Heinrich Himmler : A Life (42 page)

In autumn 1936 the Prussian State Criminal Police Office organized the centralization of Gypsy persecution—in the meantime the Reich Criminal Police Office had been created—and in 1938 a Reich Centre for the Combating of Gypsies was established.
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By mid-1939 a criminal police organization reaching down to the local police authorities had been established for ‘combating Gypsies’. The Reich Criminal Police Office worked closely together with the Research Centre for Racial Hygiene in the Reich Health Office, which since 1937 had been subjecting all the Gypsies living in the Reich—Sinti and Roma—to anthropological and genealogical examination. On the basis of this material the Research Centre produced ‘expert’ racial hygiene reports in which they developed an elaborate classification of ‘ethnically pure’ and ‘half-caste’ Gypsies.
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Based on this classification, on 8 December 1938 Himmler issued a fundamental order on the question of ‘race’. He told the police authorities it was ‘advisable to deal with the Gypsy question on the basis of race’. Experience had shown that ‘the half-castes [were] mainly responsible for Gypsy criminality. On the other hand, it has been shown that the attempts to make the Gypsies settle in one place have been unsuccessful, particularly in the case of the racially pure ones, because of their urge to travel. Thus when it comes to the final solution of the Gypsy question it will be necessary to treat the racially pure Gypsies and the half-castes separately.’ To facilitate this Himmler ordered the official registration of all Gypsies, half-caste Gypsies, and ‘people who travel around in a Gypsy fashion’ over 6 years of age.
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In this way virtually the whole Sinti and Roma population of the Reich was subject to registration by the criminal police and individual examination by the Research Centre for Racial Hygiene.

In June 1939 Himmler ordered a special ‘action’ against the Gypsies in the Burgenland in Austria, where, as a result of a compulsory resettlement programme by the Habsburgs, around 8,000 Sinti and Roma were living. The Reich Criminal Police Office ordered preventive custody for ‘workshy and particularly asocial Gypsies or Gypsy half-castes in the Burgenland’. As a result, hundreds were sent to Dachau concentration camp.
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Apart from the pursuit of politically and ideologically defined enemies of Nazism—communists, Jews, Freemasons, Christians—and the preventive combating of crime, which was becoming increasingly part of ‘labour deployment’, during the years 1936–9 the Chief of the German Police was preoccupied above all with the regulation of sexual activity, that is to say, the fight against abortion and homosexuality.

Himmler made clear the extent of his commitment to this in January 1937 in a speech at the start of the German Police Day. This was a propaganda week in which the population was asked to support the work of the defenders of law and order under the motto: ‘The Police are Your Friends and Helpers.’ Himmler stated that ‘homosexuality and the widespread practice of illegal abortion’ were ‘plagues’, which ‘would inevitably lead any nation into the abyss’. The police were, however, already involved in the ‘merciless pursuit of these abominations’.
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In the spring of 1937, at a workshop in Berlin, he declared that in future he would judge the effectiveness of the police according to their success in the fight against homosexuality and abortion.
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For Himmler the fight against these two ‘plagues’ was an important personal concern. He told the Council of Experts on Population and Racial Policy on 15 June 1937: ‘I have actually spent days and nights pondering about these two matters, which are among those of greatest concern to me. For someone who is normal and decent it’s not that easy to look into these things and try and explain them. I have asked myself the question: is this the reason why our nation is so morally debased and bad?’
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Himmler repeatedly reminded people that the consequences of the two ‘plagues’ for population policy were enormous. While in his speech to the Committee on Police Law in October 1936 he was unwilling to speculate on the number of abortions,
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in February 1937 he gave the SS-Gruppenführer a figure of 500,000–800,000 per year.
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In September of the same year he gave the Council of Experts on Population and Racial Policy a figure of 400,000,
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and in September 1938 he boasted in a public address to the Organization of Germans Abroad that he had succeeded in reducing the number of abortions from 600,000–900,000 in 1932–3 to 400,000–500,000.
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In February 1937 he estimated to the Gruppenführer that 350,000 women annually were becoming sterile as a result of abortions;
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in June he gave a figure of 100,000 victims to the Committee of Experts,
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and in September 1938 spoke of 50,000.
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Thus Himmler was very free with his assessment of the numbers of abortions, depending on whether he was referring to the threat to population policy they posed or the successes that had been achieved in this sphere. He told the Committee of Experts that if they could succeed in saving 100,000 children annually from abortion then in thirty years they would have an army of 400,000 men, an estimate that he had already included in a memorandum to Hitler.
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Himmler’s most detailed statement on homosexuality is contained in the speech that he made to the SS-Gruppenführer meeting on 18 February 1937 in Bad Tölz. Homosexuality, the dangers that it caused and the fight against it, was the main topic of this speech, which deserves to be quoted extensively because it reveals the extent of Himmler’s homophobia.
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To begin with, Himmler reminded people that, on their seizure of power in 1933, the Nazis had been faced with around 2 million people who were members of ‘homosexual associations’. By this Himmler meant a variety of organizations which had campaigned for the repeal of paragraph 175 of the Penal Code. He admitted that not all members of these organizations were ‘actually homosexual themselves’, but he estimated that one could reckon on there being between 1 million and 2 million homosexuals in Germany; indeed he even mentioned estimates of 4 million homosexual men. With a figure of 2 million homosexuals, he told the Gruppenführer, one could reckon on some 7 to 10 per cent of sexually mature men being homosexual. ‘That means, if things stay the same, that our nation is going to be wiped out by this plague.’ In addition, there were 2 million killed in the war, who could no longer reproduce, so that ‘the lack of around 4 million men who were capable of reproducing’ would ‘disrupt Germany’s sexual equilibrium’.

What was decisive, he preached to his listeners, was the fact that ‘all matters involving sex [were] not private matters of the individual’, but rather they affected ‘the life and death of the nation, world power, and the [alternative of] becoming like the Swiss. The nation that has a lot of children can expect to become a world power and achieve world domination. A nation with good racial characteristics that has few children is heading for the grave; in 50 or 100 years it will be insignificant, in 200 or 500 it will have died out.’

Himmler then went on to paint a picture of the ‘national plague’ of homosexuality:

For hundreds of years, for thousands of years the Teutonic peoples and in particular the German people have been ruled by men. But as a result of homosexuality this male state is in the process of destroying itself. As far as the state is concerned, I consider the main error to be the fact that the state, the people’s organization [the Reichstag?], the army, and whatever else you choose as examples of state institutions, all of them appoint people to posts, except in the case of human inadequacies, on the basis of performance.

But just as in the state and in the commercial world a male boss would always prefer a young, attractive woman as a typist, even if she were less efficient, to an older, less attractive but more efficient one, so there was the danger that a same-sex oriented boss would also make personnel decisions on the basis of erotic criteria. But if ‘an erotic principle, a male–female sexual principle is introduced in the male state and is applied to the relations between one man and another’, that ‘will bring about the destruction of the state’.

Thus homosexuality, he concluded, ‘undermines performance and any system based on performance and destroys the foundations of the state. In addition, homosexuals are psychologically sick to the core. They are soft; when it comes to the crunch they are invariably cowards. I believe that they can occasionally be brave in war but when it comes to civil courage they are the most cowardly people in existence.’ Homosexuals were also pathological liars. And: ‘In my experience [
sic
] homosexuality leads to a complete unsoundness of mind, I might almost say, craziness.’ Homosexuals were liable to blackmail; they were characterized by an ‘insatiable need to talk’—a characteristic which in his youth, it will be recalled, Himmler considered his worst weakness. But finally, and ‘I have to speak from their perspective, although these people like to pretend that they love each other, there is in fact no loyalty involved in the love of one man for another, whereas in other circumstances men are normally loyal to each other’.

The conclusion was that it was vital to combat homosexuality, for otherwise ‘it will be the end of Germany, the end of the Teutonic world’. The Teutons used to drown their ‘Urnings’ in bogs. ‘Unfortunately, I must say, in our case that’s no longer possible.’ It was only in the SS that one could deal with it with the appropriate rigour. Himmler claimed that there were around eight to ten cases of homosexuality a year in the SS. Those
involved—and in fact, according to secret SS statistics the number was considerable larger
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—would, after they had been sentenced and had served their term, be ‘taken to a concentration camp and shot while trying to escape’.

Himmler’s long-winded statements show from his point of view what a threat homosexuality posed to his own identity and his notion of masculinity and order. It was a case of a confrontation between two utterly incompatible worlds: his own, which he associated with the set of values: man—masculinity—male friendship—loyalty—performance—state; and the other, which he associated with femininity, eroticism, unbridled sexuality, chaos, and downfall. In his view there was only one way of treating homosexuals who wanted to move unrecognized from this milieu into the political sphere, namely, as enemies of the state who had to be eliminated.

In the same speech Himmler also dealt with the causes of homosexuality in detail:

In my view there has been far too great a masculinization of our whole life, to the extent that we are militarizing absurd things, and are putting all our efforts into perfecting how people should present themselves in public, how disciplined they are and how well they pack their knapsacks. I think it’s terrible when I see girls and women, above all girls, going around with a perfectly packed knapsack. It makes me sick. I think it’s catastrophic when women’s organizations, women’s societies, women’s clubs engage in areas of activity which undermine all feminine charm, all feminine dignity and grace. I think it’s catastrophic—I’m speaking generally, because in fact it has nothing directly to do with us—when we stupid men want to turn women into logical thinkers, try and teach them everything conceivable, when we masculinize women so that in time the differences between the sexes, the polarity, will disappear. Then we’ve not far to go to homosexuality.

Then he really got going: ‘If a boy who is in love with a girl is laughed at excessively and is not taken seriously and is called a softie and if he is told that chaps don’t go around with girls then he won’t. And then there’ll only be friendships between men. Men will decide everything in the world and the next stage will be homosexuality.’

Himmler then referred to the work by Hans Blüher,
The Role of Eroticism in Male Society
, which he had read in 1922 and the basic ideas of which he evidently assumed were familiar to his audience:

Those are the ideas of Hans Blüher, which then claim ‘the greatest form of love is not that between man and woman, for that produces children, and that’s animalistic.
The greater form of love is the sublimated love between man and man. It’s that that has produced the greatest achievements in world history’ [ . . . ] That’s the line that’s now being served up to young people in an easily digestible form, young people who are already in what is really a very masculinized movement and who, as a result of being in male camps, have no opportunity of meeting girls. In my view we needn’t be surprised that we have gone down the road towards homosexuality.

In the next section of his speech Himmler went on to apply the notion of ‘an erotic male association’ to one of his main opponents: Christianity. ‘I’m convinced that the priesthood and the whole of Christianity basically amounts to an eroticized male society for the purpose of upholding and maintaining this 2,000-year-old Bolshevism.’ One had to assume, Himmler continued, that while more than 50 per cent of the country clergy were not homosexual, in the monasteries the figure for homosexuality was 90 to 100 per cent:

But I hope that in four years’ time we shall have proved that the majority of the organization of the church: its leadership, its priesthood, represents a homosexual, erotic male society, which on this basis has terrorized humanity for 1,800 years, has required from it large sacrifices of blood and in the past has issued sadistically perverse statements. I need only refer to the trials of witches and heretics.

The attitude which denigrates women is typically Christian, and we, as National Socialists, have adopted this kind of thinking right up to the present time—in some cases as solid heathens—without realizing it [ . . . ] I’m also aware of a certain tendency in our ranks to try to exclude women from all events and festivals. The same people complain that here or there women are clinging to the churches or have not been won over 100 per cent to National Socialism. But they shouldn’t complain, given that they treat women as second-class human beings and above all keep them from participating in our internal activities [ . . . ]