Heinrich Himmler : A Life (58 page)

The fact that such free use of firearms was not an isolated incident is shown by an instruction Himmler issued some months after the reproof to Bürger: ‘I am repeatedly being informed that a member of the SS or the police has felt the need to use his firearm in a completely inappropriate and
irresponsible manner. Usually this happens in the company of others and under the influence of alcohol and indeed particularly in the eastern territories.’ Such ‘firearms abuse’, Himmler went on, was ‘not only irresponsible’ but also ‘absolutely un-German’, for ‘a German uses his weapon in battle and leaves such gunfights to the Slavs’.
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Matthias Kleinheisterkamp, commander of a Waffen-SS division, was called to order by Himmler in the most blistering manner in the autumn of 1941 because of an excessive drinking binge in the division mess: ‘As a captain or battalion commander you could afford the odd lapse. After I, in spite of serious doubts, had entrusted you with a division, you were under an obligation to face up to the fact that your time for getting drunk—should you wish to count that activity among the high points of your life—was well and truly over.’ The ‘repellent scenes of drunkenness’ had, according to Himmler, revealed a ‘character flaw you must make serious efforts to eradicate by the end of your period of service’. Kleinheisterkamp, Himmler went on, had escaped being relieved of his command only because Himmler would have had to divulge to the Wehrmacht the reason for this personnel decision—and for the sake of the prestige of the Waffen-SS he would not do this. Thus the only punishment Kleinhasterkamp could expect was a ban on alcohol: ‘I require of you not to drink any alcohol in the next two years, after showing that at the age of 49 you are not yet capable of handling it.’
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Himmler had regarded an alcohol ban for some time as a tried-and-tested method of discipline: ‘If anyone is unable to handle alcohol and treats it as would a small child, I take it away from him. Just as one takes away a pistol from a small child because he does not know how to use it properly’, he declared in 1938.
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Two years previously he had propounded the principle that in the case of alcohol-related offences the culprits were to be given the alternative: ‘Either you show you can handle alcohol and follow our example, or a pistol will be sent to you so that you can put an end to things. So make up your mind; you have twenty-four hours to do so.’
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Curt von Gottberg had received a three-year alcohol ban as early as 1936, after he lost a foot in an alcohol-related accident.
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Otto Rahn, an SS-Untersturmführer whose main occupation was as a writer, was also obliged to accept a two-year alcohol ban.
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Significantly, however, Himmler grew more lenient with regard to alcohol bans during the war: when serving at the front, particularly in the east, he made it known, alcohol consumption was ‘justified, naturally within the bounds of moderation, and occasionally even to be recommended on
health grounds’. Thus ‘alcohol bans already imposed and/or those still to be imposed’ were ‘to be set aside during service at the front’.
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In the east the disinhibiting effect of alcohol was clearly welcome.

These examples show that, in the case of members of the SS leader corps guilty of alcohol-related excesses, although Himmler delivered moral condemnations he nevertheless shied away from disciplinary punishments and preferred to use ‘educative’ means.
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This is the more curious because he generally took the view that alcohol-related misdemeanours were to be treated particularly strictly,
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for he assumed that in the case of two-thirds of all people who had ‘run aground, alcohol was the most deep-seated reason for this shipwreck’.
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Why, then, this leniency towards excessive drinkers in the SS? Had he realized that draconian punishments would not achieve anything? Or did he not really intend to get rid of alcohol-related offences at all? Had he recognized that binge drinking and intoxication were a fixed component of the SS subculture, and that this bad habit among his men gave him repeated opportunities to call individual SS leaders to account and to subject them to his educative methods?

In 1941 a further measure was introduced: the Reichsführer had a rehabilitation home set up at Buchenwald concentration camp for SS members with alcohol problems.
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In this measure Himmler saw ‘not punishment but health education in their own interests for those SS men and police referred there’; he wanted, he said, to ‘create an exemplary compulsory recovery home, in which the inmates were to be weaned off alcohol abuse by means of unconditional withdrawal of alcohol, coupled with health measures such as sport, toughening up, and so forth, and educated into being healthy men, robust in body and mind, with cause to be grateful to the Reichsführer-SS for his intervention’. Another practical measure was the imposition of a smoking ban. He also ordered that ‘food be as free as possible of meat’ (‘In particular oatmeal is always to be served in the morning with grated apple or Maggi seasoning or similar additions’), and advised that a sauna be constructed.
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The decision about who should be sent there was, of course, his.
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Financial exigencies among his subordinates similarly required the Reichsführer’s regular interventions. The fact that many members of the SS leader corps had significant debts made them, to his mind, susceptible to all kinds of temptations, as he confirmed in June 1937 in an order: ‘Thus,’ he said, the situation still arose ‘in which industrial and commercial circles or
personalities try to make SS leaders benevolent and well disposed towards them by means of unusual concessions, usually of a material kind.’
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There were numerous instances of SS leaders in financial difficulty turning to Himmler. He gave von dem Bach-Zelewski financial support several times, for example in 1938 by lending him 7,000 Reich marks to buy a farm; in total the payments recorded in the files amounted to at least 11,000 Reich marks.
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SS-Brigadeführer Paul Moder informed Himmler in 1937 that he had taken an interest-free loan of 15,000 Reich marks from the Hamburg entrepreneur Hermann Reemtsma, as his wife was demanding a large sum before she would agree to a divorce.
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SS-Gruppenführer Paul Hennicke, the chief of the Weimar police, was ‘for the moment completely broke’, as a friend of the Himmler family informed the Reichsführer in September 1939; the police chief’s salary was at the time being impounded.
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Obersturmbannführer Otto Hofmann, a wine merchant up to 1933 and then a full-time SS leader, asked Himmler in 1934 for financial help as he was suffering a ‘dire emergency’; Himmler doubted this information when, a short time later, he got wind of the fact that Hofmann had allegedly taken part in a ‘champagne binge’.
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SS-Oberführer Erwin Rösener informed the head of the Personnel Office that he was suffering ‘acute financial embarrassment at the moment’, for in the ‘time of struggle’ he had, ‘like any other party comrade, been forced to take on heavy debts and to be supported by my parents and siblings. Now I have to make that up somehow to the aforementioned by supporting them.’ Asked for his advice, Himmler decided that no additional payments should be made.
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When Marianne Bürger, who was employed at the SS officer-training college in Brunswick and married to Obersturmbannführer Karl-Heinz Bürger, asked Himmler for a monthly supplement to her income—she was expecting her fourth child—Himmler not only refused this request but also gave Frau Bürger instructions personally about how she might manage on the available money.
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Obersturmbannführer Ludolf von Alvensleben, the son of an aristocratic landowner, was, by his own admission, financially ‘at rock bottom’ in 1928.
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In 1934 he had managed to clear around a third of his enormous debts of 750,000 Reich marks. In the autumn of 1934 Himmler got wind of the fact that von Alvensleben had failed to respond to the demand of a creditor for 2,500 Reich marks. Himmler ordered that von Alvensleben ‘be questioned at a minuted interview’, and furthermore decreed: ‘If Obersturmbannführer v. Alversleben is unable to give satisfactory explanations to
show that he has treated the matter in the manner required of a National Socialist and SS leader, his continued membership of the SS is impossible. The private debts of an SS leader are a matter which his superiors must take the keenest interest in.’
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In July 1937 Himmler ordered von Alvensleben, who in the meantime was head of SS-Abschnitt X and had by his own account cleared his debts with only 12,000 Reich marks remaining, to appear in the Four Seasons Hotel in Munich, and accused him there in the presence of the Chief of his Personal Staff of enjoying free use of a car that had been offered to him at a very attractive price by the Mercedes works. Himmler forbade von Alvensleben to acquire the car on these exceptional terms.
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Before this meeting Himmler had already issued a regulation in which he described the case in detail, without mentioning von Alvensleben by name, and impressed on his men that he wanted ‘my SS leaders to remain free and independent, including in financial matters’. He expressly demanded that ‘every SS leader refuse strictly and proudly to accept favours of any kind, even if they are dressed up as having a professional purpose, such as the claim that the high-level work of the recipient in question will be made easier’.
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Whereas Himmler made a show of intervening here in order to prevent von Alvensleben from losing his independence to a company for the sake of a relatively small financial advantage, only a year later he appeared significantly more generous: in order finally to secure for von Alvensleben a life free of debt, Himmler approved a consultancy contract between the SS leader and the Salzgitter works that boosted von Alvensleben’s monthly income by 1,000 Reich marks.
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Why did Himmler consent to the consultancy, when he refused the car purchase? It appears that in the case of the consultancy his consent in the matter was a means of showing, at least to outward appearances, that things were under his control; he heard about the car purchase, however, only when the deal was in train, and was forced to intervene because his authority was being called into question. For that is primarily what was at stake in this case, and possible corruption was a secondary issue.

Old debts from the ‘time of struggle’ were, however, by no means the only reason for financial difficulties. In a staff order of December 1936, for example, the head of the Race and Settlement Main Office stated that ‘a considerable proportion of members of the Main Office are heavily in debt. The debts have arisen almost exclusively by the thoughtless acquisition of radios, cameras, motor vehicles, etc., on which only a down-payment has
been made. Most of those in debt are unmarried and comparatively well paid according to the salary scale, but by their frivolous purchases are so indebted that on the first of the month they have only small change left out of their salary.’ This, he continues, is leading to an ‘escalating amount of borrowing’ among comrades, in pubs and from businessmen, amounting to what is ‘ultimately stealing from comrades in the case of weaker personalities. But those in debt are also a good subject for the attentions of the opposition’s intelligence services.’ The SS members working full-time at the Main Office were therefore asked to hand in a declaration of debt. Any frivolous incurring of debt would result in immediate dismissal.
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In 1936–7 Himmler initiated serious measures to combat debt: he saw to it that the SS took out a loan, first of a million, later of 2.5 million Reich marks, in order to pay off the debts of first the Main Office staff, then the entire leader corps, and finally the SS as a whole.
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At the beginning of 1937 a questionnaire was used to establish the financial liabilities of the Main Office SS leaders, and in the spring of 1937 he set up a department for economic support: SS debt counsellors negotiated with creditors a partial settling of the debts; the SS men in question had to pay the sums owed to the SS and to undertake never again to incur debts and—and this was a particular concern of Himmler’s—never again to enter into hire-purchase agreements.
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‘A considerable number of old Nazis are still carrying liabilities and debts from the time of struggle and the years of economic misery’, asserted Himmler at a Gruppenführer meeting in February 1937. ‘In the long run I consider this untenable.’ For the future he recommended the following ‘way of life’: an ‘SS man buys nothing he cannot pay for’; he ‘will never buy anything in instalments’; the ‘SS man is the most honest human being that exists in Germany’.
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In his November speech to the Gruppenführer in Munich he announced an additional ten-point ‘Basic Law concerning compulsory saving’, in which one requirement was to create a savings fund into which salaried SS men each had to pay 1 mark a month.
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Alcohol abuse and indebtedness were not the only aspects of the lives of his leader corps that Himmler disapproved of. He repeatedly criticized his men, for example, for excessive ambition or exaggerated vanity. Hermann Behrends, liaison officer at the Coordination Centre for Ethnic Germans, was in fact, in Himmler’s estimation, ‘personally a decent, able, and courageous man in his work’, but Himmler was disturbed by his ‘consuming and unhealthy ambition’. For he suspected that the person behind Kaltenbrunner’s recommendation of Behrends as Kaltenbrunner’s replacement as
Higher SS and Police Leader Danube was in fact Behrends himself.
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Himmler was highly displeased when SS leaders pressed for their own promotion, and put them firmly in their place.
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