Heinrich Himmler : A Life (48 page)

In general, however, Himmler’s attitude to religious questions was characterized by his radically utilitarian outlook, indeed by unvarnished cynicism: if Christianity was harmful that was above all because it stood in the way of Himmler’s intended demographic revolution. When, for example, during the war a volunteer division of Muslims was created for the Waffen-SS (see Ill. 31), he praised Islam as ‘a religion that is both practical and appealing to soldiers’, for it trained ‘men for me in this division and promises them heaven if they have fought and fallen in battle’.
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He came to respect the Jehovah’s Witnesses, tens of thousands of whom were imprisoned in his concentration camps as a result of their pacifist and anti-Nazi attitudes, because of their stubborn will to resist: ‘If their fanaticism could be harnessed for Germany or a similar fanaticism be created in the nation as a whole in wartime, we would be stronger than we are today!’
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They also lived frugal lives and were hard-working and honest. For that reason he not only employed them in his own household and in those of friends and SS families,
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but expressed the view that precisely these qualities should be propagated among the suppressed nations in the east, where in addition the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ pacifism was extremely welcome to the Germans! In July 1944, in a long letter, Himmler therefore ordered the then-head of the Reich Security Main Office, Dr Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to export the religion to the occupied eastern territories (which by this time were no longer occupied): ‘In the case of all Turkish peoples the Buddhist faith is suitable but for other nations the teachings of the Bible Students [ Jehovah’s Witnesses] are the appropriate ones.’
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For his own men too Himmler had a ready store of pragmatic solutions to existential questions. Answers to the question of human transience were not to be sought in the realm of religion but in the cult of ancestors he propagated. This practice of revering ancestors, in his view, strengthened each individual’s consciousness of being linked to the continuum of succeeding generations; the transience of the individual was abolished in the immortality of the nation. At the meeting of Gruppenführer on the eve of the November 1938 commemoration of the Munich putsch he claimed that ‘we shall be unconquerable and immortal as a nation, truly immortal as an
Aryan–Nordic race, if we hold firm by selection to the law of blood and, maintaining the cult of our ancestors, recognize the eternal cycle of all being and action and of every other kind of life in this world. A nation that preserves its ancestors will always have children; only nations without ancestors are childless.’
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The subsequent text of the speech shows, however, that Himmler not only equated immortality with the perpetuation of the Volk as a collective—a typically völkisch attitude—but that in his view immortality was also something an individual could experience: ‘And however bitter death is for the moment—for it means taking leave—we know equally on the basis of the most ancient conviction of our blood that it is merely a move to another plane; for we have all seen each other somewhere before and by the same token will see one another in the next world.’
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Ill. 13.
‘For us death has no terrors [ . . .] The individual dies but even while he lives in his children his nation goes on after him’, wrote Himmler in 1942 in a preface to a document from the SS Hauptamt giving instructions on the conduct of dignified ‘SS obsequies’. The ceremony for Reinhard Heydrich—at which Himmler gave the eulogy—was conducted in the Reich Chancellery and was seen as exemplary. Heydrich had died after an assassination attempt.

Himmler also concerned himself intensively with the question of reincarnation. He declared to the Gruppenführer in February 1937 that this ‘was a question that could be discussed for hours’. He claimed to be personally neutral: ‘I must say that this belief has as much in its favour as many other beliefs. This belief can no more be proved by the methods of exact science than Christianity, the teaching of Zarathustra, Confucius, and so on. But it has a big plus: a nation that has this belief in reincarnation, and reveres its ancestors and thus itself, always has children, and such a nation has eternal life.’
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On a personal level Himmler did in fact have very clear views on this matter, as is demonstrated by a letter he sent the same month to SS-Hauptsturmführer Eckhardt. Karl August Eckhardt, whose main occupation was that of Professor of Legal History, had shown Himmler a manuscript with the title ‘Earthly Immortality’, on which the Reichsführer-SS had commented very favourably. Himmler let Eckhardt know that his work was ‘an immensely valuable contribution and a complete confirmation of what has been passed down orally over millennia, though, as in the case of all such things, it has not been recognized in academic studies’. He did want to see changes, however; he objected to Eckhardt’s term ‘transmigration of souls’ and wished it to be replaced by ‘rebirth in the clan and in the same blood’.
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The revised manuscript was published as a book in 1937, and was distributed by Himmler to the SS in 1939 in a special edition.
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Naturally Eckhardt had responded to Himmler’s comments when revising the work. There was no more mention of transmigration of souls but of ‘a belief in reincarnation’ that was ‘of Aryan origin’. In the foreword Eckhardt quoted one of Himmler’s favourite writers, Werner Jansen; in his ‘most profound book’, the ‘heroic song of Robert the Devil, Duke of Normandy’, he named this heroic figure as the chief witness for his main thesis that the Teutons had believed in ‘reincarnation’.

Himmler pursued vigorously the aim of making the SS the focus of a cult of the Teutons. In doing so he was not satisfied with laying bare the allegedly ‘Germanic roots’ of contemporary Germans and exhorting them to develop a cult of their ancestors. Rather, his purpose was to bring to light in a comprehensive new interpretation the supposedly
Germanic core of German history: it was the duty of National Socialism, he claimed, to lead the Germans back to their true Germanic identity. In this Himmler’s thinking was not primarily historical but racial: what distinguished Germanic-German history in his eyes was the fact that it was shaped by people with constant, genetically determined dispositions and abilities and thus could be regarded not as a historical continuum but as a stable world.
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In endeavouring to create a Germanic myth special to the SS Himmler was above all concerned to reveal the pre-Christian world of the Teutons as exemplary and their Christianization as a fatal mistake, indeed as a crime, and so by stripping away the layers behind the façade of an imposed Christianity to show the true Germanic core of medieval history. Admittedly none of these topics was new: at the latest since the beginning of the nineteenth century Germanic myth and enthusiasm for things Germanic had been a widespread movement that found expression not only in academic disciplines but also in popular forms. The radical anti-Christian turn in Germanic ideology, like its development into a Germanic faith, had already been relatively widespread in völkisch circles before 1914. Above all in the turbulent years after the defeat of the First World War the mythology of the Germanic hero was revived as a political force, plumped up with racial doctrines and set up as an ideal in contrast to the ‘levelling-down’ practised by the western democracies.
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As we have seen, Himmler too was part of this world; his Germanic awakening had taken place in 1923–4 when he read the novels of Werner Jansen.

Presumably in 1937 Himmler set down on paper the following thoughts:

We live in an era of the ultimate conflict with Christianity. It is part of the mission of the SS to give the German people in the next half-century the non-Christian ideological foundations on which to lead and shape their lives. This task does not consist solely in overcoming an ideological opponent but must be accompanied at every step by a positive impetus: in this case that means the reconstruction of the Germanic heritage in the widest and most comprehensive sense.
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On the basis of this premise Himmler developed a ‘work plan’. A research group made up of subject specialists from among the SS was to begin a collection of source material on the ‘Germanic heritage’ in some five volumes, and as a second step investigate the ‘so-called Christian Middle Ages in order to trace the various streams of Germanic heritage’. The results were to serve first and foremost the ideological ‘direction’ of the SS.
Himmler’s research organization Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) was in fact to embark on such studies in the years to come, if not in the concentrated form in which Himmler had imagined in 1937.
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What he imagined the social order and the experience of the Teutons actually to have been, and why this lost world should represent an ideal, is, it must be said, hard to discover. His pronouncements on the Teutons of the Dark Ages are decidedly sparse.
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It was only in his ‘Schutzstaffel’ speech of 1935 that he went into this topic in greater detail. In it he praised Germanic law as exemplary, in particular the principle, embedded in its belief in an all-embracing divine order, that nature and animals are worthy of protection; in addition, he praised the highly developed craftsmanship of the Teutons and their alleged ability to develop a plough that was far superior to anything comparable; their reverence for their ancestors, manifested in graves made of giant stones; their bravery and strength; their knowledge of astronomy; and finally their runes, the ‘mother of all written languages’.

As Himmler regarded their conversion to Christianity as the Teutons’ decisive original sin, preventing Germanic virtues from unfolding to their full extent in the medieval empire,
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the ‘missionary to the heathen’, St Boniface, was the particular object of the SS leader’s anger. He refused to forgive him for the felling in 723 of the Donar oak, revered by the Teutons as holy, and even 1,214 years later in 1937 he still was indignant at how ‘anyone could be such a swine as to chop down that tree’.
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But in Himmler’s view the Christianization of the Teutons was above all the fault of ‘Charles the Frank’, that is, Charlemagne, whom he repeatedly accused in public speeches of slaughtering the Saxons;
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his son, Louis the Pious, was for Himmler simply ‘infected with Jewishness’.
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Himmler’s negative appraisal of Charlemagne made no impression on Hitler, however, who in his speech to the party conference in 1935 emphasized that in the process of forming the empire of the early Middle Ages Christianity had been effective in creating communities, and declared Charlemagne the historic unifier of the Reich, a judgement he backed up with comments in his private circle.
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Thereupon Himmler reversed his opinion: in the
SS Guidance Booklets
there appeared an article by H. W. Scheidt, head of the indoctrination office of Alfred Rosenberg (usually regarded as Himmler’s main ideological competitor), in which the latter declared that the ‘true reason for the conflicts with the Saxons and the other methods of subjugation employed by Charlemagne was his thoroughly Germanic will to power and his recognition that the centralized political
power he enjoyed needed urgently to be extended’.
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Himmler himself was strikingly slow to comment. Only in 1944 did he concede that Charlemagne was the ‘subject of much controversy, much revered and in the final analysis—in spite of all the things we [ . . . ] don’t like about him and which we must nevertheless understand as part of the power struggle involved in forming an empire—a great man, because he founded the Reich’.
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On the other hand, he took a quite different view of the German King Henry I: reverence for him was probably the most powerful expression of Himmler’s efforts to reveal anti-Christian roots in the Middle Ages. In 1936, for the thousandth anniversary of the king’s birth, Himmler visited his burial-place in Quedlinburg cathedral in order to inaugurate a new tradition. The annual ‘King Henry celebrations’ were to become a fixture of the SS commemorative calendar. Himmler’s speech, published the same year, on the anniversary of the king’s death
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was designed to reveal parallels between Henry and Hitler. As was clear from the speech, Henry came to power at the same age as Hitler and, it was suggested, had to overcome similar problems: ‘When, in 919, at the age of 43, Henry Duke of Saxony, a member of the Liudolfing family of soil-based aristocracy, became the German king, he came into the most dreadful inheritance. He became king of a German empire that hardly existed even in name. The whole of the eastern part of Germany had [ . . . ] been lost to the Slavs.’