Heinrich Himmler : A Life (11 page)

Little Käthe sat on the sofa; she was wearing a grey dress that she’d made herself and which really suited her. I sat opposite her in the armchair [ . . . ] We got on really well. We talked about lots of examples of egoism, jealousy, etc., about Theo, the nice Rehrls, about a lot of things, a lot of intimate things as one does between friends. Little Käthe was very sweet. In this way I was able to tell her a lot and this time we definitely got close. Naturally, whether it will last remains to be seen. But we have formed an intimate bond [ . . . ] I went home very contented. It was a nice and worthwhile evening.
³³

In June 1922 he met an Ingolstadt acquaintance on the train. ‘She has a large landholding with a lot of livestock. A straightforward, often boyish, but I think, sweet and lively girl. It’s the same as usual: I would need only to make the first move, but I can’t flirt and I can’t commit myself now—if I don’t definitely feel this is “the one”.’
³⁴

Himmler kept creating situations that he felt were erotic and which aroused his fantasy, while at the same time insisting to himself that he must refrain from taking advantage of them. Himmler believed in sexual abstinence, not only because he believed he ought to wait for ‘the right one’, but also because he considered he was on the brink of deciding on his future and so could not enter into any binding commitment. In a short time he hoped he would either be going off to war as an officer or on a journey to a far-off land as a settler.

‘Talked about women,’ he wrote after a Carnival party about a conversation with Ludwig,

and how on evenings like these a few hours can bring one close to other people. The memory of such times is among the purest and finest one can experience. They are moments when one would like to kneel down and give thanks for what one is blest with. I shall always be grateful to those two sweet girls. I would not like to call
it love but for a few hours we were fond of each other and the lovely memory of it will last forever. Only one notices how one thirsts for love and yet how difficult and what a responsibility it is to make a choice and a commitment.—Then one gets to thinking, if only we could get involved in some more conflicts, war, mobilisation—I am looking forward to my duel.
³⁵

The repression of the subject of sexuality through the invocation of masculinity, heroism, and violence, and his self-imposed conviction that, predestined to be a solitary fighter and hero, he could not enter into any emotional commitments, form a constant refrain in his diary entries: ‘I am in such a strange mood. Melancholy, yearning for love, awaiting the future. Yet wanting to be free to go abroad and because of the coming war, and sad that the past is already gone [ . . . ] Read. Exhausted. Bed.’
³⁶
And on the occasion of Gebhard’s engagement we read: ‘Another of our group of two years ago has gone. Commitment to a woman forms a powerful bond. For thou shalt leave father and mother and cleave to thy wife. I am glad that once again two people so close to me have found happiness. But for me—struggle.’
³⁷

In May 1922 he visited friends in the country. As a prude, Himmler considered they were rather too permissive; he was shocked at their 3-year-old daughter, who ran around naked indoors in the evenings: ‘Irmgard ran about naked before being put to bed. I don’t think it’s at all right at three, an age when children are supposed to be taught modesty.’
³⁸

His time with the family clearly provoked him so much so that he wrote at greater length on it in his diary:

She is a thoroughly nice, very competent, sweet but very tough-minded creature with an unserious way of looking at life and particular moral rules. He is a very skilled doctor and also a very decent chap. His wife can be very headstrong, and he has trained her well [ . . . ] He can be egotistic when he needs to be but he is a patriot and all in all a proper man.—The fact is, there are two kinds of people: there are those (and I count myself among them) who are profound and strict, and who are necessary in the national community but who in my firm view come to grief if they do not marry or get engaged when they’re young, for the animalistic side of human nature is too powerful in us. Perhaps in our case the fall is a much greater one.—And then there are the more superficial people, a type to which whole nations belong; they are passionate, with a simpler way of looking at life without as a result getting bogged down in wickedness, who, whether married or single, charm, flirt, kiss, copulate, without seeing any more to it—as it is human and quite simply nice.—The two of them belong to this type of person. But I like them and they like me and by and large I like all these Rhinelanders and Austrians. They are all
superficial but straightforward and honest.—But in my heart I cannot believe in their type even if, as now, the temptation is often strong.
³⁹

The masculine world, defined by a combative spirit and military demeanour, in which he spent a large part of his free time, the fencing sessions and evenings for the male membership of the Apollo fraternity, and the paramilitary scene he belonged to in Munich offered him a certain support and refuge amidst all the confusion. He was therefore all the more unsettled when, in March 1922, a fellow student lent him Hans Blüher’s book on
The Role of Eroticism in Masculine Society
. This was a work much discussed at the time, the author of which puts forward the theory that the cohesiveness of movements defined by masculinity, such as the youth movement and the military, is explicable only on the basis of strong homoerotic attachments. It was precisely these attachments, which must be judged entirely positively, that made the members of these organizations capable of the highest achievements.

Himmler was shocked, as his diary indicates: ‘Read some of the book. It’s gripping and deeply disturbing. One feels like asking what the purpose of life is, but it does have one.—Tea. Study. Dinner. Read some more. [ . . . ] Exercises. 10.30 bed, restless night.’
⁴⁰
Impressed, he noted in his reading-list: ‘This man certainly penetrated to immense depths into the erotic in human beings and has grasped it on a psychological and philosophical level. Yet, for my liking, he goes in for too much bombastic philosophy in order to make some things convincing and to dress them up in scholarly language.’ One thing, however, was plain to him: ‘That there has to be a masculine society is clear. But I’m doubtful whether that can be labelled as an expression of the erotic. At any rate, pure pederasty is the aberration of a degenerate individual, as it’s so contrary to nature.’
⁴¹

Himmler’s defence mechanism against women who had at first definitely aroused his erotic interest, his abrupt smothering of erotic ideas by means of fantasies of violence, but also his alarm when suddenly confronted by the homoerotic aspect of the world of male organizations are all phenomena associated with the basic attributes of the ‘soldierly man’ of those post-war years, and were widespread in the Munich milieu in which Himmler moved. In the 1970s, in his study
Male Fantasies
, which has since become a classic, Klaus Theweleit analysed the typical defensive behaviour of these men towards women on the basis of memoirs and novels from the milieu of the Free Corps. According to Theweleit: ‘Any move “towards a woman” is
stopped abruptly and produces images and thoughts connected to violent actions. The notion of “woman” is linked to the notion of “violence”.’
⁴²
The Free Corps fighters—and the young men who took them as their model in the paramilitary movements of the time—were basically in a world without women. In order to control and suppress their urges they had acquired a ‘body armour’; physical union was experienced only in the bloody ecstasy of conflict or in their fantasies of conflict.

The image of the ideal woman, untouchable and desexualized, invoked by Himmler after he first came across it in the sex-education manual by Wegener is similarly typical of its time and milieu. Theweleit has described it in the form of the ‘white nurse’ who appears either as a mother or as a sister figure; for him she is ‘the epitome of the avoidance of all erotic/threatening femininity. She guarantees the continued existence of the sister incest taboo and the link to a super-sensuous caring mother figure.’
⁴³
Even Himmler got carried away when he met the sister of a seriously ill fellow student, who was looking after him: ‘These girls are like that; they surrender themselves to the pleasure of love, but can show exceptional and supremely noble love; indeed that’s usually the case.’
⁴⁴

War, struggle, renunciation—these three things intoxicated him, but the war still did not come and so, during his second stay in Munich, Himmler continued to pursue the idea of emigrating. But even this was more a case of castles in the air, a flight from the reality of post-war Germany, than of concrete plans.

At first Turkey attracted him; a Turkish student friend told him about the country and people: ‘People are given as much land as they can cultivate. The population is supposed to be very willing and good-hearted, but one has to spare their feelings.’
⁴⁵
Then, after a lecture at the League of German officers (General von der Goltz was speaking about the Baltic region and ‘Eastern European issues’), he noted that he now knew ‘more certainly than ever that if there’s another eastern campaign I’ll join it. The east is the most important thing for us. The west is liable to die. In the east we must fight and settle.’
⁴⁶

The next day he cut out a newspaper article about the possibilities of emigration to Peru: ‘Where will I end up. Spain, Turkey, the Baltic, Russia, Peru? I often think about it. In two years I’ll not be in Germany any more, God willing, unless there is fighting, war and I’m a soldier.’
⁴⁷
In January he took a brief shine to Georgia, and asked himself again: ‘Where will I end up, which woman will I love and will love me?’
⁴⁸
A few weeks later, in
conversation with his mentor Rehrl, he came back to the subject of Turkey: ‘It would not cost much to build a mill on the Khabur.’
⁴⁹

Running parallel to this, his efforts to embark on a career as an officer proved fruitless, although his redoubled attempts since the beginning of 1922 to establish contacts with officers of the Reichswehr—at the beginning of December 1921 he had finally received his accreditation as an ensign
⁵⁰
—and his activities throughout that year in the paramilitary scene in Munich resulted in his becoming more closely linked to potential leaders of a putsch. At a meeting of the Freiweg Rifle Club, for example, he had an important encounter: ‘Was at the Rifle Club’s evening at the Arzberg cellar—things are happening there again. Captain Röhm and Major Angerer were there too, very friendly.’
⁵¹

After only a few months in Munich he felt as frustrated as he had done during his first year of study. The confidence he had gained in Fridolfing that he would be able to show a new face to the world had dissipated. In his diary the self-reproaches mount up: he is simply incapable of keeping his mouth shut, a ‘miserable chatterer’.
⁵²
This is his ‘worst failing’.
⁵³
‘It may be human but it shouldn’t happen.’
⁵⁴
He constantly observed himself in his relations with other people to check if he was showing the necessary self-confidence—and usually the result, from his perspective, turned out to be unsatisfactory. ‘My behaviour still lacks the distinguished self-assurance that I should like to have’, he noted in November 1921.
⁵⁵
While visiting Princess Arnulf, the mother of his late godfather, he had, as he realized afterwards, forgotten ‘to ask after her health’; even so: ‘Apart from the leave-taking my conduct was fairly assured.’
⁵⁶

Himmler at times regarded himself as a thoroughly unfortunate character, a clumsy buffoon. Dressed up as an Arab at a big Carnival party at the Loritz home, which had been decorated as a ‘harem’, he noted laconically: ‘Loritz offered guests a colossal amount, beginning with cocoa, which I spilt all over my trousers.’
⁵⁷
His lapidary description of a dance attended by members of his Apollo fraternity was unintentionally comic: ‘All of us Apollonites were sitting at a table with our ladies. I hadn’t brought one.’
⁵⁸
On a visit to friends in the country he had to put up with mockery from the woman of the house: ‘In particular, she poked fun at me when I said I had
never chatted up girls and so forth, and called me a eunuch.’
⁵⁹
Moreover, he had continual problems with his stomach, particularly when he had been up late the previous night. Because of his problems his fraternity gave him permission not to drink beer.
⁶⁰

Himmler showed distinct feelings of inferiority provoked by the repeated experience of not getting the emotional support he expected from other people. His attachment disorder kept resulting in his being left with a vague sense of emptiness after encounters with people who were actually close to him. After a visit by his mother to Munich, which culminated in coffee and cakes at the Loritz home (‘Mrs Loritz, Lu, Kätherle, Aunt Zahler, Mariele, Pepperl, Aunt Hermine, Paula, Mother, Gebhard, and me’), he became ‘very monosyllabic’ at the end. In the evening he took stock: