Heinrich Himmler : A Life (24 page)

Thus the selection must involve not only the careful inspection of the future SS leader but also include his family:

The Oberführer must take particular care with the selection of leaders. He must scrutinize the milieu and the family of the person whom he has envisaged appointing to a leadership position. A good and completely impeccable leader can never come from an inferior milieu; he will always have scruples and he will never have the decisiveness that an SSF must possess.

Finally, Himmler dealt with the role of the SS within the Nazi movement: ‘We must be the best possible comrades of the SA and at the same time always provide models for them. We must always work the hardest and yet never talk about what we have achieved, for there is an old proverb that says: “He who talks a lot never achieves anything.”’ What was decisive was the recognition that the SS received from the political leadership for its reliability and loyalty: ‘Not everybody likes us; we may be shoved into a corner after we have done our work; we must not expect any gratitude. But our leader knows that he can rely on his SS. We are his favourite and most valuable organization because we have never disappointed him.’
²³

In the same month, July 1931, Himmler issued ‘Provisional Service Regulations for the Work of the SS’, which spelled out the duties of SS members in detail. According to these, SS members had to assemble four times a month. They were expected to take part in monthly meetings of the local branches and once a month undertake a propaganda trip, while two further days in the month were to be devoted to actual ‘SS duties’. These were to involve drill as well as ju-jitsu, which Himmler had practised in his student days with more or less enthusiasm.

Again, Himmler underlined the claim of the SS to elite status; it should not let itself descend to the level of petty local disputes: ‘The SS never takes part in the discussion at membership meetings. Participation in membership meetings is for the purpose of indoctrinating SS members, who are not permitted to smoke or to leave the hall during the lecture.’ Also, Himmler instructed that SS members were not allowed to get involved in the internal affairs of the SA.

The Service Regulations also laid down what songs all SS members were required to know by heart,
²⁴
as well as the details of their uniform. The SS uniform was to consist of a brown shirt, SS armbands, a black tie, a party badge, a black cap with a death’s-head badge, black trousers, black leather
gaiters, black shoes with shoelaces or riding boots, as well as a black belt. The carrying or use of firearms was strictly forbidden and would result in dismissal from the SS and the party. Admission to the SS was to be governed by the ‘strictest criteria’. The applicants had to be at least 1.70 metres tall and at least 23 years of age. In view of the fact that the SA consisted mainly of young men aged between 18 and 25, the higher age-threshold imposed for the SS underlined its claim to a special status.
²⁵

During the coming months the Service Regulations were augmented by numerous additional orders, for example to do with the organization of the staffs,
²⁶
the establishment of marching bands,
²⁷
and the medical examination of SS members.
²⁸
In the end the SS leadership’s obsession with detail went so far as to differentiate between six different types of order, each with its own distribution list, which were cascaded down over the SS organization throughout the country.
²⁹

In the summer of 1931 Himmler took another decision that was to have far-reaching consequences; he decided to set up a separate SS intelligence service. The person he chose for this task was Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich had been dismissed from the Navy in April 1931 after he had broken off an engagement and been found guilty of dishonourable conduct by a naval court of honour.
³⁰
He had got to know Himmler through SSGruppenführer Friedrich Karl Freiherr von Eberstein. After he had joined the Hamburg SS in July 1931 he was received by the Reichsführer-SS, who was impressed by Heydrich’s former position as ‘Nachrichtenoffizier’ (‘information officer’—not realizing at the time that Heydrich had been a signals, not an intelligence, officer). On 1 August 1931 Heydrich began his job as head of the new ‘Ic Service’, as the agency, using military jargon, was called.
³¹

In a secret order of September 1931 Himmler defined the structure of an intelligence network that was to reach down to Standarte level.
³²
To begin with, however, Heydrich was the only member of the organization. This changed only after the ban on the SA and SS in April 1932, when the intelligence service was provisionally camouflaged as the ‘Press Information Service’. During the following months Heydrich succeeded not only in establishing a headquarters but also in recruiting colleagues throughout the Reich, who reported their observations to it independently of the Standarte reports. On 19 July 1932—the ban had been lifted in June—Himmler appointed Heydrich head of the Party’s Security Service (SD) and ten days later promoted him to the rank of Standartenführer.
³³

The Nazi mass movement had been continually expanding since its great success in the Reichstag election of September 1930. It was now also continually making gains in state and local elections. It benefited above all from the fact that the Brüning government, which was backed by the Reich President’s right to issue emergency decrees, failed to come up with adequate solutions to the political and economic crisis and thus kept providing the NSDAP with opportunities for attacking the ‘system’.

Although dwarfed by its competitor, the SA, whose membership had risen from 88,000 to 260,000 between January and December 1931,
³⁴
the SS had also grown significantly, although it still remained far behind the quota of 10 per cent of the SA which Röhm had fixed in January 1931 as the official ratio of SS to SA. On 1 January 1931 the SS contained 2,272 members, three months later 4,490, and in October Himmler noted that the membership of the SS now stood at 10,000 with another 3,000 candidate members.
³⁵
At this point it was organized into thirty-nine Standarten, which were combined into eight Abschnitte.
³⁶

In his June 1931 speech to SS leaders, however, Himmler had emphasized that it was not so much a question of numbers, but rather the SS’s elite character that was to be decisive for the task it had set itself as a racial avantgarde. Thus ‘racial criteria’ also had to play a part in admissions to the SS. During its initial years the Reichsführer-SS did in fact scrutinize every application himself, and in the process, as he told Wehrmacht officers in a speech in 1937, focused in particular on the applicant’s photo, asking himself the question: ‘Does the man’s face reveal clear traces of foreign blood such as excessively protruding cheekbones, in other words, a case where ordinary people would say: he looks like a Mongol or a Slav?’
³⁷
However, during the first months after the so-called seizure of power in 1933 the pressure to join the SS was so great that admission was more or less indiscriminate. It was only then that a systematic form of racial examination was introduced for admission to the organization in order to control the stream of applicants.

But it was not only the SS applicants themselves who were examined. At the end of 1931, with his ‘Engagement and Marriage Order’, Himmler insisted on the examination of the race and ‘hereditary health’ of the future wives of SS members.
³⁸
The order began with the programmatic sentence: ‘The SS is a band of German men of strictly Nordic origin, selected according to certain principles’, and determined that, for the purpose of ‘selecting and maintaining blood that is racially and genetically of high quality’, from 1 January 1932 all SS members had to secure ‘permission to
marry’. Applications would be assessed by a new Racial Office, which would also start a ‘clan book’ (
Sippenbuch
) for every SS member.

Himmler was fully aware of the fact that his marriage order would meet with incomprehension, indeed ridicule, outside his organization. He even anticipated this reaction. Point no. 10 of the order stated: ‘The SS is convinced that with this order it has taken a step of great significance. Derision, scorn, and incomprehension will not sway us; the future is ours!’ Himmler referred to it twelve years later, and in a speech to the Wehrmacht admitted that the marriage order had been regarded ‘at the time as ridiculous, as nonsense, as exaggerated, and had not been understood and had been rejected even by some in the ranks of the SS’.
³⁹

However, the marriage order was not simply a fad of Himmler’s but an integral part of the SS’s attempts to distinguish itself from the plebeian SA. The marriage order was meant to express the fact that within the SS there was a fundamentally different attitude to masculinity and the relationship between the sexes to that prevalent in the SA. The image of itself projected by the SA was of a bunch of tough-guys, who liked on occasion to get drunk, were not averse to a punch-up, had a relaxed attitude to sex (which included tolerating homosexuality in their own ranks), and in general lived without ties.
⁴⁰
The SS man, on the other hand, was expected to be disciplined, to be reserved in manner, to be ‘Aryan’, and through his marriage to contribute to the improvement of the ‘racial quality’ of the German people.

As head of the new Racial Office
⁴¹
Himmler appointed SS-Standartenführer Walther Darré, who was already responsible for propaganda within the SS.
⁴²
As leader of the Nazi agricultural movement, Darré had contributed far more to the expansion of the NSDAP as a mass movement through his mobilization of the ‘rural nation’ than Himmler had done in his role as the desk officer within party headquarters responsible for agricultural questions. Indeed, he was seen as one of the coming men in the NSDAP.
⁴³
This was attributable not only to his success in mobilizing support among the rural population, but also to the fact that he was one of the movement’s keenest ideologists. In his works
The Peasantry as the Life Spring of the Nordic Race
and
A New Aristocracy from Blood and Soil
he had put forward the view that the German people needed to be ‘nordified’ through a systematic racial policy. Darré wanted to create a new aristocracy from the peasantry, or rather to recreate the ‘Germanic aristocracy’ that was rooted in the German people by establishing hereditary landholdings (
Hegehöfe
) and by the selection of the
women who would marry into them on the basis of racial principles. The selection was to be carried out by so-called ‘Breeding Wardens’ (
Zuchtwarte
).

There was much in common between the intellectual worlds of Himmler and Darré: Teutonic fantasies, hostility to Christianity (which Darré blamed for the decline of the Germanic aristocracy), and common membership of the Artamanen movement, and the two men were on friendly terms. With Darré’s appointment to the Racial Office Himmler exposed the SS to the blood-and-soil ideology and mythologizing of ‘the Teutons’. Himmler, who owed his career in the party not to original ideas but to his role as a functionary, would have had difficulty imposing these ideas on the SS as required beliefs. Darré, however, through his published works and his political success, was regarded as an authority, which is why Himmler tried to win him for the SS.

At first, however, all this remained purely symbolic. The SS began the actual ‘selection’ of the SS candidates and their future wives on a large scale only after 1933.
⁴⁴
At the start of his career as Reichsführer-SS, and particularly in his immediate sphere of operation, Himmler evidently had other priorities.

Like all of us Gruppenführer I owe to the confidence and generosity shown me by the Reichsführer-SS all that I now am. I not only owe him my high rank, but above all it is thanks to his great work and the training that he has put me through that I have developed into what I am now. To be able to serve him loyally and selflessly is not only an obvious duty but doing so gives me the greatest pleasure and the sense of being honoured.
⁴⁵

These sentences were written by Himmler’s adjutant Karl Wolff in January 1939, for the tenth anniversary of Himmler’s appointment as Reichsführer-SS. And, if one takes a look at the SS leadership corps of the early years, it is clear that Wolff was by no means the only one who owed the Reichsführer ‘all that I now am’.

The SS leadership team before 1933 was recruited above all from the age cohort born between 1890 and 1900. Almost all of them had served as young soldiers in the World War, the majority since 1914 and most of them as officers, and then often served a few more years in a Free Corps, before
being released into a civilian life in which the majority failed to find their feet and experienced that failure as a decline in their social status.

Wolff himself, born in 1900, had served in the exclusive guards regiment of the Grand Duke of Hesse and then joined the Free Corps, until he was discharged as a highly decorated lieutenant. At the beginning of the 1920s he initially trained as a banker and then, after various failed attempts, managed to get a position in advertising, eventually opening his own advertising agency in Munich. During the world depression this firm, which typically used his wife’s noble family name in its title, got into serious difficulties. With his entry into the party and the SS in October 1931 this extremely status-conscious 31-year-old hoped he had found a career that would be appropriate for someone of his social standing.
⁴⁶

August Heissmeyer was born in 1897 and fought in the war from 1915 onwards, ending up as a lieutenant. His detailed curriculum vitae, which is preserved in his SS personal file, describes the chequered path of a typical post-war career. However, he presents this as if it were the result of his involvement with the ‘movement’: ‘I began as a worker in the Marienthal woollen goods factory in Hamelin and then went to Göttingen in the summer of 1919 and attended a course in order to gain my Abitur. I was forced [
sic
] to interrupt my studies on account of the Kapp putsch.’ Heissmeyer took part in the crushing of the left-wing uprising that had broken out in the aftermath of the putsch. But, ‘when there was no further opportunity of participating in the struggle, I returned to Göttingen and passed my Abitur in October 1930 [. . .] I then began to study law and economics in Göttingen, Kiel, and then again in Göttingen [. . .] Compelled to leave the University as a result of the inflation, I went to work as a miner in Westphalia.’ Here he was tempted to become a communist, but then changed his political views: ‘I soon heard about Nazism and was swept away [. . .] In the autumn of 1922 I got a job in the Höchst chemical works as a blue-collar worker. In February 1923 I was put in charge of the safety section of the pesticides department.’