Heinrich Himmler : A Life (130 page)

If, however, Himmler’s career is reconstructed in detail, it becomes evident to what extent he imprinted his personality on his various offices. One example of this is his idiosyncratic style of leadership, which encompassed the private lives of his men and their families. Himmler saw his role as that of the educator of his SS, as a father-figure. The ‘compliance’ that had bound him to his parents was something he now demanded of his SS leaders; he could act out his voyeuristic and manipulative tendencies by snooping into their private affairs. At the same time he was at pains to extend his ‘soldierly’ self-image to the SS as a whole. Members of the SS were not to bond as mates but to submit to an iron discipline and employ the same reserved and sober social forms behind which Himmler concealed his own lack of social ease.

And if he expressly made the claim that in everything it did his SS was guided by particular moral principles, and in formulaic fashion repeatedly held up an obligatory SS ‘catalogue of virtues’, then there is an unmistakable link to features that define his personality. At the beginning of their relationship he had confided to his fiancée that he wished he could for once be allowed not to be ‘decent’ (
anständig
) and to remove the straitjacket of rules, maxims of conduct, and self-control. The SS was to supply him with plentiful opportunities for doing just that. In order to paper over the contradiction between high moral claims and obscure temptations, however, the façade of virtue and constant concern for ‘decency’ had to be maintained to outward appearances at all costs; this double standard was a feature of Himmler the man as well as of his SS.

Himmler’s attempts, by means of a special SS cult, to guarantee the cohesion of the ‘order’ and to strengthen its elite character as keeper of the Holy Grail of Nazism similarly reveal his personal weaknesses. Himmler himself needed symbols and insignia, myths and shrines, festivals and rituals, both to orientate himself as well as to give sensuous expression to his fantasy
world and to be able to share it with others, even if imperfectly. The peculiar primness and artificiality of this cult, in which Himmler was constantly playing the role of master of ceremonies, provided an unconscious illustration of his inhibited personality.

Gradually the personality and the office became one. Private life and career became increasingly interlinked: his brothers and friends joined the SS, while Himmler treated SS members like members of his own family. Unbidden, he made their family life, their health, their private debts, and their alcohol consumption his business. And when he was considering breaking free of his now-unsatisfying marriage and forming a new attachment, he recommended ‘second marriages’ to his men and the fathering of illegitimate children.

Above all, his position in the Nazi state seemed to open up to him the opportunity of transforming dreams and ambitions that had long enthused him in private into political reality on a grand scale: liberation from the chains of the Christian religion and the rejection of restricting moral obligations; the re-evaluation of procreation and marriage from the point of view of racial breeding and selection; a career as an officer and army commander; the creation of an ideology that would be an adequate substitute for religion; finally, the restoration of a lost Germanic world, and in particular the radical extirpation of the hated ‘subhumans’ as the prerequisite for the realization of this utopia.

In this way, and over time, he created a position of power geared completely to himself personally and defined by his specific predilections and peculiarities. Himmler was the complete opposite of a faceless functionary or bureaucrat, interchangeable with any other. The position he built up over the years can instead be described as an extreme example of the almost total personalization of political power. This phenomenon can be explained only by means of the specific power structures in Nazism and their dynamic: leadership by a charismatic Führer, the absence in this system of law and regulations, the permanent pressure to adapt power structures to altered political goals—these resulted in a situation where large parts of the apparatus of power were indeed linked directly to the ‘Führer’ by means of tasks and responsibilities that had been designed with specific people in mind, but these confidants of Hitler had extraordinary freedom of action in the discharge of these responsibilities.

In Himmler’s case, a series of relatively distinct phases in his political career can be discerned, in each of which the Reichsführer set out a specific
vision of the SS. In so doing he was reacting to the processes of change affecting the regime and was contributing also to those changes: he was, however, unable to direct or control them entirely.

In 1933 he at first had to content himself with the post of Chief of the Political Police in Bavaria. By exploiting, among other things, the mounting conflict between the party and state leadership on the one hand and the SA on the other, and recommending himself to the former as a reliable ally, he was able within a relatively short time to propel himself upwards to the post of Chief of the Political Police in the other German states and finally in the entire Reich. The successful liquidation of the SA leadership—his erstwhile mentors Röhm and Strasser fell victim to it—was to strengthen considerably the position of his SS and remove any doubts about his loyalty to Hitler. From this position he developed a comprehensive programme for the leadership of the police as a whole, which after Hitler had appointed him Chief of the German Police in 1936 he intended to amalgamate with the SS to form a ‘state protection corps’.

When, at the end of the 1930s, the Third Reich moved to expand, he redefined his goals: Alongside settlement and ‘racial selection’ of the population in the territories ‘to be Germanized’, he expanded the Waffen-SS, deployed it as part of the policy of repression in the occupied territories, and introduced a policy of systematic, racially based mass murder. In the period 1938–40, however, he not only gained a string of new responsibilities but had to accept several painful defeats and setbacks. Among them were his failure in the Fritsch crisis and the criticism from the Wehrmacht he was forced to suffer on account of SS atrocities in Poland and of his so-called ‘procreation order’; in the newly conquered countries of northern and western Europe he was not able to be as effective everywhere as he had imagined, and in occupied Poland his massive resettlement programme had ground to a halt.

With the invasion of the Soviet Union he hoped he would be able to leave this period of stagnation behind. In the summer of 1941 it was unequivocally Himmler who seized the initiative to extend the executions already being carried out by his Einsatzgruppen and other murder squads of ‘suspect’ Jews in the Soviet Union to a blanket genocide of the Jewish minority in the occupied eastern territories. In doing so he was convinced that he was acting in harmony with Hitler’s long-term plans. This initiative was Himmler’s response to a further defeat: his marginalization with regard to occupation policy in the east, which he had heard about in mid-July. By
now employing the police powers he enjoyed for the purpose of genocide—and this was his calculation—he secured for himself and his SS the much more wide-ranging task of subjecting the conquered territories to a gigantic programme of deportation, resettlement, and extermination. From his perspective the murder of the Jews was only the first step towards a much more extensive ‘new order’ based on racist criteria.

In the autumn and winter of 1941 Himmler played a key role in the intensification of the persecution of the Jews, that is, in the preparation of the first waves of deportations and the inclusion of additional territories in eastern Europe in the extermination programme. Behind this too were considerations that went far beyond the ‘elimination’ of the Jews: at the height of the Nazi politics of conquest he replaced the notion of a ‘Germanic’ Reich with the vision of a ‘Greater Germanic’ Empire.

In the spring of 1942 it seemed to him that the moment had arrived when he could finally achieve a breakthrough for this aim: he saw an opportunity of extending the Holocaust to more and more groups of Jewish victims. First the whole of occupied Poland was caught up in the whirlwind of mass extermination, followed by—and the assassination of Heydrich clearly played an important part in this—the rest of the European countries. By September 1942, immediately after these fundamental decisions taken mainly between April and June 1942, he set the course of a development that, seen in its totality, amounted to nothing less than the creation of a new order on the European continent under SS leadership. This was made possible by his linking together a number of diverse tasks: he took over responsibility for ‘combating bandits’ in the occupied territories, had a complete settlement plan drawn up for the territory under German domination, constantly expanded the Waffen-SS’s recruitment opportunities, concerned himself with the integration of the ‘Germanic countries’ into the new Reich, planned to build up his own arms business, tackled the systematic removal of ‘asocial’ elements, and, under the banner of ‘extermination through labour’, ensured the expansion of the concentration-camp system.

From Himmler’s perspective the sequence of brilliant military victories won by the Wehrmacht from 1939 onwards was like a time-lapse, making the span of several generations that he had hitherto estimated as being necessary to establish a Greater Germanic Reich drastically shrink: in 1942 there seemed to him a window allowing him and his SS to turn ideas that had up to then been regarded as utopian into reality. What looked from his
standpoint like a huge acceleration of historical processes and the entirely justified expectation of turning utopian dreams into reality in a very short time seems to me an absolutely decisive factor in explaining his actions in implementing the ‘Final Solution’ and organizing gigantomaniacal ‘plans for a new order’. Up to this point he had, in his own estimation, been ultimately successful with almost everything he had tackled. Nothing and nobody seemed capable of stopping him.

Yet very shortly after this, at the end of 1942, came the turn in the war, and Himmler was forced to put his extensive plans on hold. If one examines more closely the diverse projects to which he had given powerful impetus, most in any case ran aground fairly swiftly: his projects for new settlements were inadequately carried out or ended in a fiasco; his plan to build bridgeheads in the ‘Germanic countries’ by forming alliances with local leaders and agencies willing to collaborate was largely unsuccessful; his own arms business never materialized; the ‘combating of bandits’ turned out to be a hopeless endeavour; the large-scale recruitment of ethnic Germans into the Waffen-SS weakened the position of German minorities in south-eastern Europe, and the recruitment of volunteers from ‘alien nations’ to the Waffen-SS had mainly negative results.

Now he concentrated fully on what had always represented the core of his power: the exercise of violence and terror, with the help of which he now intended to guarantee the ‘security’ of the territory still dominated by Nazi Germany. By taking on further offices, in particular that of Reich Minister of the Interior and commander of the Reserve Army, towards the end of the war he to all intents and purposes united in his own person all the instruments of violence belonging to the Nazi state.

Nevertheless, he was unable to stop resistance movements in the occupied territories, nor is there evidence to suggest that he had developed even the beginnings of a coherent idea of how to do so. The situation in Germany itself was, however, different: up to the military capitulation in May 1945 he was largely successful in what he had set himself in 1937 as his chief task in the event of a new war, namely, to cover the regime’s back in the ‘internal theatre of war’ inside Germany. The fact that the Third Reich did not collapse from within but only under the force of the Allied armies—a prolongation of its existence that cost millions of lives—really was to a considerable extent the work of Heinrich Himmler.

In the final phase of the war Himmler tried for the very last time to redefine his role in the Third Reich: as an honest broker, who, acting from
allegedly humanitarian motives, was opening up the way for peace. He made efforts to establish contacts with the western Allies via neutral states, offering in the process the possibility of exchanging concentration-camp prisoners and even seeking to contact Jewish organizations—an absurd course of action that possibly underlines his tendency to indulge political illusions as much as his striving to adjust to whatever circumstances he found himself in. When these efforts failed and Hitler repudiated him in the final days of the war he took refuge in hectic activity, without finding anything with which to counter his inner or outer collapse.

What is remarkable in all this is above all Himmler’s ability, in the course of the Nazi dictatorship, on the one hand to create all-embracing plans for the power complex he controlled, and on the other to allocate to the individual component organizations of his empire tasks connected with the realization of these plans that, from the regime’s perspective, not only made sense ideologically and in terms of power politics, but also gave the impression of forming a coherent whole. Although he was extremely careful in each individual case to obtain Hitler’s confirmation of any new powers, he was nevertheless the one who was able to combine these separate powers tactically into a system. In this way he made successive additions to his areas of responsibility, until finally, at the end of the war, he was probably the most powerful Nazi politician after Hitler.

And yet Himmler’s career cannot be interpreted one-sidedly in terms of a continuous and persistent process of realizing existing ideological tenets. Although a particular theme—the refrain of the eternal struggle of ‘Germanic’ heroes against ‘Asiatic’ subhumans—runs through his mind and actions, this way of seeing the world was so general and vague that he could adapt it to fit any political situation. This ability to combine ideology flexibly with power politics was his real strength.