by Bill Yenne
Two days later, when elements of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division reached the site, the smoldering ruins of the gutted Schloss Wewelsburg had been thoroughly looted by local people. Around forty people who were still at the nearby Niederhagen concentratuion camp were set free.
Meanwhile, Time magazine had related in its Himmler cover story the fascinating rumor that Himmler was planning a massive guerrilla war after Germany’s defeat. The magazine asserted that the Reichsführer SS
spends much time picking obscure but fanatical Nazis for his guerrilla army. Some have been planted in concentration camps, to pose as anti-Nazis when the Allies take over. Others have been given identity cards taken from ordinary Germans killed in air raids, and from 30,000 people associated with the old Weimar Republic who were recently purged. Thus equipped, the chosen Nazis can merge into the general population without detection. Hitler Youth are being trained in underground techniques in three schools known as Ordensburgen, and in a postgraduate institution called the Führer Schule, at Chiem See in Bavaria. The guerrilla army already numbers more than 500,000; the ‘general staff’ has been picked.
The rumor was far from the truth.
The SS was filled with men who expected to go down with the ship, but there were also realists. Just as Himmler himself harbored fantasies of a negotiated armistice that would allow the SS to remain intact, Walther Schellenberg of the SD had been acting on similar fantasies. As Heinz Höhne writes:
As early as autumn 1941 he had begun cautiously and tentatively to probe the possibilities of a separate peace with the Western Allies and for this purpose he used a circle of anti-Nazi resisters, who, using international channels, had been carrying on confidential discussions with the Allies or with pro-Allied foreigners ever since the outbreak of war. There were many curiously fortuitous connections between these anti-Nazis and SS headquarters. Dr. Carl Langbehn, for instance, a Berlin attorney and a member of the [July 20 plotters], was in contact with Himmler via his daughter who was a school friend of Himmler’s daughter, Gudrun.
Some months before the noose tightened in the late winter of 1945, Schellenberg had approached Himmler, obliquely asking him about his own thoughts on how the war might be ended, now that total victory was out of the question. Himmler was taken aback at such talk, which SS doctrine considered blasphemy, but he neither arrested nor executed the SD boss. Instead, he listened as Schellenberg suggested that it might be possible to exploit the deep divisions between the Anglo-American Allies and the Soviet Union.
As Höhne writes, Himmler had actually begun
toying with the alluring thought that, should the war situation worsen, his mission might be to replace Hitler and bring peace to Germany and the world. The idea had flashed through his mind and he had, as quickly, put it behind him—the Reichsführer SS could never be unfaithful to the ‘greatest brain of all time’ [as Himmler referred to the Führer]. But the insidious thought returned again and again…. That Himmler, the agent of the most gruesome crimes of the century should seriously have believed that the world would be prepared to regard him as a peace negotiator, today seems a fantastic idea. At the time, however, things looked different; people [such as Schellenberg] wished to see Himmler at the conference table precisely because they believed he had the power.
Through Schellenberg and Felix Kersten—who had moved his family out of Germany to neutral Sweden in 1943—Heinrich Himmler began a dialog with Count Folke Bernadotte of Wisborg, a wealthy Swedish nobleman who was no stranger to the Third Reich. In his role as vice president of the Swedish Red Cross, he had made a number of visits to Germany, where he had been successful in negotiating the release of around 30,000 people, mainly Scandinavian nationals, from concentration camps.
They first met on February 18 at the Hohenlychen SS sanatorium near Ravensbrück, about fifty-five miles north of Berlin. Bernadotte’s recollections of Himmler provide a portrait of a man still very much in control and very confident of the outcome of World War II. The physical description is of the slight man who had trouble with athletics as a boy. Emotionally, though, he was optimistically cocky and relishing his own sick, off-color jokes. Bernadotte described Himmler as having “small, well-shaped and delicate hands, and they were carefully manicured, although this was forbidden in the SS. He was also, to my great surprise, extremely affable. He gave evidence of a sense of humor, tending rather to the macabre…. Certainly there was nothing diabolical in his appearance. Nor did I observe any sign of that icy hardness in his expression of which I had heard so much. Himmler … seemed a very vivacious personality, inclined to sentimentality where his relations with the Führer were concerned, and with a great capacity for enthusiasm.”
When Bernadotte presented him with a gift, a seventeenth-century treatise on runic inscriptions in Scandinavia, Himmler was “noticeably affected.”
Himmler ignored Schellenberg’s earlier caution not to go off on any mystical tangents. The book had proven to be the catalyst for Himmler to excitedly lecture for about an hour on runic lore. Instead of discussing the dire state of affairs facing his Reich, Himmler became lost in time and space, as though thrown into a Listian trance at the very sight of these sacred runes.
This was, perhaps, the last lecture on the Armanen Futharkh ever to be delivered in Nazi Germany.
When they finally got down to business, each man had an agenda. Bernadotte wanted to talk Himmler out of as many Jewish Scandinavian camp inmates as possible, and Himmler wanted to talk about Bernadotte’s brokering a deal with the Western Allies so that he could divert all the attention of the Reich to fighting the Red Army. Though Schellenberg recalled that Himmler had seemed favorably disposed to Bernadotte personally and hoped to maintain contact with him, no progress was made on either agenda item.
Over the coming weeks, Heeresgruppe Weichsel failed to stop the Red Army at the Vistula, and the Soviets began closing in on the Oder River, only about thirty miles east of Berlin. On March 20, Hitler finally ordered Himmler to relinquish command to the Wehrmacht. General Gotthard Heinrici took over the mission impossible, and Himmler returned to his intrigues.
When Bernadotte met the Reichsführer SS for a second time at Hohenlychen on April 2, the mood was different. Gone was the affable sense of locker-room humor and the happy talk of runes. Himmler was depressed and grew only more morose when Bernadotte told him that the Allies would probably not want to parley with the king of those concentration camps that they were only now starting to discover.
By the time that Himmler traveled to Berlin to toast the haggard and delusional Adolf Hitler on his fifty-sixth birthday on April 20, nearly everyone in the leadership of the Third Reich was talking about surrender. The only ones who still fully subscribed the fight-to-the-finish mentality were Martin Bormann and Josef Goebbels—but neither of them was actually doing any fighting. They were cowering with Führer in his bunker, deep beneath the Chancellory building, listening to Hitler’s rants about imaginary armies, to bad news on the shortwave radio, and to the distant rumble of Soviet artillery.
Sipping champagne with Hitler and Himmler in the bunker that day were many of the notables of the Nazi regime. Bormann and Goebbels were there, of course, because they now lived here (Goebbels with his wife and their six children). So too were Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, and Admiral Karl Dönitz, who now commanded both the largely nonexistent German navy and the armies defending northwest Germany.
Having seen his Führer for the last time, Himmler met with Bernadotte the following day and again on April 23. The count recalled him as now “spent and weary,” as well as nervous and irritable. Nevertheless, Himmler did agree to several of Bernadotte’s requests for releasing this or that group of prisoners to the Swedish Red Cross. Himmler also reiterated his willingness to surrender to the British and Americans, cautioning the count that he would never surrender to the Bolsheviks in the East. Bernadotte again told him that it was way too late for a separate peace deal, closed his briefcase,
and departed.
He and Himmler would never again cross paths.
By now, Himmler was essentially a vagabond. Having abandoned Prinz-Albrechtstrasse and Berlin, he had held court for a time in Hohenlychen, but he had smelled the Red Army in the distance and moved on. By the last week of April, he, in his Mercedes, followed by his entourage of SS staff in cars and SS guards in trucks, were roaming northern Germany. They now numbered around 150, including SS bureaucrats and young women from his clerical staff. Among this entourage were SS Sturmbannführer Rudolf Brandt, the Reichsführer’s personal aide, and Sturmbannführer Heinz Macher, who made that last official SS visit to Schloss Wewelsburg two months earlier.
By now, the entourage also included the old Ahnenerbe astrologer, Wilhelm Wulff, who was a friend of Felix Kersten. He made an odd addition given that in 1941, Himmler’s Gestapo had briefly incarcerated every astrologer in the Reich for fear that they had influenced deputy Führer Rudolf Hess in his mysterious and never explained flight to Scotland that year. Hitler had been further opposed to astrology because it applied equally to all races, untermenschen as well as übermenschen. Himmler’s mind, on the other hand, was open to the stars.
The convoy must have been an amazing sight—indeed, straight from a film by Federico Fellini—as they swaggered into this command post or that. Here was the erstwhile “most feared man in Europe,” accompanied by his Ahnenerbe astrologer and his masseur, and surrounded by Black Knights in full SS regalia, complete with their silver-trimmed daggers dangling at their waists.
By April 28, Himmler was at Plön in Scheswig Holstein, where Dönitz had his headquarters. Here, the Reichsführer and the admiral sat down to talk about the future, together with Johann Ludwig Schwerin von Krosigk, a former Oxford Rhodes scholar, who had been the German minister of finance since 1932. They agreed that when, not if, Hitler was no more, they would all be willing to serve his successor. They also all agreed that Hitler would probably pass the torch to Himmler.
However, that same day, the news that Himmler had been talking to third parties about surrendering the Third Reich was picked up by the Western media and broadcast on the BBC. When Hitler heard this on his shortwave, he became furious and ordered Himmler arrested. This message did not reach Plön until late on April 30, along with word that Dönitz was designated as the Führer’s successor.
By this time, though, a great deal had changed in the Führer’s bunker in Berlin. Earlier in the day, Goebbels and his wife had murdered their six children and committed suicide. Meanwhile, Hitler had killed his dog, murdered Eva Braun, his longtime girlfriend and wife of one day, and then had committed suicide himself. Martin Bormann slipped out of the bunker, hoping to escape Berlin. Rumors swirled for decades that he had escaped, all the way to a comfortable retirement in South America. The conventional wisdom today is that he died on the streets in the Soviet shelling.
It has often been pointed out that the night of April 30 has special significance in the calendar of ancient Nordic paganism. It is Walpurgisnacht, the night on which the witches dance with the gods in an age-old Germanic festival celebrated with immense bonfires. Some say that the deaths in the Führer’s bunker represented a pagan self-sacrifice.
Exactly two decades had passed since April 30, 1925, when Adolf Hitler had first severed his ties with Ernst Röhm, the man who had controlled his SA. This break had underscored the Führer’s need to develop Heinrich Himmler’s SS into an alternate party security apparatus. It was an eerie anniversary.
On May 1, 1945, the men in Plön finally learned the news from the bunker. On the morning after Walpurgisnacht, the morning after Götterdämmerung, as Dönitz pondered what he was to do as the Reich’s new Führer, the Reichsführer was once again on the road. By now, the highways and muddy byways of Germany were clogged with people. There were retreating soldiers and soldiers racing to surrender to the Americans or British. There were civilians fleeing the Soviets, and there were people who had lost their homes in bombing raids and Allied artillery barrages. It seemed as though everyone were on the road, as though everyone in Germany were a refugee.
At one point, Himmler considered, but rejected, the idea of taking his convoy to seek refuge at Schloss Arolsen. This nearby castle was the family home of Waffen SS General Josias Waldeck, the hereditary prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont and a loyal Black Knight who had two years earlier enlisted two of his daughters in the SS Helferinnenkorps.
During that same turbulent day, Himmler also learned that Count Schwerin von Krosigk had now been named as foreign minister, so Himmler got in touch with him with a scheme. Shortly after their biography of Heinrich Himmler was published in 1965, Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fränkel were approached by the count himself, who told them for the first time of his strange conversation with Himmler on the evening of May 1. They had met on the road between Plön and Eutin, where Himmler insisted that the new foreign minister ally Germany with Britain and the United States, whereby Germany, together with the Allies, would have “a splendid chance of expanding their eastern borders as far as the Urals.” They had, Himmler insisted, “never been so near to that most desirable aim of German foreign policy.”
Schwerin von Krosigk took Himmler aside and quietly suggested that he shave off his trademark mustache, lose the black uniform, and just try to slip away.
Himmler ignored him. Manvell and Fränkel wrote, “Himmler seemed utterly unable to grasp realities; he was convinced that his own future as ‘the second man in the Dönitz administration’ was assured.” The Reichsführer told Schwerin von Krosigk, “All I want is a brief chat with Montgomery and Eisenhower. It should be easy enough to convince them that I and my SS are an indispensable Ordnungsfaktor [guarantee of law and order] in the struggle against Bolshevism.”
Himmler was, however, totally out of the loop.
The following day, May 2, the German armies in Italy surrendered unconditionally, and General Helmuth Weidling, the commander of the Berlin Defense Area, surrendered the capital to Soviet general Vasily Chuikov. By then, most of what was left in Berlin after the American and British air assault had been blown to bits by Red Army artillery.
DÖNITZ—WITHOUT HIMMLER’S KNOWLEDGE—had already begun putting out peace feelers of his own, trying to contact British field marshal Bernard Montgomery, the commander of the Allied 21st Army Group, which was then closing in on Schleswig Holstein from the west. Two days later, he and Montgomery concluded a deal, whereby Dönitz officially surrendered all the German forces in Denmark, the Netherlands, and northwestern Germany. Having surrendered explicitly to Montgomery, Führer Dönitz was indulging his own unrealistic fantasies about setting up a provisional government at his new command post in Flensberg, near the Danish border.
In the meantime, Himmler and his unwieldy caravan had caught up with Dönitz again. He now fully expected a ministerial role for himself in the so-called Flensburg Government, but on May 6, Dönitz dealt him the final, crushing blow. A man whose role in the government of the Third Reich only a few weeks early had been nonexistent personally handed the Reichsführer SS a memo that read: “In view of the present situation, I have decided to dispense with your further assistance as Reich Minister of the Interior and member of the Reich Government, as Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, and as chief of the Police. I now regard all your offices as abolished. I thank you for the service which you have given to the Reich.”
In the space of less than a week, Heinrich Himmler had been fired by two Führers; had his astrologer predicted that alignment of dark stars? As Himmler now looked around him, he saw his entourage melting away. It was now every SS bureaucrat for him- or herself.
The wheels of total surrender were already in motion. In the wee hours of the morning of May 7 in Rheims, France, under Dönitz’s orders, the Oberkommando Wehrmacht chief of staff, Gen. Alfred Jodl, sat down at the headquarters of the Supreme Allied commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, and signed the unconditional surrender paperwork that surrendered all German forces to
the Allies. A similar surrender was inked later in the day in Berlin by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel of the Oberkommando Wehrmacht and Soviet marshal Georgi Zhukov. World War II in Europe was officially over.
At last, on May 8, the day that the unconditional surrender took effect, Heinrich Himmler took Schwerin von Krosigk’s advice and took a razor to his upper lip.
As it hit the road, the Himmler entourage had dwindled to just a handful, including Brandt and Macher. They no longer swaggered, these SS men, nor did they sport the regalia of Black Knights. Having changed clothes, they were just a few more frightened refugees who had discarded the proud trappings of a sacred order that was supposed to have lasted a thousand years.
Heinrich Himmler, the former “most feared man in Europe,” had even discarded his ID and now carried the papers of someone else. Ironically, they were those of a man named Heinrich Hitzinger, whose execution Himmler had once ordered. Himmler even got his hands on an eyepatch to use to disguise his identity.
Heading westward, the men abandoned their Mercedes when they reached the Elbe River and paid a man with a boat to shuttle them across—for 500 reichsmarks a head. For the next two weeks, they roamed the countryside, scrounging for food and sleeping in the dirt.
Nearly three decades earlier, when he was a young man, Heinrich Himmler had spent another postwar summer down on the farm. Flushed with Völkisch enthusiasm, he had gotten the rich dark Germanic soil under his fingernails, and he had loved it. He was, for a brief moment, a city boy overwhelmed with the charm of rural life. He had even joined the brotherhood of the Artamanen Gesellschaft, and he had later owned a chicken farm. Now here he was, back to the rustic countryside of the Völkisch past, with no running water, no electricity, and no polished porcelain Prinz-Albrechtstrasse bathrooms.