Heinrich Himmler : A Life (25 page)

However, in April 1925 Heissmeyer was dismissed on the grounds of his political activity for the NSDAP. In the meantime he had married and had a son: ‘I returned with the family to live with my parents-in-law in Hamelin. My attempts to get back to flying proved unsuccessful [. . .] I then returned to Göttingen to finish my studies with the help of my parents-in-law. However, things turned out differently because very soon, in October
1925, I took over command of the SA [. . .] When my father-in-law heard about my political activities he cut off my monthly allowance.’

Heissmeyer then had to cut down on his political involvement and concentrate on maintaining his family:

To begin with, I became a fruit-tree salesman. My family had been living apart from me for three years in Hamelin and I now brought them to live with me in Göttingen. When nobody wanted to buy any more trees, after about 1½ years I became a salesman for Siemens–Schuckert. But business collapsed because of the increasing shortage of money and the economic crisis. I then became a driving instructor in a driving school [. . .] in Göttingen where I worked from February to December 1931. In December 1930 I joined the Göttingen SS. By November 1931 I had succeeded in increasing its numbers from 18 to 600.

In December 1931 he was put in charge of Standarte 12 and ‘moved to Brunswick, while my family had to stay behind in Göttingen for financial reasons’.
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In October 1932 he took over Abschnitt XVII (Münster).

Kurt Wege, who was born in 1891, had been a soldier from 1911 onwards and was discharged in 1920 as a lieutenant. His subsequent career was chequered. To begin with he worked in farming and began a degree in agriculture, which he had to interrupt in 1923 because of the inflation. He then tried to get by as an unskilled worker, then as a cashier, and then as a clerk, but was repeatedly made redundant. In 1926 he once again became a student—‘since I couldn’t find suitable employment’—but then gave it up and instead did a correspondence course in bookkeeping. He earned his keep as a ‘security official’ with the Berlin Guard and Security Service, a private firm. ‘But I had to give up this strenuous night work for health reasons.’ He was appointed secretary of the National Transport League on a trial basis, but his ‘appointment failed to be confirmed as a result of disagreements between the two chairmen. I also became ill as a result of my previous work as a security official.’ Between 1927 and 1929 he worked as a salesman. In addition to his career problems, he suffered personal tragedy: his wife died in 1923 and Wege, who had two school-age children, went to live with his mother. In December 1929 he finally found permanent employment with the NSDAP Gau Berlin. From there he switched to the salaried position of an SS-Oberführer and leader of SS Abschnitt XIII (Stettin).
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Richard Hildebrandt, who was born in 1897, passed his Abitur in 1915, volunteered for military service, and was discharged from the army as a
lieutenant in 1918. After the war he studied economics, languages, history, and art history, without finishing his degree in any of them. He then worked in banking and as a clerk in commerce and industry in various places. In spring 1928 he went to the United States, where he worked ‘mainly in manual occupations (farming, horticulture, artisanal)’. In 1930 he returned to Germany. He had already joined the party in 1922, and on his return from the United States he again became actively involved and joined the SS in 1931, where he was appointed adjutant to Sepp Dietrich, the head of the Munich SS Abschnitt.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger was born in 1894 as the son of an officer. He left grammar school without taking his Abitur, took part in the World War as an infantry officer and in various post-war military actions, and was discharged from the army in 1920 as a lieutenant. At first he tried his hand at bookselling, but lost his job in 1924 and switched to a management post in the Berlin waste-disposal department, from which he was also dismissed in 1928. He described his profession from now onwards as ‘independent businessman’. Krüger also began a family in these economically difficult years. He married in 1923 and his first son was born in 1929. He joined the NSDAP at the end of 1929. In 1933 he was in temporary charge of SS Abschnitt III (Berlin), but then switched to the SA, where he was appointed to senior positions. In 1935, however, he was to return to the SS.
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Friedrich Jeckeln was born in 1895. He was unable to finish his mechanical-engineering degree because of the outbreak of the World War. He volunteered for the army and achieved the rank of lieutenant, and from 1917 onwards was a pilot in the Flying Corps. He married in 1918 and administered an estate that belonged to his father-in-law. However, they soon fell out with one another. Jeckeln concluded from the behaviour of his father-in-law that, as he told Himmler some years later, he must have married into a family of Jewish extraction. This notion (for which there was no evidence) resulted in his becoming increasingly alienated from his wife. From then onwards he spent a considerable amount of time with a group of former officers, among whom, as he admitted, he ‘sometimes consumed a significant amount of alcohol’. Finally, he left the farm and he and his wife separated. During the following years he tried in vain to establish himself in another profession. He married for a second time, but got into considerable financial difficulties as a result of old debts owed to his father-in-law and the maintenance payments due to his first wife, and had to declare himself bankrupt. ‘I felt a broken man and was financially ruined.
I couldn’t find a job and get settled’, as he subsequently put it when describing this period in his life to Himmler. It was while in this depressing personal situation that he joined the NSDAP in 1929, at the beginning of the economic crisis, and in the following year the SS. When his divorced wife once again complained to Himmler that her former husband was behind with maintenance payments, Jeckeln responded: ‘Only when Germany is free will I be able to put right everything that has been brought about by the decline of our nation and fatherland.’ Thus, for him the Nazi ‘seizure of power’ came as his salvation.
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Werner Lorenz was born in 1891 and went to a military cadet school. He joined the army in 1912 and became an officer in 1914. He described his career during the post-war period in his curriculum vitae as follows: ‘After the war ended, his regiment was deployed on frontier guard duties; until June 1919 he commanded a squadron of his regiment. He was then discharged. Since 1929 actively involved in the NSDAP. Joined the Danzig SS in January 1930’, which he subsequently built up. Significantly, his curriculum vitae does not mention his civilian life at all. In his SS personal file his occupation is given as ‘soldier’.
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Kurt Wittje was born in January 1894 and, from June 1932 onwards, was leader of SS Abschnitt IX (Würzburg). He was one of the few high-ranking SS leaders who managed to get taken on by the Reichswehr as an officer during the 1920s. However, in 1928 he had to leave the army because of suspicions of homosexual activities, and joined the board of a limited company. He joined the SS in 1931; he wisely kept the reason for his discharge from the army to himself.
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The leaders of Abschnitt V (Essen), Karl Zech, Abschnitt X (Kiel), Paul Moder, and Abschnitt XVI (Zwickau), Heinrich Schmauser, all of them former army officers, had had to follow similar careers that they did not consider appropriate to their social standing, such as ‘commercial employee, miner and mining official’,
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‘mail order manager, clerk’,
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or ‘in banking’.
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Among the high-ranking SS leaders there are three who, in terms of their birth and personal circumstances, can definitely be described as upper class. Thus, on the basis of his birth Josias, Hereditary Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont, was certainly an exception among the high-ranking SS leaders. Born in 1896, the prince had fought in the World War, was discharged from the army as a lieutenant, and had subsequently studied agriculture and economics at Munich University. It was there that he had got to know
Himmler.
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In 1923 he broke off his studies without having graduated. To begin with, he was involved in the Jungdeutscher Orden, which he left in 1926. He joined the SS in November 1929, where, in September 1930, he became Himmler’s adjutant and then his ‘chief of staff’.
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The leader of Abschnitt VI (Breslau), Udo von Woyrsch, who was born in 1895, had a full-time job managing his father’s estate.
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The later Munich police chief, Friedrich Karl Freiherr von Eberstein, who was born in 1894, became a factory owner in the 1920s after a standard military career as a cadet, war volunteer, army officer, and member of a Free Corps. He joined the SS in 1929, but was provisionally transferred to the SA, where he filled a number of high-ranking posts.
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Only three of the early high-ranking SS officers had not achieved the rank of officer in the military. Sepp Dietrich, who was born in 1892, came from a humble background and began his career in the hotel business. He was called up into the army in 1914, discharged as a sergeant in 1919, and then joined the Free Corps. Between 1920 and 1923 he worked for the Bavarian state police, and then, thanks to the head of the Munich NSDAP, Christian Weber, in the latter’s petrol station. From 1925 onwards he was involved with the NSDAP; he joined the party and the SS in 1928. Two months later he had already become leader of the Munich SS Standarte and, in July 1929, SS-Oberführer for the whole of Bavaria. In July 1930, as Oberführer South, he took over responsibility for the SS throughout southern Germany. He was promoted to Gruppenführer in December 1931 and from February 1932 was in charge of Hitler’s bodyguard, which was to operate from 1933 onwards as the staff guards at the Reich Chancellery and was to form the basis of the ‘Leibstandarte’.
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Kurt Daluege, who was born in 1897 the son of a middle-ranking civil servant, served in the army from 1916 onwards, where, like Dietrich, he achieved the rank of sergeant. After the defeat he was involved in various paramilitary organizations and took part in confrontations with Polish militia. From 1921 onwards he studied at the Technical University in Berlin and graduated with a diploma in civil engineering. At the same time he was involved with radical right-wing organizations, and joined the NSDAP in 1923. To begin with he was active in the SA; indeed, he was the leader of the SA in Berlin–Brandenburg from 1926 to 1929. However, the fact that Walter Stennes was appointed SA-Oberführer for northern Germany instead of himself may have persuaded Daluege to accept Hitler’s advice and transfer to the SS in the summer of 1930, where he took over the leadership
of the Berlin SS. In this role Daluege was to play a decisive part in the party’s internal surveillance of the unruly Berlin SA. In civilian life Daluege had succeeded in establishing a conventional middle-class existence for himself that was markedly different from the personal biographies of the other high-ranking SS leaders. He earned his living as a senior manager in the Berlin city department for refuse disposal, was married in 1926, and had three children.
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Among the former NCOs was Alfred Rodenbücher, who was leader of the SS Abschnitt XIV (Bremen) from October 1932 onwards. Born in 1900, he had joined the Navy in 1916 as a cabin boy and ultimately been promoted to the rank of chief petty officer. In 1930 he transferred from the Navy to the career of a low-ranking civil servant. His appointment to a leading position in the rapidly expanding SS offered him the prospect of a much more prestigious career.
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Rodenbücher, like Himmler, belonged to the so-called war youth generation, who, while being fully aware of and experiencing the effects of the war, had not actually been able to fight in it. Among this age cohort, which formed a definite minority within the SS leadership, was Fritz Weitzel, who was born in Frankfurt in 1904. An apprentice locksmith, Weitzel had at first been a member of the Socialist Workers’ Youth organization, but then transferred his allegiance to the NSDAP in 1923. Soon after the founding of the SS in 1925 he took over its organization in Frankfurt. After being appointed to various different posts, at the end of 1930 he was made leader of the SS in the whole of western Germany. In 1930 he was also a successful candidate in the Reichstag election, which gave him financial security.
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In 1927 Weitzel had been sentenced to a month’s imprisonment for his involvement in an abortion case.
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When a party member reported this to Himmler, he replied that he was fully aware of the circumstances and that he was of the ‘opinion that Party comrade Weitzel’s honour had not been affected or damaged in any way by the whole affair’. He would ignore any further ‘letters of denunciation’ in this matter.
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In fact the sentence did not have any negative effect on Weitzel’s career.

Wilhelm Rediess, who was born in 1900 in Heinsberg in the lower Rhine area, served a few months in the army from June 1918 but was not sent to the front. A qualified electrician, after his discharge from the army Rediess could not find employment in his trade. To begin with he worked as a trainee in agriculture, and then, between 1924 and 1928, after having undergone the appropriate training, was employed as a skilled mechanic
in various firms. ‘I became unemployed after the collapse of my firm as a result of the economic crisis’, he noted in his curriculum vitae. After the occupation of the Rhineland by French troops in 1923 he joined the Völkisch-Social-Bloc, which later went over to the NSDAP en masse. In 1925 he became the leader of an SA Sturm in Düsseldorf. He joined the SS in 1930 and took over Abschnitt XI (Koblenz) on 1 January 1931.
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With a remarkable instinct Himmler had gathered round himself a group of men who, although they no more matched the high ideals of the SS than he did himself, were nevertheless men on whose loyalty he could rely. Many of them were dependent on him for their very material existence, a situation which, when necessary, he knew well how to exploit. This, then, was the team with which he set about building up his organization.