Heinrich Himmler : A Life (55 page)

Hermann Fegelein, the former head of the main SS Cavalry School in Munich and now commander of the 8th SS cavalry division, wrote Himmler a letter in October 1943 on the latter’s birthday, in which he not only vowed loyalty but claimed he was doing so because he owed the Reichsführer his entire existence:

Just as previously when we played sports, now in wartime too we have ridden undaunted, even in the most difficult times, assured in our hearts of victory under your command and in obedience to your orders. The fallen comrades of your cavalry units are testimony to this; they died on the field of honour, fulfilling your saying: ‘We have to do more than our duty: as knights without fear or reproach.’ In the heaviest fighting, in all seasons, summer or winter, we have served undaunted, loyal and obedient, true to you, Reichsführer, and to our word, carrying out everything we promised in peacetime. [ . . . ] In my life you have been the great patron, a strict superior officer, and an unfailingly helpful comrade. Together with SS-Obergruppenführer Jüttner you have made me what I am today. I have often had to carry out orders of yours that were heavy with responsibility and sometimes looked as if they were suicide missions. But my men and I have come through them all, through the mentality of our teams and through our precise way of thinking as Prussians. By nature I have the impetus, but it is you who have taught me to be conscientious and aware of my responsibilities, and ready to carry out my duty to the letter, and I believe I can say today that I have always proved how sacred your orders were to me. Perhaps, Reichsführer, you could tell the Führer that we feel this in our hearts simply and in faith and with the instinct of the German soldier, whose ancestors fought just like us for 2,000 years for the good of the Reich and who, when necessary, also fell.
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Friedrich Jeckeln, the Higher SS and Police Leader Ostland (the Baltic States and Byelorussia) and Russia North, reported to Himmler in May 1944 that two of his children had died. His letter ends as follows: ‘My wife is distraught. I can bear even heavy blows of fate and still be committed and
have the strength to work.’ Himmler answered: ‘It is terrible when fate suddenly strikes. I know that you as a profoundly loyal National Socialist and SS man grieve for your two sons, one of whom died a hero’s death and the other of whom died so tragically as a child. I know too, however, that you always remain the same, unbowed and committed.’
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Six months later Jeckeln let Himmler know that his home had been completely destroyed in a bombing raid. ‘My entire earthly possessions have gone up in smoke. My wife and my four small children are safe at her parents’ farm [ . . . ] And now we’ve really got to act!’
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The idea of loyalty had been internalized by many SS leaders to such an extent that the mere suspicion that they might have lost the Reichsführer’s confidence could become a nightmare. The Viennese police chief Josef Fitzthum, who came under suspicion of having been too liberal with the profits of the ‘Aryanization’ programme, wrote in September 1940 to Himmler: ‘The sense that I may have lost the confidence you have placed in me up till now is unbearable. Your reassurance that I still have it means a thousand times more to me than any formal exoneration.’
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Obedience, the second pillar in Himmler’s doctrine of virtue, was the practical consequence of loyalty. If loyalty was an emotional attachment, obedience had to be demonstrated in practice; loyalty was an ‘attitude of mind’, the internalized willingness to be obedient that found expression in achievement and in the fulfilment of one’s duty.
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Disloyalty meant in effect treason, and in principle was unforgivable. If instances of disobedience did occur, however, Himmler’s approach was distinctly flexible; for disobedience, he explained, was a weakness of the Teutons, who were by nature headstrong. In certain circumstances, therefore, a mild punishment or even a pardon was possible—as long as the foundation of the relationship, namely loyalty, was not compromised. Gottlob Berger, head of the SS Main Office, was aware of this flexibility when, in July 1942, he told Himmler with regard to a conversation with General Steiner, who was under suspicion of disobedience, that he had gained the impression that ‘he was loyal to the core’, whereupon Himmler assured Steiner in a letter: ‘I trust you implicitly.’
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‘Anyone who is disloyal’, as Himmler said in his programmatic SS speech of 1933, ‘excludes himself from our society. For loyalty is a matter of the heart, never of the intellect. The intellect may stumble [ . . . ] but the heart must always go on beating, and when it stops a human being dies, just as a nation dies, when it breaks its oath of loyalty.’
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If Himmler demanded of his men not only obedience but absolute loyalty and elevated loyalty to the supreme law of the SS, then this was certainly also the result of his own insecurity in his relations with others. Although he developed considerable diplomatic skill in the course of time in concealing this weakness, in essence he could sustain personal relationships in the long term only if he controlled the relationship or if, as in his relationship as a young man with Röhm or Strasser or as in the case of Hitler, he subordinated himself to the other person. On the other hand, close personal relationships with people he regarded as equals he found difficult, as becomes clear from his complicated or cool relations with other leading party members. His strong need to reinforce obedience (something that went without saying in the SS) with an emotional element (that of loyalty), to have this confirmed by the repetition to him of formulaic expressions of loyalty, and to invent regular rituals of loyalty was no doubt deeply bound up with this deficiency of character.

By comparison, his elucidations of another central term in the catalogue of virtue, ‘comradeship’, remained insipid. We can infer from one of his few comments on this subject that comradeship in the final analysis supported men’s training in obedience.
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‘I ask that you train each other in your Sturm. You must be vigilant that in your Sturm no one lacks decency!’, Himmler proclaimed in December 1938 when speaking to an SS Standarte.
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But how comradeship was to be developed emotionally, how it was to be lived in everyday life inside and outside the SS, and whether and how far it was to encompass personal affection, friendship, and mutual trust—these were matters on which Himmler was silent. We have already indicated that, in particular in 1936–7, Himmler had opposed tendencies to regard the SS as a male league and had vehemently attacked Blüher’s theory that such leagues were based, in the final analysis, on homoerotic attachments. Yet Himmler had no alternative to offer beyond mere commitment to loyalty and obedience.

On the other hand, in almost every speech there is an appeal to the SS to carry out their tasks ‘decently’. ‘Decent’ (
anständig
) was a word he frequently connected with terms such as ‘pure’ and ‘chivalrous’; what was meant was generous, understanding behaviour, free from selfish motives. ‘Decency’ was omnipresent in Himmler’s world. ‘May each of us live through every good day as decently as every bad one’, was his message to his men in the foreword to the 1937 SS calendar.
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Decency was required above all, however, when Himmler was demanding ‘relentlessness’ and ‘severity’, in
particular when executions were to be carried out: ‘Soldiers have to do many things,’ he said looking back on 30 June 1934, ‘but they must always do them decently, cleanly, setting aside understandable Schadenfreude and personal advantage. [ . . . ] Only if these principles are observed have we the moral strength and resolve to do these things and thus to be the kind of instrument the Führer requires.’
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Sadistic torture or reviling of victims was, in Himmler’s view ‘not decent’ and therefore to be rejected.

During the war Himmler was to stand by the claim that the SS killed its enemies ‘decently’. His best-known declaration on the subject of decency and mass murder was made to the SS-Gruppenführer in Posen in October 1943, and referred to the mass murder of the Jews: ‘Most of you will know what it is like to see 100 corpses lying side by side or 500 or 1,000 of them. To have coped with this and—except for cases of human weakness—to have remained decent, that has made us hard.’
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Even in 1936, however, he had drawn a distinction, and not during a secret meeting of his Gruppenführer but in a public statement to the Prussian State Councillors. The principle of a ‘decent fight’ applied only to ‘any opponent worthy of such treatment’; it was, on the other hand, ‘madness’ to apply ‘this chivalrous attitude [ . . . ] to Jewry and to Bolshevism’, or to the treatment of a ‘Jesuit fighting to gain earthly power’ or ‘Jewish or Jewified Freemasonry’.
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In his Posen speech of 1943 he took the line that it was necessary

to be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely [ . . . ] to those of our own blood and to no one else. How the Russians or the Czechs fare is a matter of indifference to me. [ . . . ] Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch concerns me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch is being dug for Germany. We will never be brutal and callous unless it is necessary: that is obvious. We Germans, who alone on this earth have a decent attitude to animals, will of course adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and to apply ideals to them so that our sons and grandsons have an even harder time with them. If anyone comes to me and says: ‘I can’t make the anti-tank ditch with women or children. It’s inhuman because they’ll die’, then I am forced to say: ‘You are murdering your own blood, for if the ditch is not made then German soldiers will die and these are the sons of German mothers. It is our blood.’ That is what I would like to inculcate in the SS and have, I believe, inculcated as one of the most sacred laws of the future: our concern, our duty, is towards our nation and our blood; that is what we must be concerned about, must think about; for that we must work and fight, and for nothing else.
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‘Decency’ towards ‘animals in human form’ was, therefore, for Himmler not a moral imperative but purely a matter of expediency, because, as he explained in a speech in May 1944, the ‘many little subhumans in our service’ were ‘attached to their master with doglike devotion [ . . . ] because he was decent to them’.
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Himmler’s concept of decency can be read as a cipher for double standards; it stands for norms that were in themselves contradictory. On the one hand decency, even towards enemies, is declared to be virtuous, but on the other it is labelled as ‘madness’. Decent treatment could be expedient, but there was always the danger of treating enemies too well and thus doing damage to one’s own cause—and that was morally reprehensible. Accordingly, it was decent not to treat one’s enemies decently.

This is the only way of explaining how the SS on the one hand laid claim to being honourable and chivalrous, and yet on the other found every possible way of degrading, torturing, and murdering human beings with the greatest cruelty. The aura of dread surrounding the SS was a component in their strategy of terror, and Himmler knew how to exploit this effect. ‘I have no intention, at least not during the war, of dispelling the bad reputation we have, which is only advantageous for Germany, because it keeps enemies at a distance’, we read, for example, in a speech Himmler made to senior naval officers in December 1943.
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The demands of decency posed major problems even for Himmler himself. However firmly and repeatedly he declared ‘decency’ to be his life’s motto, it was impossible to disguise the fact that, just once in a while, he wanted to be allowed to be ‘not decent’ and ‘not well-behaved’, as he had confessed to his fiancée at the beginning of their relationship.
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The context in which he confessed to this is important; he was referring to his stomach problems, caused, he believed, by precisely those constant efforts to be ‘decent’. He knew, therefore, that his rigid self-control, his torturous system of rules and virtues, was causing psychosomatic disorders. His body bridled at the imposition of decency—it wanted instead ‘not to be decent’.

Himmler’s constant appeals to ‘decency’ can be read as the expression of his strenuous efforts to resist temptations ‘not to be decent’: to be cruel, to torment or revile his enemies, to benefit from their downfall or to take malicious pleasure in it—‘understandable Schadenfreude’, as he called it in 1936. The imposition of ‘decency’ seems essentially to be a way of combating those feelings, which were only too familiar to him.

As far as the ‘decency’ of his leadership corps was concerned, the Reichsführer-SS manifestly had similar doubts. Significantly, he could not bring himself to decide in the summer of 1942 to issue an order against anonymous letters in the SS. He told his administrative chief Pohl that he would be able to ban such things only ‘when I am sure of again having peacetime commanders and chiefs to whom any reasonably decent SS man can and does confidently come when he is deeply troubled. At this point I know that this will not be true of the majority of the people in question.’
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Below the level of ‘virtues’ there was a series of Himmler orders regulating the conduct of SS members, most of which he produced on 9 November each year and which he regarded as the ‘basic laws’ of the SS; over the years they were collected numerous times in a constantly growing catalogue.
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Alongside the engagement and marriage orders of 31 December 1931, the ‘honour law’ of the SS of 9 November 1935 was the most important of these basic laws. It committed SS members to ‘defend’ their ‘honour by the use of arms’. This could certainly be understood as promoting duelling (as a former member of duelling fraternity, Himmler had obtained Hitler’s express approval for this regulation).
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In practice, however, Himmler tended if possible to avoid such duels and instead to settle these conflicts by conciliation. To this end, he set up special ‘arbitration courts’ that decided whether in actual cases of someone’s honour being slighted a duel was appropriate or not. This judgement had to be confirmed by the Reichsführer,
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for ‘duelling with swords should not be done as lightly as in the past, otherwise duelling will be turned into a completely devalued formality’.
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If a duel was judged to be unavoidable it had also to be approved in advance by Hitler;
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at the beginning of 1943 duels of this kind were forbidden on principle ‘during wartime’.
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