Army of Evil: A History of the SS (8 page)

He also resigned from his job. With Germany seemingly on the brink of civil meltdown, semi-official volunteer units were being created from the various paramilitary groups and fragments of the Free Corps. The Imperial Flag had split, and Himmler followed Röhm into the Imperial War Flag faction. From there, he applied to and was accepted by the Werner Company, a volunteer unit sponsored by the German Army. This group was soon disbanded, but Himmler was back in the Imperial War Flag when Röhm took it into the folkish-nationalist combat league at the end of September 1923.

Consequently, Himmler had a small, walk-on role in the
Putsch
. On the evening of 8 November, Röhm led his group to the Bavarian War Ministry building, and Himmler carried the banner (which, of course, was the old imperial war flag). There is some confusion about whether they gained access to the building,
*
but they certainly surrounded it: Himmler was photographed outside, clutching the flag atop a barricade. Before long, they themselves were surrounded by the police, who approached carefully in armoured vehicles and set up their own machine guns and light artillery.

It was to Röhm’s besieged group that Hitler and his cohorts were marching when the shooting broke out on the Residenzstrasse on 9 November. The Imperial War Flag was attacked on the same day, but
after two men had been killed, and Röhm and a few other leaders had been arrested, the remainder, including Himmler, were disarmed and allowed to go home.
¹⁴

This was a defining event in Himmler’s life. It made him an active comrade of men whom he greatly admired; it gave him a cause; and it satisfied a deep urge to be at the centre of conspiratorial events and “in the know.” He was an assiduous organiser of his own and, to some extent, his family and friends’ lives, to such an extent that some thought him an interfering busybody, and he carried this trait into his membership of the Imperial War Flag.

In the aftermath, his worried parents hoped that he would settle down and resume his career. Instead, he devoted his energies to keeping alive the flame of the Imperial War Flag and acting as a courier between folkish groups and leaders who were trying to revive the movement. He also joined the National Socialist Freedom Movement—Gregor Strasser’s successor group to the NSDAP—and gave several public speeches during the 1924 election campaign. He travelled from town to town on his motorbike, lecturing small crowds, proselytising the message of National Socialism, which meant he had now embraced the extreme anti-Semitism of the movement. He still kept an assiduous record in his diary of what he was reading, and around this time these lists are dominated by anti-Semitic pamphlets, heroic German myths and several spiritualist and occult tracts.
¹⁵
He adopted militant anti-Semitism simply because that was the creed of the movement and the milieu he had joined. In his youth, he had been no more than a “mild” anti-Semite, and his father had several Jewish friends. However, his post-war association with such radical nationalists as Röhm undoubtedly focused his attention on the “Jewish question.” The anti-Semitic propaganda he read, especially when combined with the romantic German imagery that had been a staple of his life since childhood, evidently had a striking and deep-seated effect on him.

There can also be little doubt that Himmler had a powerful desire to conform to the values of anyone he admired and respected. In his
youth, he had submerged himself in the bourgeois Roman Catholic mores of his parents, family and schoolfriends; as a young adult, he wholeheartedly—even fanatically—subscribed to the radical, militarist nationalism of his student circle; and once he entered the National Socialist movement, he eagerly adopted its virulent anti-Semitism.

Himmler’s campaigning did not go unnoticed, and in July he was offered the position of Gregor Strasser’s secretary. Strasser was a resident of Landshut so probably knew the Himmlers from their time in the town, but it was equally possible that Himmler was recommended by Röhm or another leading National Socialist. Either way, Himmler, at the age of just twenty-three, was now on the National Socialist payroll.
¹⁶
At the time, Strasser was regional leader for Lower Bavaria and a deputy in the Bavarian
Landtag
(state parliament) and was also forging links with National Socialist–leaning groups in northern Germany and the Rhineland. It seems that Himmler was tasked with holding together the various threads of the semi-underground National Socialist groupings—both party and SA—in Lower Bavaria. Strasser thought his new secretary was “incredibly keen…he’s a perfect arms NCO. He visits all the secret depots.”
¹⁷

In the December general election, Strasser was one of the few National Socialists elected to the Reichstag, which meant he needed Himmler even more and led to Himmler’s appointment as Strasser’s deputy regional leader for Lower Bavaria. This was a significant promotion: Lower Bavaria was one of the key strongholds of National Socialism. The fact that a man as young as Himmler was put in effective charge of this region after just over a year in the party speaks volumes for his reputation as an administrator and organiser, if not his personal charisma and popularity among the rest of the membership (Strasser was unlikely to appoint a potential rival in his place).

Himmler was therefore the “man on the spot” when Schreck’s “protection squad” circular arrived in Lower Bavaria. However, he had already joined the SS on 2 August, when he was given membership
number
*
168
¹⁸
(he had nominally joined the SA on the same day). As Strasser’s deputy, Himmler was no doubt privy to the internal workings of party headquarters in Munich, which explains how he had prior knowledge of the new organisation before it was announced to the mass of the party.

There is little record of Himmler’s SS activities at this stage, and he may well have devoted as much, if not more, of his time to several other organisations. He was, for example, the Regional Leader in Bavaria for the Artamanen Society, a folkish agricultural society that espoused a “back to the land” ideology and advocated settling German farmers in the East as a sort of pioneer group. The putative elite status of the SS within the NSDAP, and its focus on intelligence-gathering, probably appealed strongly to Himmler, but there was no reason for him to think that it would ever become anything more than a small bodyguard service. He did take his squad to the “Party Day” at Weimar in July 1926, when the Blood Banner was placed in the custody of the organisation, but it seems likely that Himmler’s role as Strasser’s deputy took precedence over any SS activity.

In September 1926, Strasser was appointed National Propaganda Leader, but he was still busy with his Reichstag duties and organising the North German National Socialists, so much of the propaganda work was actually done by Himmler, who deputised for him in this role as well. He is credited with inventing the technique of saturating an area with posters, speakers and canvassers, which became the standard campaign method for the NSDAP. Equally importantly, from September 1926, he was working in the party’s headquarters in Munich and so was able to impress the people who really mattered. At this relatively early stage, the majority of the NSDAP’s members and indeed its leadership were still members of the lower middle classes,
so the well-educated, bourgeois Himmler would certainly have stood out.

It was also in 1926 that Himmler met the woman he would eventually marry. Margarete (“Marga”) Siegroth was the daughter of a Prussian landowner. A qualified nurse, she and a Jewish gynaecologist had opened a private clinic in Berlin,
¹⁹
where they practised homoeopathy, hypnosis and a variety of other popular, alternative treatments. Himmler met her while sheltering from a rain shower in a hotel lobby at Bad Reichenhall, and was apparently captivated by her statuesque figure, blond hair and blue eyes. Marga was eight years older than him, a Protestant and a divorcée, but as far as Himmler was concerned, it was love at first sight. According to Otto Strasser,
²⁰
Himmler lost his virginity to her, which is probably true, because he remained extremely socially conservative and prudish.

In September 1927, Himmler became Heiden’s deputy in the SS. There was a certain logic to this appointment: in his previous propaganda role, Himmler had made use of intelligence reports compiled by SS groups that detailed the activities of left-wing opponents and right-wing rivals; and, of course, he himself had been an active member of the SS almost since its inception. His enthusiasm and organisational talent were two more points in his favour, and he wasted little time in exerting his influence. In “SS Order No. 1,” which he issued on 13 September 1927,
²¹
he tightened up regulations to ensure that SS members always appeared in the same uniform, rather than in sportswear and lederhosen, which had apparently been worn at a recent Nuremberg Party Day. Another directive was that local SS units should conduct at least four “activities” each month, two of which had to involve drill and singing. Finally, the order enjoined local SS commanders to begin forwarding various pieces of information to party headquarters: systematic intelligence reports about opponents’ political activities; the names of prominent local Jews and Freemasons; special community events; secret orders and plans of political opposition groups; and press
clippings about the party.
²²
This presaged the SS’s later role as the Third Reich’s primary security organisation.

Himmler soon became the driving force within the organisation. He still fulfilled his propaganda duties—although Strasser handed responsibility for propaganda over to Hitler in the run-up to the spring 1928 elections
*
—but he found the time and the energy gradually to eclipse Heiden. According to Koehl, the latter “seems to have become a fifth wheel, hanging around the offices of the ‘[Folkish] Observer’ as a survival of an earlier free corps type.”
²³
Even so, the SS remained a comparatively small and obscure organisation. By comparison, Pfeffer von Salomon’s SA, the party’s mass uniformed group, was commanding much of the leadership’s attention and was increasingly being used by the younger generation of leaders as the workhorse of the movement.

Although a full-time party official, Himmler’s salary at this time was relatively modest. Following his marriage to Marga in 1928, they used the proceeds of the sale of her clinic to fund the purchase of a small farm at Waldtrudering, near Munich, where they intended to supplement their income by raising chickens. However, despite Himmler’s enthusiasm for agriculture, by now his party duties were leaving him little time for either the farm or his new wife. Indeed, the couple were soon leading largely separate lives, a pattern that would continue until Himmler’s death. Their only child, a daughter named Gudrun (known as Püppi), was born in 1929. By then, her father was busy plotting a path that would make him one of the most powerful men in Germany.

*
His appointment was later officially backdated to 6 January for reasons which remain unclear.

*
Padfield, for example, says, “Röhm could not gain access” (p. 65), while Höhne has him “in possession of the War Ministry…the muzzles of their machine guns poked menacingly out of the windows” (p. 36).

*
It isn’t entirely clear how SS membership numbers were allocated. Individuals who joined before Himmler have higher numbers (for example, see Bednarek above). It is probably the case that numbers were allocated by the SS HQ in Munich and that, therefore, it was easier for those in close physical proximity to prod them into action.

*
Hitler took control of party propaganda in the run-up to the elections in the spring of 1928 before handing over responsibility to two individuals: Josef Goebbels in Berlin and Fritz Reinhardt in Munich.

T
here is no record of what specific instructions were given to Heinrich Himmler when he took over as National Leader of the SS on 20 January 1929. Following his two predecessors’ poor performance, it is likely that he was simply told to rejuvenate the organisation and increase its membership.