Heinrich Himmler : A Life (52 page)

When he conducted the ceremony himself Himmler was accustomed to give the couple a pair of silver goblets, and he recommended this practice to the SS commanders. For the exchange of rings, he introduced the following line: ‘I wish not only, as of old, that your love should be without beginning or end, but I wish that your clan may be without beginning or end.’
¹⁸⁰

Christian baptism was to be replaced by a ‘name consecration’. A set of instructions still in existence shows how such a ceremony was to be structured.
¹⁸¹
It was to be held in special ‘consecration rooms’, in which there was to be an altar draped with a flag bearing the swastika, on which, in place of the holiest Christian symbol, there was to be a picture of Hitler. Behind the altar three SS men had to stand holding an SS standard, while the walls were to be decorated with a black flag bearing the SS runes. The ‘consecrator’ took the place of the priest and the ‘loyal guardian’ that of the godparent.

The child had to be laid before the altar. Then texts from
Mein Kampf
were spoken or sung in chorus. The ‘consecrator’ delivered the following articles of faith on behalf of all present: ‘We believe in the God of the universe / And in the mission of our German blood / that grows eternally young from the German soil. / We believe in the nation, the bearer of this blood / And in the Führer, whom God has given us.’ If Himmler was ‘guardian’ at birth ceremonies he gave as a present a small silver cup and a spoon. A lovely old custom, as he said, recommending it to the Gruppenführer in 1936, was that of giving the child ‘the large blue sash denoting new life and made of blue silk’.
¹⁸²

When, in 1937, Karl Wolff’s third child received the name Thorismann, Himmler presided over the ceremony, which was carried out by his prehistory adviser Weisthor. Weisthor wrapped the child in the blue ‘sash of life’, then gave the Wolffs the cup, the spoon, and a ring; the child should not wear it until, ‘as a youth you have proved yourself worthy of the SS and your clan’.
¹⁸³

The celebration of the solstices was Himmler’s particular hobby-horse, and above all the summer solstice of 21 June: he wished to give this day back its ‘ancient meaning’. What he meant by this he explained rather ponderously
to the SS Gruppenführer in November 1936—as always, when awkward subjects were being dealt with, ‘quite openly’, but ‘without this being something that should immediately be released for publication for the masses or, as I should perhaps better say, the rank and file of our SS leaders and men’.

‘You see,’ Himmler began his train of thought, ‘our men often complain and say, “Where for heaven’s sake are we supposed to meet decent women, decent girls we can marry!”’ In order to respond to this emergency he intended to make the summer solstice again a festival ‘of Maytime, a festival of life, a festival of marriage’. For in ancient times ‘the time between the spring festival and the summer solstice was the time for young people to compete with each other. It was then customary that the young people danced and leapt around the summer-solstice fire. Marriages were made.’

On this pattern, the ‘SS men’s sporting competitions, which we shall put on every year,’ were ‘always to take place between Easter and the summer solstice’. Himmler’s ideas went far beyond the sporting aspect, however: ‘I can imagine my initiative being adopted by the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädel) and the Women’s League, with competitions arranged for girls at the same time as the SS establishes competitions for men [ . . . ] If this process of selection were supported by a racially based selection of the participants in the female competitions it is my view that in the course of the years the summer solstice will be brought back to its true, ancient, and necessary significance.’
¹⁸⁴

As he let the Ahnenerbe know in a circular in September 1938, Himmler was assuming that in certain Germanic tribes it was usually only at the summer solstice that ‘children were procreated and thus sexual intercourse took place’.
¹⁸⁵
The summer solstice as a festival of copulation was symbolized, as Himmler said in 1936 at the Leadership School for German Doctors at Alt-Rehse in Mecklenburg, by ‘the ancient custom that the finest boy leaps through the fire with the finest girl (both having been chosen through physical contests)’.
¹⁸⁶

Himmler naturally insisted on taking part every year in the summer solstice ceremonies.
¹⁸⁷
In 1935 they were in the Sachsenhain at Verden, in 1936 on the Brocken mountain. In 1937 he was at Ludendorff’s funeral on that day, but in 1938 he again celebrated the summer solstice, this time at Wolfsberg in Austria, and in 1939 on the Baltic near Kolberg (Ko
ó
obrzeg).

Himmler constantly intervened in what was to happen at the ceremonies. In 1936 he called on the Standarten to rehearse a ‘torch dance for fifty-one dancers’ created specially for this occasion, and to perform it at as many ceremonies as possible.
¹⁸⁸
In 1938 he once again issued an order for the summer and winter solstice celebrations to be carried out in a uniform manner for the next three years,
¹⁸⁹
and after the summer solstice he asked for reports on the celebrations from the whole of the Reich. He may well have been extremely enthusiastic about the results, for the various SS units had proved to be particularly imaginative in this year: while one Standarte could report the ‘demonstration of a gymnastic dance by the BDM in dresses with colourful bodices, which led into a general folk-dance around the fire’, in SS Abschnitt XVII ‘ribbon dances’ and ‘bridal waltzes’ had been practised. The Oberabschnitt Danube reported graphically that, ‘after the anthem of loyalty and the national anthems members of the Hitler Youth hurled hoops of fire into the valley and young couples formed to jump together through the slowly subsiding fire’.
¹⁹⁰

If the summer solstice celebrations as conceived by Himmler formed the finale to the annual trials of physical strength within the SS,
¹⁹¹
at every winter solstice ‘intellectual contests in the SS’ were to take place, as Himmler informed the Gruppenführer in 1937. To this end, in 1937, he explained, genealogical tables as well as family histories and pieces on the significance of reverence for ancestors were to be produced.
¹⁹²
Apropos of how to conduct the winter solstice, Himmler explained in 1936 to the Gruppenführer:

The winter solstice is not only the end of the year, Yuletide, after which come the twelve holy days, when the new year begins, but rather it was above all the festival when ancestors and the past were remembered, and when the individual realized that without his ancestors and his worship of them he is nothing, a small atom that can be swept aside at any time. Yet integrated into the infinite chain of their family in true modesty, ancestors and grandsons are everything.
¹⁹³

Accordingly, at the Yule celebrations gradually twelve candles were to be lit, and at each one a saying connected with the light was to be recited, which was followed by a general response: ‘May their light shine.’ The sayings revolved around the thought that the life of an individual was absorbed into the ancestral line.
¹⁹⁴
In November 1937 Himmler issued the order that, following the winter solstice, SS men and their wives or fiancées in SS units had to celebrate Yuletide together. On this occasion the
newly married SS members were to be given the Yule lights donated by the Reichsführer-SS.
¹⁹⁵
In November of the following year Himmler asked the young SS scholars who belonged to ‘team houses’ to ‘encourage young writers to compose German songs for Yuletide that could be sung at the celebrations of the party and its organizations in place of Christian hymns’.
¹⁹⁶

Himmler even turned his mind to the subject of funerals. In 1936, as he explained to his Gruppenführer, he had assigned the task of ‘producing designs for tasteful coffins’. Wreaths of artificial flowers were not to be used under any circumstances. ‘I suggest that throughout the winter the departments of the SS should give wreaths only of conifers—spruce, pine, or Scotch fir. That is simple and, if the wreaths are properly made, the nicest and best thing. In summer use oak and beech leaves and twigs for wreaths and add some nice flowers.’

Once again, what was important to him was ‘that gradually a style should emerge. For everything we do must gradually conform to our innermost being. How we live, what sort of furniture, morals, and customs we have, all of this must be an expression of our inner selves.
We
must achieve this, and indeed in these first years of the SS we must lay the foundation stone.’ Himmler emphasized, nevertheless, that he had no objection to Christian burials, if the relatives wanted them, referring to the death of his father which had occurred only a few days previously. The religious ceremony had, however, to be kept strictly separate from the SS ceremony.
¹⁹⁷

In 1942 the SS Main Office issued a publication,
Suggestions on How to Conduct a Funeral
. Himmler wrote the preface: ‘For us death has no terrors. [ . . . ] The individual dies, but even during his lifetime in his children his nation develops beyond him.’ An SS funeral was to consist of the funeral service, the funeral procession, and the solemn burial. To supplement the ceremony, quotations from the Führer, aphorisms, and literary sources were recommended. The funeral of Heydrich on 9 June 1942 was considered the paradigm for a truly successful occasion of this kind (see Ill. 13).

The responsibility for conducting these diverse ceremonies could not, however, in the Reichsführer’s view be placed in the hands of those in charge of SS indoctrination; that would lead to the creation of a new ‘priesthood’ within the SS. ‘We do not want that in the SS.’ It was, he said, the task of commanding officers to officiate at the ceremonies.
¹⁹⁸
When, in April 1940, he caught an SS leader planning to conduct an SS marriage ceremony that was outside his sphere of responsibility as a commander, Himmler threatened him thus: ‘If I should catch you or another
SS leader again acting as a speaker or organizer of a clan ceremony [ . . . ] I shall strip you or the person concerned of his rank and lock you up for several years for attempting to re-found the priesthood.’
¹⁹⁹

In November 1936 Himmler requested the SS-Gruppenführer not to conduct birth or marriage ceremonies on SS premises or in public, but rather within the family.
²⁰⁰
Any report in the press was to be avoided.
²⁰¹
The private nature of these ceremonies, as Himmler explained to the Gruppenführer, should prevent any ‘priest’ from turning up and objecting that a ‘heathen marriage’ or ‘something like a church ritual’ was being carried out. He wished to avoid, he said, ‘taking a step out of time, one for which people are not ready and that would not yet be understood and so would make a ridiculous impression’.
²⁰²
There were good reasons for Himmler to be nervous about making the SS cult, which he had expressly designed, all too public, as will become clear through other examples. He feared not only ridicule from the public, but in particular Hitler’s negative attitude with regard to any too pronounced revival of the Germanic heritage: ‘Rosenberg, Himmler, and Darré have to stop this nonsense with cults’, he had said in 1935, according to Goebbels’s diary.
²⁰³

As far as the normal SS social gatherings were concerned, Himmler was tireless in trying to prevent them from degenerating into all-too-vulgar events, ‘bleak evenings of drinking’, as he himself called them; instead, it was his wish to incorporate them into his plan of education. In 1941 he produced an eight-point sheet of guidelines for a—to his mind—successful ‘comradeship evening’.
²⁰⁴

First of all, we read, one thing is crucial: ‘In all circumstances such social evenings must be properly planned.’ And: a ‘responsible leader’ must supervise the ‘organization of the programme’ and ‘have a firm hold on the evening’s events’. He must, for example, ensure that before the evening starts the men have eaten properly so that they are not ‘obliged to drink on an empty stomach’. Furthermore, on attending such an evening Himmler had noticed that ‘people had forgotten the self-evident custom that no one may smoke until the highest-ranking officer gives permission’. He had, he wrote, gained the impression that ‘a number of men and officers had succumbed so heavily to a smoking addiction that they could not last a quarter of an hour without smoking’. In addition, officers on these occasions had not ‘to huddle together in a group and create their own clique, but had rather to sit among their men, which is why they are called “comradeship evenings”’. Himmler warned his readers: ‘To have any value, the first part of any such evening has
to serve to celebrate the education of officers and men. Regimental music or music played by a few of the men, “hearty songs” [ . . . ] a very few (one or two) well-delivered poems, a speech by the commander or someone of high rank—these are the things that have to make up the programme of a comradeship evening.’ Even a good atmosphere came down, in Himmler’s view, to organization.

In Himmler’s opinion the rituals and festivals he had designed required a suitably dignified space, and he took pains to create locations that symbolized the continuity of ‘Germanic’ culture to a high degree. The Reichsführer-SS made it his aim that ‘as far as possible each Standarte [regiment] shall have a cultural focus for German greatness and the German past, and that it should be put in order again and restored to a state worthy of a nation of culture’.
²⁰⁵

The most important of these ‘cultural foci’ were to be situated in northwest Germany, the place of origin of the house of Saxony so esteemed by Himmler. The burial-place of Henry I in Quedlinburg on the eastern border of the Harz mountains was one of these SS ‘holy places’, but it was by no means the first.