Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts

by Bill Yenne

  Those of the SS leaders who read these secret SD reports must inevitably have wondered what would become of the SS on the day when everything in which they had believed collapsed. The SS leaders had long since begun to think about the unthinkable. To many the thought of Germany without Hitler no longer seemed revolutionary. The war had demolished many of their illusions; the daily grind of the regime and above all the Eastern campaign had destroyed the old identity of view between Adolf Hitler and his SS. Even the SS leaders could no longer evade the question with which every person in authority found himself confronted in 1944—whether to allow the country to be completely wrecked for the sake of a criminal regime.

  There was already a groundswell of opposition to Hitler growing even within the SS itself. It was growing in small patches, like mold spores on a piece of bread. The senior leadership of the Waffen SS, like that of the Wehrmacht, would have been happy to see Hitler gone, although as SS men, they had sworn a personal oath and would firmly oppose assassination. Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe, a former Kripo officer who had run Einsatzgruppe B in the East, was the centerpiece of the only contingent of SS men involved in the July 20 conspiracy. Nebe was among those arrested and executed.

  Himmler had emerged from July 20 more powerful than ever. As Heinz Höhne wrote, “Himmler’s power was in fact such that even at the time many succumbed to the belief that, behind the aging and decaying Hitler, he alone was responsible for holding the disintegrating regime together. Late in 1944 the world press from Stockholm to San Francisco carried the headline ‘Himmler—Dictator of Germany.’ Anyone who did not have personal experience of the gruesome and grotesque realities of National Socialism’s final phase may be forgiven for thinking that, in its last months, Hitler’s Germany was ruled from the SS barracks.”

  In November 1944, it was Heinrich Himmler, not Hermann Göring, who stood in for the Führer at the annual anniversary commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch. Each year, Adolf Hitler had made a point of returning to Munich in triumph to gloat about the ultimate success of his revolution. In 1944, he wasn’t feeling so triumphant and sent the Reichsführer SS in his stead. Left to right in the row behind Himmler are Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Oberkommando Wehrmacht (with the baton); Franz Xaver Schwarz, Nazi Party treasurer and Reichsschatzmeister (national treasurer); and Wilhelm Frick, former minister of the Interior, who had been named protector of Bohemia and Moravia. U.S. National Archives

  Within those barracks still reigned the belief in the mystical power of the Black Knights who could still snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Indeed, on December 16, the world got a small taste of how much fight the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS still had left in them. Operation Wacht am Rhein (Watch on the Rhine) caught the Americans by surprise, violently punching a hole in their lines and sending them reeling. Four German armies flowed into the famous “bulge” behind the previous American lines. Among these was the Sixth SS Panzer Army, under Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich. Created on October 26, it was spearheaded by Kampfgruppe Peiper of the 1st SS Panzer Division under the command of Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper and was comprised of veteran Waffen SS divisions, such as Dietrich’s old Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.

  Though the Americans recovered and pushed the Germans back again, the Battle of the Bulge badly mauled the Yanks, cost them close to 100,000 casualties, and delayed their offensive into the Reich by more than a month. For a time, it also frightened the Allies and greatly heartened the German leadership. It gave men such as Hitler and Himmler the optimism they needed to keep on believing that the war would end with a favorable armistice.

  Gudrun Himmler at the age of fifteen. Interned by the British during her later teens, she emerged from captivity as an angry and unrepentant Nazi. A lifelong disciple of her father and still a follower of his cause in the twenty-first century, she was referred to during the postwar years as a “Schillernde Nazi Prinzessin” (“dazzling Nazi princess”). U.S. National Archives

  How had Heinrich Himmler really pictured the way the war might end?

  Himmler had always predicted that World War II would end in German victory, but even in 1944, he imagined a fate no worse than the way that World War I had ended—a negotiated armistice with armies in place and with Germany’s borders unviolated. Apparently, Himmler could not conceive of what the Allies meant by the doctrine of Unconditional Surrender that had been articulated at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943.

  At Posen, Himmler still could not imagine that German forces would ever lose all of the land that they had captured within the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa—much less that Allied armies would ever set foot inside Germany. In the Posen speech, he had told his Black Knights that when World War II was over, “we will bring the equipment and the best training of the Waffen SS into all our [SS components]. Then we continue working in the first half year after the war, as though the next large-scale attack may begin the next day. It will be very relevant in the negotiations for an armistice or peace, if Germany has an operational reserve, an operational weight of 20, 25 or 30 intact SS divisions.”

  He was picturing a powerful Germany—still dictating terms, even if not totally victorious—thanks to the power of the Aryan supermen of his SS. Specially selected and specially endowed with an Aryan blood line stretching back to the Armanen god-kings, they were—or so they believed—an invincible warrior race that would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

  A year later, did they still believe that this was possible?

  Himmler did. As Heinz Höhne wrote, “One man at least, believed in this specious story of SS omnipotence—its own Grand Master. To him it seemed that the hour had come when he could purge National Socialist Germany of all ‘treachery’ and all doubts, of those satanic powers which, in his distorted view, had so far prevented Germany’s final victory. In a sort of ecstasy he proclaimed in August 1944: ‘What we are waging now is a sacred war of the people.’”

  The arrests and executions that followed the July 20 bombing served their purpose. Whatever discontent there had been in the ranks of Wehrmacht or Waffen SS on July 19, it went back in the box as the dust settled at the Wolf’s Lair. The arrests and executions succeeded in putting a lid on active dissent within the armed forces, which made operations such as Wacht am Rhein possible.

  Elsewhere though, it was a different story.

  Himmler’s own house was beginning to unravel. The Ahnenerbe, largely forgotten by the Reichsführer amid the exigencies of war and a failed coup, was essentially dissolving. At the Reichsuniversität Strassburg, the Ahnenerbe’s Institut für Wehrwissenschaftliche Zweckforschung (Institute for Military Scientific Research) was closing up shop. Two years earlier at the Reichsuniversität, Dr. August Hirt and Bruno Beger had been devoting themselves to medical experiments that had required that around 100 bodies be collected. On Himmler’s orders, SS Standartenführer Wolfram Sievers had been personally involved in seeing to it that these bodies were delivered. Now the presence of these bodies at the Reichsuniversität was seen as a growing liability. What would the approaching Americans and Frenchmen say if they found these “specimens”?

  Wolfram Sievers, the Ahnenerbe business manager, was nervous and fearful for his own future. On September 5, 1944, as the Allied armies were racing across France and closing in on Alsace, Sievers sent a message to SS Sturmbannführer Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s personal aide:

  According to the proposal of [February 9, 1942] and your approval of [February 23, 1942, referencing Document Number] AR/493/37, Prof. Dr. Hirt has assembled the skeleton collection which was previously non-existent. Because of the vast amount of scientific research connected therewith, the job of reducing the corpses to skeletons has not yet been completed. Since it might require some time, Hirt requested 80 copies of the directives pertaining to the treatment of the collection stored in the morgue of the Anatomical Institute, in case Strassburg should be endangered. The Collection can be defleshed and thereby rendered unidentifiable. T
his, however, would mean that at least part of the whole work had been done for nothing and that this singular collection would be lost to science, since it would be impossible to make plaster casts afterwards. The skeleton collection as such is inconspicuous. The flesh parts could be declared as having been left by the French at the time we took over the Anatomical Institute and would be turned over for cremating.

  Sievers then asked Brandt what the next course of action should be, naming three options: “(1) The collection as a whole is to be preserved; (2) The collection is to be dissolved in part; (3) The collection is to be completely dissolved.” Despite his fears, Sievers was torn over the issue of letting all of that “research material” go to waste. Such was the mindset of those within the Ahnenerbe. Even when the difference between right and wrong did finally dawn on him, Sievers could not let go of his arrogant Ariosophy.

  Nevertheless, when Brandt visited Sievers at his operational headquarters on October 21, Sievers told him, “The collection in Strassburg had been completely dissolved in the meantime in conformance with the directive given him at the time. He [Sievers] is of the opinion that this arrangement is for the best in view of the whole situation.”

  Sievers was lying.

  According to Frederick Kasten, in his article “Unethical Nazi Medicine in Annexed Alsace Lorraine,” which appeared in George Kent’s 1991 book Historians and Archivists: Essays in Modern German History and Archival Policy, the skeletons, many still with their flesh intact, remained in Strasbourg as the Ahnenerbe researchers scampered away. He also notes that, some years after the war, they were dissected by French medical students, who had no idea how they came to be at the university.

  Bruno Beger wound up in the Waffen SS and spent the latter part of 1944 in the Balkans, stamping out partisans even as the Red Army approached. Early in 1945, he was transferred to the Wolgatatarische Legion, then on the collapsing German positions in northern Italy. Perhaps it was fitting that the proud, Ariosophist SS man who had spent the year before the war measuring the skulls of Central Asians should have ended the war surrounded by Central Asians wearing the uniform of the Third Reich.

  By now, Ahnenerbe president Walther Wüst had exiled Beger’s old Tibet companion, Ernst Schäfer, to the mountains of the Obersalzberg. Wüst had created a new institute, using Sven Hedin, the prestigious old Swedish Central Asia explorer, as a figurehead. He then assigned Schäfer to run the Sven Hedin Institute for Innerasian Research out of Schloss Mittersill, a mountaintop castle overlooking the Obersalzburg’s Pinzgau Valley.

  Early in 1945, as the Ahnenerbe staff begin abandoning Widmayerstrasse like rats fleeing from a sinking ship, forgetting all about Schloss Mittersill, Ernst Schäfer got in touch with the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. He proposed that they might want to take over the Sven Hedin Institute after the war, which Schäfer expected would be very soon. Brooke Dolan II, who had headed Schäfer’s first Tibet expedition in 1931 was associated with the academy, and Schäfer thought that he had an in.

  He didn’t.

  Dolan was out of town, doing clandestine work for the United States government in the Far East. After having made a secret visit to Tibet during World War II, Dolan would die in a mysterious plane crash behind Japanese lines in China in August 1945.

  In the meantime, Schäfer had been able, at least, to avoid the increasing number of Allied air raids that blasted Munich. And the Alpine Obersalzberg reminded him a little of Tibet and of the good old days before the noose was pulled tight.

  CHAPTER 23

  Götterdämmerung

  IT HAS LONG BEEN a favorite metaphor to describe the end of the Third Reich as “Götterdämmerung,” the “Twilight of the Gods,” that is epitomized so dramatically in the opera of the same name that concludes Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen, the operatic cycle that had been so inspirational to Heinrich Himmler and his pagan elite.

  Wagner had based his opera on the ancient story from the Eddas known as the Ragnarök, or Ragnarökkr, which is translated into modern German as Götterdämmerung. The Ragnarök tells the tale of a titanic battle in which the gods Thor, Freyr, Heimdall, and even Wotan himself are killed—hence the term “Twilight of the Gods.” Snorri Sturluson includes the story in his twelfth-century Prose Edda, and it is a recurring theme wherever Nordic mythology is examined in depth.

  In the Wagnerian opera, Götterdämmerung is the climactic moment in which the Valkyrie Brünnhilde orders an immense funeral pyre for her deceased heroic lover, Siegfried. Having sent Wotan’s ravens home to roost, she rides into the funeral pyre herself. She and Siegfried are consumed by fire. As she immolates herself, the Ring of the Nibelungen, which Brünnhilde is wearing, is cleansed of its curse and is afterward reclaimed by the Rhine Maidens. This completes the cycle, as the Rhine Maidens were present at the beginning of Das Rheingold, the first opera of the Ring Cycle.

  According to the memoirs of Albert Speer, the Reich’s minister of armaments, the final performance by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra before they were evacuated from the city in 1945 was of Brünhilde’s immolation scene, at the climax of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. It was an appropriate choice. If 1944 had been, to paraphrase Winston Churchill again, the “beginning of the end” for the Third Reich, then 1945 was its final descent into a fiery immolation. The most symbolic scene of the real-life immolation of the Reich came in January, when Allied bombers over Berlin scored a hit on Number 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, once the most feared address in Europe, blowing it to rubble.

  Within weeks of the beginning of the year, Allied armies had crossed the borders of prewar Germany on all sides. By March, the Americans had reached the Rhine, the mother river of German identity and of the Wagner Ring Cycle. On March 7, the U.S. Army’s 9th Infantry Division captured and crossed the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, a few miles south of Bonn. Within a couple of days, the better part of three divisions had become the first Allied troops to cross the Rhine with dry feet.

  Meanwhile, the Soviet armies on the eastern front, which had been more than 600 miles east of Berlin a year earlier, were now closing in on the German capital. Adolf Hitler was desperately ordering the creation and deployment of new divisions and new armies—both real and imaginary.

  One of the real ones would be the source of Heinrich Himmler’s last moment of glory as a military commander. On January 24, Hitler put Himmler in command of Heeresgruppe Weichsel (Army Group Vistula), an amalgam of German forces that were put in place to try to stop the Red Army at Poland’s broad Vistula River, a natural barrier about 200 miles east of Berlin. Army chief of staff Heinz Guderian had originally urged Hitler to put this last-ditch-effort group under Wehrmacht control, but the paranoid Hitler no longer trusted the Wehrmacht. He wanted the Black Knights of the SS to spearhead the final miracle defense of his capital and his Reich.

  On February 12, Himmler was on the cover of Time magazine, his grim visage above a pair of crossed bones, a totenkopf motif. Calling him “the Man Who Can’t Surrender,” the magazine said, “Clearly or dimly, most Germans realized that Himmler was the new master of the Third Reich. Last October, Himmler himself had told how Germany would be defended: ‘Every village, every house, every farm, every ditch, every forest and every bush.’ As Adolf Hitler’s longtime chief butcher, torturer, spy and slavemaster, Heinrich Himmler is the archetype of the top Nazi who cannot surrender. Now, while keeping Hitler as the Führer symbol, Himmler does the dictator’s job of maintaining Germany at war. Around himself and his henchmen he has formed the last granite-hard core of German resistance.”

  In 1945, Wilfried Nagal painted this impression of the untermenschen from the East descending upon the Reich, pushed forward by death himself. In Nagal’s fantasy, and that of many Nazis, this was the nightmare struggle between East and West about which Karl Maria Wiligut had warned Heinrich Himmler a decade earlier. U.S. Army art collection

  Many diehard German officers, especially SS officers, were ordering their troops to fight to the la
st man, while elsewhere, the order of the day was “every man for himself.”

  On March 31, about 100 miles due east of the Rhine and 100 miles northeast of the Remagen bridgehead, SS Sturmbannführer Heinz Macher was following orders. Heinrich Himmler had personally ordered Macher to do the unthinkable: destroy the most sacred shrine of the Schutzstafel. Macher and his fifteen-man demolition team had arrived at the SS Schule Haus Wewelsburg that morning with a partial truckload of explosives—as much as they were able to scrounge on short notice. They had stopped by the local fire department in Wewelsburg village, and Macher had told them to expect to see smoke and flames. He then ordered them to ignore the smoke and flames. This immolation scene had been ordered by the Reichsführer himself.

  With that, they went to work. The unfinished institute, which was intended to be the seat of Aryan higher learning for a thousand years, met an ignoble end. The guardhouse and southeast tower were rocked by explosions. The team ran out of explosives before they could finish the job, so they turned to fire, one of those primal elements that had been celebrated in pagan rites during Wewelsburg’s halcyon days. Files were heaped into bonfires, and soon the building itself was engulfed in flames.

  The SS Ehrenring (SS Honor Ring) was better known as the “Totenkopfring” because of the death’s head that was placed at the center. It was conceived by Heinrich Himmler as a means of recognizing the founding members of the SS, but it was eventually awarded to most senior SS leaders. His signature is engraved on the inside. Photo by Kris Simoens, used by permission

  Himmler had earlier proclaimed that all the Totenkopfrings of the SS dead be returned to this Aryan Valhalla, where they would be enshrined for a thousand years. Some of the estimated 9,000 rings that were at Wewelsburg that morning had been here for less than a year when Macher went to the place where the rings were kept. He took them into the Niederhagen forest and buried them. As the story goes, they are still where he put them.