Heinrich Himmler : A Life (127 page)

Back in Stockholm Kersten informed his link-man to the World Jewish Congress, Hillel Storch, that Himmler had in addition declared his willingness to release 10,000 Jewish prisoners to Sweden or Switzerland.
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As early as February Himmler had been in direct contact concerning the release of prisoners with the Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte, who acted on behalf of the Swedish government. Himmler met Bernadotte for the first time on 19 February, when the latter was in Germany, and again at the beginning of March.
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Agreement was reached that Scandinavian concentration-camp inmates should first be assembled at Neuengamme, and finally Bernadotte, who was continually including new groups of prisoners in his demands, gained consent for them to be brought by Swedish Red Cross medical teams via Denmark to Sweden. Himmler’s assent, given to Kersten, to the release of 10,000 prisoners was an important step forward in this negotiation process. In fact far more than the 8,000 Swedish prisoners—actually more than 20,000 people—were to be rescued.
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Bernadotte was, however, surprised at the manners and behaviour of his opposite number, as he noted after their discussion in February: ‘He appeared strikingly, indeed astoundingly, obliging, showed his sense of
humour, even a touch of gallows humour, a number of times and liked to make a joke to lighten the tone a little.’
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It is quite obvious that Himmler was still versatile and in the process of changing roles again in the very last phase of the Third Reich, by presenting himself as a poised and conciliatory negotiating partner who was at pains to bring things to a sensible conclusion.

After visiting Himmler in mid-March, Kersten also brought to Sweden a letter to himself from the Reichsführer. It is one of the most surprising documents that Himmler wrote in his entire time as Reichsführer-SS. In the letter Himmler first gave Kersten official notification of the release of the 2,700 Jewish men, women, and children to Switzerland, and added: ‘This is to all intents and purposes the continuation of the course my colleagues and I had been pursuing consistently for many years until the war and the unreason unleashed by it in the world made it impossible to carry through.’ From 1936 to 1940, he goes on, ‘in conjunction with Jewish-American organizations’, he had worked intensively towards a solution through emigration, with ‘very beneficial’ results. ‘The journey of the two trains to Switzerland’, the Reichsführer-SS continues, ‘is, in spite of all difficulties, the deliberate resumption of this beneficial process.’

Himmler then felt obliged to refer to the situation at the Bergen-Belsen camp. He wrote that on hearing the rumour that ‘a typhus epidemic of catastrophic proportions had broken out’, he immediately sent a team led by his chief medical officer of health to the camp. ‘Cases of this type of epidemic typhus’ were ‘very often found in camps containing people from the east, but should be regarded as under control through the use of the best modern clinical treatments’. Finally, he said he was sure that ‘if demagoguery and superficialities are excluded and all differences set aside, wisdom and reason, along with humane sentiments and the willingness to help, will inevitably, notwithstanding the bloodiest wounds, come to the fore among all parties’. He concluded the letter ‘with all good wishes’.
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The effrontery of this letter is breathtaking: did Himmler really believe that by posing as a detached, humanitarian intermediary he could construct a negotiating position with the western Allies? After all, by this point the concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz had long since been liberated, and for months detailed reports about mass murder in gas chambers had been circulating in the international press. Confronted with his own downfall, had Himmler drifted into a world of illusions?

From a biographical perspective another explanation for his behaviour can be found: for him it was simply important to preserve the outward forms until the very end, and he did this by adding to the various roles he had assumed during the Nazi dictatorship a further one, that of the honest broker. If the chance arose to establish contact with the western Allies via Bernadotte or other intermediaries, to extend the human trafficking, and possibly also to begin negotiating about a separate peace, then the other side would not be dealing with an ice-cold, calculating Reichsführer-SS who presided over life and death, but rather (and Himmler’s letter to Kersten was designed to pave the way for this) his negotiating partners would have to accept him in the role of a man of honour guided by the best intentions.

On the Allied side, it must be said, there was a different view. When the Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress suggested involving the British embassy in the transfer of prisoners to Sweden, the British Foreign Secretary Eden wrote to Churchill that he was unwilling to have anything to do with the business, and for one reason only: Himmler was behind it. Churchill wrote ‘good’ on the report, and noted clearly in the margin: ‘No link with Himmler.’
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On 2 April Bernadotte had a further meeting with Himmler. After his return to Stockholm the Count informed the British ambassador, Victor Mallet, about their discussions.
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According to Bernadotte’s report, Himmler now, in contrast to the previous meeting, gave the impression of a man who knew all was lost. When Bernadotte suggested that the best course of action was now to surrender, Himmler responded that Hitler opposed any such move and he felt bound by his oath.

Himmler knew, Bernadotte said, that he was No. 1 on the Allied list of war criminals; he had complained that outside Germany he would be regarded as brutal. In fact he loathed brutality. When, thereupon, Bernadotte reproached him with a concrete instance of a massacre by the Gestapo, Himmler at first denied it but at a further meeting the following day conceded that, on the basis of enquiries he had made in the meantime, this regrettable incident had in fact taken place. After this conversation Himmler sent a message to Bernadotte via his secret-service chief Walter Schellenberg to say that, in the event of Hitler’s radically revising his position, he hoped that Bernadotte would go to Allied headquarters and attempt to mediate. Was this an attempt to introduce the possibility of a coup? Bernadotte took pains to get to the bottom of it, and a few days later had the message sent that he would be prepared to make an attempt at
mediation if Himmler assumed power in Germany and dissolved the NSDAP.
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Himmler remained indecisive, however, even as the days passed. He could neither bring himself to declare himself Hitler’s successor and then offer the Allies the Reich’s capitulation—a step even the serving Finance Minister, Ludwig Count Schwerin von Krosigk, advised him to take on 19 April—nor was he prepared to brace himself for a partial military capitulation in northern Germany.
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On 19 April a further emissary travelled from Sweden to Germany. To Kersten, Himmler had declared himself willing to speak directly to a representative of the World Jewish Congress. Hillel Storch asked Norbert Masur, a Jew of German descent who had emigrated to Sweden, to take on this mission. The two-and-a-half-hour discussion took place during the night of 20–1 April at Kersten’s property near Berlin and lasted until five in the morning. In addition to Masur and Himmler, who had just arrived from Hitler’s last birthday celebration, Schellenberg, Brandt (Himmler’s private secretary), and Kersten were also there.

In this discussion too Himmler played the role of the man of honour. In lengthy explanations to his Jewish guest he tried to defend, or else to gloss over, the regime’s policy towards the Jews. The first plan had been the emigration of the Jews, but after the outbreak of war the regime had been confronted with hostile masses of eastern Jews who had to be brought under control. The war against the Soviet Union had been forced on Germany, he claimed; in view of the dreadful conditions in the east many Jews had died, but many Germans had suffered in the war as well. The concentration camps had been severe but just. Yes, there had been abuses, but he had punished those who were to blame. As a result of epidemics the death-rate had been high, and that was why they had been forced to build large crematoria.

Himmler gave figures for the number of Jews still alive in the individual concentration camps, and claimed that 150,000 had been left behind in Auschwitz and 450,000 in Budapest. This greatly exaggerated total for the number of survivors was clearly a brazen lie. He then complained that although he had handed over the camps of Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, atrocity stories were being circulated as propaganda about the alleged horrific conditions in the camps and he was being blamed personally. Nobody had been dragged through the mud by the press in the last few years as much as he.

At this time reports and pictures of the Bergen-Belsen camp, which had been handed over to the British army on 15 April, were in fact circulating in the world’s press: between January 1945 and the liberation 35,000 prisoners had died in the camp, which was piled high with unburied corpses, and a further 14,000 died in the first two months after the liberation.
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Buchenwald had been liberated on 11 April; in the preceding days the SS had transferred more than half of the prisoners elsewhere. There was no hand-over of the camp.

Masur repeatedly objected to Himmler’s blatantly false presentation of events, but was nevertheless determined to listen to the essential points in the latter’s sermon in order not to put his mission in jeopardy. Overall, according to his estimation, Himmler gave the impression of being intelligent, educated, and historically aware. For the most part, Masur recorded, Himmler had spoken calmly even when the discussion had become controversial. His tense inner state had, all the same, been evident. Another thing struck Masur: Himmler’s need to keep talking, which was almost unstoppable.

Finally, Himmler declared to Masur that he was ready to hand over a thousand Jewish women from Ravensbrück to the Red Cross, and additionally a series of smaller groups of prisoners of various nationalities. By then the discussion had touched on every possible political question, and Himmler had exploited the opportunity to give a wide-ranging defence of the regime. It was possible to infer from this account that he considered Germany’s defeat to be inevitable. The country would not, however, surrender, he said. He himself had no fear of death. The best of the German nation, as he had told Kersten on parting, would perish with the Nazi leadership, and what happened to the rest was of no importance.
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Bernadotte was to meet Himmler on two more occasions: first of all early on 21 April, immediately after Himmler’s talks with Masur, in Hohenlychen, where Bernadotte achieved further concessions with regard to the release of prisoners,
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and finally after Himmler had called for him once again—in the meantime the Reichsführer had been forced to leave Hohenlychen for the north-west because of the approach of Soviet troops, and had established himself with a fairly large entourage in the police barracks in Lübeck.
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In the night of 23–4 April the two men met in the Swedish consulate in Lübeck. Himmler declared to him, according to Bernadotte’s account of the conversation,
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that Hitler had turned away from life and would be
dead in a few days. He, Himmler, now felt entitled to act even without Hitler’s consent. Now he asked Bernadotte straight out to convey to the Swedish government his wish to arrange a meeting with Eisenhower, so that the German western front could surrender. The eastern front would be held as long as possible. Although Bernadotte immediately explained that he considered such an initiative to be unrealistic, he declared himself willing to communicate Himmler’s request on condition that Denmark and Norway were included in the offer of surrender. Himmler agreed. Beyond that, Himmler told Bernadotte, if his offer were refused he would take over command of a battalion on the eastern front and die in battle.
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In the days that followed Himmler waited anxiously for a response. On 28 April, at the Wehrmacht High Command, he chanced to meet Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, supreme commander of the navy, and asked if the latter would be ready to assume a ‘role in the state’ in the event of Hitler no longer being in Berlin and a successor having taken over his office. In making his offer Himmler had already made it plain whom he regarded as Hitler’s successor.
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Bernadotte confidentially informed the British and American ambassadors in Stockholm about his meeting with Himmler. In addition, Himmler had given Bernadotte a letter to the Swedish Foreign Minister, Christian Günther. As expected, the western powers turned down the offer of a partial surrender, and exposed Himmler—who had expressed to Schellenberg
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his fears of that very thing happening—to all the world by publishing his offer at the end of April in the world’s press.

Charles de Gaulle, President of the provisional French government, tells in his memoirs of a final attempt by Himmler to get his head out of the noose: via ‘unofficial channels’, he had received a memorandum from Himmler with an offer of an alliance. France was to join with a defeated Germany to prevent a situation where it was treated by the Anglo-Saxon powers as a satellite state. De Gaulle, for whom this train of thought ‘unquestionably contained a grain of truth’, could not bring himself to respond to the friendly proposal—for, as he succinctly put it, Himmler had ‘nothing to offer’.
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Meanwhile, on 29 April Hitler in his Berlin bunker had also learned of Himmler’s initiative from the international press. He flew into a rage. In his Political Testament, written the same day—the day before his suicide—he expelled ‘the former Reichsführer-SS and Reich Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler’ from the party and from all offices of state. To complete
the picture, it is worth mentioning that Himmler’s successors were the Breslau Gauleiter Karl Hanke, as Reichsführer-SS, and the Gauleiter and Bavarian Prime Minister Paul Giesler, as Reich Minister of the Interior. Hitler used his testament to heap further blame on Himmler; Göring, who a few days before had also been removed from all his offices for flouting Hitler’s authority, was similarly criticized. As Hitler wrote, ‘through secret negotiations with the enemy, which they held without my knowledge and against my will, and through their attempt in defiance of the law to seize power in the state,’ both had ‘done untold damage to the country and to the whole nation, quite apart from their treachery towards me personally’.
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