Heinrich Himmler : A Life (39 page)

After the elimination of the communists, the Gestapo and the SD concentrated on the so-called ‘wire-pullers’, the intellectual opposition—Freemasons, Jews, and politicized priests—on whom Himmler, Heydrich, and Best had increasingly focused since 1935. Here too, however, there were significant differences in the way these groups were treated.

In the speeches he made during the 1930s Himmler invariably counted the Freemasons among the Nazis’ arch-enemies and referred to them in the same breath as the Jews, the Bolsheviks, and the politicized priests.
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However, the Reichsführer-SS, who since his youth had been a believer in the widespread conspiracy theories concerning the Freemasons, did not specify in these speeches what exactly the allegedly nefarious activity of the Freemasons consisted of.

In fact, in the meantime he must have come to the conclusion that the Freemasons posed no threat to the Nazi regime. This assessment was shared by the experts of the Gestapo and SD: for them, from the mid-1930s onwards, the combating of Freemasonry was no longer a priority. In 1935, in his influential series of articles in
Das Schwarze Korps
, ‘Phases of Our Struggle’, Heydrich demonstratively referred to Freemasonry as merely ‘an auxiliary organization of Jewry’ and therefore indicated that it was no longer regarded as a separate threat.
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Because of the Nazis’ hostility to Freemasonry, most of the lodges had already dissolved themselves in 1933 or had been dissolved by the state governments.
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By the summer of 1935 all the associations of Freemasons had been liquidated.
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Former members of lodges were discriminated against in the Third Reich, for example, if they were employed in the public sector.
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Moreover, as a matter of principle they were excluded from party membership, which automatically blocked their access to a wide range of privileged positions.
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But there was no systematic persecution of Freemasons. What is more, the fact that someone was a Freemason or had previously been one did not generally justify the imposition of protective custody.

The dwindling significance of Freemasonry was reflected in the organizational arrangements of the Gestapo and SD. Whereas before 1933 the SD had kept a special register of Freemasons,
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after its move to Berlin at the beginning of 1935 it established a ‘Museum of Freemasonry’ in which the items confiscated from the lodges, their libraries, and documents were collected together.
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It was being signalled that the ‘problem’ now belonged to the past. At the beginning of 1936 the SD department originally specifically devoted to Freemasonry was amalgamated with the desk officers dealing with the Jews and church matters to form a main department responsible for ‘Ideologies’.
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From the summer of 1937 onwards the Gestapo no longer dealt with this topic. Under the order of 1 July 1937 dealing with the demarcation of functions referred to above, Freemasonry was allocated entirely to the SD.
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With the destruction of the communist underground appearing to be imminent, ‘the Jews’ were among those ‘intellectual forces’ referred to in Himmler’s public speeches who were secretly intriguing against Nazism and
who, from 1935 onwards, were increasingly to be the target of the SS leadership and the Gestapo. However, for the period before the November pogrom of 1938 it is impossible to find any lengthy anti-Semitic statements by Himmler. He mostly treated the question of the Jews cursorily and often in a stereotypical manner along with the other enemies, and without spending any time on them.
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It was only in his major speech to the Reich Peasant Rally in Goslar of November 1935—in other words, a few weeks after the issuing of the Nuremberg Laws—that he embarked on a comprehensive anti-Jewish polemic. Significantly, the speech was printed under the title ‘The SS as an Anti-Bolshevik Combat Organization’, thereby emphasizing the link between anti-Semitism and ‘anti-Bolshevism’.

Himmler ranged very widely. He began by introducing the farmers gathered together in Goslar to the Persian Empire of Xerxes I (519–465
BC
) in order to explain the moral perniciousness of the Jewish festival of Purim. Himmler reinterpreted the annual commemoration of the saving of the Persian Jews from a pogrom—Xerxes had ordered a mass slaughter of his Jewish enemies—as ‘the radical destruction of an Aryan nation by Jewish-Bolshevik methods’. Then he described a series of similar ‘tragedies’ in which, however, one could in some cases only ‘sense [ . . . ] that here our age-old enemy, the Jew, in some form or through one of his organizations had his bloody hands in the affair’. Himmler’s list included: ‘the tireless executioner’s sword wielded at Cannstatt and Verden’ (in other words, the mass killing of Alemannen in 746 by Karlmann and of the Saxons by Charlemagne in 782); the medieval and early modern witch trials (‘We can visualize the fires burning at the stakes on which tens of thousands of the martyred and tortured bodies of mothers and girls of our nation burnt to ashes’); ‘the courts of the Inquisition which depopulated Spain’; the Thirty Years War; the French Revolution (‘a revolution organized solely by the order of Freemasons, this marvellous Jewish organization’); as well as the Russian Revolution of 1917.

When looking through his manuscript, Himmler may have had doubts about whether his arguments would stand up. The idea that Jewish stringpullers should have manipulated Charlemagne, the ‘Slaughterer of the Saxons’, of all people and should have conceived the Spanish Inquisition must have been hard to take, even for hard-line anti-Semites. Moreover, by referring to Persians, Spaniards, French, and Russians he had extended the list of those who had suffered from Jewish machinations so much that the
central role of the Teutons as the ‘victims’ of the Jewish world conspiracy had become insufficiently clear. Thus, he asked his listeners not to succumb ‘to excessive Aryan and German objectivity’ by focusing on the details but rather to concentrate on ‘the general point’.

During the first years of the Third Reich neither the Gestapo nor the SD played a prominent role in Jewish persecution. During this period the Jewish policy of the Nazi regime was initially driven decisively by the subtle interaction of party activists and state legislation. The party started ‘actions’ against the Jews, such as the boycott of 1 April 1933 and the riots of spring and summer 1935, or the pogrom of November 1938, to which the state bureaucracy then responded with measures in order further to restrict the lives of the Jewish minority. As far as the party was concerned, apart from the staff of the Führer’s Deputy under Rudolf Hess and Martin Bormann, a key role was played by a number of particularly anti-Semitic Gauleiters (Goebbels in Berlin, Grohé in Cologne, Streicher in Nuremberg), while the state operations were controlled by the Reich Interior Ministry.

The role of the Gestapo in this sphere was above all to keep the activities of Jewish organizations under surveillance
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and to carry out state measures. However, the Gestapo became increasingly unwilling to wait for laws or decrees, and began initiating such measures by issuing its own edicts. In January 1935, for example, the Gestapo ordered returning émigrés to be interned in ‘re-education camps’, which effectively meant concentration camps, as was made clear in a regulation issued a few weeks later.
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In February 1935 the Gestapa banned all events in which support was sought for Jews to remain in Germany.
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Another example was the flag ban of February 1935, which forbade Jews to raise the swastika; it was not legally confirmed until September 1935 with the Reich Flag Law.
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Himmler’s involvement in such bans varied. In July 1936, for example, he signed a directive that required requests for licences to run a pub to make it clear whether the applicant was a Jew,
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and on 15 June 1936 he informed the state secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry, Hans Pfundtner, of Hitler’s request that in future Jews should not be allowed to use German first names. However, the Interior Ministry did not act on this for another eighteen months.
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In general, Himmler left the implementation of anti-Jewish measures to Heydrich, who during the 1930s became the central figure in the Jewish policy of the Gestapo and SD. Heydrich’s role was increased by the fact that Göring, in his position as head of the ‘Raw Materials and Foreign Exchange
Staff’ (the precursor of the Four Year Plan organization), assigned him the task of setting up a ‘Foreign Exchange Search Office’. This new responsibility enabled Heydrich in future to move against Jews who were under ‘suspicion of emigrating’ on the grounds of alleged breaches of foreign-exchange regulations.
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This appointment was the first of a whole series of responsibilities involving Jewish persecution which the Reich Marshall assigned to the head of the security police and SD during the coming years. This created two competing chains of command involving Jewish policy: Hitler–Himmler–Heydrich and Hitler–Göring–Heydrich. The Reichsführer-SS was thereby in danger of being excluded from the decision-making process in the event of his proving insufficiently active on the anti-Semitic front.

As far as Jewish persecution was concerned, both the Gestapo and the SD concentrated above all on encouraging emigration and preventing all attempts at ‘assimilation’ by German Jews. A Gestapa report of November 1934 formulated this as a programme, stating: ‘it is the aim of the state police to encourage Zionism as much as possible and support its efforts at pursuing emigration.’
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However, for this purpose it was necessary to know the numbers involved and who was to be supported. Thus, from 1935 onwards Gestapo offices recorded the names of Jews domiciled in their districts, a process that had been substantially concluded by 1939.
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Meanwhile, the SD’s Jewish department had acquired a group of young, self-confident officials—Dieter Wisliceny, Herbert Hagen, Theodor Dannecker, and Adolf Eichmann—who, in the course of 1937, set about developing their own comprehensive version of Jewish policy. Their intention was to harmonize the various and sometimes conflicting aims of Jewish persecution—expulsion, forcing the Jews out of the economy and society, and plundering them. This group believed that its position as the brains trust for Jewish policy had been confirmed by Heydrich’s ‘functions order’ of 1 July 1937, in which he had assigned all Jewish matters to the SD.
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From now on the SD increasingly involved itself in the practice of Jewish persecution, which was really the task of the Gestapo. When the German–Polish Agreement on Upper Silesia of 1922 came to an end in July 1937 and the Nazi regime could now apply the anti-Jewish legislation to this part of the country as well, Eichmann, who had been sent to Breslau a few weeks before, carried out vital preliminary work there.
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After the so-called Anschluss with Austria this SD tactic of trying to
acquire an executive role came to fruition with its assumption of auxiliary tasks for the Gestapo.
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Unlike in the case of the Jews, there was one group among those Himmler defined as enemies that aroused in him something akin to passion: Christians. And that was particularly the case when he was speaking to closed meetings of members of the SS, when he did not need to pay any attention to wider considerations of policy regarding the churches.

Thus, in 1938 he declared: ‘Christian doctrine has been responsible for the destruction of every nation. A religion which (a) sees women as sinful, (b) marriage as the lesser evil—it is at least better than the alternative, such teaching is in the long run absolutely liable to bring every nation to the grave.’ Christianity, according to Himmler, was ‘the destroyer of every nation’.
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On the occasion of the transfer of the expropriated headquarters of the Order of Teutonic Knights to the SS by the city of Vienna in 1939 he informed his listeners that he had ‘the firm intention’ ‘thoroughly to break with’ two developments that had had fatal repercussions for German history: ‘in the first place, with a doctrine that in our view is wrong for Teutons, the fateful doctrine of an Asiatic Christianity, and secondly, with the squandering of blood [ . . . ] caused by the negation of the clan and the negation of the family.’
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He warned the Oberabschnitt leaders on 9 June 1942: ‘We shall have to deal with Christianity in a much tougher way than hitherto. We must sort out this Christianity; it has plagued us throughout our history and weakened us in every conflict. If our generation doesn’t do it then I believe it could go on for a long time. We must face up to the need to deal with it.’
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Three months later, on 16 September 1942, in a speech to SS and police leaders in Hegewald, his Ukrainian summer headquarters, he described Christianity as ‘a perverse ideology that is alien to life’, because ‘in a typically oriental way it equates women with sin and has regarded procreation as legitimate only if a priest has given his blessing; then it was just about all right. But—and this was the strongest moral impulse of the Catholic Church—every sexual act between a man and woman in which the object was not to have a child or in which it was prevented was declared a mortal sin.’
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For the sake of outward appearances, however, Himmler tried to create the impression that the SS was neutral in its attitude towards the Christian
denominations. Thus, in January 1934 he expressed his displeasure at having read in a newspaper report that ‘an SS formation has taken part in the enthronement of a state bishop’. Himmler described this as ‘tasteless’ and ‘incorrect’, since ‘the SS members who had been ordered to participate would have been thereby exposed to moral conflict’. A ‘politicization of religious life does not accord with our ideology. Even the appearance of it must be avoided at all costs.’
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In October 1934 he insisted that clergy and, in March 1935, theology students must quit the SS.
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In September 1935 he banned SS members from ‘participating in leadership roles’ in religious communities, in particular with the German Christians.
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Himmler did not intend to reform Christianity in Nazi Germany; rather, he wanted to draw a clear dividing-line against Christian communities of any kind. In November 1937 he even went so far as to ban SS members in uniform from taking part in religious ceremonies.
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