Archives at College Park, Maryland, this author poured through overwhelming numbers of records from the Third Reich. At the Hoover Institution Archives, I leafed though documents from the personal staff of the Reichsführer SS and saw documents bearing the signature of Reinhard Heydrich and that runic “HH” mark with which Heinrich Himmler signed his correspondence.
Many of Himmler’s speeches made it to magnetic tape. Germany was, after all, a world leader in recording technology. In addition to the paper trail, there is Himmler’s audio trail, consisting of more than one hundred speeches, recorded either on acetate discs or “red oxide” magnetic tape. While nothing he said in the secret ceremonies at Wewelsburg is believed to have been recorded, there is no shortage of other recordings of his shrill voice.
Historians often cite the speech that he delivered on October 4, 1943, at Posen, in eastern Germany, as his definitive policy statement on the “sacred” burden off the SS. The tone was candid, direct, and visionary. The speech was important for its lack of ambiguity and the sorts of metaphors that usually clouded Himmler’s references in his orations.
Most historians regard the venue as incidental. However, quite to the contrary, we can see in Posen a significant locale, highly charged with meaning. It possesses a schizophrenic identity; Poles see the city they call Poznan as important to their national identity, while for Germans, the same city, known in German as Posen, is emblematic of traditional Prussian and German hegemony across eastern Europe.
The first Polish king, Boleslaus the Brave, was crowned here in 1025 at the Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul, the oldest Polish church of its size. As the location of this crowning, it is seen by Poles as the birthplace of the earliest Polish kingdom. Both Boleslaus and his father, Mieszko, are buried here. In 1848, after centuries with a Polish identity, the city and its surrounding region were absorbed into Prussia and the German Confederation as Grenzmark Posen-Westpreussen (Posen-West Prussia). Even after Poland was recreated as an independent state at the end of World War I, Posen remained German.
Heinrich Himmler inspects one of his Black Knights. As he told them, “We will instill the laws of the SS Order in [our children]…. It must be natural that from [our SS] Order, from this racially superior upper strata of the Germanic people … to impose a Fürungsschict [guidance layer] over all of Europe…. [I]t is [our noble destiny]…. [T]he black uniform will be naturally very attractive in peacetime.” Author’s collection
It was to this city that Himmler came in October 1943, World War II’s turning point year. It was in 1943 that the great expansion of Adolf Hitler’s empire sputtered and began to falter. It was not, as Britain’s prime minister Winston Churchill cautioned at the Allied Casablanca Conference in January 1943, the beginning of the end, but it was the end of the beginning.
In North Africa, the German drive toward the Suez Canal had been halted. In the Soviet Union, at Stalingrad, German armies had suffered a defeat of immense proportions. However, Hitler’s legions still occupied much of the Soviet territory that they had conquered in Operation Barbarossa. The Allies had landed troops in Italy, but German defenders still appeared to have turned most of the former Axis partner’s territory into an impregnable fortress. The greater Germany of the Third Reich remained intact. The cross-channel invasion of German-occupied France had yet to materialize.
When Himmler ascended to the stage at Posen’s old Rathaus (city hall), there was a sense that the Third Reich was at a portentous crossroads. His audience in the Rathaus on October 4 included nearly 100 SS officers, mainly from units operating in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They were the cream of the dark corps. His words that day were for them and them only. An audiotape was recorded, then transcribed and typed by SS Untersturmführer Werner Alfred Wenn. Both the tape and transcription were locked away in secret for safekeeping, but discovered by American forces after World War II. They are now in the U.S. National Archives.
“In the months which have flowed past since we together were in June 1942, many comrades have given their lives for Germany and for the Führer,” Himmler began, asking them to rise for a moment “in the honor of all of our dead SS men and dead German soldiers, men and women.”
With that, he “soberly” and “truthfully” began his candid overview of the way World War II was going for the Reich. With regard to the German underestimation of Soviet capabilities, he admitted, “We were mistaken in this evaluation of the situation absolutely.”
It was a tough challenge for Himmler to spin the losses that the Aryans of the Wehrmacht had taken at the hands of the subhuman Slavs. The only way was to talk of the unlimited “masses” that the Red Army threw into the battle from 1941 and into 1942. In speaking of that winter of decision when the Wehrmacht had been irrevocably turned back from the gates of Moscow, he blamed the Soviet commissars, whose “hardness and unyieldingness, whose fanatical, brutal will drove … the ra
w material of the Slavic and Mongolian masses [Mongolischen menschenmassen] to the front.”
The Reichsführer SS at the podium. In October 1943, Heinrich Himmler told his Black Knights, “I would like to inoculate the SS … [with] one of the holiest laws of the future: Our concern, our obligation, is our people and our blood; but we have to ensure and think to work and fight…. Everything else is soap lather, it is fraud on our own people, and is an obstacle to an early end to the war.” U.S. National Archives
He goes on to explain that in 1942, “Russia would have been cut off from its sources of main oil, and hunger would have crippled the civilian population,” if Germany’s Hungarian and Romanian allies not allowed themselves to be beaten by the Red Army. He then complains that the Romanians retreated like the “valueless Italian army.”
In his speech, Himmler was scathing in his assessment of Germany’s former Axis partner. The Italians had surrendered to the Allies only a month earlier, forcing Hitler to send German armies into the country to face the Allies. It was Himmler’s opinion that “the weakness of this people lie in its blood, in its race…. Italy was a weak confederate to begin with, [losing major campaigns from] Greece and Africa to Russia. There is no people, who did not lambaste the Italians … because as soldiers, they were cowardly men everywhere…. [T]he Italians failed everywhere.”
To the delight of his audience, the Reichsführer went on to highlight the heroic role that had been played by Waffen SS units, especially the II SS Panzerkorps, during 1943. This unit had been formed as an umbrella corps for the 2nd Das Reich SS Panzer Division and the 9th Hohenstaufen SS Panzer Division. In early February 1943, the corps was under the command of SS Gruppenführer Paul Hausser, the man Himmler had personally selected to head the SS Verfügungstruppe, the Waffen SS precursor, back in 1934. As Himmler pointed out, the II SS Panzerkorps had stopped the Soviet momentum that began with their Stalingrad victory and helped to stabilize the German front.
Himmler then proceeded to relish the success of the Waffen SS during 1943, recalling, “In the hard fights in this year, the Waffen SS is fused from the most diverse divisions, in the bitterest hours, from which it is formed: Leibstandarte, Verfügungstruppe, Totenkopfverbände, and then the Allgemeine SS. Now, our divisions Reich, Totenkopf, Kavallerie, and Wiking were there. In the past weeks, everyone [in the Wehrmacht took heart, knowing that] beside me is the Wiking Division, beside me is the Reich Division, beside me is the Totenkopf Division. Thank God, nothing can happen to us now. So it is within the Waffen SS.”
No doubt thinking of his conversations with Karl Maria Wiligut as they motored around the Paderborn hills, Himmler turned to the romantic notion of titanic clashes between East and West. “With the exception of few high points, which Asia brings out again and again every few centuries … of an Attila, or, unfortunately for us Europeans, a Ghengis Khan, a Tamerlane, a Lenin, a Stalin … this mixture people of the Slavs developed a unterrasse [lesser race] [inbred] with drops of our blood, a prominent race.”
“You know that what I’m about to say about Russians is absolutely true,” Himmler snarled wryly. “It is true that the Volga boat operators sing wonderful, it is true that the Russian is today in the modern time a good improviser and a good technician. It is true that to a large extent that he holds his children dear. It is true that he can work very industriously. It is just as true that he is stinking lazy. It is just as true that he is an unrestrained beast, which can torture and torment other humans.”
He justified the inhumane treatment of Soviet prisoners, underscoring that an SS man’s loyalty is to the black corps, “a basic principle that must be the absolute rule”:
Heinrich Himmler (center, engrossed in conversation) enjoys a beer with a table of SS and Wehrmacht officers. Himmler later insisted that “criminal offenses, which occur under the influence of the consumption of alcohol, [should be] twice as highly punished,” but he apparently saw no harm in having a few himself. Author’s collection
We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other 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 so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females weaken and fall down while digging an antitank ditch [for German forces] interests me only insofar as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished.
Pausing for applause, he continued:
We Germans, who have, as alone in the world, a decent attitude to the animal [and we] will take a decent attitude also toward these “people animals,” but it is a crime against our own blood to make and bring them the same ideals of concern, with which we approach our own sons and grandsons. If [a German] comes to me and says: “I cannot build the tank ditch with the children or the women, because it is inhumane, because they might die,” then I must say: “You are a murderer of your own blood, because, if the tank ditch is not built, then German soldiers die, and those are sons of German mothers. That is our blood.”
Himmler’s view of the sacredness of the SS is perhaps best summarized in this entreaty: “I would like to inoculate the SS … [with] one of the holiest laws of the future: Our concern, our obligation, is our people and our blood; but we have to ensure and think to work and fight, for nothing else. We can be indifferent to everything else. My wish is that the SS, with this attitude sidesteps the problem of all foreign, non-Germanic peoples, above all the Russians. Everything else is soap lather, it is fraud on our own people, and is an obstacle to an early end to the war.”
With this, Himmler gave the assembled Black Knights his take on what he expected from the opposition:
In my judgement, if the next large offensive is like past ones, Russia is at the end of its manpower potential. One can naturally draw in sixteen-year-olds, one can even anticipate [drafting] fifteen-year-olds…. If the fate of the nation demands it, better a fifteen-year-old dies than the nation dies. However, one cannot continue endlessly, because with thirteen-year-old and twelve-year-old boys, one can no longer fight a war to its conclusion.
In my judgement, the manpower potential is one of the weakest points of the Russians, although it was once their greatest strength. Secondly, I am convinced that we have not yet recognized the potential for an outrageous famine to prevail in Russia. Those at the front are still better nourished than are the people behind the front. Nevertheless, it is already very bad at the front in many cases. The Russians also have large transport difficulties that have not yet been overcome.
Having given his views on the imminent collapse of the Red Army and the Soviet Union, the Reichsführer SS turned to their Allies, the two nations that he considered the Soviet Union’s softer partners.
In four years of war, England has not yet had very many bloody losses. In England, fear constantly prevails, and when our submarine war begins in full strength again, as I am convinced it will, British equilibrium [will be at risk]. All military operations which England and America want, stand and fall with the [materiel] tonnage. The landing operations in Italy with Salerno [a month earlier in September] certainly cost one half million tons. I doubt very strongly whether England is strong enough itself to carry out many such landing operations…. I believe, that the war for England—and this is valid still more for America—really goes to the blood of its sons. The war will become still more unpopular in England and America than it already is.
America leads, more than England, a two-front war, the Pacific war against Japan, our stronger and more martial confederate, and the war in Europe and in the Atlantic. I do not believe that the best conditions prevail in America. America has always had a very large number of Jews and a brutal plutocracy. It is probably inconceivable, how hard pressed the American are…. Large political difficulties are coming.
England and America are not united. England says to America, “You must help me more in Europe.” America wants England to help it with the defeat of Japan. England tries to use the Americans [in the war against] Germany. England is in an ever more difficult situation. Mr. Churchill cannot spare his English soldiers.
Thinking of England, Himmler complained of Germany having not yet fulfilled its destiny to rule all of the Völksdeutsche of the world. He compared the Reich to the British Empire, saying, “We in the old Reich—I mean now small Germany—who are only a nation for 70 years; we did not yet have the opportunity to control [Europe] with a German minority…. To control hundreds of millions of humans with a minority as England has for 300 years…. If we could wake up in 100 years, we would see that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren could do it better…. I believe that we [the SS], are protected against errors in accordance with our … self-assured racial attitude.”
Himmler predicted then that if a day came when Russia was exhausted or “ruled out,” and if the suffering of England or America became too much for them, then the Third Reich would prevail as a Weltreich, a world realm. He added that since 1938, “the large Germanic Reich remains with us…. [T]he way is free to the east…. [T]hat Germany is a Weltreich is justified. That will be the reason for this war, may take it now five, perhaps six, perhaps even seven years.”
The idea of the immense struggle between East and West, which Himmler and Wiligut had discussed in an abstract way on their prewar rambles through the Teutoburgerwald, was now looming large in Himmler’s conception of those coming five to seven years. He was excited by the notion of his SS knights being such an integral part of this struggle. They and their successors were ready, he hoped, to lay down their lives for this great apocalyptic battle—whenever it materialized. The SS men were indoctrinated to lay down their lives for the cause of Führer and Reichsführer, but in remarks that he made later in the speech, Himmler seemed as though he just wanted to make sure.