Heinrich Himmler : A Life (57 page)

Georg Lörner, born in 1899 and later head of Amtsgruppe B in the SS Main Office for Economy and Administration, had taken part in the First World War. After completing a course at a business school, in 1923 he went into his brother’s firm: ‘Because of the adverse economic circumstances and various failures the firm was forced in February 1930 to declare itself bankrupt’, he wrote in his curriculum vitae.
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Carl-Albrecht Oberg, born in 1897 and deployed in the war as a Higher SS and Police Leader, had been a war volunteer and Free Corps fighter who in 1921 assumed the role of go-between linking the Reichswehr and the Patriotic Associations in Schleswig-Holstein. ‘In January 1926 I was again employed as a businessman, as my political post up to that time, being financed by private means, was not sustainable.’ In the end he found work with a company importing bananas, but not for long. ‘This firm was liquidated after about a year and a half, making me jobless. In November 1930 I bought my present cigar shop.’ The following year he became a member of the NSDAP and in 1932 of the SS.
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Günther Pancke, in the Second World War a Higher SS and Police Leader in Denmark, was born in 1899 and fought in the First World War as an officer cadet. After the Revolution he was active in the Free Corps in the Baltic region, then spent the time between 1920 and 1926 in Argentina, where he worked on cattle ranches. On a visit to Germany in 1926 he found a job. ‘In June 1930 I joined the party and in 1931 the SS. After a tear-gas attack in protest at a private showing of the film
All Quiet on the Western Front
put on by the Reichsbanner, I was dismissed without notice from my firm and put in prison for six weeks. The sentence was suspended and on 1 January 1932 I went as a teacher to the SS School at Kreiensen.’ A full-time post in the SS followed, and Pancke’s career rapidly took off.
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For Otto Hofmann also the seizure of power meant a unique opportunity to return to the military milieu. Born in 1896, he was a war volunteer and member of a flying unit. After his divorce in 1926 he had lost his post as general manager in his parents-in-law’s wine wholesale business and then worked as a salesman for a wine merchant. In April 1933 he decided to take a full-time post in the SS, to which he had belonged for a number of years. In 1940, after numerous promotions, he became head of the Race and Settlement Main Office.
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Georg Ebrecht, originally an artist, was born in 1895 and volunteered as a soldier in 1914, ending the war as a lieutenant. Up to 1924 he was active above all in various military organizations; long travels abroad followed and eventually he settled in East Africa as a planter of sisal. In 1922 he had already separated from his first wife; his divorce in 1926 was followed four weeks later by marriage to a woman who was already living on his plantation in Africa. In 1931 he was economically finished: ‘When, after the huge collapse of prices on the world market, the plantation I had painstakingly built up became uneconomic, I went back to Germany.’ He joined the NSDAP, in which he was active as a speaker, without support from any occupational income. The seizure of power opened up to him a professional career as a party functionary, first as a district leader, then as a Gau Inspector. In 1935 he moved to the Race and Settlement Main Office, where in 1937 he became a section head.
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In 1938 his second marriage ended in divorce, on the grounds of ‘complete breakdown’, the court commenting that because of his function in the Race and Settlement Main Office he took the fact that the marriage was childless particularly to heart.
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Ebrecht married a third time and had two daughters.
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Hanns Albin Rauter, a Higher SS and Police Leader in the Netherlands in the Second World War, was born in 1895 and fought in the Austrian Army for the whole of the First World War. He was then head of the Styrian paramilitary Heimatschutz, but in 1933 was expatriated from Austria as a result of National Socialist activities. Without career or money, he joined the NSDAP and the SS.
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The SS leaders from the war youth generation had also frequently been active in Free Corps and military groups, the young ones often in radical right-wing paramilitary youth organizations. This cohort, Himmler’s contemporaries, was not only preoccupied with the trauma of defeat and the failure of the putches, it also shared an attitude that veered between disappointment at having arrived too late and a defiant posture of ‘We’ll show the older generation’. We have already been introduced to a number of members of this group, who joined the NSDAP before 1933—for example, Heydrich, the discharged naval officer, and Fritz Weitzel, the junior fitter with a conviction for aiding an abortion.
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In general the members of the war youth generation had better prospects of successful careers than the cohort of young soldiers, who had lost decisive years through their military service. A number of later SS leaders from this group went to university, in particular to study law. In the late 1920s and
early 1930s they had mostly completed the second state examination in law. But with the onset of the economic crisis, and in view of the surplus, widely bemoaned, of candidates for graduate professions, they had only the slimmest chance of a post in the civil service, and even if they did get one they had first to accept years of unpaid work as trainees. The prospects for establishing themselves as lawyers were also poor. Those who had studied other subjects were confronted with similar problems; Himmler’s failed career in agriculture illustrates the difficult situation. A takeover of power by the Nazis offered the prospect of a suitable career in the state or in one of the party organizations, and this undoubtedly provided one of the powerful motives propelling this group towards the NSDAP from the end of the 1920s. For many people, even for those who were not university educated, there was no comparable alternative.

Born in 1903, Werner Best, who in 1939 became a departmental head in the Reich Security Main Office and organizer of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland, had, after his law degree, become a junior judge. In 1930 he joined the NSDAP in the Hesse-Darmstadt Gau and headed its legal section. When in 1931 the so-called ‘Boxheim documents’, papers providing evidence that Best had made concrete plans for a National Socialist coup, were passed on to the authorities, he was dismissed from state service. The Nazi takeover of power provided him with the means in March 1933 of gaining a position as state commissar for police in Hesse; he became involved, however, in internal power struggles in the party and in September 1933 was removed from his post. In this situation Himmler offered him the opportunity of taking over the SD-Oberabschnitt South-West.

The following can also be cited as examples of university graduates who saw in the SS comparatively good career prospects: Hermann Behrends, doctor of law and trainee lawyer from 1930 to 1933, was in the SS from February 1932 and in the SD from the end of 1933, where he took over the central department for ideological evaluation. In 1936 he moved to the Gestapo, became staff manager of the Coordination Centre for Ethnic Germans (
Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle
= VoMi), and in 1944 a Higher SS and Police Leader in Serbia.
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Otto Ohlendorf, born in 1907, studied law and political science and worked at the Kiel Institute for World Economics. From 1936 he made a career for himself in the SD, where he began by being responsible for reporting on economic affairs and from 1939 headed the ‘German Home Affairs’ department. In 1941–2 he was in addition chief of Einsatzgruppe D and responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of
Jews; Himmler clearly wanted to test out Ohlendorf’s ‘severity’, as the latter was considered an intellectual.
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Hermann Fegelein was born in 1906, and as commander of SS cavalry units participated decisively in ‘combating partisans’ and the ‘cleansing campaigns’ that were to cost thousands of civilians their lives. He had completed his grammar-school education in 1926, studied for two semesters, and then broken off his studies. He entered the Bavarian State Police, but left again in 1929. He worked at his father’s riding school until, in 1933, he joined the SS.
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Fritz Katzmann was born in 1906, and in the Second World War, as an SS and Police Leader, was chiefly responsible for the systematic mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in Galicia. After being trained as a carpenter he worked from 1923 to 1928 in various towns. ‘From 1928 to 1933 without work. From July 1933 to November 1933 in charge of the works police at United Steel in Duisburg-Hamborn. December 1933 to January 1934 in Duisburg as district head of the German Labour Front.’ In February 1934 he was taken on full-time as an SS Leader.
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Erwin Rösener, later Higher SS and Police Leader for the Alpine region, and born in 1902, attended a technical school up to the age of 13, became an apprentice electrician between 1917 and 1921, and then worked for various firms. He was actively engaged in the Nazi movement, moved in 1929 from the SA to the SS, and was therefore sacked by his employer. ‘Now I was able to devote myself completely to the movement. I then had short-term employment but always had to leave because of my political activities.’
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Numerous members of both cohorts suffered considerably as a result of failing to gain a foothold in a career. Marital problems, alcoholism, debts, and long-term medical consequences took their toll on many. Of course, the SS leaders were not alone in having these difficulties: we are not dealing with a negative selection of damaged lives, but rather with life-stories representative and typical of the time. Large segments of the German population had similar experiences. And the biographies of a whole series of leading SS men from the same generation developed without any striking interruptions.

Himmler, it must be said, knew how to exploit for his own purposes the susceptibilities evident from the ruptures described in the biographies of many members of the SS leader corps. He was able to make these men dependent on him in sometimes subtle ways. After all, many of the weaknesses he encountered in his dealings with his men were most probably
familiar to him from his own experience and from personal acquaintances and friends of his own age.

On 26 July 1939, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, Higher SS and Police Leader based in Brunswick, received a letter from the Reichsführer-SS. Himmler had received information, he wrote to Jeckeln, that a few weeks previously the latter, ‘while under the influence of alcohol’, had roared through towns and villages in his car at a speed of 80 to 100 kilometres an hour, ‘showing disregard for drivers and pedestrians’. Himmler demanded that Jeckeln answer three questions: ‘1. Did you drive on this particular stretch of road? 2. How much alcohol had you drunk on that day? 3. Were you in breach of the rules of the road?’ Jeckeln knew where Himmler had got his information. On the evening of 23 June a Hamburg businessman and active member of the NS Motor Corps (NSKK) had given chase and, after catching up with Jeckeln at a level-crossing after a fairly long and very eventful pursuit, had challenged him about his inconsiderate and dangerous driving, obviously fuelled by alcohol. Jeckeln revealed himself to be an SS-Obergruppenführer and drove on, but the NSKK man had not let the matter rest there.

Jeckeln, who years before had admitted to Himmler that he had an alcohol problem, then sent his Reichsführer the following ‘report’: at lunchtime on the day in question he had met a number of notable people for an ‘intimate lunch’, the purpose of which was ‘to maintain good social relations and comradeship’. He had left this occasion, which was to go on into the evening, shortly before eight and set off to his hunting lodge. With the exception of minor infringements he had, as he emphasized, observed the rules and above all had driven safely. Jeckeln attempted to allay suspicion that he had had too much to drink by listing all the drinks he had consumed that day: ‘4–5 glasses of Moselle wine’, ‘3 or at most 4 glasses of schnapps’, then possibly ‘3 glasses of beer on top’. Jeckeln’s calculation that if he admitted to ten or twelve alcoholic drinks Himmler would not count these as excessive drinking seems to have worked; on the evidence of his personal file the evening’s drive had no further consequences for him.
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During a comradeship evening in May 1936, following, of all things, an inspection of Dachau concentration camp, an ‘argy-bargy’—as Kaul later described it, in order to play it down—occurred between Brigadeführer Kaul and Oberführer Unger. In the course of this the two opponents tipped wine and beer over each other’s uniforms. Unger was not prepared in retrospect to take the ‘idiocies’ particularly seriously either, and excused the incident by referring to the good atmosphere that had prevailed at this cheerful evening’s drinking: ‘It was also already very late and the large amount of alcohol consumed had created a very good and jocular mood.’
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Himmler decided not to go along with the suggestion of von dem Bach-Zelewski, the Oberabschnittsführer in charge, of initiating formal proceedings but rather gave his chief of staff the task of summoning the two SS leaders and giving them a dressing-down in Himmler’s name.
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In February 1942 Karl-Heinz Bürger, who at this point was preparing himself for his future tasks as a Higher SS and Police Leader in the Ukraine, received a letter from Himmler. The Reichsführer reproached him with having, in his earlier post as ‘desk officer responsible for ideological questions’ and during his inspection of educational establishments, taken part in a ‘massive drinking bout’. During this he had ‘manifestly more or less lost the power of rational thought and all self-control’, and fired his pistol. Bürger candidly admitted the facts, claiming the incident had happened during the celebrations to mark the opening of the official residence of his boss Heissmeyer in January 1941. ‘The devil must have got into me when I fired two shots at the ceiling lights. At the time this frivolity caused me much unease and I could explain it only by the fact that the deep sense of dissatisfaction I had felt during my assignment to the administrative office of SS-Obergruppenführer Heissmeyer was finding violent release.’ Himmler’s reaction was extreme indignation: an ‘ideological educator who himself so abandons education and proper conduct’ had ‘morally no right [ . . . ] to pass on ideology to other people’. Nevertheless, he did not intend, he wrote, to take disciplinary action—on the assumption that this was an ‘exceptional case’. He impressed on Bürger the need in future ‘to bring the ideology he preached [
sic
], his bearing and the conduct of his life—in particular with regard to alcohol—into line with each other’.
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