Himmler (Peter Padfield's Second World War)

by Peter Padfield

‘never ceased to wonder that this mild-looking, mild-mannered, rather self-effacing man should have it in him to wield the great power that is his.’[105] Stephen Roberts described him in similar vein as lacking any distinction in appearance, ‘modest in manner. His very indefinite features and his glasses make him look rather insignificant, more of a student than an agitator.’

In the early hours of 15 March, the Czech President gave in and signed away what remained of his country. German troops had already crossed the border. The citizens of the capital, Prague, awoke to find swastika standards and field-grey steel-helmeted soldiers in the streets. Behind the columns came Heydrich’s SD-Einsatz staffs, mixed teams of police, Gestapo and SD officials armed with lists prepared from the great card index in SD Section III 225, who directed Einsatzkommandos in the arrest of suspected leaders and ideological enemies, and established police, Gestapo and SD headquarters in what was shortly declared the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

‘Here I stand, and no power on earth will remove me from here.’[114] The moment made an indelible impression on Wolff, no doubt on Himmler and Bormann as well. For Hitler, it was another demonstration of his divinely ordained mission, and another proof that the western powers dared not oppose him.

‘Danzig is not the object,’ he confided. ‘It is a question of broadening our Lebensraum in the east.’ His object would be to isolate Poland; if this should not be possible, however, it would be better to attack in the west, settling the Polish problem at the same time.[120]

Of the two other principals, Chamberlain and Hitler, neither wanted a general war; nor did their advisers, nor their military, nor the British or German people, nor the French government and people, who found themselves sucked along in the British wake, nor of course the Poles, who were the first victims. The situation had been created by Chamberlain’s reckless pledge to Poland; the western powers’ inability to support that pledge in any practical sense left an opening on the game board of eastern Europe between the two major powers who claimed that sphere, Germany and Russia. It was their moves, specifically their non-aggression pact, that decided the date and initial direction of the European war.

There is no doubt that Hitler would have preferred an agreement with England. That comes through as plainly from the records of the bewildering number of unofficial mediators between England and Germany during this fateful summer of 1939 as from the pages of Mein Kampf, and all subsequent speeches. But when it became clear to Hitler that the price for agreement with England was disarmament, hence the end of his aim to carve out an eastern empire by military force, he had only two options, outside the two-front war he was determined to avoid: either renounce his sacred mission or come to terms with his mortal enemies in the Kremlin to secure his eastern flank. The former was impossible personally and politically. The latter it had to be. He hoped, he even expected, that when England saw the Russian sword snatched from her hand and understood that she had no prospect of intervening effectively in eastern Europe she would renege on her pledge to Poland; if not he would finish off Poland in short time with a Blitzkrieg, then loose his Luftwaffe and Panzers in the west to smash France.

As for Stalin, he had no illusions about Hitler’s ultimate aim. In order to parry it he had an obvious interest in embroiling Germany in war with the western powers: in the best case both sides would bleed and exhaust themselves; in the worst case it would give his military and industrial expansion programmes a year or two more. Also he could hope that by allying with Germany he might divert Germany’s ally, Japan, from striking north – against Russia – into the alternative policy of a strike south against the British and Dutch colonies.

The war was engineered in the negotiations in Moscow and Berlin which divided Poland and eastern Europe into spheres of interest between them.

Hitler’s inner compulsion to begin his mission in the east was formalised on 15 August, the day von der Schulenburg’s discussion with Molotov convinced him he would secure the agreement he wanted with Stalin.

Von Ribbentrop flew to Moscow the following morning, and after conversations with Stalin and Molotov put his signature to the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. A secret protocol divided Poland between them along the Narev, Vistula, San river line, declared Lithuania in the German sphere and the two northern Baltic states, Estonia and Latvia, in the Russian sphere as well as Finland and on the southern flank the Rumanian province of Bessarabia.

It is notable that Himmler appears to have played little part in the decisions of these fateful days.[20] Göring, von Ribbentrop, von Weizsäcker of the Foreign Ministry, Keitel, Bormann had been at Hitler’s side; Goebbels had whipped up the press against the Poles. Himmler had remained working feverishly in Berlin, co-ordinating his Verfügungstruppe and reinforced Totenkopf battalions and SD–Security Police Einsatzkommandos with the Army command. If he exercised the malign influence on the Führer attributed to him by Goerdeler and others of the opposition, it does not seem to have amounted to more than agreement on the measures necessary to subjugate Poland after military victory:

It is a measure of Hitler’s uncertainty that three o’clock struck, and he had still not given the word. Two minutes later the doors from his study opened, and he emerged before the expectant gathering to announce ‘Fall Weiss!’ – ‘Case White!’ It is not clear why he said it. He had not succeeded in detaching England from Poland; Henderson was due to fly to London the following morning with his latest proposals;

The decision seems explicable only in terms of the excitement and strain in which Hitler had been living the past fortnight and his habitual response in crisis to take up advanced, exposed positions. In any case he soon rescinded the order. Some time after 4.30 he received news that Great Britain and Poland were about to sign their pact, and shortly after six he was handed a message from his friend Mussolini to say that Italy could render Germany no assistance in the event of a conflict with Poland; she had neither the military nor the economic strength to resist an Anglo-French attack.

Hitler somehow returned to his original determination. On 31 August he gave the word again for ‘Case White’.

At 4.30 next morning, 1 September, without a declaration of war, German forces began the assault much as von Reichenau had described Blitzkrieg to Winterbotham five years before, Luftwaffe and Panzer columns acting in concert to overwhelm and cut through the defences.

Two days later Chamberlain finally gave up hope of halting the attack by negotiation and resigned himself to war. An ultimatum was drafted and Sir Nevile Henderson was instructed to call on von Ribbentrop at nine the following morning, 3 September, to present it. Von Ribbentrop was at the Chancellery with Hitler.

Of the armed services, the one least prepared for the announcement was the Navy, which still had years to make up before it would be in a condition to challenge the Royal Navy. Raeder recorded his despair for the file: ‘Today the war breaks out against England–France, which according to the Führer we need not have reckoned with before about 1944 and which until the last moment the Führer believed he should prevent

The two men who were probably closer to him for a longer period than even Karl Wolff, the chief of his personal staff, Dr Rudolf Brandt, and his ‘magic Buddha’, Felix Kersten, both referred to his vacillating nature and inability to make up his mind.[32] Yet this apparent contradiction is surely one of the keys to understanding him: was it not because he was so little able to make up his mind that he needed a creed to hold on to and a master to obey?

Hitler displayed similar indecisiveness before large decisions as the rationally inexplicable course of events between 24 August and his final order for ‘Case White’ on 30 August indicates. He, too, so lacked powers of judgement that he had to cling to his simple creed and despise the conventionally educated who brought logical arguments to bear on real problems. The story of the Third Reich suggests that his scorn was not misplaced.

the monstrous crimes now launched in the east, seem to have arisen not so much from a warrior caste confident in its strength as from the pathology of weakness and inferiority. It is surely no accident that the three leaders who increased their power from the outbreak of war until the final collapse and who kept the Reich on its straight course for destruction, Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, had the best reasons for feeling inferior.

On the face of it Stalin seemed to have gained by the new arrangement, which brought the Soviet empire to the very borders of East Prussia. It is doubtful if Hitler gave it a thought; he was resolved to unleash his armies against Russia at the first opportunity. In the meantime he needed a quick settlement in the east in order to convince the western powers that there was no point in continuing the war – or more probably while he struck west to smash France and drive Britain from the continent in order finally to free himself for the real war for the east.

We are not dealing with individual psychopaths; we are not dealing with a Reichsführer who was merely the sum of Heinrich Himmler’s genes and experiences, a man who could be described as either ‘indecisive’ or ‘ruthless’ or labelled with any of the attributes he has been given here. We are dealing with something which was infinitely greater and infinitely less than the sum of ‘Himmler’s’ characteristics,

On 5 October Hitler entered Warsaw for his triumph; Himmler and Wolff accompanied him as they had accompanied him for his triumphal entries into Vienna and Prague and most recently Danzig.

This seems to have been the turning point in his attitude towards Hitler – although with such a complex personality it is hardly possible to be sure. At least from this time on his feelings for the Führer and the Party which he and the Navy had done so much to promote from the very earliest days became increasingly ambiguous. He remained a committed nationalist, but, ever more pessimistic about the methods of National Socialism, he lapsed like thinking members of the Reaktion into despair.

Adolf Eichmann, who had conducted the successful business in Jewish emigration from Vienna, subsequently from Prague, was transferred back to head a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Berlin. His chief task now, instead of promoting emigration from the Reich to Palestine, the USA and other countries overseas, was simply to deport Jews to the occupied east of Poland as the first, preliminary stage before what Heydrich termed the ‘ultimate aim’ of the Jewish policy.

Hitler had simply bounced himself into the European war five years too soon.

the Bürgerbräu–Venlo provocation was brilliantly successful. And in the atmosphere of fear and suspicion created deliberately by the Gestapo, it was evident to von Brauchitsch, Halder and the other senior generals who had dusted off and reworked the 1938 plans for an Army putsch that the bomb attempt against Hitler could easily be turned to use by Himmler and Heydrich as the pretext for a pre-emptive SS strike against them.

inflated by his lightning victory in Poland, Hitler might have considered these objections outweighed by the advantage of surprise. In that case the provocation might have been designed primarily to produce a pretext for attack in the west, and it was only his characteristic hesitation before decision, bad weather and the generals’ opposition that caused postponement until the following spring.

From this it followed that their most dangerous enemies were those of their own blood who had adopted foreign nationalities, especially when they were in commanding positions; as examples he named from the Polish campaign General (Juliusz) Rommél, the defender of Warsaw, Admiral (Josef) Unrug, defender of Hela, and General (Viktor) Thommée, the defender of Modlin, who was of Huguenot descent, ‘also our blood, Germanic blood’.

The attack began against the neutral Low Countries at 5.35 in the morning of 10 May. Again Oster of the Abwehr had passed the word through his contacts; again his warning was virtually disregarded. In any case the speed and violence of the assault by every conceivable arm was sufficient to surprise and overwhelm any preparations that might have been made.

After the British Expeditionary Force in the north had been rescued by an extemporised flotilla of small craft from the Dunkirk beaches,

was apparently Philipp Bouhler who suggested after this successful demonstration that gas chambers should be camouflaged as shower rooms with the carbon monoxide entering through the pipes and nozzles.

In addition to gas chambers, there were gas vans whose occupants could be killed by the driver throwing a switch to divert the exhaust into the gas-tight body of the vehicle.

The inability of the western allies to stem the advance of the German armies across France inspired Mussolini to enter the war on Hitler’s side, fulfilling the earlier promise of a central European ‘Axis’ of the two dictatorships. On the same day, 10 June, the French government abandoned Paris; four days later German troops entered the capital. On 16 June the French Premier resigned, to be replaced by Marshal Pétain, who immediately entered armistice negotiations. The terms Hitler imposed were extraordinarily moderate considering the huge war indemnity the Germans had hoped to claim from France in the first war, the humiliation they had actually forced on Russia at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 and Germany’s own humiliation at Versailles.

He expected that after the French defeat the British would realise the hopelessness of their position and respond to his peace overtures; he did not want to encourage the ‘warmongers’ around Churchill by driving the French too hard and perhaps pushing them into taking their Navy over to Churchill and carrying on the fight from overseas. He contented himself with reclaiming Alsace-Lorraine, occupying Paris and north-east France and, in order to widen his naval- and air-strategic position, occupying the Channel and Biscay coastal areas down to the Spanish border. He left Pétain’s government in Vichy central and southern France, the French fleet and all her colonies. He contrived to express the vengeance in his soul, in the German soul, by having the armistice signed in the clearing in the forest of Compiègne outside Paris where the armistice ending the first war had been signed, and in the same railway car, fetched from its museum. Strangely Himmler was missing from this, Hitler’s greatest triumph. It was apparently due to ill health.

Edward – now Duke of Windsor – had been forced to abdicate as much probably for his political and pro-Nazi views as for his insistence on marrying an American divorcée. At the time of Himmler’s comments Windsor was serving on the British Military Mission in France.

On the same day the secret SD report on the people’s mood began with ‘the chief question which stirs the whole German population: “When will the real war against England start, and how long will it last?” ’[31] To judge by these reports the people had been growing ever more impatient for ‘retaliation’ against England, seen as the instigator of the war; rumours about peace negotiations through the mediation of the Duke of Windsor in Spain had been circulating since at least the first week in July, to the dismay of ‘the overwhelming part of the population’ who wanted to see England brought to account.

In the ghettos being formed in the major cities SS-Führers engaged in even more lucrative ‘black’ economic enterprises employing Jewish labour or took the equivalent of ‘protection’ money from entrepreneurs setting up workshops with Jewish craftsmen.

Höss, who had been given the task that spring of converting a former Polish artillery barracks at Auschwitz into a camp for 10,000 inmates, recalled after the war the inadequate human material he had to work with; junior officers and even the professional criminals sent to him as Kapos, or foremen, were not only incapable but displayed a ‘conscious negligence and malevolence that simply forced me to do the most important and urgent things myself’.[36]

By this time Churchill had rejected Hitler’s ‘last appeal to reason’. Hitler concluded, reasonably and rightly, that this stubbornness could be caused only by expectations that Russia and the United States would enter the war against Germany.

he stressed that Russia was the factor on which England placed most hope; if Russia were removed from the reckoning British hopes in America would also disappear since America would have to cope with a Japan whose weight had increased on the Far Eastern board. He concluded that if Russia were smashed, England’s last hope would be extinguished:

Meanwhile at the end of September a three-power pact was signed between the two Axis powers and Japan; Russia was invited to join, in order to form a four-power anti-British bloc stretching from Tokyo to the shores of the Atlantic,

was a colossal gamble: he had to crush the Russian armies before winter. The military precedents were not good, nor indeed the implications of the name chosen for the venture:

From this it seems plain enough that it was a conflict between his orders and an inner aversion to mass slaughter and genocide which brought about his partial collapse, Yet Kersten was in a sense party to his master’s acts, and would have attempted to distance himself by distancing Himmler, so far as possible, from the ultimate decision for genocide.

It is probable, therefore, that what he rationalised as ‘the old, tragic conflict between will and obligation’ was a more fundamental conflict between the two parts of his own personality, the weak, insecure, indecisive core and the hard outer carapace he had grown to conform and compete in the exaggeratedly masculine society of the Freikorps men who became the Nazis.

Meanwhile an armoured division had been despatched to North Africa under General Erwin Rommel, one of Hitler’s most enthusiastic supporters. He had taken command of all Axis mobile forces in Libya and on 31 March had begun a lightning offensive which drove the British back to the borders of Egypt inside a fortnight. In the early hours of 6 April German forces, including the Leibstandarte and SS-Division Das Reich had entered Greece and Yugoslavia,

The leading classes, the officer corps, the diplomatic corps and higher civil service, the Herr Professoren and Herr Doktoren, the medical profession, the legal profession, the art historians, big business and finance, and the chains of petty officialdom and the people had sunk their individual selves and their doubts to follow the strong leader they found they wished to revere as the greatest warlord of all time. It was the spiritual triumph of the Prussian warrior caste. It had created the German nation scarcely seventy years before. Now obeisance to authority, orderliness, industry and hard soldierly virtues were raised to mindless extremes – parodies of the original code – and the nation was welded together as it had never been under Prussian rule.

When the battleship Bismarck was sunk soon after she had herself sunk the pride of the Royal Navy, the battlecruiser Hood, it was widely believed that American bombers were responsible, and ‘renewed hate and anger broke out against this country [the USA] and its government.’

Stalin regarded warnings received from Churchill and Roosevelt with intense distrust as Anglo-American provocations designed to upset the fine balance of his relationship with the Reich. Yet his master spy, Richard Sorge in Japan, had reported that Hess had been sent to Britain in a last-ditch attempt to negotiate peace before the attack on Russia, and war was inevitable.

The best guess about why, when the attack was launched, the Red Army and Air Force were caught completely off guard, many of the front-line officers even on leave in Black Sea resorts, is that the seed had taken root and Stalin was convinced there would be demands followed by an ultimatum.[130] There was none. The bolt was launched – in the first grey light of dawn – from a clearing sky. This was the ultimate surprise – on top of the surprise that Hitler could contemplate war with the three major world powers. Perhaps it should not have been: Hitler’s entire career and successes had been built on surprise and disregard of conventional thinking. It seems that Stalin with all his intelligence sources, perhaps because of them, failed to read the character of his enemy.