It is impossible to say how many of Himmler’s senior officers took his notions as seriously as, for instance, Stroop, how many were prepared to go along with them for the sake of their rank and elite status, or to identify the points where his ambitions did dovetail in precisely with their own ideas of themselves as guardians of the Germanic virtues, members of the master race, future conquerors. All that can be said is that those who labelled him a crank did so after the lost war. At the time he was considered a persuasive speaker.
