Heinrich Himmler : A Life (53 page)

As early as 1933 Himmler had set out to find a suitable building for the planned SS ‘Reich leadership school’. In November he had viewed the Wewelsburg near Paderborn, a three-cornered castle built in the seventeenth century, the owner of which, the district of Büren, no longer wished to maintain it. Himmler took the view that the Wewelsburg was exactly right for his purpose.
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After alterations, the castle was transferred to Himmler in a solemn ceremony on 22 September 1934 by the district administrator of Büren. Manfred von Knobelsdorff became the first captain of the castle (this designation was introduced in 1935). Up to that point he had been the SS chief indoctrination officer and he was Darré’s brother-in-law.
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In 1935 Himmler moved responsibility for the project from the Race and Settlement Main Office to his Personal Staff;
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its official designation was now Wewelsburg SS School.
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In the meantime, however, the institution’s emphasis had shifted: now its function was research on National Socialist ideology.
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In fact, the impression created is of ‘uncoordinated pseudo-scientific research undertaken for a specific purpose and determined
by the individual ideas of whoever was working there at the time’, the main emphasis lying on the task of creating a genealogical chart of the Himmler family.
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When, from 1936 onwards, the Ahnenerbe took over by degrees the SS research projects that were ideologically relevant, vague plans were made that increasingly envisaged the castle as a site for ceremonial and prestigious occasions.
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Between May 1935 and November 1937 Himmler visited the Wewelsburg many times, and on some occasions for several days. In May 1938 a meeting of all the most senior officers of the SS took place there. Alongside Sepp Dietrich, Eicke, and Wolff were Daluege, the head of the Main Office, Werner Lorenz, August Heissmeyer, Heydrich, Walter Schmitt, and Pohl.
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In November 1938 Himmler announced that he intended in future to hold a conference of Gruppenführer every spring at the Wewelsburg,
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and to use the occasion to swear in the new Gruppenführer.
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The first such gathering was planned for March 1939, but the occupation of Czechoslovakia meant that it did not take place.
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While staying there in January 1939 Himmler made various decisions. He was not prepared to open this ‘treasure’ to the ‘hyenas of the press’, and therefore publications about the Wewelsburg were as far as possible to be suppressed. He planned a planetarium for the castle, and in addition—clearly under the influence of the romanticism surrounding castles—he intended to establish a hoard of gold and silver ‘for a rainy day’.
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For his own room he wanted a ‘long, narrow Gobelin tapestry [ . . . ] depicting a maidenly young woman, a future mother’.
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The death’s-head rings that reverted to the Reichsführer-SS after the death of their wearers were to be stored in a special cabinet.
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The family coats of arms of deceased Gruppenführer were to be hung in the castle so that, as he explained to the Gruppenführer in 1939, ‘those who come after us must always take counsel together before our plaques, and must always stand upright in our presence so that they will do things as we did them’.
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Those Gruppenführer with no coat of arms—in other words, the majority—were called upon by the Personal Staff to have one designed, a move that occasioned extensive correspondence.
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Comprehensive structural changes were made to the Wewelsburg, and the Reichsführer-SS had it equipped with numerous objects from the applied arts. The Gruppenführers hall, which was to be decorated with, amongst other things, coats of arms, was largely completed, and also a crypt in the castle tower, although neither was ever used. Nor did ceremonies,
celebrations, or cult rituals take place at the castle, and only once, in June 1941, did the Gruppenführer actually hold their conference at the Wewelsburg.

Up to the end of the war a special Wewelsburg construction management team was drawing up plans for a grandiose extension of the site, which Himmler approved at each stage. Yet neither these nor any other remaining documents throw light on what function the Wewelsburg was supposed to assume in the life of the SS. The numerous contradictory and erratic instructions that Himmler gave out over the course of time for the extension of the castle indicate that he himself was not clear what this project was actually about.
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About 20 kilometres north-east of the Wewelsburg, near Detmold, were the Externsteine, a further ‘cultural focus’ of the SS. The Externsteine were a striking group of rocks that, according to a view prevalent in völkisch circles, represented a Germanic sanctuary. There was particular speculation that it was in fact Irminsul, the legendary chief sanctuary of the Saxons destroyed by Charlemagne.

Himmler was firmly convinced that the Externsteine played a significant role as a site of Germanic worship, and with the help of the Ahnenerbe he wished to provide scientific proof of this theory. What is more, he set about, by means of a foundation specially created for this purpose, developing the Externsteine into a neo-Germanic sanctuary. In 1934 and 1935 he ordered excavations of the Externsteine, which like all archaeological efforts before it produced no evidence of a ‘Germanic’ past history to the stones.
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Himmler did not, however, loosen his grip. In April 1937 he issued a detailed assignment: a medieval relief on one of the stones showing the descent from the Cross was to be investigated to see if what was there was not a ‘Christian reworking of a Germanic depiction’.
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A few months later, in November 1937, he voiced concrete speculations about why the rocks were blackened by fire. One explanation, he said, was, ‘as SS-Brigadeführer Weisthor and I have long supposed, fire, which in some degree served astronomical purposes and whose function it was to indicate phases of the sun, months, and perhaps also days’.
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Himmler did not, however, want to subject such speculations to expert scientific debate. Similarly, in November 1937 he instructed the Ahnenerbe to check any publication about the Externsteine in advance; the aim was to obstruct any ‘that might in any way provoke a debate about the Externsteine’.
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After a further visit to the stones he wrote, on 20 April 1940, to Pohl that ‘a lot of things’ had to ‘happen’ on the site. Once again Himmler had very precise ideas about the development of the publicly accessible site: ‘At both entry gates, halls or houses must be erected in the style of the farmhouses of Lippe [ . . . ] At the Externsteine themselves the ascents to rocks 1, 2, and 3 must be altered.’ Various demolitions and changes had to be undertaken, and after that

the foundation’s entire site must be put in our care. We shall also take on responsibility for the forest and protect the bird life as far as possible. I am declaring the site a reserve in perpetuity, where the only game that may be shot are boar, as I believe these could at best be a nuisance to visitors. Feral cats and dogs may still be shot. All other animals shall be able to run free here. We intend [ . . . ] to ensure that the forest again becomes as it once was and that animals can survive in it [ . . . ], not by artificial feeding but rather through the planting of trees and shrubs, including wild fruit bushes. [ . . .] At the same time we must arrange for one of the South Tyrol hoteliers to come to Horn and build a decent hotel there. [ . . . ] We must keep a constant eye on all details such as noticeboards, signs, and waste-bins to make sure they are tasteful and placed so that they are easily spotted. [ . . . ] All in all, the public must be educated to behave as if in a truly sacred place.
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It was not only the adversities of war that made the development of the site difficult and caused Himmler to postpone his plans until peacetime.
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In February 1942 Hitler told him, explicitly and unambiguously at an evening party, that the Externsteine had ‘certainly never been a ritual site’.
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The so-called ‘Saxons’ grove’ (Sachsenhain) near Verden was created by Himmler to commemorate the execution of allegedly 4,500 Saxons by Charlemagne in 782. The building-work began in the winter of 1934–5. In memory of the Saxons 4,500 boulders were set up; a village of Lower Saxon half-timbered houses that had been pulled down elsewhere completed the site.
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At the summer solstice of 1935 Himmler and Rosenberg conducted the official inauguration of the site. In his speech the Reichsführer-SS recalled ‘the ancient law of German religion [ . . . ] that ascendancy is followed by downfall and downfall then followed by new life, as long as the will and the strength of blood live on in an earthly being’.
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The invocation of ‘German religion’ referred to the fact that the Sachsenhain was intended as a monumental accusation in stone of the cruelty of Christian methods of conversion—a reproach that was, as it happens, untenable, for Himmler’s repeated
assertion that the Saxons had been killed as a result of the emperor’s policy of conversion was completely without foundation.
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There is evidence that Himmler revisited the site in the summer of 1938 and gave various instructions for its design.
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After Hitler, however, had ‘rehabilitated’ Charlemagne in his speech to the party conference in 1935, there was no more question of making the Sachsenhain a central ritual site for the SS. Up to the end of the war, however, it served the SS as a location for indoctrination and meetings.

As the history of all three sites graphically illustrates, Himmler’s attempt to celebrate SS ideology by means of holy places, special rituals, and gifts with symbolic significance did not get beyond the preliminary stages: the manifestations of the ‘cult’ remained in the end as undefined as their content. From Himmler’s perspective the reason was, no doubt, clear: it was not that he was on the wrong track, but rather that National Socialist Germany was simply not yet ready for his substitute religion.

Himmler added to the ideology and rituals peculiar to the SS an unmistakable leadership style, aimed at aligning the SS with him as an individual and with his goals. He saw himself primarily as the educator of his men: he not only personally established the principles on which members of the SS were selected, trained, disciplined, and made to conform to a model of family life governed by the SS ethos, but also monitored pedantically whether they were being observed.

As part of this process, his whole apparatus of control was designed exclusively around himself, and the management structure was decidedly unclear. By distributing the executive authority for his various areas of responsibility (police, SD, concentration camps, General SS, Waffen-SS, and others) over several SS Main Offices, Himmler ensured that the SS did not fragment into diverse, autonomous power-blocs. He had no deputy, nor was there a body composed of the top SS leaders that met regularly. Gruppenführer meetings were effectively no more than roll-calls. Himmler therefore could—and was obliged to—intervene repeatedly and make decisions over matters large and small. The creation of the Higher SS and Police Leaders (
Höhere SS und Polizeiführer
= HSSPF) allowed him at the same time to direct control over regional offices. Despite his pedantry, Himmler was not first and foremost a bureaucrat. He did not wish to create an administrative apparatus that controlled his sphere of power according to fixed rules. Bureaucratic institutions, as he was aware, tend to compel even their own leadership to act within the rules, to limit their room for manoeuvre and to make their actions predictable. By contrast, Himmler’s style of leadership was highly unpredictable.

This type of leadership reflected his mistrust of others and his need to be in control. Himmler attempted to guide the extensive apparatus over which
he had authority through voluminous instructions, in part concerned with absurdly minor matters, through countless decisions on individual cases, or through direct interventions; as a precaution he reserved final judgement in numerous cases for himself. He instructed and advised, criticized and commanded. No detail was too insignificant for him.

If Himmler was in his office, he worked long hours. As a rule he arrived at 10 a.m. and, apart from short breaks for lunch and supper, rarely left before 1 or 2 in the morning.
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He preferred, however, to size up situations in their own location and then to make a point of reaching decisions on the spot rather than from his desk at headquarters. He recommended this procedure to his men also; for example, on 16 September 1942 to the SS and Police Leaders he had assembled at his headquarters at Hegewald: ‘It is really no accident that I make decisions on most problems when I am on the spot. I don’t decide them in Berlin but go to Lublin, Lemberg [Lvov], Reval [Talinn], and so on and eight, ten, twelve big decisions are made that evening. You should do this too!’
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Throughout his career Himmler was constantly on the move: as a Gau assistant in the mid-1920s he roared through Lower Bavaria on his motor-bike; as deputy Reich propaganda chief he travelled the length and breadth of the Reich with the aid of the Reich railways; and as Reichsführer-SS he travelled through the whole of Europe during the war by special train, by plane, und by jeep. He particularly enjoyed inspection tours of newly conquered territories where the smoke of battle had hardly dispersed, in the company of a small entourage. In such cases he liked to get behind the wheel himself.

Significantly, among the photos he sent during the war to Gmund on Lake Tegern, to give his daughter Gudrun an idea of her father’s daily work, there are none that show him at a desk in a fixed location. Instead there are numerous shots of him in animated conversation, on journeys and inspections, or making speeches.
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That is exactly how the Reichsführer-SS wanted to be seen: as communicative, ubiquitous, as a leader who took care of everything, had everything under his control, and shared the privations of his men.