Heinrich Himmler : A Life (125 page)

It was believed in all earnestness that such serious inadequacies in a fighting force consisting primarily of adolescent boys and old men could be compensated for by guerrilla tactics, by means of which—supported by tricks and guile—every copse and every farm was to be fought for. Borrowing an idea from the Chief of the General Staff, Heinz Guderian, Berger recommended to the men of the Volkssturm the novels of Karl May
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as ‘training literature’.
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In fact the Volkssturm was used above all for basic tasks such as evacuating towns and villages before enemy troops arrived.
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From October, however, battalions were deployed at the front in East Prussia,
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and from November on the western front near Metz. But the results were so negative that in February Hitler ordered that Volkssturm units should in future be used only to protect the rear areas. Nevertheless, in the following months Volkssturm units were to be repeatedly sent to the front, above all in the east.
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Even if the military value of this last effort remained slight, the fact that the structure of the Volkssturm, down to its local groups, mirrored that of the party organization
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showed what Himmler’s and Bormann’s first priority was with regard to it, namely, that all men capable of bearing arms should be recorded and disciplined by the party (Volkssturm soldiers were subject to the jurisdiction of the SS and police courts). The primary motive for the creation of the Volkssturm was therefore, in all probability, the Nazi leadership’s fear that the war could be brought to a premature end by means
of a rebellion on the home front. Nazi leaders at the highest level in the final phase of the war were driven by this anxiety, and the memory of 1918, which was constantly adduced in this connection, reveals to what extent members of the Nazi elite had fallen victim to the myth of the stab in the back, which they themselves had conjured up often enough.

In his radio address of 18 October Himmler alluded to a further organization that he had brought into being along with the Volkssturm: ‘Even in the territory they believe they have conquered,’ he warned the Allies, ‘the German will to resist will constantly spring to life again, and, like werewolves, death-defying volunteers will damage and destroy the enemy from the rear.’
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On 19 September Himmler had already appointed Obergruppenführer Hans Prützmann, former HSSPF for Russia-South, as ‘General Inspector for Special Intelligence’, and authorized him to create small undercover units that would carry out acts of sabotage behind enemy lines on German territory under threat of occupation. These partisans were to be trained in the camps of the guerrilla combat troops, special anti-partisan units led by Otto Skorzeny. They were placed under the HSSPF. Preparations for guerrilla fighting on German soil were given the name ‘Werewolf’.

This was an allusion to the title of a book (
Der Wehrwolf
) by Hermann Löns,
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much read in its day and one disseminated by the regime, a heroizing portrayal of a secret resistance group of peasants from the Lüneburg Heath at the time of the Thirty Years War who defend their homes against marauding freebooters. The spelling ‘Werwolf’, which Himmler himself used, was at the same time a reminder of the creature of folklore, a human being who under cover of night transforms into an animal.

The fact that the werewolf units were originally conceived for fighting in border areas temporarily occupied by the enemy was responsible for the relatively late preparations for an armed underground in Gaus located in the German interior. Only a few more far-reaching plans to continue the fight even after a surrender were developed, as such considerations were forbidden on principle in view of the Nazi rhetoric of ultimate victory.

In spite of these significant obstacles, the creation of the werewolf units was by no means without effects and consequences. For the idea current today that they all simply broke up after the Allies swept over them is not entirely accurate. Although the attempt to build up a guerrilla movement in
occupied Germany was unsuccessful (the decisive prerequisite—namely, support from the population, which was in fact sick of war—was lacking), new research indicates that werewolves and other fanatics from the civilian population who continued the fight against the Allies on their own initiative even after the occupation did in fact carry out thousands of attacks, and hundreds of allied soldiers and German ‘collaborators’ fell victim to them.
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The most spectacular werewolf operation was the murder on 25 March 1945 of Franz Oppenhoff, who had been appointed Oberbürgermeister of Aachen by the Allies on 31 October 1944. The Aachen district court, which carefully reconstructed this case in 1949, discovered that the murder was carried out on the personal orders of Himmler, passed on by Prützmann in November 1944 to the responsible HSSPF. The HSSPF’s attempt to ignore them was in vain. Himmler issued numerous reminders in letters and by telephone, and the murder was eventually carried out by a commando group that had been smuggled through the front line.
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When, in the autumn of 1944, after Allied troops had occupied almost the whole of France, the western frontier of the Reich came under threat, Himmler was given a further military task: in November Hitler appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the Upper Rhine, with the powers of an army group commander, his job being first and foremost to construct a sort of defensive front out of the assorted units of the Reserve Army, Volkssturm, border patrols, and police.

In the first week in January units of the army group Upper Rhine reinforced the offensive of army group C, located north of it in Alsace (Operation North Wind), which was designed to exploit the retreat of American troops from the Saar front following the Ardennes offensive. Army group Upper Rhine mounted as part of this operation three fairly large assaults without achieving any strategic advantage.
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In the war diary of the Wehrmacht High Command there is no trace of any contribution made to the fighting by the Commander-in-Chief Upper Rhine.

During this period Himmler set up his headquarters in a special train at Triberg station in the Black Forest. The main advantage of this remote location was that the mobile headquarters could be moved into the security of railway tunnels in the event of air raids.
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On 21 January 1945 Himmler and his train went to Schneidemühl,
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where he took up a new post: Hitler had appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the army group Vistula. As Goebbels noted in his diary, this decision was ‘mainly due to the fact that the
troop formations retreating from the advancing Soviets have become fairly disordered and a firm hand is required to turn them back into solid fighting units’.
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This task was ‘absolutely safe’ in Himmler’s hands.
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As he confided to Goebbels, Hitler appeared at this time ‘extremely pleased with Himmler’s work’. The propaganda minister thereupon suggested that Hitler appoint Himmler ‘as soon as possible Commander-in-Chief of the army’, in other words, transfer to him the function Hitler himself had assumed since 1941. Hitler was not yet willing, however, ‘to take this far-reaching measure until Himmler has proved his ability by handling successfully several large operations’.
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This was precisely what Himmler was to attempt on the Vistula.

With regard to Himmler’s work as commander of the army group Vistula, we have the record of his most important military colleague in this function, the memoirs of Colonel Eismann, who in the middle of January 1945 was made 1st General Staff Officer of the group.
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Hans-Georg Eismann first met Himmler in January 1945 in Schneidemühl, where the train of the Reichsführer-SS was parked. He recalled: ‘Himmler received me seated at the desk of his elegant saloon wagon, listened to my report, and then moved to a larger table in the middle of the room on which a map of operations from the Wehrmacht High Command was lying. He questioned me briefly about my previous experience and then proceeded to deliver a kind of lecture about the current situation with reference to the map.’

The army group Vistula was tasked with closing a 120-kilometre gap that had been opened in the front between the army groups Centre and North, in order, as Eismann wrote, ‘to form a viable defensive front at least along the general line of Central Silesia to the lower Vistula’. The section of the front that had to be defended quickly lengthened to 450 kilometres, however.

On his induction by Himmler, Eismann recorded: ‘The essence of the somewhat unclear explanations was, however: With the army group Vistula I shall stop the Russians in their tracks, then beat them and force them to retreat. That was a tall order [ . . . ] It was difficult to avoid the reaction that this was a blind man discoursing on colour.’ When Eismann posed the question of ‘what reinforcements would be available and at what time’, he received ‘from my commanding officer a rather loud and ungracious lecture on my having the typical attitude of the General Staff’, which ‘reached its climax in the assertion that General Staff officers only ever had concerns and
were scholars with only academic learning who could not improvise. Their mindset was defeatist and so on. He, Himmler, would put a stop to such concerns and get to grips with things with single-minded energy. That was the only way to get on top of difficult situations.’ Of course, these comments, as Himmler assured him when he asked, had not been directed at Eismann personally.

Eismann also produced a very detailed description of his new boss:

To look at, medium height, a slightly elongated upper body, slightly bow-legged, a little plump rather than slender. He wore the familiar simple grey uniform. His head viewed face-on resembled a fairly pointed triangle. Particularly striking was his profile with its receding chin. Very lively eyes, usually somewhat screwed up, which in conjunction with his cheekbones gave his face a slightly Mongolian appearance. Narrow lips, though not cruel-looking. Altogether this large face had nothing daemonic or cruel or in any way significant. It was the face of the man in the street. His hands were striking, at least for anyone who attaches any importance to what hands tell us. They were not at all elegant. Rather clumsy, not large hands with long fingers and broad fingertips, but rather soft like women’s hands when he shook hands with you. Apart from that my impression of Himmler was of an animated man with varied interests, perhaps a little over-active and with very strong views.

The staff that Eismann found in place was completely inadequate, and essentially had neither equipment nor communications at its disposal. In the special train there was only a telephone. There were no communication links to the two subordinate armies.

How did Heinrich Himmler, Commander-in-Chief of the army group Vistula, assess the situation described above? The answer is: not at all. He was simply unable to reach an operational assessment of the situation as a whole. He stared, mesmerized, at the vast gap he had to close. [ . . . ] The words ‘method of attack’ and ‘strike at the flank’ were ones he used constantly but it did not occur to him that the Russians were on the point of capturing the flank of his own desperate second army. Yet one glance at the map he had constantly in front of him made this plain. For him there seemed to be nothing but ‘attack’.

In July 1944, in an address to officers, the Reichsführer-SS had summarized his military maxims in the following insight: ‘The time for intelligent operational methods is past. In the east the enemy is on our borders. The only type of operation available here is to advance or stand still.’
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Himmler concentrated on holding the strongholds of Thorn, Posen, and Schneidemühl. On 30 January 1945 he put forward the commandant of
Schneidemühl, ‘as an example of a staunch and undaunted commander and fortress commandant’, for a military honour, because the latter had ‘personally shot with his own weapon’ a number of his retreating soldiers and had ordered a sign to be hung round their necks with ‘This is what happens to all cowards’ on it.
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The same day he gave orders for SS-Standartenführer Karl von Salisch, the former police chief of nearby Bromberg, to be shot for ‘cowardice’, as well as dismissing the former district governor and the city’s mayor and having them drafted into a ‘probation battalion’.
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But in the final analysis such drastic measures were the helpless expression of a rigid defensive stance, which was catastrophic for the operational leadership of the army group, and which, according to Eismann’s observations, was the result of Himmler’s fear of Hitler: ‘The dreaded Reichsführer-SS was completely at the mercy of his own fear of Hitler. It made him unable even to present any kind of reading of the military situation to Hitler with forcefulness, let alone to gain acceptance for it. This fundamentally subaltern attitude did much damage and cost a great deal of unnecessary bloodshed.’ Eismann was forced to state that Himmler not only ‘lacked any previous knowledge and experience for such a difficult and purely military task’, but he also complained that the latter as commander of the Reserve Army was incapable of ‘obtaining suitable reinforcements of men and materials promptly for his own army group’.

On a visit to Berlin at the beginning of March Himmler met Goebbels, who was surprised at how ‘disproportionately optimistic’ Himmler was about the situation.
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Himmler’s colleague Eismann had a completely different impression: ‘The more unfavourable and difficult the situation became for army group Vistula, the more Himmler realized that there were no laurels he could gather there. He now also doubtless recognized that he was not up to the responsibilities of military leadership and became aware that his enemies in the Führer’s headquarters were making the most of this.’
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Shortly after Hitler visited army group Centre in March Himmler suffered an angina attack. From then on, Eismann recalls, the lectures on the situation took place, if at all, at his sickbed; finally Himmler went to Hohenlychen, to the sanatorium of his schoolfriend Gebhardt, until on 21 March Hitler relieved him of his duties as Commander-in-Chief of army group Vistula.