Himmler (Peter Padfield's Second World War)

by Peter Padfield

Like the witch, the Jew and the Untermensch served both as scapegoats for the ills of society and as means of spreading orthodoxy, the Nazi orthodoxy of the pure blood of the Herrenvolk. As with the demonology of witchcraft, the formulation of Jew and Untermensch owed much to projections of sexual fantasy and hysteria from the subconscious:

This was similar to the position they occupied in Germany before the Nazis took power: sciences, the arts, the professions, especially the medical profession, held a far higher proportion of Jews than their numbers in the German population warranted, and they were popularly believed to hold most of the strings of finance and commerce.

Probably he was doing what his father expected of him, as at school he did what his teachers expected; he was a supreme conformist, and the adolescent diaries probably tell us more about the father than the son.

The Third Reich is often represented, particularly in Germany, as a radical departure from the normal line of Prusso-German history; it is sometimes represented as the consummation of that history. Unquestionably it was both. It was born in revolution against the established order, but like all revolutions led to the establishment of the same order in more extreme form under a new ruling class.

would be surprising if a nation with Germany’s embattled history and geographical position in the centre of a continually warring continent either could or would have evolved a philosophy which would have had much meaning for the Anglo-Saxon nations, England and America, whose geographical positions, hence historical and economic experience, were so entirely different.

To suggest that Germany in the twentieth century could or should have been liberal and democratic – soft and effeminate to the German view – is as misleading as it would be to suggest that the Anglo-Saxon nations could have become authoritarian and militarist. Particular ideas that command national acceptance arise from particular conditions that compel it.

The chief vehicles in the early stages were the Germanenorden, a secret society formed in Berlin in 1912 which had established throughout Germany lodges modelled on masonic lodges, and its offshoot the Thule Society. This was supported by the Navy but was camouflaged as a literary circle for the study of German history and customs.

It was rabidly anti-semitic and anti-communist and was devoted to preserving the purity of the German race. Its ultimate aim was to unify Europe under the leadership of a greater Germanic Reich. Its symbol was the swastika.

It was this party which Adolf Hitler joined while working as a political agent for a regular Army captain named Ernst Röhm; later the name was changed to the German National Socialist Workers Party (NSDAP), in the shortened form Nazi Party.

Anti-semitism had been a principal feature of the middle-class völkisch movement in and around Munich since the latter half of the nineteenth century when capital in the shape of big industry, department stores and property speculators had begun forcing artisans, small shopkeepers and farmers out of business. The Jews had been identified with capital; thus an article in the Munich paper Deutsches Volksblatt in 1895 had concluded, ‘If we do not solve the Jewish question, we shall not solve the social question either.’[39] Now Jews had led the communist take-over of Munich and the subsequent reign of terror.

At the beginning, as a youth of nineteen in hospital in Ingolstadt, he was not a fanatic. He was a devout Catholic, a believer and regular churchgoer, a nationalist patriot with an admiration for the soldierly virtues and a disappointed longing to be an officer. He was völkisch in that he believed in the Germanic race, but he was no more anti-semitic than was normal for his class and time;

Practically all the love objects claimed by Freikorps man are to be found in Himmler’s diaries and letters and are later repeated again and again in his speeches; they include the Fatherland, the soil of the homeland, the German people, the Germanic blood community, the uniform, comrades, superiors, subordinates, weapons and fighting. Thewelweit concludes from his study: ‘In other words these men claim to “love” the very things that protect them against real love-object relations.’

It can be stated with confidence, therefore, that in early summer 1920, nearing the end of his second decade, he was quite prepared to believe in the usual stereotype of the Jew, but equally prepared to disbelieve the more bizarre perversions attributed to the race. More interesting, perhaps, in view of his later convictions, he was prepared to try and evaluate the evidence. In short, he was not a fanatic.

Indeed, given his youth and inexperience and the company he kept and the evil mood of the nationalists and officers, to whose ranks he still aspired, it would have been scarcely conceivable for him to have had any other views. They were the old pan-German, biological-racist views grown more extreme in the forcing-house of Bavarian politics. The traditions of separatism, Catholicism and loyalty to the Wittelsbach monarchy had always led Bavarians to distrust Berlin.

Anti-semitism rose from this social ferment as it had from similar conditions in the past. In this case the process can be closely observed. It was fuelled by inflation, which had been growing steadily since the end of the war, probably as much a result of government and industrial resistance to the allied demands for reparations as of the financial deficits of the war years.

So countless individual failures and resentments were added to the national feeling of humiliation. Extremist writers and orators played on this, raising as a scapegoat the old bogey of the Bavarian völkisch and south German and Austrian nationalist movements – the Jew.

For Hitler’s power came from his ability to sense the fears and hopes of his audiences and give them back in heightened form.

seems that this unhappiness and uncertainty made Heinrich vulnerable to the anti-semitic myths, for by the summer of 1922 he had succumbed. Two years earlier, he had described Die Sünde wider das Blut as ‘tendentious’, its author blinded by his hatred of Jews, and he had felt inclined to investigate the sources. The sources were provided in Judas Schuldbuch and he was satisfied they were a ‘marvellous collection’. Chamberlain’s pamphlet had moved him to execrate ‘This atrocious Jewry’. He was able to admire the Jewish dancer’s qualities of loyalty yet when in June a terror squad murdered the Jewish Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, he noted in his diary that he was glad for he was convinced that, ‘whatever he did, he did not do for Germany.’[100] Evidently he thought Rathenau had been working for the international Jewish–Marxist conspiracy.

The rate of inflation took off. In six months the Mark, which had been quoted at 9 to the US dollar at the end of the war, fell from 18,000 to over 350,000 to the dollar. It continued falling by the day, by the hour until it was worth less than the paper used to print it; piles of notes were weighed and measured for height rather than counted; in November a glass of beer cost one billion Marks.

The Nazi Party, whose growth had been modest until then, began to count its members and sympathisers in tens of thousands; its paramilitary arm, the Sturmabteilung or SA, numbered some 10,000.

Himmler was one of many who did not limit their paramilitary activities to a single unit. He joined several, but attached himself in particular to Captain Ernst Röhm in the Reichsflagge, and when this organisation split, he followed Röhm into the Reichskriegsflagge. Röhm was, of course, one of the key figures in the nationalist movement. He was channelling secret Army funds via two ostensibly private companies into the groups he supported, which included the Nazi Party and its fighting arm, the SA, now led by the first-war air ace, Hermann Göring. In August 1923 Himmler joined the Nazi Party; his membership number was 42,404.[4]

As for Heinrich Himmler, the whole affair from beginning to end demonstrates that, whatever the rights and wrongs on either side, he already possessed all those qualities of priggish self-assurance and vindictiveness which formed the cornerstones of his later career. He had no need to change; he had only to wait for his niche in life to catch up with him. Of course, he had no idea of this.

This paradox was made possible by the belief, propagated by Houston Stewart Chamberlain and other mythologists of Aryanism, that Jesus had not been a Jew but the illegitimate son of a Roman centurion. Das Leben Jesu reinforced Himmler’s belief, despite the author’s contrary views, that ‘Jesus was no Jew.’ No doubt this was necessary for his continued attendance at Christian services.

So the links in the international conspiracy against the Aryan race latched together in Himmler’s mind: Jews – Bolsheviks – freemasons – Jesuits.

At all events the urban lower-middle classes, who had lost their savings, shops, businesses and livelihoods during the inflation, and the peasantry rallied to the cause; in the Bavarian elections the Völkisch Sozialer Block became the second largest party with 17 per cent of the vote. In the country as a whole the former Nazis and völkisch groups of the north and Bavaria who had allied to form the National Socialist Freiheitsbewegung (Freedom Movement), gained thirty-two seats in the Reichstag with some 6 per cent of the votes cast.

It seems probable, therefore, that the move marked a complete break with his parents. Alfred Andersch was told by his father, a Ludendorff supporter, thus well informed about the völkisch movement, that the young Himmler had quarrelled with ‘the old Himmler’ and the two were ‘deadly enemies’.

The elections, held on 7 December, proved a disaster for the völkisch movement. The vote dropped by over a half to less than a million, and only fourteen of the thirty-two Reichstag seats won in the spring were retained. One of these went to Gregor Strasser.

After his release Hitler was considered so harmless because of the poor showing in the polls that the ban on the Nazi Party was lifted – either that or his supporters in the Bavarian hierarchy believed the Nazis were still necessary as hammers of socialists (SPD) and communists (KPD).

Now Hitler was free the power struggles in the movement were brought to a head. Hitler had no use for alliances. He was fascinated by Mussolini’s fascism in Italy and wanted a similar monolithic party with himself as leader. In any case his egocentricity dictated

Hitler had an infallible nose for men who would follow him blindly, and it must be assumed from Himmler’s later awe-struck devotion to ‘the greatest brain of all time’ that he acquired his admiration and reverence during these early days in Munich. For those prepared to drop all critical faculties, either because, like Himmler, they needed to believe, or like the majority because they came from strata unused to reasoned debate, Hitler could exert a powerful fascination.

Combining as he did the organisation of Party propaganda, which depended so much on timely intelligence, and the leadership of the SS in one of the most important Gaue, Himmler was already at the centre of SS activities when he was appointed deputy Reichsführer in September 1927. His minute attention to detail and discipline were felt immediately. On 17 September SS Order No. 1 promulgated strict regulations for uniform, behaviour, training sessions and intelligence duties.

Whether or not Himmler read or knew much about Fouche, according to Otto Strasser he wrote a memorandum on the need for a Cheka-style secret police to monitor Party members and the SA, and convinced Hitler that the SS should perform the function, assuring him that they would be his most loyal guards: ‘They will be blindly devoted to you and continue the tradition of the Stosstrupp Hitler of 9 November 1923.’

Moreover Hitler had detected in him that capacity for absolute belief and blind loyalty that goes with the inner need for a cause to lose oneself in and a star to follow.

The outside world obtruded that summer when Marga bore Himmler a daughter; she was named Gudrun, supposedly after the heroine of Werner Jansen’s Das Buch Liebe. Much as he was devoted to her, his family life continued to suffer from the fanatical demands he made on himself in the cause of the Party. To judge by her resigned letters, Marga spent most of her time alone at their small home in Waltrudering with her infant daughter and one maid.

As unemployment mounted through 1930, going above the three-million mark in September, more and more Germans, particularly among the young, sucked in this message of hate. At Reichstag elections called that month, nearly six and a half million voted for the National Socialists, carrying them in one bound from an insignificant fringe group less than a quarter the size of the Communist Party to the second-largest national party with 107 seats. One of the seats was allotted to Heinrich Himmler.

Thus in scarcely over a year since Heinrich Himmler had been appointed Reichsführer-SS the Party was catapulted into the stress centre of German and world finance and politics. Exactly when he realised this or when he realised that his conception of the SS as the elite of the Party was about to be fulfilled is impossible to say, but the greater the intra-Party rivalries forced by these pressures, the more the SS came to play the key role as the loyal, unquestioning praetorian guard of the Führer and the more Heinrich Himmler himself became the key figure.

Feeling so insecure and threatened on every side, it is not surprising that the Navy responded enthusiastically to the anti-Versailles Treaty, anti-communist, pro-nationalist slogans of the Nazi Party. The feeling was particularly strong among younger officers and the association of retired naval officers, but it permeated all ranks, and Raeder himself was in touch with Hitler via the retired Admiral von Levetzow.

Himmler’s SS, as the most reliable Party formation which had by now attracted a relatively large proportion of nobles and the upper-middle class into its officer corps, largely bypassing the original kleinen Leute, was supported by a large number of industrialists apart from those whose contributions were extorted by protection or blackmail. Thus, although it was kept on a tight financial string by the Party treasurer and his nominal chief, Röhm, Himmler was able to expand the SS at a tremendous rate through 1932.

The Nazis gained most and, in Reichstag elections at the end of the month, emerged as by far the largest party with 13.75 million votes and 230 seats against the social democrats’ 8 million and the communists’ 5.25 million.

Hitler was offered a post as Vice-Chancellor, with Strasser as Commissioner for Prussia; he refused, demanding the Chancellorship as his due as leader of the largest party. The President, von Hindenburg, who took an instant aversion to the ‘Austrian’, refused to entrust power to him and his murderous revolutionary band.

the Party faced bankruptcy. Moreover the decline in the polls, matched by a falling-off in Party membership, a serious decline in morale and disaffection in the SA at being denied the power they expected threatened Hitler’s bargaining position. It was now that the banker Kurt von Schröder emerged as the decisive mediator and with him Heinrich Himmler and Wilhelm Keppler, organiser of Hitler’s Freundeskreis of industrial leaders.

Heydrich’s SD gathered material evidence of the scandals in the Osthilfe for use in putting pressure particularly on von Hindenburg’s son Oskar, as stiff and morose a caricature as the President himself, who in consort with State Secretary Meissner virtually controlled the old man. Hitler’s strategy was on the one hand to threaten Oskar personally and the Junkers as a class with exposure, on the other hand to bribe him with Army rank and additional land for his estate. By this means he was to be persuaded to overcome his father’s refusal to appoint Hitler as Chancellor.

If Hitler and the Nazi Party as a mass movement were conceived in the pan-German Thule Society and nursed by the Army and Navy combined, this programme reveals that finally they were brought to the altar of power by high finance and industry, in particular by the owners of the new light industries of the second industrial revolution, supported by the banks, in particular the giant Deutsche Bank to which von Schröder’s Cologne Bank was affiliated. Emil Georg von Stauss of the Deutsche Bank was prominent in the group of investors von Schröder formed after this key meeting to underwrite Nazi Party debts.

Now only one obstacle stood in the way – the President himself. Apparently Hitler removed this on 22 January in private conversation with Oskar von Hindenburg. Afterwards Oskar was ‘extremely silent’, according to President von Hindenburg’s State Secretary, Meissner, who accompanied him to the meeting: ‘the only remark he made was that it could not be helped – the Nazis had to be taken into the government.’

Meanwhile communists, social democratic leaders, even monarchists and conservatives of the Bavaria People’s Party, opposition journalists, Jewish businessmen and other enemies on Heydrich’s card indexes were rounded up from lists already prepared before the take-over, and thrown into prisons in all the main towns in Bavaria and, when these were full, into wild concentration camps such as had been established in Prussia. One of these wild camps was extemporised by the local SS troop in a derelict munitions factory at Dachau on the northern outskirts of Munich. It was here that Himmler decided to found the first official concentration camp.

By establishing this triangle – Political Police (later Gestapo) – concentration camp – SS – Himmler gained complete control of the system of terror for and in the state of Bavaria.

Dachau was not simply a cage for the unverbesserlich; it was a standing threat to every citizen who might think of stepping out of line. The other political parties hurriedly dissolved themselves, and on 14 July a law was published whereby the NSDAP was named as the only political party in Germany; anyone organising another or forming a new party would be punished by penal servitude or prison.

After the parties the next action was against the Catholic Church. Here, however, Himmler and Heydrich had to move more carefully, so strongly was Catholicism embedded in the region, and indeed throughout areas of Germany; moreover Hitler was negotiating a concordat with the Vatican. For the moment they admitted defeat, but it was precisely because of the strength of the opposition and the danger it represented to the new ideology that the retreat could only be tactical. After the priests it was the turn of the Jews. On 19 July it was announced that all Jewish organisations apart from synagogues and purely charitable institutions were to be disbanded and their assets confiscated.

Two things, however, can be said with certainty: the SA, now a huge, heterogeneous and generally discontented army of 4 million, threatened the hereditary leadership of the Army, the Junker landowners, the bureaucracy and the heavy industrialists with a continuation of the revolution – or, as they termed it, ‘the second revolution’ – to complete the Machtergreifung by toppling these ‘reactionary’ groupings, whose creature they believed Göring to be; as indeed he was. The other certainty is that everything Göring learned was immediately made available to Himmler and Heydrich.

Hitler had been as good as his word in suppressing communists, socialists and trade unions, but the SA was filling the vacuum as an anti-capital, anti-landholding, anti-bourgeois, anti-tradition mass movement, and Hitler appeared unwilling or powerless to curb it. Goebbels at the Propaganda Ministry actively incited it. The excesses of SA street rowdies continued: no business manager could feel free from the threat of extortion; no ordinary citizen could pass by an SA collecting box without having to dip one hand in his pocket and raise the other in the Hitler salute; no social event was sacrosanct.