Himmler (Peter Padfield's Second World War)

by Peter Padfield

The seriousness of the position was clear from Hitler’s appearance; shocked visitors to the Wolfschanze or the Berghof saw ‘an old, stooping man with an unhealthy, puffy face’,[63] whose left leg, arm and hand shook uncontrollably. Yet, sustained by will – or amphetamines – and his most loyal inner circle, Bormann, Himmler, Goebbels, Dönitz and Speer, he saw the turning point in his fortunes within grasp: a rush programme of new jet fighters, the ‘Vergeltung’ rockets, new U-boats with unprecedented underwater speed would prevent or defeat the allied invasion and allow him to transfer his western armies east for the decisive battle to break the ‘exhausted’ Russians.

Perhaps it also arose from a subconscious longing to rationalise what he knew to have been a crime of historic dimension – and given his devout Catholic upbringing can it be doubted that deep within, entombed by reinforced structures of dogma and reason, but quickening and twisting in the night, was a core of primal, childlike understanding that he had sinned, sinned in the sight of the Lord.

Himmler explained the Kapo system in the camps as a whole to the generals in his June speech. These approximately 40,000 German political and professional criminals were – he asked them not to laugh – his Unteroffizier corps for the whole camp community. Laughter. Each Kapo was responsible for seeing that his thirty, forty or one hundred prisoners performed their work, committed no sabotage, were clean and left their beds tidy; it could not be more orderly in a recruits’ barracks. ‘He must also drive his men,’ he continued. ‘The moment we are not satisfied with him, he is no longer a Kapo, he sleeps among the men [of his block] again. That they will kill him in the first night – that he knows.

Moreover post-war German historians of the resistance also – and with far less excuse – overlook the odium which surrounded the very name of Germany. The British and Americans were determined not to repeat the mistakes of Versailles: the German nation was to be divided so that it could never again support militarism or have the industrial capacity to sustain aggression. Since the allies were in a position to achieve this their posture was as ‘real’ as von Stauffenberg’s was ‘unreal’. Moreover the proposals from the opposition did not differ greatly from Himmler’s proposals, and were frequently conveyed via the same channels;

Everyone in the higher positions in Germany right up to Goebbels and Hitler was aware that a political solution had to be found and – since the vast majority was anti-communist – had to be found with the west.

If correct, this was a significant conversation, for as Chief of Staff von Stauffenberg would have personal access to Hitler, and it is difficult to believe that Himmler was not aware by this date, eight months after von Stauffenberg’s appointment to the Bendlerstrasse, that he was the new dynamo of the military opposition.

In Himmler’s files there is a message from January 1944 that can be construed as confirmation that he knew about the new centre of military opposition in the Bendlerstrasse building; yet it tantalises by its incompleteness and omission of names.

When General Eisenhower launched the invasion armada for the coast of Normandy in the early hours of 6 June 1944 the allies achieved complete strategic and tactical surprise. Dönitz, whose U-boats and special small craft were supposed to play a key – and suicidal – role in the critical initial stages while the troops were being landed, was on holiday with his family in the Black Forest. Rommel, commanding Army Group B on the Channel and North Sea coasts, was at home on his way to report to Hitler at the Berghof.

von Kluge consented to Rommel sounding out the army and corps commanders about their attitude in the event of a military take-over for a separate peace in France. Von Kluge’s own attitude was that he was ready to place himself at the disposal of the leaders of the military putsch if Hitler were removed, but beyond that he would not go. By the 15th Rommel had received similar assurances from all his senior officers, including the two most senior Waffen-SS commanders, Oberstgruppenführer Paul Hausser, commanding the Seventh Army, and Sepp Dietrich, commanding the I SS-Panzerkorps.

By rational calculation the war was lost. The opposition might hope that by removing Hitler they could split the enemy coalition and save the Fatherland. Hitler was probably more realistic in thinking it ‘childish and naive to expect that at a time of grave military defeat the moment for favourable political action has come. Such moments come when you are having success.’

On the 19th von Stauffenberg received confirmation that he was required at the Wolfschanze the next day. Final preparations were put in hand, codewords agreed, and the wider circle of conspirators, military and civilian, were alerted. At this stage it is worth speculating on how much Himmler might have known.

The best guess must surely be that Himmler was fully informed of the progress of the plot, knew that von Stauffenberg was the leading spirit in the young ‘Graf’s circle’, knew he had been called to the Wolfschanze on 20 July – indeed he was working with him to supply reinforcements for the eastern front – and assumed that he would or might make the attempt then. The best guess about his actions, based on the methods he had employed throughout his career, was that he intended remaining on the sidelines, waiting for the work to be done for him, confident in the ability of his organisations to take control in the wake of a successful assassination of Hitler, confident at the least that he had enough cards to be able to bargain with the military to retain his internal power. The alternative would be civil war and the complete collapse of the fronts.

It is clear, therefore, that Himmler knew treachery was afoot; whether he knew precisely that von Stauffenberg would carry a bomb to detonate at the Führer conference on the 20th is impossible to determine. At all events he did not go to the Wolfschanze that morning, but remained at his own field headquarters some miles distant, where Kersten gave him his usual treatment.

Von Stauffenberg naturally assumed that Hitler had been killed. However, from his position near the right-hand corner of the table, von Stauffenberg had placed the briefcase outside the solid transverse support, and this and the heavy table top itself, which Hitler was leaning over, acted as perfect blast deflectors. Those standing to the right of the support were severely, four mortally, wounded; the others, including Hitler, suffered shock, burst eardrums, burns, but otherwise minor laceration from splinters.

Ultimately everything turned on the fact that Hitler was not dead. It was not Himmler, ‘Gestapo’ Müller or the Leibstandarte who put down the revolt, but doubt in the minds of the conspirators. Fromm was the first leader to renege – not that he ever seems to have been fully committed. The sequence and timing of events are uncertain, but shortly before four Olbricht heard from von Haeften that he and von Stauffenberg had landed, and Hitler was undoubtedly dead. In response either to this call or to a call from OKH at about the same time, Olbricht had the pre-prepared announcements and ‘Walküre’ orders taken from the armoured safe and sent to the telex coding room below, and other instructions were despatched by hand.

Fromm allowed him to retain his revolver to take his own life, and permitted Olbricht to write a last letter to his wife, then he announced a summary court martial in the name of the Führer, and pronounced sentence of death on ‘Colonel of the General Staff Mertz [von Quirnheim], General Olbricht, the Colonel’, indicating von Stauffenberg, ‘whom I will not name, and Oberleutnant von Haeften.’ He ordered their immediate execution. So the revolt collapsed inwards at the centre. It had already broken down and for the same reasons in the provinces and Vienna and Prague.

Olbricht, von Stauffenberg, Mertz and von Haeften were taken down to the courtyard of the Bendlerstrasse building and there shot by an execution squad in the headlights of parked vehicles. They paid the price for their seniors’ earlier step-by-step compromise with the monster they had raised. Alternatively they died in a hopeless attempt to save Germany and her good name long after both had been lost irretrievably. They died as brave men, von Stauffenberg crying out at the last, ‘Es lebe das heilige Deutschland!’ (‘Long live sacred Germany!’).

According to Himmler’s account in a speech to the Gauleiters on 3 August Fromm made a ‘most peculiar’ first impression on both Goebbels and himself. He could not help thinking that some ‘uncomfortable partners, not to say witnesses, were quickly being done away with’.[5]8 Fromm was arrested next day – later to be executed himself.

It was not only Himmler who gained by the failed attempt. Hitler’s position was strengthened enormously. For the paladins at the Wolfschanze, for Keitel and Jodl and the other military men who could count themselves fortunate at escaping mutilation or death at the hands of a brother officer, for ordinary Germans oppressed, in the words of the SD public opinion report, by ‘a kind of creeping panic’[61] at the steadily worsening news from every quarter, the explosion in the conference room acted like a cathartic, releasing pent-up desperation.[62] ‘Holy wrath and boundless fury fill us at the criminal attempt on the life of our beloved Führer

Thus 20 July marked not only the disastrous end of the opposition schemes but the consummation of the Nazi revolution.

While Hitler, Bormann and the Wehrmacht chiefs were crying vengeance and instructing their people to root out and liquidate any conspirators they could find, Himmler, directly he saw that the putsch had collapsed, sought to conciliate, calm and avoid factions.

All the historic forces which had impelled Germany to this point, its necessary warrior past and all the philosophers and romantics who had forged from it the Aryan myth, the race-hygiene scientists, the Herr Professoren who had interpreted history in terms of Germany’s all-conquering mission and Kultur, the soldiers and statesmen who had drunk from the Prussian legend and created the myth of the ‘stab in the back’ and the ‘unbeaten German Army’ of the First World War – all the forces which had created Himmler’s world impelled him on, and without them he was literally nothing. At the same time all the historic forces which that mission had called into being against Germany, and the loathing, and the determination that she should be so dismembered that she could never rise again from a second Versailles to plunge Europe into a Third World War dictated that there could be no softening of the allies’ demand for unconditional surrender and the absolute destruction of all that German militarism and Nazism stood for. This was the legacy of history, and the resolution of these opposing forces could only come through further fighting, slaughter, suffering, hate and unbridled destruction.

Himmler had always appeared the most powerful figure under Hitler. It is impossible to say whether he was in practice, and meaningless to ask since he was never prepared to use his power directly to change the course of events; he amassed it to garner more as others amass fortunes and lay them up in securities and bank vaults. He infiltrated and formed alliances and when the time was ripe made spectacular take-overs, and hungered for more empires to topple and dreamed of unlimited authority in a world of Saga, but he did not, it seems he could not, flex the vast network of interlocking force he controlled, except on behalf of his Führer.

He was not, of course, ‘der treue Heinrich’ as his flirtations with the opposition and the west demonstrate. Yet neither was he the potential King Heinrich. Had he wished to take over the Reich he could scarcely have had more favourable conditions than those immediately preceding 20 July. It could be said it was the west’s failure to treat with him that kept him loyal.

The course of the 20 July conspiracy seems to indicate that he was prepared, as ever, to watch the game and toy with treason, but when the moment came he failed to act and simply allowed power to flow back to its original source. Probably he was relieved inwardly that, by sparing Hitler, Providence had taken the decision out of his hands; he could continue to serve his Führer. After 20 July his importance as perpetual second man became more marked. His powers had increased dramatically. The Army in disgrace had lost whatever moral and political authority it had retained to that date. By contrast Himmler, whose Waffen-SS grew to thirty-eight divisions – at least in name – had been entrusted with command of the Home Army and with raising the new ‘people’s divisions’; behind all his titles as Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police, Minister of the Interior, Chief of Army Armaments and commander of the Replacement Army, he was Minister of War in all but name, overall chief of intelligence, chief of the concentration camp labour and industrial complex, and had taken over responsibility for the V rocket production programme;

He and Goebbels, less than twenty years before both ragged, wandering activists for a semi-proscribed, minority cause, putting up at the poor homes of Party members wherever they spoke, became the key figures in the last stand of the system that had grown miraculously from their efforts. Hitler had disappeared from public view. Only the image Goebbels had created of him remained potent. It was Goebbels, appointed Commissioner for ‘Total War’, and Himmler, in his role as drummer for the new divisions, who sought to mobilise all resources for the war effort and recruit all males at home – then women and girls – for the defence of the Fatherland.

On 12 September Kersten, who had begun to use his special relationship as Himmler’s ‘Magic Buddha’ to persuade him to release certain prisoners from the camps, petitioned him on behalf of a group of twenty-seven priests. In the course of the discussion Himmler confessed to the mistake the Nazis had made in attacking the Church; it had proved stronger than they – the Party – but he wondered if, despite all he had attempted against it, there was still room for him inside. Agreeing to release the group, he said, ‘When I am dead, will these priests also pray for my soul?’[37]

Himmler’s failure to understand the loathing his name inspired in the west was due to his National Socialist vision, aided no doubt by wishful thinking. The hatred for him was propaganda whipped up by the Jews around Roosevelt and Churchill, but once western financiers woke up to the frightful danger of Bolshevism facing Europe they would ensure that the propaganda changed direction; then he might look forward to the British and American press hailing him and the SS as saviours of Europe.

As for the odium surrounding his name, Kersten mentioned this during a treatment that winter, and Himmler replied with justification that the west accepted Stalin as an ally, and worse could be said of him.

At all events his attitude towards the Jews did not seem to change; only his policy altered with the changing circumstances: on the one hand Auschwitz and other remaining extermination camps were vulnerable to the next Russian advance; on the other hand he needed all the labourers he could muster, chiefly for a line of anti-tank ditches and fortifications known as the East Wall to hold the Red Army before the Reich. These two factors dictated that the gassing should end, but precisely when he gave the order to stop is uncertain. The Jewish Sonderkommando at Auschwitz–Birkenau got wind of the coming change in early October and, knowing that it meant the end for them, revolted at rollcall on 7 October, throwing themselves on the guard. All were mown down with machine-gun fire. However, extermination at Birkenau continued alongside selection for the labour gangs until the end of October. It was then run down and the demolition of the gas chambers and crematoria and the destruction of camp records began.[52] This probably started earlier at other camps in former Poland.

there can be no doubt that he was restrained from making large gestures of mercy for the remaining Jews to redeem himself in western eyes by the fear of what Bormann, Goebbels and von Ribbentrop would be able to make of such a reversal of a basic Nazi tenet. Equally there can be no doubt that he lacked the moral courage to brave his Führer’s anger.

he was seeking to preserve himself, if necessary at the expense of Führer and Party.

This applied to the destruction of the Jews. His order to cease the extermination had less consequence than the necessary dismantling of the killing factories before the Russian advance. Even if he had wished it he could not have erased the effects of years of indoctrination. His order had no effect on Eichmann’s sense of mission, no effect on the desensitised camp Kommandants and guards; if Jews were not to be destroyed directly, they could still be worked and starved to death. Of course this did not apply only to Jews: the whole camp labour–industrial complex under Pohl which consumed workers as an expendable energy resource was raised to heightened tempo by the demand for production to stave off defeat, or by that deeper urge noted by Höss for death.

Such was the empire of the camps: all who were sucked in, whether guards, doctors or inmates, were caught up inevitably in the living nightmare and adapted and lived the parts ascribed and expected of them or went insane or died or were killed, or themselves killed. It was outside imagination, a nether world where primal, forbidden urges for blood, sacrifice and subjection were licensed and given free rein on non-persons; it was the inversion of love, the ultimate fantasy of the superman and the master race where ‘sub-humans’ were reduced to ‘Mussulmen’ and ‘Mussulmen’ were despatched ‘to the chimney’ and reduced to ashes.

‘However, the hard will of the RFSS was always behind him. What came from the concentration camps in war arose simply and solely from the aspiration of the RFSS.’[81] The tenor and content of Himmler’s speeches from long before the war leave no doubt that camp Kommandants and guards were fulfilling his express wishes by dehumanising and treating the inmates as fit only for labour and death; he set the example himself by verbal humiliation of the prisoners drawn up for inspection during his visits to the camps.

What came from the concentration camps in war arose simply and solely from the aspiration of the Führer .…’ The Führer, of course, expressed the will of the Party. Himmler’s creation was the extreme realisation of that will.

Nevertheless it was customary after the war, especially for officers of the regular services, to depict Himmler in the most grotesque light and invest him with every shortcoming. This was both a psychological and political necessity. By saddling him with the odium of crime, and in large measure the responsibility for disaster, they presented their own service as honourable, disguised their complicity and provided a scapegoat for the most terrible moral and material defeat suffered by the nation. There was no reason, in any case, for regular Army officers to be sympathetic towards the SS.

Kersten described him as in a highly nervous state. According to his account this was because of an order Himmler had received from Hitler to destroy the concentration camps and their inmates rather than allow them to fall into enemy hands.[33]

For any analysis of Himmler’s character, March was the testing month. The war was lost irrecoverably. In the area of his own command, roads were filled with beaten troops and civilians fleeing west; Zhukov’s tanks pressed through when they came upon them, mowing the ragged columns down indiscriminately with gunfire, grinding stragglers into the mire beneath their tracks.

and now Himmler for letting him down. He laid the blame for the rout in Pomerania directly on Himmler. In the course of a diatribe against him on 11 March, he told Goebbels that Himmler had fallen prey to the Army General Staff from the beginning of his command. Goebbels entered in his diary: ‘The Führer accuses him [Himmler] of flat disobedience and intends to give him a piece of his mind on the next available occasion and make clear that in the event of a repetition of such an instance an irreparable breach would occur between him and Himmler .…’

What he was like after his interview in the Chancellery bunker is not recorded nor what Hitler said to him, but in the evening Hitler told Goebbels in a telephone conversation that he had given him ‘an extraordinarily severe dressing-down’.[43] The grotesquely swollen ego that made Hitler lay the blame for catastrophe on everyone but himself provoked the desire, since he had to fall, to bring everything down with him. Lust for the destruction of his enemies, the driving force of his years in power and of the war itself, turned on the German Volk who had proved biologically inferior, and failed him.

Now Hitler was planning to extend the scorched-earth policy in the east to the Reich itself, ostensibly to deny the invaders means of sustaining their assault on the homeland, emotionally to vent his hate and to repay the ultimate insult to the world of his creation in blood and ashes. Of the top leadership, only Speer was able to remove himself and look into the vortex from the outside. After returning from an inspection tour of the Rhineland industries in mid-March convinced that the war was lost economically, he set about writing a memorandum – on the day Himmler received his dressing-down – to dissuade Hitler from his policy of destruction.

When Speer remonstrated, he told him that if the war were lost the nation also would perish. That was inevitable. There was no need to consider the basis for even a primitive existence – on the contrary it was better to destroy it themselves.

However Speer escaped, he demonstrated that it was possible for one of the inner circle to break free and actively to rebel. Himmler could never make the break. His roots in the ideology went deeper than Speer’s; he was also a politician of subtlety and was still attempting to sell the west the view he had developed of the SS as the instrument of anti-Bolshevik order in an Anglo-American–German western Europe.

This seems to be the explanation of his behaviour from March to the end, and it seems to delineate his character. Whether he renounced National Socialism emotionally, whether he returned to God as he told the Finance Minister, von Krosigk, later, whatever inner turmoil and tearing he experienced were concealed behind his vacillations and his actor’s masks. Goebbels wrote of him on 7 March as ‘one of our strongest personalities’.[48] Guderian, who had opportunity to study him closely during these last months, described him as ‘the most impenetrable of Hitler’s disciples’.

perhaps that is why he simplified Himmler’s extraordinary dilemma: it was not simply that his whole career and organisation had been constructed around loyalty to the Führer, it had also been constructed on absolute hostility to Bolshevism. He could no more consider surrendering to the Russians than Hitler could, and while the western allies insisted on unconditional surrender, east and west simultaneously, he felt himself unable to do any more than Hitler to stop the fighting. All his attempts at negotiating had been for an exclusively western solution.

Himmler does not appear to have been called. Perhaps he was too far away; he was establishing a headquarters at Ziethen Castle, Wustrow, on the Baltic coast to the east of Lübeck Bay, to which he could move when Berlin fell. More probably it was because he was out of favour. Sepp Dietrich’s ‘failure’ in Hungary on top of his own failure to halt the Russian thrust into Pomerania had made a bitter impression on Hitler. Goebbels’ diary entry for 30 March had recorded Hitler talking of Dietrich’s ‘guilt before history’, and he noted that ‘Himmler’s standing with the Führer has accordingly sunk noticeably.’ Himmler was a punctilious person, Hitler had told him, but no commander. He totally lacked the divine spark.

found Himmler in great distress over the way he had been almost completely abandoned by Hitler.[77] This was on top of his continuing indecision about his own responsibilities. Now there was no escaping that militarily the war was lost.

While there were many generals like his own successor, Heinrici, already sidestepping their orders and trying to create a situation in which more Germans, soldiers and civilians alike, would be able to surrender to the western allies, there were others fanatically loyal to their oath and determined to fight to the last.

Alternatively there is the simple explanation. His nerves were not strong enough for the ordeal: inadequacy he had always sought to conceal with extreme conviction and exhortations to hardness had been exposed by this ultimate test. Like a hunted animal, he was twisting frantically in every direction to find escape, using the methods of guile and camouflage and treachery with which he had climbed to and retained his power.