Heinrich Himmler : A Life (128 page)

The accusation of being a faithless traitor to his leader and his country was sure to be an extraordinarily heavy blow to Himmler, the more so because he no doubt considered it unjust. He had delayed his initiative to the very last moment, until the day, 22 April, that he heard from Führer headquarters about Hitler’s last briefing, at which the ‘Führer’ declared that he was no longer in a position to give orders and thereby had effectively abdicated. Himmler had good reason to assume that, after Hitler had excluded himself, he had the right, in the name of the Reich leadership, to initiate a move to end the war by political means, as it was impossible to tell whether Hitler, who seemed to have lapsed into passivity, had settled on the succession. Yet Himmler did not realize that behind Hitler’s withdrawal of 22 April was his calculation that, while keeping a door open for last-minute negotiations, he could nevertheless hold onto the possibility to the last of distancing himself once more from the peace soundings, should they fail, and of thus not tarnishing his historical reputation with the disgrace of surrender.
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As the last chapter of the history of the concentration camps shows, Himmler failed to keep his agreement given to Kersten in March to hand over the camps to the approaching Allied troops. Although Bergen-Belsen had been handed over, this was only because the outbreak of a typhus epidemic prevented any further ‘evacuations’.
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Meanwhile Dora-Mittelbau and Buchenwald were cleared at the beginning of April on his express orders. Of the total of 48,000 inmates at Buchenwald the SS removed some 28,000; by the end of the war at least a third of them had died.

In the middle of April the group of officers in the SS Business and Administrative Main Office responsible for the concentration camps had a final meeting at which, in line with a directive from Himmler, it is very likely that the evacuation of the last camps not yet liberated by the Allies was discussed. The camps in question were Sachsenhausen, Dachau,
Neuengamme, Flossenbürg, and Ravensbrück. There is proof that Himmler instructed Dachau and Flossenbürg directly that no living prisoners were to fall into enemy hands. In the days that followed the SS leadership also refused requests by the Red Cross for the last camps to be handed over.

The fact that Himmler broke his word is probably attributable on the one hand to fear that his consent would be taken by Hitler, who disapproved strongly of his trade with concentration-camp prisoners, as a breach of confidence. On the other, the world should not be deceived by Himmler’s appearance in the guise of a humanitarian intermediary: he was prepared to save human lives only if he received tangible returns from the opposing side. He still viewed prisoners as human capital, and intended to exploit them to the end as bargaining-tools—hence his determination to keep them with him at every stage of his retreat.

In view of the emerging division of the as yet unoccupied parts of the Reich, the last death marches went in two separate directions. Prisoners from Flossenbürg and Dachau marched southwards, while those from Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme marched north. These evacuation marches collapsed into chaos, and frequently a large proportion of the prisoners were shot by the guards. At the end of April more than 3,000 prisoners were transported in indescribable conditions by ship from Stutthof near Danzig to Neustadt on the Bay of Lübeck, where those who had survived the rigours of the voyage were killed on the beach by guards and marines. American troops liberated Flossenbürg on 23 April, Dachau on 29 April, and Mauthausen on 5 May.
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Of the more than 714,000 prisoners still in the concentration-camp system at the beginning of 1945, estimates suggest that between 240,000 and 360,000 fell victim to the evacuations.
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Himmler’s crowded diary in the last months of the Third Reich did not allow for any more visits to his family in Gmund or to his mistress Hedwig Potthast and their children in Berchtesgaden. Letters and telephone-calls acted as a substitute. Both women were unswervingly loyal to him to the end; no evidence has survived that suggests they came to have any doubts about their relationship with this mass-murderer or about their life at his side.

On 16 January Margarete Himmler received a visit from her brother-in-law Gebhard, Heinrich’s elder brother. Her diary entry makes one suspect that Gebhard—who since 1933 had enjoyed rapid success in his brother’s slipstream in his career in vocational training—had, in view of the imminent destruction of the Third Reich, brought up the fatal role his brother had played in it and the fact that the Himmler family were actually staunch Catholics. If his intention had been to cause Margarete to reflect in some manner, then this attempt was a total failure. ‘He then wanted to have a talk with me on my own. I sensed something unpleasant was coming. But that it would become so awful, hearing him say such mean things about other people, and that he would talk about his parents and Heini, raising his eyes to heaven in that Catholic way! I’ll never understand it.’
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Two weeks later she wrote of Heinrich: ‘How wonderful that he has been called to great tasks and is equal to them. The whole of Germany is looking to him.’
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On 21 February she noted that she intended to stay in Gmund, as that was what Heinrich wanted.
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Margarete remained in contact with Himmler into April. Then she left Gmund as American troops were advancing. Mother and daughter fled towards the south and fetched up in a British internment camp in Italy. A British Secret Service officer who questioned both of them thought that no interrogation was necessary, as his impression was that Margarete’s life had remained relatively unaffected by her husband’s professional activities. He also attested that Himmler’s wife had retained a ‘small-town mentality’.
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Hedwig Potthast saw Himmler for the last time in March in Hohenlychen, returning from there to her house in Berchtesgaden. After that both spoke daily on the telephone, with the last conversation on 19 April. ‘Even though I am still telling myself that the new year will be hard, perhaps burdensome,’ she had written almost cheerfully to him in her last New Year letter, ‘I am almost curious to see what it will bring. Above all I wish you strength for the task you have been entrusted with by the Führer and the fatherland.’ A few of her letters from January 1945 are preserved, basically describing her daily life in Berchtesgaden: she reported on their children’s progress, and we learn that she kept up neighbourly contact with the Bormanns and that Frau Fegelein, Eva Braun’s sister, paid her visits. She also enjoyed the winter scenery in Berchtesgaden. ‘Why is it that you can’t ski?, she asks in the last existing letter, dated 12 January 1945.
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Indeed: Why had Himmler never learnt to ski?!

Cut off from his family and his second family, and still in the Lübeck police barracks, Himmler tried, after the failure of his attempt to make contact with Eisenhower, to defend himself against the charge of being a faithless traitor. In a radio message of 30 April to Kaltenbrunner, who had set up his headquarters in southern Germany, he distanced himself from Allied reports about his talks with Bernadotte, and about an announcement of the Führer’s death, which he had allegedly written. The fight, as he stressed, must be continued under all circumstances.
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That same day he was paid an unexpected visit by Grand Admiral Dönitz, who had just received a radio message from Bormann from the Führer’s bunker in Berlin informing him of Himmler’s treachery and calling on him unequivocally to take ‘swift and implacable’ measures against all traitors. Dönitz confronted Himmler with the accusations that he had sought contact with the Allies behind Hitler’s back, which Himmler denied. Dönitz, who—by contrast with Himmler—had no instruments of power at his command, noted this declaration of innocence and returned to his headquarters in Plön. There news arrived, still on the same day, that meanwhile the succession as laid down in Hitler’s will ‘had come into force’. In this manner Dönitz heard the news of Hitler’s death and that he was to succeed him.
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Dönitz thereupon asked Himmler to come and see him; he arrived during the night accompanied by six armed SS men. Dönitz informed him about the dispositions for the succession. Visibly shaken, Himmler immediately offered himself as ‘second-in-command’, an offer that Dönitz refused with thanks, pointing to the non-political nature of the government he was to head.
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Himmler reappeared several times unbidden in Dönitz’s headquarters, until on 6 May the latter officially dismissed him as Reich Minister of the Interior (Hitler’s dismissal of Himmler in his testament had, in the view of those concerned, never become legally effective). The dismissal had been preceded by negotiations with Himmler, who was still trying to gain some form of official recognition from the new government in his capacity as Reichsführer-SS. After his dismissal it was made clear to Himmler that he was to keep his distance from the seat of government, whatever it did.
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Walter Lüdde-Neurath, the Grand Admiral’s adjutant, and Count Schwerin von Krosigk, Dönitz’s Foreign Minister, both agree in their memoirs that at this time Himmler made a decidedly optimistic, cheerful impression and spoke of how he and his SS would take on an important role in the
emerging post-war order, while claiming that if that were not to come off he could manage to go into hiding.
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To conclude from this that Himmler harboured illusions even up to May 1945 about his future fate would be going too far. Others who observed him more closely during these days gained the opposite impression. To Bernadotte, Himmler appeared in April to be exhausted and under great strain—‘he was manifestly having a serious battle to maintain the external appearance of calm’
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—and Schellenberg similarly describes Himmler as in an extremely agitated state that he was unable to control.
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Throughout his life Himmler had been at pains to govern and conceal his emotions and responses, to present himself to others as even-tempered and very positive, and, whenever circumstances permitted, to be as amiable as possible to those with whom he had dealings. As he saw it, his office, his position with regard to his subordinates and vis-à-vis his negotiating partners required such a demeanour. For that reason nothing definitive can be said about his actual state of mind in those days. The reports of Schellenberg and Bernadotte indicate that he was fighting against the threat of psychological breakdown, concerned to maintain his vaunted self-discipline and self-control.

To the end he made ever more hectic attempts to find some kind of solution to avert his inevitable downfall. As he may have told himself, he still had considerable instruments of power at his disposal: several Waffen-SS divisions remained under his command, and in the territory not yet occupied by the Allies he was in charge of the organization of the Reserve Army, had command of the police, the Volkssturm, his network of agents, and finally of the terror organization Werewolf, which was to be active behind enemy lines. In addition, he was holding hundreds of thousands of prisoners in the camps as bartering-counters.

At the beginning of May, when all attempts had failed, he stood empty-handed. He had not managed to make really effective preparations for flight or for a life under cover of a false identity. To whom could the head of the SS and police apparatus turn with a request like that, without appearing to his staff as a boss whose calls for endurance and whose displays of optimism had simply been empty rhetoric?

Thus, his only recourse was to a forged paybook that gave his identity as Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger, the name he chose hinting at his inner reservations about actually denying his identity. As far as disguising his appearance was concerned, though he had got himself some civilian clothing
and an eyepatch he had not even changed his spectacles. To the end he was recognizable as who he was: Heinrich Himmler.

In practical terms he was equipped for suicide. Like all Nazi leaders he possessed lethal poison. Yet beyond that he had evidently made no preparations at all regarding the circumstantial aspects of a possible suicide. He had neither chosen a place of significance (for example, some north German Germanic sanctum) nor does he appear to have drawn up a declaration in the event of his death, or, as far as one can tell, written a farewell letter. To die in a last battle, as he had proclaimed he would, was not something he wanted to do either, and he lacked the decisiveness to hand himself over officially as a prisoner as, for example, Göring had done. To present himself candidly to the Allies, take responsibility for his deeds and misdeeds, and defend his SS men—even had he possessed the courage to take this path, he had blocked it off through his own contradictory behaviour in the previous weeks and months. He could calculate that in any war-crimes trial not only his crimes would come out but also his attempts to use lies, deception, and shady deals involving human lives to avert at the last moment the downfall threatening him and save his own skin. How, for instance, could he explain the letter that he had given Kersten in March, in which he had pretended to be working for a humanitarian solution to the ‘Jewish question’?

All that remained for him in this situation was to go on the run in a more or less aimless way. On 11 May, now superficially disguised as Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger, he left the Flensburg area together with his private secretary Rudolf Brandt, his adjutant Werner Grothmann, and a further adjutant by the name of Heinz Macher, Heinrich Müller, the chief of the Gestapo, and the chief of his personal security service, Josef Kiermaier. The group of six men went first to Friedrichskoog in the district of Dithmarschen, about 100 kilometres to the south.

In Friedrichskoog the weather was bad. Not until 15 or 16 May could the six men cross the Elbe estuary, which was several kilometres wide, in a fishing-boat and continue their journey to Neuhaus in Lower Saxony; according to Grothmann, the intention was to get to the Harz mountains, where Himmler would hide out for a time and then make his way to the Alps. After Neuhaus they travelled on foot to the Meinstedt area. There Brandt, Müller, and Kiermaier split off from the group in order to have their identification papers stamped by the British commandant of the town, but never returned. Müller was the only member of the group who actually succeeded in disappearing without trace.