Heinrich Himmler : A Life (43 page)

It’s up to us to be clear about the fact that our movement, our ideology will be able to survive if it’s supported by women, for men grasp things with their reason, whereas women grasp everything with their emotions. The greatest sacrifices in the witch and heretic trials were made by German women and not by men. The clerics knew very well why they burnt 5,000–6,000 women because they were emotionally loyal to the old knowledge and the old doctrine and emotionally and instinctively were not prepared to abandon it, whereas the men, on the basis of logical thinking, had already come to terms with the fact: there’s no point any more. We’ve been politically defeated. I give in. I’ll let myself be baptized.

After this brief digression Himmler returned to his central theme: ‘In my view there is too much masculinization in our whole movement, and this exaggerated masculinization provides fertile soil for homosexuality.’ Then,
on the basis of what he had been saying, Himmler made some suggestions to the Gruppenführer, gave some tips on how the two sexes could, so to speak, get to know one another:

In line with what I’ve indicated, please make sure that our men get a chance to dance with girls at the summer solstice. I think it’s absolutely right that we should organize the occasional dance for new recruits in the wintertime, and we need to make sure that we invite the best girls rather than inferior ones and give SS men the chance to dance with the girls and enjoy themselves. I consider that important for one reason above all, namely, in order to make sure that no one is ever set on the wrong road towards homosexuality.

In the case of adolescents also, Himmler continued, they should make sure ‘that boys of 16–17 meet girls at dancing classes, evening get-togethers, or in some other way. Experience has shown that it’s at the age of 15–16 that boys are most vulnerable. If they fall for a dancing partner or get a girlfriend then they’re OK, then they will no longer be at risk’:

In fact we in Germany don’t need to worry about bringing boys and girls together at too early an age and encouraging them to take part in sexual intercourse. No. Our climate, our race and nation, ensure that 16-year-old boys consider their relationships with girls as the purest and most ideal form of love. The moment they have fallen in love with a girl—and I must repeat this—then mutual masturbation with friends, male friendships, or friendships between boys of this sort of sexual nature are out of the question because they are ashamed of themselves in the eyes of their girlfriends. They have a personal bond.

In this speech Himmler was clearly referring above all to his own (slow) sexual development. Although he had been a keen participant in dancing classes and idolized numerous girls and young women and cultivated friendships with them, he had evidently not had intimate relations with the opposite sex until the age of 27. On the contrary, he had rejected close ties and sexual activity on the grounds that he had to save himself for a ‘masculine’ task. Moreover, he had spent his youth above all in organizations notable for that overt masculinity that he now considered so dangerous. And before that, he had had very close ties with the Catholic Church, whose priests he now described as being members of a ‘homosexual erotic male association’.

Thus one can regard this speech as a more or less unconscious reflection on the ‘threat’ of the temptations of homosexuality to which he himself had been subject in the past. It was to a considerable extent self-criticism,
a critical examination of the way in which, until his marriage in 1928, he had adopted the image of ‘a soldierly man’ or ‘a solitary freebooter’. The fact that he eventually abandoned this image and redefined the SS as an ‘order of clans (
Sippenorden
)’ was, on the one hand, certainly a result of his need to create a distinct profile vis-à-vis the SA, which was indeed the target of his description of the dangerously excessive masculine tendencies in the Nazi movement. On the other hand, however, as is clear from his speech of February 1937, in retrospect Himmler considered that his move away from an exclusive ideal of masculinity rescued him from the homosexual temptations to which he was liable and which he had described so vividly in his speech. During the following months and years, Himmler acted upon the notion that one must protect youth from the dangers of homosexuality by permitting natural relations between the sexes. Later on he spoke out against the condemnation of sex before marriage and discrimination against illegitimate births.
¹⁵⁴

Himmler’s homophobia not only determined his hostility to an excessive ‘masculinizing’ of the Nazi movement, it also dominated his views on the ways in which SS members should relate to one another; he wanted to avoid emotional relationships becoming too close, to eliminate feelings as far as possible. The SS should not be bound together by male friendships and Eros, but by sober comradeship and, above all, by ‘soldierly’ discipline. The Reichsführer-SS transferred his obsession with self-control to the male organization of the SS.

How, then, did the police pursuit of homosexuals work in practice? During the months after the murder of Röhm and his supporters the Gestapo and police had begun systematically to move against homosexuals.
¹⁵⁵
This was facilitated by the strengthening of paragraph 175 of the Penal Code in June 1935.
¹⁵⁶
With Himmler’s takeover of the German police in June 1936 the measures were intensified. Already in October Himmler signed an order establishing a Reich Centre for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion, and issued detailed guidelines for the arrest of homosexuals.
¹⁵⁷
Josef Meisinger, the head of the department, was also responsible for the special Gestapo desk, which Himmler had established in 1934 and which existed alongside the criminal police arrangments for the pursuit of homosexuals.
¹⁵⁸
The Reich Centre had above all the task of registering particular categories of homosexual men who had come into conflict with the law. The aim was, on the one hand, to prevent homosexuals from ‘penetrating’
the party, the Wehrmacht, and the civil service, and on the other, to gather material that would compromise particular groups (Jews, Freemasons, leading representatives of the Weimar ‘system’). By 1940 they had filled 42,000 cards.
¹⁵⁹

The number of sentences increased significantly from 1935 onwards as a result of these measures—from fewer than 4,000 in the years 1933–4 to over 22,000 in the period 1936–8—but these figures also show that the police and judiciary had no problem confronting the spectre of millions of homosexuals that Himmler had raised in his speech in Bad Tölz.
¹⁶⁰
In March 1937, a few weeks after this speech,
Das Schwarze Korps
published an article clarifying the SS’s official line on the matter. According to this it was necessary to differentiate: only 2 per cent of all homosexuals were ‘really abnormal’; as far as the majority was concerned, it was a case of people who had been seduced and who, with the aid of work therapy, educational measures, and the threat of punishment could be weaned away from their vice. Even if the article marked the start of a campaign by
Das Schwarze Korps
against homosexuality, it had become clear that there was no intention on the part of the Reich leadership of the SS to criminalize millions of men.
¹⁶¹
Thus, in May 1937 Himmler announced to the working party of the criminal police referred to above that the vast majority of homosexuals could be transformed into ‘normal men’.
¹⁶²

On a number of occasions the Chief of the German Police intervened directly in the pursuit of homosexuals. In March 1937, in the course of discussions about a new Penal Code, Himmler demanded that, as a matter of principle, in the case of breaches of the ban on homosexuality it should be possible to impose not just imprisonment but also penal servitude.
¹⁶³
In October 1937 he surprisingly ordered that actors or artists should not be arrested for ‘unnatural sexual relations’ without his permission.
¹⁶⁴
In May 1939 he instructed the Reich Criminal Police Office not to be too strict in their interpretation of the legally required voluntary principle when it came to the sterilization of homosexuals.
¹⁶⁵

During the Second World War the pursuit of homosexuals was no longer a priority for the security police. Although in July 1940 Himmler ordered that homosexuals who had seduced more than one partner should be taken into preventive custody,
¹⁶⁶
the aim now was more to control the practice rather than persecute it. When, three years after his tirade of February 1937, Himmler came to talk about the topic again, in a speech to the Gauleiters and other high-level party functionaries, he appeared confident ‘that we
shall overcome this vice, this terminal illness for a nation. I believe I can say that our young people are no longer providing recruits for this vice, or not to such an extent. In general, our young people have largely given up this aberration, so that this vice, or let us say the recruitment to this vice, is coming to an end and the number of men who are falling for this vice has reduced.’ In his view the group in question was ‘still half a million strong’.
¹⁶⁷

Did Himmler really believe that within a matter of three years three-quarters of all homosexuals had given up this ‘vice’? The fact that, only a few years after his homophobic panic attacks, Himmler could comment relatively calmly on the topic provides another example of his pragmatism. Since, during the war, the Gestapo and police could not devote much effort to it, he simply declared the problem solved, just as, at the end of the 1930s, he had already played down the number of abortions and, during the war, was to adjust his views on other matters of sexual policy to suit changed circumstances. Moreover, from his point of view Himmler had good reasons for no longer going out on a limb on the question of the pursuit of homosexuals. In 1938 he had falsely accused the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Werner von Fritsch, of homosexuality, and as a result had damaged his reputation with Hitler not inconsiderably, a point we shall return to.

Apparently it was only the SS and police who were to be excluded from the more lax attitude towards homosexuality. In November 1941 Hitler’s ‘Purification Edict’ introduced the death penalty for such cases within the SS and police.
¹⁶⁸
In the edict, which announced the new regulation, Himmler committed the members of the SS and police to act as ‘pioneers in the fight to eliminate homosexuality among the German people’.
¹⁶⁹
In practice, however, it became apparent that as a rule only a few death sentences were passed. Himmler examined such sentences very carefully and suspended a number of them.
¹⁷⁰

Himmler’s behaviour in the case of Untersturmführer Otto Rahn is also significant. This writer, whose subject-matter—the search for the Holy Grail and the history of heretics —enjoyed Himmler’s particular approval and who was personally aquainted with Himmler and had helped him in his research into his family history, in 1939 suddenly requested his discharge from the SS and shortly afterwards committed suicide. The reason for this action was clearly the fact that he could no longer conceal his homosexuality.

Himmler considered this a ‘particularly tragic’ case, as Rahn had done everything possible to make up for his ‘failings’ vis-à-vis the SS. Indeed,
Himmler had a notice signed by Wolff placed in
Das Schwarze Korps
, which described Rahn as ‘a decent SS man’—in other words, an exoneration.
¹⁷¹
Himmler also ensured that Rahn’s
Lucifer’s Courtiers
, which he had given to Hitler in 1937 as a present in a special edition, was distributed to the SS as a gift (and like other works of Rahn) was even republished towards the end of the war.
¹⁷²
This was despite opposition from Rosenberg’s office, which made objections based on ‘the personality of the deceased author’.
¹⁷³

Up until now we have dealt fairly extensively with the activities of the security police under Himmler’s leadership. How did the much larger section of the police, the order police (
Ordnungpolizei
), develop during these years?

In June 1936 Himmler had already instructed Kurt Daluege, the chief of the Order Police Main Office, concerning the duties of his office. These involved, above all, responsibility for the Schutzpolizei (the uniformed police in the cities), the Gendarmerie (the equivalent formation in the rural districts), the traffic police, the local police (
Gemeindepolizei
), as well as various administrative matters involving the police such as in the sphere of trading standards and health supervision.
¹⁷⁴

On 1 September 1936 Himmler assigned Inspectors of the Order Police to the provincial governors in the Prussian provinces and to those Reich Governors whose headquarters were located where the commanders of the military districts were based; in general they performed supervisory functions. However, from 1937 onwards they were assigned to the new Higher SS and Police Leaders. In this role, as part of the process of Reich centralization, they contributed towards removing the police authorities, which had hitherto been subordinate to the state governments, from the responsibility of the regional administrations altogether.
¹⁷⁵

In 1935, as part of the rearmament programme, the so-called Landespolizei
*
was integrated into the Wehrmacht, with the result that the uniformed police lost approximately half its strength and was reduced from 104,000 to fewer than 49,000 officers. By 1938 the uniformed police—Schutzpolizei, Gendarmerie, and local police—had once more reached a
total of 100,000 officers. Priority was given to former soldiers who had been discharged from the Wehrmacht after between two and five years’ service.
¹⁷⁶
Thus half the personnel with whom the uniformed police entered the war consisted of recent recruits, the majority of whom had military experience. This force was supplemented by approximately the same number of superficially trained police reservists.