Himmler (Peter Padfield's Second World War)

by Peter Padfield

His July 1941 instruction to Heydrich may be said to mark the organisational beginning of the systematised programme of genocide – as opposed to the wild initial pogroms – distinguished by the use of gas – as opposed to shooting – and known after its guiding brain as ‘Operation Reinhard’.

The initial belief in a swift collapse of the Soviet colossus had faded, yet ultimate success was not doubted. The early spectacular rate of advance had been slowed; the Russians, conjuring up fresh divisions, were inflicting enormous losses, and winter, which would halt everything, was only a few weeks away. Yet the central Army Group was within striking distance of Moscow,

Now that Hitler had taken the generals’ advice for an all-out push on the Soviet capital the weather had turned against him; heavy rains had made the ground a morass in which tanks and motorised units stuck fast. Meanwhile a guerrilla war had erupted in Yugoslavia.

Worst of all, the United States had all but entered the war: the US Navy escorted convoys to mid-Atlantic ‘meeting points’ where the Royal Navy took over;

suggests that despite Himmler’s later speeches making light of the liquidation of Jews as purely a matter of hygiene – ‘it is not a Weltanschauungs-question to rid oneself of lice; it is a matter of cleanliness’[35] – despite this and other speeches before his SS-Führers, a part of him, perhaps much of him, rejected this solution. Yet of course he had to carry it out for it was the Führer’s wish.

The German armies before Moscow were caught in the grip of winter. It seems extraordinary that although Blitzkrieg against Russia had been under preparation from at least 1934, no provision had been made for an extended campaign and the rigours of the eastern climate. No suitable cold-weather clothing had been provided, no ice axes, no lubricants which would work in the extreme temperatures now experienced; fires had to be lit under vehicles before they would start, tank turrets would not turn, horses froze to death, frostbite claimed thousands of troops. Much of this was due to the early confidence and Hitler’s refusal to contemplate the possibility of failure.

As the Red Army launched its counter-offensive on 6 December, Japanese naval and expeditionary forces were fanning eastwards across the Pacific for Hawall and other island groups, and southwards into the China Sea for the Philippines, Hong Kong, Siam and British Malaya with the same insane intent at a surprise knock-out of their opponents, the western democracies, as had betrayed Hitler into the Russian campaign.

It is not surprising that this famed example of a warrior state should have found echoes in Germany. The Prussian elite who had ruled Bismarck’s Reich had adopted the ideals of Sparta; Nietzsche had drawn much from the same source. If Himmler read and spoke more of the ancient Indian warriors of the Kshatriya caste and the Vedic scriptures, nevertheless he had absorbed the spirit of Sparta through his pores from earliest boyhood.

There is no doubt from this and other accounts that Himmler could shine at social events when the company was congenial to him. He was not the invariably grim fanatic or ‘crank’ depicted in so many post-war memoirs. Of course on this occasion most of the guests were directly subordinate to him and could be expected to share his opinions; nevertheless he was obviously cheerful and expansive. Höss’s description of the evening which so surprised him actually tallies with Kersten’s account of dinners with Himmler, his staff and guests at field headquarters; service matters were not discussed, neither was there any small talk.

he did not do all the talking; he drew the others in, reserving for himself only the formulation of practical lessons from the case discussed. As for women, Kersten reported him as always extremely respectful towards them and when talking about them. He hated obscenity or double entendres; he regarded these as insults to his own mother. He was very fond of children, a characteristic noted by most others who knew him, and was always ready to give time to widows and war orphans, indeed his staff were forbidden to turn them away.

Of course it cannot escape attention that the evening on which Höss first experienced Himmler’s best social form followed hard on his inspection of the extermination of 449 people, naked women and children leading the procession to the chamber.

While there were many paths to perfection, in essence they involved a man doing his caste duty in a disinterested, – passionless way, dedicating it only to God. And here, perhaps, is the key to the picture of Himmler, by nature a squeamish man, forcing himself silently to watch an extermination at Auschwitz. Performance of duty detached from passion was indeed what he continually sought from his staff at the death camps.

Early the following month he travelled to Rome. The highlight of his three days there was an audience with Mussolini. He gave the Duce the Führer’s greetings, which he followed, as Hitler had told him to, with an exposition of the situation on the eastern front. Afterwards they discussed the difficult supply position to North Africa and the U-boat campaign against British shipping. Finally Himmler launched into a dissertation on the Jews.

Himmler’s observations on Italy were to prove as wrong as his predictions about the Reich. Not only was Hitler fighting three great powers with superior resources in men, materials and productive capacity, but he was continuing to pay a heavy price for becoming enmeshed in world war several years too soon, before Göring had integrated the satellite economies or come near the goal of self-sufficiency in raw materials.

in 1940 while Germany spent an estimated $6 billion on armaments against Great Britain’s $3.5 billions, Britain produced 50 per cent more aircraft, twice as many heavy vehicles, twelve times as many armoured cars, more ships and almost as many tanks and guns.

Nevertheless his stock had fallen drastically, and Hitler acted as he had with the generals, virtually taking over tactical control of the air forces on the eastern front, and making all major decisions about aircraft production. His natural inclinations in favour of attack against defence and in favour of terror as the ultimate argument, together with his unscientific faith in scientific wonder weapons which would outweigh mere numerical superiority, exacerbated the already desperate situation; it was eventually to leave the Reich defenceless in the air. The one miracle weapon that could have saved Germany, the atomic bomb, was not taken seriously enough to be accorded the priority it was given in Britain and America – where, of course, Jewish physicists who had fled from Germany played a leading role.

It was up to him (Himmler) to make the first move though. He had the SS. ‘That’s exactly it, Herr Kersten. I cannot make a move against the Führer – I who am Reichsführer-SS, whose motto is “My honour is my loyalty”.’[25] Whatever part Himmler had been playing before in encouraging the peace-feelers to the west, from now on the pressures on him to effect Hitler’s removal as a precondition for negotiations increased almost by the week. On the one hand were reports from Führer headquarters and his own observations of Hitler’s behaviour which must have tended to confirm the diagnosis in his secret medical report; on the other hand the situation was worsening on every front, naturally strengthening the opposition’s call for Hitler’s removal before it was too late, naturally converting others, especially in the Army and the industrial community, to the same view.

Raeder stood the impassioned onslaught in silence, then tendered his resignation. Hitler immediately changed his tone, but Raeder stood by his decision. In his place Hitler chose the thrusting commander of the U-boat arm, Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had impressed him as much by his fanatical commitment and optimism when reporting at Führer headquarters as by the successes his boats had achieved against allied merchant shipping. Bar the ‘miracle weapons’ under development, U-boats were Hitler’s last hope for bringing the Anglo-Saxon powers to terms by cutting the Atlantic supply lines on which they depended.

Hitler’s moods were swinging with particular violence at this time and Himmler suffered from his tongue on 15 January, according to a letter Martin Bormann wrote to his wife Gerda the next day. The cause of Hitler’s displeasure is not known. It is possible that it had something to do with Himmler’s failure to nominate a successor for Heydrich as chief of the RSHA,

For behind the aggressively confident, tight-lipped façade of an incorruptible sailor, possessed of what former superiors had reported on as ‘iron will-power, goal-oriented certainty and unwearying toughness … inner enthusiasm for his profession … and absolute reliability’[29] Dönitz was basically insecure and as emotionally dependent as Himmler on a martial creed to adhere to and a war father to venerate.

intuitively sensed Dönitz’s dependence and played up to the paternal image expected. Dönitz responded with burning commitment. He was by nature inclined to see his own goals more clearly than difficulties or possible difficulties which might be raised by his opponents. This natural optimism combined now with the desire to impress his war father and gain his good opinion with his determination and will to victory was exactly what Hitler needed after Stalingrad; the relationship was a success from the start.

Five killing factories had been established by this date – not counting the smaller, earlier ones like Chelmno and Maly Trostenets which used or had used gas vans, or training camps such as Trawniki; they were Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Belzec – which had been closed down permanently in December 1942 – and Auschwitz–Birkenau. Birkenau was designed as the largest, but only gradually attained full capacity through that spring and summer of 1943. The first two of the new complexes of underground changing room/gas chamber/electric lift/crematorium ovens – the ultimate in production-line murder – came into operation in late March, the third in April and the fourth towards the end of June. Korherr submitted his first report on 23 March. It showed that up to the end of 1942 almost 2 million Jews had been ‘evacuated’ and/or submitted to ‘special treatment’. Since the figures for occupied Russian areas were incomplete, the true number was probably greatly in excess of this.

Here we are back at the question of Himmler’s concealed doubts and anxieties. For on the one hand he could observe at close quarters Hitler’s swings of mood. These veered between extreme depression and withdrawal after Stalingrad – causing Morell to announce that the Führer was suffering a manic–depressive illness and to advise a three-month rest – and what Speer described as unreasonable optimism, and Hitler’s valet as periods of high optimism despite increasingly grim reports, interspersed with periods of depression.[43] On the other hand Himmler was very aware that the ‘defeatism’ in intellectual circles of the opposition had spread to large sections of the population.

Another trend, caused by Speer’s efforts in particular to convert the economy to total war, was the fear among the bourgeoisie that National Socialism was growing indistinguishable from Bolshevism; in face of the growing concentration of state capitalism there were prophecies of ‘the ruin of the middle classes’[45] – literally the opposite of what Himmler had hoped to achieve.

First the Anglo-American armies in North Africa forced the surrender of the Axis Army which Hitler had been reinforcing – involving a loss of men and matériel comparable to that at Stalingrad. Next the Allies invaded Sicily as a stepping-stone to Italy, and towards the end of July Italian disaffection towards the war and Italy’s German ally resulted in the overthrow of Mussolini and the fascist government. These shocks were compounded by continuous Anglo-American ‘terror’ air-raids on German cities, especially Hamburg, where firestorms were created of devastating proportions, sucking trees, roofs and people into the flame centre; rumours spread of riots among the civil population being put down by police, SA or the Wehrmacht.

There was widespread cynicism about German news bulletins. In western areas people were toying with the idea of an American occupation, saying it would not be so bad, ‘perhaps even better than at present’. All hope of a victorious conclusion to the war had gone – so it appears from these SD reports – and those inclined to be hostile to the Party or cynical about the leaders were secretly looking forward to a turn in Germany like that in Italy when the Party would find itself isolated. Hitler, Goebbels, Bormann and other leaders had begun to find these SD reports disconcertingly frank and pessimistic;

The whole issue of peace with one or other of the enemy groups had been complicated by a decision of Roosevelt and Churchill announced publicly after the Casablanca conference that January that the allies would be content with nothing less than the ‘unconditional surrender’ of Germany, Italy and Japan.

The more likely explanations for Himmler repeatedly protecting the Admiral are either that Canaris had been Himmler’s and Heydrich’s man inside the Abwehr from the beginning, and Himmler trusted him to keep a close eye on the activities of Oster and the others, or, as Canaris’ biographer Heinz Höhne suggests, both Himmler and Canaris had reached the same conclusions about the hopelessness of winning the war against both east and west and were working on the same lines for Hitler’s removal and negotiations with the west. This is certainly true of Canaris; it seems to be true for at least one side of Himmler. It does not, of course, rule out the first alternative. Indeed the total disintegration of Canaris’ sense of purpose, even of his personality and appearance, marked by his staff from at least 1942 may have been due to his realisation that in taking up the appointment as Abwehr chief he had made a pact with the devil. By early 1943 he had an air of complete physical exhaustion; his face was tired and hollow, his eyes abstracted; his hand trembled.

It is at this point, with the opposing pressures on Himmler increasing by the day, on the one hand to preserve the internal discipline of the Axis in face of repeated shocks, on the other hand to remove Hitler and install a government with which the west might feel able to talk, that it is legitimate to speculate on which side of the balance Heydrich would have thrown his weight and what might have been achieved. But Heydrich was dead.

Thus far he must have been dissuaded by the answers received from the west, for as von Hassell had noted his name was coupled with Hitler’s as a synonym for all evil.

On his return he reported to Himmler, who asked factual questions and appeared to treat the project absolutely seriously. Langbehn mentioned the need to eliminate Hitler, but since this had been the constant factor in all talks with the west this could not have surprised Himmler; apparently it did not disturb him either.

It is not necessary to see Himmler’s flirtation with the opposition in black and white terms as either a genuine move against Hitler or on the other hand a high-level provocation to probe and keep the leading opposition figures under observation. It is more explicable in terms of his natural bent for intrigue, for playing one grouping against another, for knowing everything, for keeping files on everyone, and for building and maintaining power through his secret knowledge; it is explicable above all perhaps in that byzantine world in terms of his skill in keeping all options open until forced to come down for one side or another.

He discerned grounds for hope, however, the most important of which was a spiritual awakening among both Catholics and Protestants. The Catholic churches were crowded every Sunday, the Protestant churches not yet, but a movement had begun.

Every word that comes from Hitler’s mouth is a lie. If he says peace, he means war, and if in the most sacrilegious way he uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the stinking gate of hell, and his power is debased. Certainly one must conduct the battle against the National Socialist terror-state with every rational means, but whoever today still doubts the real existence of demonic powers has widely misunderstood the metaphysical background to this war. Behind the concrete, behind material perceptions, behind all factual, logical considerations stands the irrational, i.e. the battle against the demon, against the emissaries of the Anti-Christ

The undercover surveillance Himmler had ordered, or perhaps denunciations by indoctrinated students, led within days to the arrest of Hans and Sophie Scholl and several of their accomplices. They were tortured and executed. Their message outlived them; the leaflets were passed clandestinely, reaching far beyond Bavaria and making such an impression that the students were attacked by the propaganda organs as communists.

The prospect of German defeat animated resistance movements in every occupied country from western France to Russia, from Norway to Greece and the Balkans. The movements were aided by the allies and by the sheer crassness of Nazi occupation policy: in the east peoples who had greeted German forces as liberators from the oppression of Bolshevism had been turned into bitter enemies; even in the west naked exploitation and pillage, conscription for forced labour and the ruthless taking and shooting of hostages had bred hatred for the Herrenmenschen. Himmler and the SS were not alone to blame. Every organ of the Party and the Wehrmacht and the industrial power groupings shared responsibility for displaying what the French after the first war had called rightly the criminal arrogance of the German nation.

Himmler, the SS, SD and Gestapo were the chief agents of terror which was both cause and effect of the vicious, rising cycle of resistance and oppression throughout Europe. Terror was the method in which the Party was born. Terror begat terror. Yet all three armed services assisted in the restoration of internal discipline by this means and, like the big industrialists, made use of slave labour for their war production, co-operated with the SD and handed over certain categories of prisoner to them ‘for special treatment’ in full knowledge of the meaning of that euphemism. Himmler was, as he had always been, merely the most extreme, emotionally committed exponent of the orthodoxy of the master race.

A working camp with an even more frightful reputation than Auschwitz, if that were possible, was Mauthausen.

Mauthausen was but one extreme example of the way in which the ideology of the master race and the dogma of terror, besides encouraging and, for its practitioners, excusing depravity, was senselessly wasteful and counter-productive. Mauthausen had been classed in 1941 as a Category 3 camp for incorrigible criminals and asocials incapable of re-education; while the distinctions between categories of camps tended to disappear in the pressures of total war, Mauthausen preserved a specially vicious aura.

There were other anti-partisan units formed from collaborators or Red Army defectors, notably the Kaminsky Brigade which operated behind Army Group Centre, and the 1st Russian SS National Regiment commanded by a former Red Army major Gill, who had defected – in his own words – ‘not from political motives, but to save my skin’.[109] Instead of rotting from starvation and disease in a Wehrmacht camp or being handed over to the SD for ‘special treatment’ at Mauthausen or Auschwitz, Gill had elected to go for Gestapo training in ‘pacification’ measures; afterwards he had recruited a ‘national unit’ from Russian prisoners of war for operations against Soviet partisans.

An unforgettable allegory of the triumph over Jewry! The Warsaw ghetto had ceased to exist. Because Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler had willed

By the autumn of 1943 the military situation was hopeless. The summer offensive, codenamed ‘Zitadelle’, aimed at enveloping a Russian salient centred on Kursk between Army Group Centre and Army Group South, had been held and turned in armoured battles of unparalleled size and destructiveness.

There was some evidence for the view that the British and Americans were becoming anxious about Stalin’s growing power and ambition, yet it was possible to draw a conclusion diametrically opposed to Hitler’s: the worse things went for the Reich the harder both sides would press in from east and west to gain maximum advantage for themselves from the shattered carcase.

Dönitz, Rommel, appointed Commander-in-Chief in Italy, and Bormann all noted the confidence Hitler radiated at the time of the Italian crisis.[21] It probably emanated from amphetamines; it was noticed that at some time in the summer of 1943 he developed a mannerism characteristic of amphetamine use – a compulsive picking at the skin at the back of his neck ‘as if he wanted to scratch something off’.

it may be on the other hand that in this critical situation for the Reich he wished to implicate them in the extermination, as it were making them accomplices and subject to retribution if the Reich went down in defeat and the allies fulfilled a promise they had made to hunt down and punish all war criminals. Albert Speer was of this view; long after the war he wrote that he assumed Hitler had asked Himmler to reveal the extermination to the Party leaders to indicate that their bridges had been burned. However that may be, this was, so far as is known, only the second time that he dropped euphemism and spoke frankly about the awesome burden on his shoulders; the first time had been two days earlier to his senior officers.

The speech surely reveals that it was not Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich alone, nor the officials in the field alone, but the mind and soul of the Party and all those who had been convinced by the Party’s message that willed the end of the Jews. Himmler was the flywheel, Hitler the driving belt in this machine with countless cogs and gearings fuelled by hate and the urge to destroy.

It was unrealistic to expect that the disappearance of the entire millionfold Jewish race from Europe could be kept a secret; in any case too many people, German managers and workers of all nationalities in the factories at Auschwitz and throughout the General Gouvernement, and soldiers on their way to or from the eastern front, saw the flames and smelled burning flesh as their trains were shunted in the area of the death camps,

The longer von Stauffenberg discussed the change of government necessary in order to make the Reich acceptable to their enemies as a negotiating partner, the clearer it became to him and his brother Berthold, serving in the legal department of naval headquarters, that Hitler had to be killed, not simply arrested or replaced. All their plans were directed towards Hitler’s assassination as the necessary precondition for an Army take-over and the neutralisation of the SS.

It appears there were four attempts to assassinate Hitler during this period:[55] on one occasion a bomb was smuggled aboard his plane before he flew, but the detonating mechanism failed. Whether the other three attempts aborted because of Hitler’s habit of changing his schedules at the last moment in order to foil planned attempts, because of ill luck, or because Himmler learned about them and had Hitler change his itinerary is unclear.

This last phase of Nazi power in Europe saw the logic of the Weltanschauung reach its apotheosis. The oil of the Caucasus, the minerals and industries of the Donetz basin, the fertile agricultural lands of the Ukraine, eastern Lebensraum, all the ostensible targets of Hitler’s assault, had been lost during the Soviet advances of the winter and spring, together with almost a million German and Axis troops; four out of thirteen German armies in the east had been smashed, another virtually annihilated in the Crimea and forced to evacuate by sea. A Russian thrust deep into the Bukovina region of northern Rumania had split the defence of the southern area; intelligence experts of Foreign Armies East predicted a continuing Russian advance without pause from this salient north-westerly into the southern flank of Army Group Centre, the last bastion of German strength in the east.