Heinrich Himmler : A Life (3 page)

Ullstein Bild, Berlin

Ills. 3, 6, 13, 18, 19, 31

US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

Ills. 2, 5, 15, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29

The views and opinions associated with these photographs and the context within which they have been published do not reflect the views or principles of the Holocaust Memorial Museum nor does the publishing of these pictures imply that the Museum shares these views and opinions. The publisher and author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.

On the afternoon of 23 May 1945, more than two weeks after the German surrender, a group of about twenty suspects—German civilians and soldiers—who had been rounded up two days previously, were brought into the British forces’ 31st Civilian Interrogation Camp near Lüneburg.
¹

Captain Selvester, the duty officer, began the routine interrogation of the prisoners: the men were brought individually into his office, where he took down their personal details and questioned them. He had been at work for some time when he heard from the sentries that three of the prisoners waiting outside his office were causing trouble by demanding to be seen immediately. This was extremely unusual. Selvester knew from experience that most prisoners would do anything to avoid drawing attention to themselves.

His curiosity aroused, Selvester ordered the three prisoners to be brought in. Thereupon a fairly short, ill-looking man in shabby civilian clothing entered his office, followed closely by two taller men of distinctly military bearing dressed half in civilian, half in military clothing. All three were under suspicion of belonging to the Secret Field Police. Selvester sent the two taller men out again in order to take a closer look at the shorter one, who was clearly in charge. The man removed a black patch covering his right eye, put on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, and introduced himself calmly as the person his outward appearance unmistakably indicated: Heinrich Himmler, the former Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police, Commander of the Reserve Army of the German Wehrmacht, and Reich Minister of the Interior.

Selvester immediately sent for the most senior interrogation officer, Captain Smith, and, in order to be quite sure, both demanded a specimen signature from Himmler. At first Himmler refused, clearly suspecting the
men were after a souvenir, but agreed in the end on condition that the paper was destroyed as soon as his signature had been compared with a copy kept in the camp.

After this Selvester himself set about searching the prisoner. First of all, he discovered documents in the name of Heinrich Hitzinger, Wehrmacht sergeant. In Himmler’s jacket he then came upon a small tin with a glass phial containing a colourless liquid. Recognizing that it was a suicide capsule, Selvester asked Himmler as innocently as he could what was in the phial. The reply came that it was medicine to treat stomach cramps. When a second identical tin was found in Himmler’s clothing Selvester was forced to conclude that his prisoner still had a further capsule hidden on or inside his person.

Himmler was therefore subjected to a minute examination that included all orifices, though the most likely and most dangerous hiding-place, his mouth, was carefully omitted. Instead, Selvester then ordered cheese sandwiches and tea, both of which Himmler was happy to accept without removing any suspicious object from his mouth. He did, however, refuse to put on the items of British uniform offered to him in place of his confiscated clothing, fearing most likely that the intention was to take photographs of him for use as propaganda.

So now he was sitting in his underclothes and draped in a blanket facing the British officers. It was established that the two men accompanying him were Obersturmbannführer Werner Grothmann, the SS leader’s adjutant, and another member of his staff, Sturmbannführer Heinz Macher.

Towards evening a more senior secret-service officer arrived and began to interrogate Himmler. Meanwhile, the British began deliberating how they could retrieve intact the capsule presumed to be in Himmler’s mouth. Military doctors were asked if drugs could be used to render him unconscious but this was rejected as too risky.
²

The interrogation was brought to a temporary close towards midnight. Himmler was taken to the headquarters of the Second British Army in Lüneburg. The whole time he had been in Camp 31 Himmler had appeared cooperative, from time to time positively jovial, and willing to answer the British officers’ questions, or at least that was Selvester’s impression. Though at first he had seemed unwell, he had visibly recovered after being given something to eat and the chance to wash.

Once in Lüneburg Himmler was subjected to a thorough medical examination, in the course of which the doctor, Captain Wells, discovered in
Himmler’s mouth, which he was reluctant to open, a blue-tipped object. As Wells attempted to remove this foreign body, Himmler jerked his head to one side to avoid him. He bit into the capsule and collapsed. After fifteen minutes all further attempts to remove the remains of the poison from his mouth and to revive him were abandoned. Closer inspection revealed that the poison was cyanide.
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Three days after his death Himmler’s body was buried. Only a British officer and three sergeants who had dug the grave were present. There was no religious ceremony and the place of burial was unmarked.
⁴

Himmler’s behaviour during his final days is full of contradictions. Unlike other prominent Nazis he had not taken his own life in the last days of the war but rather gone into hiding, although in such an amateurish manner that he and those with him were bound to be caught at some point. When he fell into Allied hands he made sure they knew who he was and yet then evaded responsibility through suicide. The fact that he acted in this way and not in accordance with the virtues of an SS officer he perpetually preached—which included taking responsibility, in however crude a form, for one’s own actions—was to disillusion his men deeply and result in the posthumous reputation of the Reichsführer-SS remaining largely negative even among his former adherents. In the post-war years no Himmler legend was waiting to be born.

In May 1945 Himmler had simply been absorbed into the flood of millions of refugees and soldiers. His end appears as puzzling as his career in the service of National Socialism. How could such a banal personality attain such a historically unique position of power? How could the son of a prosperous Bavarian Catholic public servant become the organizer of a system of mass murder spanning the whole of Europe?

The aim of this biography is to penetrate as far as possible the mystery of this man’s personality and the motives underlying his monstrous deeds. To succeed in this, however, it is necessary to go beyond the established pattern of political biography and take into account quite literally the whole of Himmler’s life in its separate stages and its various spheres of activity, including the non-political ones.

Such a comprehensive biographical approach allows us to reconstruct the development of this personality, its essential character traits and typical behaviour patterns in its formative years, which extend into the start of
Himmler’s political career, and thereby to gain insights that will illuminate his later life. This method makes it altogether possible to explain what motivated this ‘young man from a good family’ to join the radical right-wing splinter party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), in the mid-1920s, and what impelled someone who was fairly weak physically and nondescript in appearance to develop the protection squad (
Schutzstaffel
) he commanded into the martial SS and steer it on a course of selecting only the racially perfect. His personality also allows us to draw conclusions about what moved Himmler in the following years to stick stubbornly to his post in spite of defeats and frustrations, and to work consistently to build up a power structure that exercised decisive control over the territory under German domination. As far as the unprecedented crimes he organized are concerned, his own justification of them is indissolubly bound up with his biography, with his notion of ‘decency’, which on closer inspection turns out to be no more than a label for petit-bourgeois double standards.

A Himmler biography can, however, achieve much more. For if we build up a biographically coherent picture, with both chronological and synoptic analysis, of the diverse activities for which Himmler, as Reichsführer-SS, Chief of the German Police, Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation, Reich Minister of the Interior, and Commander of the Reserve Army, was responsible, we are in a position to recognize that the individual fields of political activity for which Himmler was responsible were much more strongly interlinked than is commonly supposed. In addition, surprising coincidences of timing come to light that have not been recognized in research to date.

Research up to now on the history of the SS and Nazi Party structures has concentrated above all on the reconstruction of the mass crimes carried out by the SS (with the Holocaust clearly the main focus of attention), as well as on its various spheres of action. Thus, repression, racial extermination, the Waffen-SS, settlement and ethnic policies, espionage, and so on were considered primarily as a series of separate pillars of the SS empire. Yet if an explanation is sought for what held this exceptionally heterogeneous apparatus together and for how it came, in the course of time, to seek more and more tasks, to extend its areas of activity, and, on several occasions, to redefine itself, then the focus must be turned onto the life story of the man at its head. For Himmler was to redefine the role of the SS repeatedly, in clearly distinguishable phases of its existence.

From the small bodyguard unit he took over in 1929 he created in a very short time a paramilitary organization with elite pretensions sworn to serve the top Party leadership. In 1933/4 he was able to to propel himself relatively quickly up to the rank of Reich Chief of the Political Police. From this position he developed a comprehensive plan for the management of the whole of the police force which, after Hitler had appointed him Chief of the German Police, he intended to amalgamate with the SS to form a state protection corps (
Staatsschutzkorps
) to provide comprehensive internal security.

When at the end of the 1930s the so-called Third Reich began to expand, he set new targets; alongside settlement and racial selection of the population in territories identified for ‘Germanization’, he expanded the Waffen-SS and played a role in the policy of repression in the occupied territories. From 1941 onwards he introduced a policy of systematic mass murder based on racial criteria. In his eyes this was the first step towards setting up a qualitatively new, racially based power structure—the Greater Germanic Reich.

At the end of 1942, however, the regime went on the defensive and Himmler changed his emphasis once again. Now he concentrated entirely on guaranteeing ‘security’ within the area still under Nazi rule, and until the end of the war all the internally enforceable methods of violence of the Nazi state were united in his person.

This evidence suggests that Himmler’s actual strength consisted in redrawing every two or three years the master plans for his sphere of power, on the basis of which interdependent tasks, aligned with the overall policy of the regime and justifiable in terms of both power politics and ideology, were allocated to the individual parts of this heterogeneous power conglomerate. By these means he responded to the increasing political radicalization of the Nazi regime and simultaneously gave that process decisive impetus.

This ability Himmler had to connect ideology and power politics in a most efficient way, by creating a continuous stream of new and wide-ranging tasks for his SS, makes one thing clear above all: the biographical approach offers the only adequate way of grasping and explaining the history of the SS in all its facets. Without the man at its head this heterogeneous organization, constantly expanding and growing more radical, cannot be investigated in a way that is thorough and complete.

Added to this is the recognition that Himmler’s personal predilections, aversions, and diverse quirks were deeply ingrained in the organization and leadership of the SS and actually played a formative role in its structure. This is, for instance, true of Himmler’s idiosyncratic notion of personnel management, which included surveillance of the private lives of his men and in many respects is reminiscent of the behaviour of a strict and solicitous father figure. It is true also of his attempt to establish an SS cult that fitted entirely the Germanophile tendencies of this Catholic dissident. The state protection corps, into which Himmler wanted to develop the SS, offered him in many respects a form of self-protection, a cover organization behind which he could act out his personal desires and hide his own weaknesses.

Himmler as Reichsführer-SS was precisely not someone who exercised a political function or held an office with a stable group of powers, but rather in the course of time he created for himself from the diverse tasks allotted to him by the Führer a unique position of power that was completely geared to him as an individual. Leading the SS, ensuring its internal cohesion and its future viability, became in fact his whole life.

The more Himmler carried over his personal maxims into his leadership of the SS, and the more he and his office grew together, the more he disappeared as a private individual behind the function of Reichsführer-SS. While a variety of sources (in particular diaries and letters) provide us with a relatively large quantity of information about the private Himmler up to the start of the 1930s, such personal documents become ever rarer with the increase in his range of powers and in the claims his professional duties made on him. Himmler had hardly any private life any more. Although we have a large number of official documents at our disposal, in which Himmler’s personality—his characteristic style, his resentments, predilections, and prejudices—clearly emerges, the purely biographical method, in spite of such evidence, comes up against its limits at the latest in the mid-1930s. It would also be presumptuous—as well as completely erroneous historiographically—to attempt to explain the actions of Heinrich Himmler as Reichsführer-SS first and foremost on the basis of his life. The history of National Socialism cannot be reduced to the intersecting careers of a number of leading Nazis.