Heinrich Himmler : A Life (126 page)

As military commander of the Volkssturm, commanding officer of the Reserve Army, and last but not least, as Chief of the German Police Himmler still had scope for finding a role in the defence of the Reich. In
the final weeks of the war he issued a series of martial decrees designed to ensure steadfastness and create terror. On 28 March 1945, for example, he ordered: ‘The displaying of white flags, the removal of anti-tank obstacles, the failure to report for Volkssturm duties, and similar behaviour are to be dealt with with the greatest severity [ . . . ] All males in a building where a white flag is displayed are to be shot. There must be no delay in implementing these measures.’ On the 15 April the order was: ‘No German city will be declared an open city. Every village and town will be defended and held by every means possible. Any German man who fails to uphold this fundamental national duty will forfeit his honour and his life.’
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In the final months of the war the Gestapo murdered thousands of people. At the latest in February 1945, the lower level regional offices of the Reich Security Main Office were given permission to make their own decisions about the ‘special treatment’ of prisoners, and Gestapo offices made considerable use of this freedom. At the end of March Himmler issued a command that anyone bearing arms had the right to shoot looters on the spot: in many places, after air raids in particular, the Gestapo therefore killed suspects. In addition, in the last weeks of the war the Gestapo dismantled a large number of their prisons. Those prisoners who had been destined for ‘special treatment’ or who were not freed by the Allies were shot as part of mass executions. The main victims of all these measures were foreign workers.
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After the Allies made a successful landing in June 1944, followed in the succeeding weeks by heavy German military defeats, Hitler attempted to break up the Allied coalition by preparing a counter-offensive in the west and by circulating rumours about a separate peace. It is quite clear that he intended to cause confusion by creating the spectre of a separate peace and thus to set about preparing the ground for an actual separate peace treaty. Among Hitler’s closest associates these ideas were treated seriously.

When, for example, the Japanese ambassador Hiroshi Oshima apprised Hitler in September 1944 of his government’s proposal to approach the Soviet Union with the aim of initiating peace negotiations with Germany, Goebbels encouraged Hitler in a detailed memorandum to make a similar approach to Stalin.
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In the same month Foreign Minister Ribbentrop
sought permission from Hitler to make contact on the broadest basis with the enemy powers, and Hitler had false information spread via Spain about a Soviet offer to make a separate peace in order to lay the bait for the western powers.
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It is in this context that notes Himmler made in preparation for a discussion with Hitler on 12 September should be viewed. There we read the significant words: ‘England or Russia’ and ‘Russia–Japan’.
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A few years ago a short note by Churchill was discovered in the Public Record Office in London that may possibly be connected with these soundings. This note, dated 31 August, reveals that the Secret Service had passed to Churchill a series of documents, including a ‘Special Message from Himmler’. It is impossible now to reconstruct the content of this message, as Churchill had made the handwritten comment (which was an extremely unusual occurrence) on the document: ‘Himmler telegram left and destroyed by me.’
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How such a telegram could have been conveyed emerges from a letter from the Spanish Foreign Minister Ramón Serrano Súñer, who at the beginning of 1944 had offered Himmler his good services should the latter wish to make contact with Churchill. Himmler had the letter forwarded to the German Foreign Ministry.
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Whether he availed himself of this or a similar offer in order to make an approach to Churchill or whether the ‘Himmler telegram’ refers to something completely different is impossible to establish.
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Everything, however, points to the fact that he would never have ventured such a step without the agreement of his ‘Führer’.

Only after Himmler had been in a position (as commander of the Reserve Army, Commander-in-Chief of the Upper Rhine, Commander of the army group Vistula, and as military head of the Volkssturm) to acquire an impression of the true hopelessness of the military situation did he make a series of attempts, albeit hesitatingly and indecisively to the last, to come to a political agreement to end the war. The fact that Hitler, even in the final stages of the war, was not prepared to initiate serious moves to end it by political means did, however, prove an obstacle to the realization of such ideas of Himmler’s. Hitler was realistic enough to recognize that, with the prospect of imminent victory, the Allies would no longer be interested in such proposals, and he was as unwilling to resign as he was to surrender.

The Goebbels diaries indicate that from January 1945 onwards the propaganda minister was in virtually continuous discussions with Hitler about the possibility of making peace, but that in view of the constantly deteriorating military situation Hitler saw such an initiative as bound to fail. Instead, he at first pinned his hopes on a split in the enemy coalition.
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The
(therefore purely theoretical) discussions between Goebbels and Hitler during these months about the prospects for peace thus focused as a rule on the western powers.

At the beginning of March, however, Goebbels was confronted with the news that Hitler considered a separate peace to be a possibility, if at all, only in the east: ‘The Führer is convinced that if any of the hostile powers were to enter into talks with us, the Soviet Union would certainly be the first.’ On the other hand, ‘the war against England’ was to be continued ‘with the greatest vigour and ruthlessness’. Ribbentrop’s efforts ‘to put out feelers towards the western countries’ were, therefore, ‘completely hopeless at the moment’.
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Two days after his discussions with Hitler, on 7 March, Goebbels had a two-hour meeting with Himmler at the sanatorium at Hohenlychen. Himmler, who had ‘suffered a bad angina attack’, looked ‘slightly battered’ to Goebbels. In the main the two were in complete agreement about ‘the situation in general’: ‘He speaks of Göring and Ribbentrop in the most critical terms, describing them as the two sources of error in our general conduct of the war, and he is absolutely right.’ As Goebbels noted, Himmler was ‘very worried’ about the situation at the front, but even more so about food supplies. ‘The morale of the troops is without doubt affected. Himmler admits this on the basis of the experience of the army group Vistula.’ But in addition and above all, ‘neither in the military nor in the civilian sector do we have strong leadership at the centre, because everything has to be put to the Führer himself and yet that is feasible in only a very few cases. Göring and Ribbentrop are obstacles at every turn to a successful conduct of the war.’

What, therefore, should be done? It was, after all, impossible ‘to force Hitler to break with the two of them’. This comment suggests that at this meeting there may have been talk of using more forceful methods of making Hitler adopt another political course, yet both were wary of taking this idea further. According to Goebbels,

Himmler sums up the situation correctly in what he says. His reason tells him that we have little hope of winning the war by military means, but his instinct tells him that in the long run a political route will open up so that we can still turn the war in our favour. Himmler sees this possibility more in the west than in the east. He believes that England will come to its senses, though I am somewhat doubtful about that. Himmler’s analysis shows he is focused completely on the west and expects nothing from the east.

Goebbels took a different view, as is shown by his diary comments on Himmler’s statements: ‘I believe we would achieve more in the east and that Stalin is more realistic than the English–American maniacs.’ What, according to his own notes, he did not tell Himmler, was that the latter’s judgement that it was in the west that a political solution was to be sought was diametrically opposed to Hitler’s. By keeping this fact from him he advisedly allowed Himmler and his western option to slide into a political blind alley. He left the Reichsführer in a reasonably cheerful mood: ‘In the atmosphere surrounding Himmler there is something very nice, modest, and absolutely National Socialist, and this has an extraordinarily beneficial effect. One can only be thankful that, at least as far as Himmler is concerned, the old National Socialist spirit still prevails.’
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A few days later Goebbels was obliged to comment that Hitler was harbouring considerable resentment against the Reichsführer. ‘The Führer is placing a large part of the blame directly on Himmler. He says he was continually ordering Himmler to move our troops to Pomerania, and that as a result of repeated indications from the Department of Foreign Armies he made the mistake of believing in the push towards Berlin and making corresponding dispositions.’ Even when he, Hitler, gave clear orders, they were ‘constantly undermined by secret sabotage. In this regard he levels the most severe reproaches at Himmler [ . . . ] Clearly Himmler fell victim to the General Staff the moment he took over as army group commander. The Führer accuses him of rank disobedience and intends on the next occasion to give him a piece of his mind and impress on him that if such a thing should occur again the result would be an irreparable rupture between them.’ Goebbels added: ‘I regarded entrusting Himmler with the command of an army group as a mistake in the first place. In the present situation that is not what he should be doing, particularly not if it might lead to a rupture with the Führer.’

And this breach evidently went far deeper still. Hitler confided to Goebbels that if, as Goebbels had suggested, he had transferred the supreme command of the army to Himmler ‘the catastrophe would have been even worse than it is anyway’—an altogether damning verdict for Himmler.
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In the days that followed Hitler was to send Goebbels the minutes of his military briefings so the latter could see for himself that his ‘Führer’ had in fact warned of a Soviet push towards Pomerania in the face of contradiction from his military advisers.
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Hitler informed Goebbels two days later that Himmler bore ‘the historic guilt for the fact that [ . . . ] Pomerania and a large part of its population had fallen into Soviet hands’.
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Goebbels, however, was intelligent enough to recognize that this failure was rooted in the system: unfortunately, he wrote, Hitler had ‘neglected to convert his opinion, which was based more on intuition than on knowledge, into clear orders. As a result everyone has done what he wanted, including Himmler.’ Goebbels was clear-sighted about the issue: ‘Rather than making long speeches to his military colleagues, the Führer would do better to give them brief orders but then to ensure with ruthless rigour that these orders are obeyed. The many routs we have suffered at the front are the result of poor leadership methods and wrong information.’
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On 15 March, the following day, Hitler informed his propaganda minister that Himmler had been to see him and that he had given him ‘an extraordinarily vigorous dressing down’.
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At the same time, or a few days later, Hitler also let Goebbels know that he intended to remove Himmler from the command of the army group Vistula. Goebbels commented on Himmler’s unsuccessful excursion into the higher echelons of the military command as follows: ‘Unfortunately, he was tempted to chase after military laurels, but he has been a complete failure. He’s bound to destroy his good political reputation by this.’
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In spite of this dishonourable discharge, Himmler, after his sudden recovery, insisted, as Colonel Eismann records, ‘on celebrating in grand style the transfer of command to his successor’, though inevitably his ‘theatrical swansong, which was not clouded by any kind of specialist knowledge, made a strange and indeed positively repellent impression in the midst of such an extremely grave situation’.
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At the end of March another serious occurrence caused a further deterioration in the relationship between Hitler and Himmler. Hitler accused, of all people, the ‘Leibstandarte’—the original core unit of the armed SS, which during the whole of the war had been deployed repeatedly in critical military situations and suffered heavy losses, and whose leader, Sepp Dietrich, was celebrated by the Nazi media as a war hero—of failure on the Hungarian front, and compelled Himmler to issue the so-called ‘armband order’: members of the unit were made to remove the strip with the words ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’ from their uniforms—an extraordinary humiliation for the SS and its Reichsführer.
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When, in March 1945, Himmler was giving more intense thought to the possibility of taking soundings towards ending the war by political means, he was doing so, therefore, in a situation in which he had failed as an army commander and had been seriously discredited in Hitler’s eyes. In the weeks previously he had pursued his old idea of using Jewish prisoners as hostages, and it appears that his escalating conflict with Hitler strengthened his resolve to develop this project into a political mission. As the Third Reich was conducting a war against the Jews, the key to ending the war logically lay in the latter’s hands.

In mid-March Himmler’s personal physician Felix Kersten, who had moved to Sweden and had offered his services to the Swedish Foreign Minister as an intermediary, came to Germany, where he still had an estate. Himmler told him that the concentration camps would not be blown up as the Allies advanced; further killings there were forbidden and the prisoners were instead to be handed over to the Allies.
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He was to reaffirm this several times in the following days,
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and a short time later Himmler did in fact issue the order to camp commandants not to kill any more Jewish prisoners and to take all measures to reduce mortality among them. The order was delivered to the commandants by Pohl personally.
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