Heinrich Himmler : A Life (56 page)

The regulation concerning the ‘sacredness of property’ of November 1936, according to which in future there were to be no more locks on lockers in SS troops’ accommodation, was also a basic law, along with the ‘duty to save’ and the ‘sacred task [ . . . ] of giving help of every kind to the wives and children of dead comrades’.
⁶⁸
During the war the order ‘Last Sons’ was added: it laid down that members of the Schutzpolizei and the SS who were the ‘only or last surviving son’ in their family should be sent home from the front and told: ‘It is your duty, through the procreation and birth of children of good blood, to ensure as quickly as possible that you are not the last son [ . . . ] so that you can be deployed again in the front line of battle.’
⁶⁹

There was little that escaped Himmler’s attention. His men were supplied with a constant stream of rules of conduct and prohibitions. He felt obliged to take steps to curb cheating and other discreditable practices in sports; at SS sports events he demanded ‘incorruptible honesty’, ‘chivalrous bearing’, and ‘strict adherence to the standards of good behaviour’.
⁷⁰
He reminded his men of the need to observe the speed limit,
⁷¹
and forbade high-ranking SS leaders who held a pilot’s licence to fly while on duty.
⁷²
SS men were not allowed to address each other as ‘Herr’ but had to use their rank, and on Mother’s Day they had to ensure they were at home.
⁷³
Men should acknowledge each other ‘not with a limply bent arm, but in a soldierly fashion, with arm and hand outstretched’.
⁷⁴
And when shaking hands, remove gloves! Or, to use Himmler’s words: ‘When SS men greet each other with a handshake, even if this takes place between a man and his superior officer, they must shake hands and not gloves.’
⁷⁵

According to Himmler, ‘indoctrination’ was of the greatest importance in ensuring the enforcement of SS virtues and for the loyalty and commitment of SS members. At first it was the responsibility of the Race and Settlement Main Office.
⁷⁶
A suitable organization was built up in the course of 1934: every SS unit down to the Sturm had an individual head of indoctrination who was appointed by the Race and Settlement Main Office and who was to ensure that all SS men within his field of responsibility took part once a week in an indoctrination hour. This indoctrination organization was directed by the thirteen full-time race officers from the SS-Oberabschnitte, who since April 1937 had been called ‘SS Race and Settlement leaders’ (
RuS-Führer
). It also came within their remit to implement the marriage order and, from 1938, to carry out the racial examination of whole population groups, initiate resettlement measures, and more besides.
⁷⁷
To brief the indoctrination leader, at first indoctrination letters were issued sporadically and then replaced in 1936 by the
SS Guidance Booklet
(
SS-Leitheft
), which appeared regularly with guidelines and information.
⁷⁸
In 1937 the indoctrination organization of the SS took on the ideological training of the police.
⁷⁹
In August 1938 Himmler withdrew responsibility for indoctrination from the Race and Settlement Main Office, with whose head he had quarrelled, and transferred it to the SS Main Office.
⁸⁰
At this point the
indoctrination office had thirty-one full-time staff members and 430 honorary indoctrination leaders.
⁸¹
At the beginning of 1939 Himmler transferred responsibility also for the so-called team houses (
Mannschaftshäuser
) from the Race and Settlement Main Office to his Personal Staff. The total of sixteen team houses accommodated SS members who were receiving special ideological training and being toughened up in martial sports. They were to form the core of an academic SS elite.
⁸²

According to the principle of their ideological training, SS men were not to ‘know about’ National Socialism; rather, they were to ‘live’ it. ‘The indoctrination leader must fire the emotions of his SS men. He can do that only if he propounds our intentions on the basis of his own most profound inner experience’, as one set of instructions put it. ‘The indoctrination leader must be a man’s man himself and a living example of every word he says.’
⁸³

It would seem more than doubtful whether this could be realized in practice: indoctrination was schematized and formalized to the extent that there was little scope for improvisation. ‘Flights of ideological imagination are something I most decidedly will not tolerate’, as Himmler informed his indoctrination leaders.
⁸⁴
Das Schwarze Korps
then also described the attitude of many SS comrades to indoctrination as follows: ‘Of course, this or that person thinks, “We ought to go along, especially because our superior officer is also going to be there (promotion!). In any case,” as these people console themselves in a typically philistine manner, “the cosy get-together afterwards is always really nice.”’
⁸⁵

In February 1936 the head of the Race and Settlement Main Office ordered that the ‘basic indoctrination’ of SS members had to take place in a total of twenty-eight weeks, split into four blocks and spread over twenty-one months in all. In every indoctrination week two teaching units of forty minutes each were to be held and had to follow a particular pattern: reading and discussion of an extract from
Mein Kampf
and of a short essay on a particular topic, followed by the presentation of a practical example derived from the procedure for approving marriages, so that the SS men were given some direction when choosing the right wife.
⁸⁶
The four blocks of basic indoctrination covered the following topics: blood and soil (eight weeks), Jewry, Freemasonry, Bolshevism (eight weeks), history of the German nation (eight weeks), the SS year and customs, honouring the dead (four weeks).

The matching teaching materials can be found in the first seven editions of the
SS Guidance Booklets
, which even after the ‘basic indoctrination’ was completed remained the most important training resource.
⁸⁷
Booklet 9 was
concerned, among other things, with the history of the SS, while other booklets concentrated on the SS’s spring games,
⁸⁸
topics from prehistory and early history, and German history.
⁸⁹
In addition there are constant ‘tips’ on choosing the right partner
⁹⁰
and—under the heading ‘For the family’—hints on how to choose ‘good’ German first names, in order to prevent aberrations, which were clearly quite frequent.
⁹¹

Himmler himself took control of the design of the
SS Guidance Booklets
. At the meeting to discuss Booklet 10 he imparted some general instructions to Joachim Caesar, the head of the Indoctrination Office: ‘It is my wish that the material used in indoctrination is not always taken from
one
area of life. Every area of life should be touched on and indeed in such a way that the trainee looks forward to the next indoctrination session and to reading the booklet. Above all, the way things are presented is what counts. The articles are never to be longer than 5–6 pages.’ In particular he recommended
The Loyalty Book
and
The Passion Book
, works by his favourite writer Werner Jansen, as models.
⁹²

In line with the example of Jansen’s books, Himmler advocated above all heroic stories in the
SS Guidance Booklets
—sagas, as he put it.
⁹³
‘We must get rid of the idea’, he declared in a lecture some years later, ‘that a “saga” is something untrue, something made up. Rather, Norway’s or Denmark’s sagas are the history of these nations, and the saga of our nation is the history of our nation from its earliest time. And the human heart, that of men and women in Germany, can respond to this form of saga, of story, with its sensitive voice, much, much more than scholarly, didactic writing can teach men or women.’
⁹⁴
In 1937 the
SS Guidance Booklets
did in fact move more towards putting historical material across in the form of ‘heroic sagas’.
⁹⁵

The SS’s ‘ideological training’ therefore moved further and further away from its initial ambition of passing on to SS members a comprehensive ‘vision of the world’, and concentrated instead on the ‘most imaginative’ dissemination possible of heroic role-models. First and foremost, SS men were to ‘believe’ in the order’s mission; above all, emotional attachment to the organization was promoted. Through membership of the SS they had taken their place in a phalanx of heroic figures who had fought an eternal battle against ‘subhumanity’ to protect their families and their ‘blood’. In this struggle private decisions regarding marriage and children played a significant role. As we shall see, the Reichsführer-SS therefore devoted particular care and attention to these questions, beyond the scope of indoctrination in general.

Himmler’s educational ambitions were not confined to the behaviour of his subordinates while on duty. Rather, they embraced all aspects of his men’s lives: their appearance, their economic circumstances, their relationship to alcohol, their health, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, marriage and family planning. The Reichsführer-SS reserved for himself the right to demonstrate in an exemplary fashion to members of the SS, down to those of the lowliest rank, his severity and omnipotence. This he did by means of targeted interventions in the most diverse areas of their lives. The most senior members of the SS leader corps in particular had to endure painstakingly precise surveillance of their entire existence.

In the second half of the 1930s and during the Second World War the SS leadership—in other words, those who had reached at least the rank of Gruppenführer—was drawn overwhelmingly from two groups: young First World War volunteers and the so-called ‘war youth generation’. The young volunteers were those born in the 1890s (mostly after 1895) who had seen service in the First World War, most of them from the outbreak, and had predominantly served as young lieutenants and then been members of the Free Corps. Members of this cohort had helped decisively to build up the SS before 1933. The so-called ‘war youth’ generation (that is, those born after 1900 who, although they had been fully aware of the war, had been too young for active service—Himmler’s cohort) began to fill leading posts from 1933 onwards. There were, of course, also older men among the leaders, yet on closer inspection it appears that the majority of these played no active role in the SS but rather had been rewarded by Himmler with a relatively high rank in the General SS as part of his strategy of cultivating contacts. The Gau leaders of the veterans’ organization, the Reichskriegerbund, for example, had, when their organization was taken into the SS,
received the rank Gruppenführer, without as a result achieving any significant influence on the leadership of the SS. The situation with regard to police officers (some of them long-serving officers, others Nazi activists appointed after 1933) was different; Himmler conferred corresponding SS ranks on them in order to incorporate them into the ‘state protection corps’ he was aiming to form. As the police became increasingly important after Himmler’s appointment as Chief of the German Police, but in particular after 1939, when the racial utopia he advocated was being implemented (for example, in the fight against asocials in the 1930s or the mass executions carried out by the order police in eastern Europe during the war), these latecomers joining the SS in a sideways move should be taken into account in any analysis of Himmler’s tactic of attaining his goals with the help of a subtle personnel strategy.
¹

At this point, however, the two cohorts mentioned above (young war volunteers and the war youth generation), who put their stamp on the SS in the 1930s, are the focus of attention. I have already discussed the specific biographical characteristics of the young war volunteers in the SS leadership, whose period as First World War soldiers was frequently followed by a frustrating and unsuccessful civilian career and who thus saw the SS as their last chance. Those who attained leading positions in the SS before 1933 were presented in
Chapter 6
; after 1933 further war volunteers moved up into the top positions.

Herbert Gille, born in 1897, was one example. He was to become the commanding general of the 2nd SS Tank Corps. A former cadet and professional soldier, Gille had taken work after the First World War as an estate manager, until in 1929 he was ‘cut back’ without any prospect of further work in agriculture. Until 1931 he got by as a travelling salesman and then as an independent insurance salesman. In 1932 he gave up this work for a full-time post as chief of staff of the SS-Abschnitt IV.
²
In March 1933, immediately after the seizure of power, he was, however, relieved of his position, taken into custody for three months, and expelled from the SS; precise reasons for these measures were never given to him. Although rehabilitated in March 1934, he was, as his brother wrote to Himmler, ‘financially ruined and psychologically very low’. In a personal interview with Himmler in April 1934 he regained his spirits a little,
³
and Himmler gave him an interim position as a Standartenführer. He clashed with his superiors, however, again lost his job, and was judged by his superior officer Jeckeln as ‘unsuitable for a leading role in the higher echelons’.
⁴
Gille was
given a third chance: he was moved to the political action squad (
Politische Bereitschaft
) in Ellwangen and this time he was successful in carving out a career in the armed SS (
Verfügungstruppe
).
⁵