Heinrich Himmler : A Life (122 page)

On 21 July he therefore spoke to his officers in terms that were as grandiose as they were vague about what was known before the assassination attempt: ‘As an old Nazi [ . . . ]—and let’s be open and German about this with each other—I have always been expecting something to come from these circles. And as Reichsführer-SS, with all the information sources at my disposal and with my instinct for political developments, I was in a position to anticipate for a very long time some initiative from reactionary elements on the political spectrum. I knew it would come some time or other.’
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On 3 August 1944 he was similarly vague when addressing the party’s Reich leaders and Gauleiters: ‘We had been [ . . . ] on the trail, shall we say, of all these reactionary conspiracies for a long time.’ In this connection he
named, among others, Johannes Popitz, Franz Halder, and Erich Fellgiebel as suspects even before 20 July; while making the most derogatory remarks about those conspirators who had meanwhile been exposed, he avoided any comment about the extent to which he had been aware of concrete preparations for the coup.
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After 20 July Himmler became very active in order to compensate in retrospect for his own failure. During the night of 20–1 July Otto Skorzeny, celebrated in propaganda as the man who freed Mussolini, advanced on the Bendler block with an SS company in order to occupy the building where the headquarters of the Reserve Army (Ersatzheer) and of the conspirators were located and begin questioning the officers who were already there or who had been ordered to report there.
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On 21 July the 20 July Special Commission was created in Office IV, the Gestapo headquarters, of the Reich Security Main Office, and was composed of up to about 400 staff organized into eleven groups. In the following days 600–700 arrests were made and the commission succeeded in establishing relatively quickly the detailed sequence of events of the attempted coup: Kaltenbrunner, head of the RHSA, gave Himmler a daily report on the progress of the investigation. Nevertheless, the Gestapo remained ignorant of the actual extent of the conspiracy.
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On 30 July Himmler discussed with Hitler how to proceed against the perpetrators. Himmler noted: ‘1. Judicial process. 2. Stauffenberg family. 3. Members of the Seydlitz family.’
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In addition to the planned conviction of the conspirators and their accomplices by the People’s Court, these headings indicate that ‘clan custody’ (
Sippenhaft
) was to be applied to the family of the attempted assassin, Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, and to that of General Walther von Seydlitz, chair of the ‘League of German Officers’ founded by German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union.
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Above and beyond the Stauffenberg and Seydlitz families, the Gestapo took more than 140 family members into custody in July and August.
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On 25 October Kaltenbrunner let Bormann know that Himmler had refused ‘to establish specific guidelines regarding clan custody. The whole of Count Stauffenberg’s family must be taken into custody. Otherwise every case must be examined individually.’
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On 21 November Müller gave instructions on how to proceed with clan custody: thereafter Himmler intended to decide personally whether this form of internment was to be imposed.
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The regime was to make use of clan custody up to the end of the war. In
April 1945 200 people in this category were still interned in Dachau concentration camp, to which they had eventually been moved.

In addition, Himmler exploited the attempted coup to justify a new wave of mass arrests. He obtained Hitler’s permission to do so on 14 August 1944, as he noted in his calendar: ‘Arrests of S.P.D. and K.P.D. bigwigs.’ At the same time he recorded: ‘Thälmann is to be executed.’ Four days later the former head of the KPD, who had been in a concentration camp since 1933, was in fact murdered.
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The arrest of the ‘bigwigs’ extended to all former KPD and SPD members of the Reichstag and regional assemblies and town councillors throughout the Reich. In this ‘Operation Thunderstorm’, as Müller, the Gestapo chief, made clear in instructions to the regional offices, it was ‘irrelevant [ . . . ] whether there is any evidence against them at this point’. Even ‘former SPD party and union secretaries’ were to be included in the operation, which was to be carried out in the early hours of 22 August. The day before, Müller, again on Himmler’s orders, gave instructions for former elected representatives belonging to the Catholic Centre Party also to be arrested, among them the former mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer. Far in excess of 5,000 people were targeted, the majority of whom were, however, released after two to four weeks. The whole operation was evidently designed to intimidate overwhelmingly any actual or potential opponents.
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The Gestapo did, however, see to it that opponents of the regime in their custody, either prominent ones or those the Gestapo considered the most dangerous, did not survive the war. In April 1945 an official in military intelligence, Hans von Dohnanyi, former head of military intelligence Wilhelm Canaris, his deputy Hans Oster, the military judge Karl Sack, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Georg Elser, who had attempted to assassinate Hitler, were murdered in concentration camps.
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The campaign of retribution against the 20 July plotters and all other opponents was, however, only one of the consequences of the failed coup. On the very day of the assassination attempt Hitler appointed Himmler chief of the Reserve Army in succession to Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm, Stauffenberg’s immediate superior, who had been aware of the
conspiracy. Thus Himmler acquired one of the most important posts within the army: the range of his responsibilities covered, among other things, military equipment, law-enforcement throughout the army, prisoners of war, reserve personnel, and training, in other words, all army training establishments. In fact, in the summer of 1944 the Reserve Army consisted of almost 2 million men. Although this appointment was made as an immediate response to the coup attempt and was intended to humiliate and punish the military, from whose ranks the conspirators came, it was not a complete surprise. For on 15 July, five days before the coup, Himmler had decisively invaded Fromm’s sphere of influence, something that, incidentally, may well have contributed to Fromm’s final realization that a coup was unavoidable if the army were not to be at the mercy of the SS in the short or long term.

On 15 July Hitler had transferred to Himmler the responsibility in future for ‘training, National Socialist indoctrination, disciplinary penal codes, and courts martial’ in the case of fifteen planned new army divisions—a significant encroachment by the Reichsführer-SS on the army and one that gave rise to the expectation that in future Himmler would be put entirely in charge of the creation of new Waffen-SS units. For Himmler, this extension of his powers and the prospects arising from it were of decisive strategic importance, for they provided the means of overcoming the shortage of personnel that threatened the SS in 1944; for the recruitment quota conceded to it by the army was no longer adequate to cover the SS members required to replace German Waffen-SS casualties. And a further aspect is important: there was a subtle connection between this task of Himmler’s to establish new army divisions and ‘train’ them as National Socialists and his addresses to the generals in May and June, in which he had openly admitted the murder of the Jews. By this means the army was being told in no uncertain terms that it was now an instrument of the political and ideological objectives of the regime, and shared responsibility for the criminal consequences of the latter’s policies.

On the afternoon of 15 July Himmler spoke with Fromm, who only a few hours beforehand had been curtly informed by Hitler in the Führer headquarters of the new arrangement. In this interview Fromm, who had been steamrollered by events, subordinated the new divisions to Himmler ‘with regard to their deployment’, allowed him to have a say about who should fill the officer posts, and agreed to the subordination of the planned divisions (which after 20 July were to be given the martial name of National
Grenadier Divisions) to three SS general commandos yet to be formed, which could be established only with massive support from the army.
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The boundaries between army and Waffen-SS had therefore already been almost completely obliterated when on 20 July Himmler gained control of a substantial part of the army in the form of the Reserve Army. Having been appointed Reich Minister of the Interior the previous year, he prepared to unite in his own person this monopoly of power spanning the whole Reich territory—a reinvention of the old idea of a state protection corps, though one now operating under the conditions of war and of positively gigantic proportions.

If his appointment is viewed in the context of a series of other important shifts of responsibility it also becomes apparent that the failed assassination provided an opportunity for a group of Nazi political leaders who for some time had been demanding ‘total war’ to get their way. These men had agreed amongst themselves and attempted to pressure Hitler in this direction. As has already been mentioned, Himmler must be counted as one of this group, along with Goebbels, Bormann, and Speer. On 25 July Hitler gave Goebbels authority and far-reaching powers to move to total war,
¹⁷
and empowered Bormann to execute all necessary measures to ‘bring about a total war effort’ within the party and its structures. Bormann was to exploit this responsibility, among other things, to extend Himmler’s monopoly of power. According to a decree from the Führer of 20 September 1944, in the event of enemy forces penetrating into Reich territory executive power in the field of operations was removed from the military commanders and transferred to the so-called Reich defence commissars (the Gauleiters). It was then Himmler’s task to ‘coordinate throughout the Reich’ the measures to be taken in the field of operations by the Reich defence commissars.
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The ‘gang of four’, namely, Goebbels, Bormann, Himmler, and Speer, therefore had the Nazi apparatus of power de facto in their hands to a considerable extent, while at the same time being careful neither to question Hitler’s leadership nor to take any steps openly against the official number two in the state, Göring. They operated only within a sphere of activity determined by Hitler and made no serious attempt to exceed these boundaries. None of the four, for example, took any initiative to convince the others that the war could be ended only without Hitler; in each case their link to the ‘Führer’, both personal and as part of the political power structure, was too strong. Thus the powerful foursome moved towards inevitable and total defeat.

In the night of 20–1 July Himmler, in his new capacity as commander of the Reserve Army, gave his first instructions. He reversed the orders that had been issued the previous day in Fromm’s name and began to fill the top posts in his new sphere of operations with reliable SS leaders. On 21 July he appointed Hans Jüttner, director of the SS Leadership Main Office, as his deputy and Chief of Staff.
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How Himmler saw his responsibility was something he revealed a few days after his appointment, when he wrote to Fegelein, his liaison officer in Hitler’s headquarters, that ‘everyone who opened his mouth’ would have to ‘be shot ruthlessly’ by ‘detection commandos [ . . . ] composed of the most brutal commanders’.
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He gave his first address to officers from the army armaments office and the General Army Office on 21 July. The coup had occasioned ‘deep grief for us soldiers’, he announced, even though he could by no means be sure about the grief of those present. As an antidote to the spirit of revolt he advocated a return to the ‘genuine, ancient military virtues’, and to illustrate his point invoked the familiar catalogue he had been making the SS commit to for years. To the virtues of loyalty, obedience, comradeship, hard work, and truthfulness he added another, however: faith. ‘All your training, selection, and skill’, he impressed on the officers, ‘has been in vain if it is not founded on unshakeable faith in the German prerogative and German victory. I base this faith on the merits of our Germanic faith and of our race. I am convinced that we are of greater worth than the others.’
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In the following days there were more speeches to officers of army divisions that were similarly constructed round the catalogue of virtues, ‘decency’ of course being one of them. No attentive listener could fail to notice, however, that the ‘faith’ that Himmler conjured up in these speeches was only supposed to conceal the fact that he could not come up with anything to counter the increasingly hopeless situation of the Third Reich.
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Yet on 3 August 1944, to the party’s Reich leaders and Gauleiters, Himmler presented a completely different face. There was no more talk of communal ‘grief’. Instead, Himmler was settling scores with the military leaders, ‘this clique’. Every undesirable development, crisis, and defeat suffered by the German army since the end of the First World War was, he claimed, the result of a conspiracy of reactionary and incompetent General Staff officers: from 1941 onwards ‘these staffers’ were increasingly to blame ‘for the spread of defeatism from the top to the bottom of the army’.
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At the beginning of August Hitler authorized Himmler, ‘for the purpose of reducing staff to examine and simplify the entire organizational and administrative basis of the army, the Waffen-SS, the police, and the OT [Organisation Todt, the Wehrmacht’s construction group]’. By so doing he was giving Himmler leave to intervene in the organization of the Army as a whole.
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Himmler delegated this task to Pohl, the Head of the Business and Administrative Main Office, though Pohl discovered that a special appointee in the shape of General Heinz Ziegler had only a few months previously been given the job by Hitler of standardizing the Wehrmacht’s organization. Pohl was therefore in favour of discretion, but Himmler let him know that that he was ‘not interested’ in whether ‘General Ziegler is still there or not’.
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Two months later he expressly forbade Pohl ‘to make even the slightest concession’ to the Wehrmacht High Command.
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