Heinrich Himmler : A Life (59 page)

Ill. 15.
Although right-handed, Himmler practised shooting with his left hand as well and stipulated that the SS as a whole should do the same. His men were supposed to learn to make up for physical weaknesses and other inadequacies through self-discipline and willpower.

In June 1942 he reproached SS-Brigadeführer Walther Schröder, Higher SS and Police Leader in Riga, with being ‘addicted to being constantly in the newspapers’, and ‘made it clear’ to him that ‘the next time he was mentioned in a newspaper article’ he would be ‘demoted’:

It is not the task of the SS and Police Leader to put on a public show and make a name for himself in the rear area post of Riga, rather it is to work from morning till night to care for his troops, to train and lead his men, learn about the region and its people, and learn also about the minutiae of workplace procedures. Public display and newspaper propaganda are not necessary for this. What is required is that your superiors, not the public, are convinced of your effectiveness, for the public does not promote or demote you. Take this final warning to heart.
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There were also instances of his finding fault with the ‘company kept’ by senior SS leaders. Thus, in March 1943 SS-Gruppenführer Gerret Korsemann received a letter from his Reichsführer containing the reproach that Korsemann had been a guest at the home of a major who was held by the officer corps of the order police to be a man ‘about whose worth and character opinion has often been divided’. He knew, however, that he could expect of Korsemann ‘that in future in choosing your friends and close associates you apply the care and acuteness of judgement I must demand of a Gruppenführer for his intimate circle’.
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SS members who committed suicide were reprimanded by him even after death. According to Himmler, 85 per cent of suicides in the SS were ‘committed for reasons that can never be acknowledged: fear of punishment, fear of being tested, after a reproof from a superior, after a quarrel with parents, after breaking off an engagement, jealousy, an unhappy love life, and so forth’. Such suicides were, he claimed, ‘seen by us SS men as an escape, an evasion of the struggle, of life itself’. In such cases no notice was to be taken of the suicide and the SS was to keep away from the funeral.
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Suicides were not to be buried with a formal ceremony but had to be ‘put in the ground’ (
verscharrt
).
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Himmler explained the rising number of suicides in the SS at the end of the 1930s by claiming that the cohorts reaching adulthood in the Weimar Republic were ‘hothouse plants’.
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The Reichsführer showed himself similarly concerned about the health of the SS. He prescribed medical examinations, read the diagnoses, and gave his men tips on nutrition and lifestyle. Occasionally he decreed where men should go on holiday and for how long, and forbade them to read official files while there.
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The constant pressure and ceaseless ‘deployment’ led to numerous members of the SS leader corps, although only in their late thirties or early forties, suffering considerable physical wear and tear, and above all psychological and psychosomatic problems, during the war years. In the medical reports the same keywords recur: fatigue, exhaustion, problems with ‘nerves’, depressive conditions.

For example, the report on Gruppenführer Waldemar Wappenhans from April 1944 read: ‘He seems agitated and exhausted. Purely physically his heart and circulation are no worse than at the last examination. [ . . . ] But I
was unhappy about his state as a whole. I think that from a medical point of view he urgently needs some mental rest to regain his equilibrium.’
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In the case of SS-Gruppenführer Karl Gutenberger, Himmler ordered a ‘comprehensive medical examination’ after hearing about his health problems. The SS-Reich Medical Officer Robert Grawitz recorded that at the examination the 38-year-old seemed ‘a little absent-minded’, and showed a ‘slight degree of indifference, a kind of euphoria, a tendency to see everything on the same level’. ‘Possibly what we are seeing is the beginning of a post-traumatic change’—which caused Grawitz to prescribe an examination by a consultant at the psychiatric clinic at the Charité hospital in Berlin.
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On the basis of the results Himmler sent Gutenberger first of all for four weeks to the SS ‘Höhenvilla’ in Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary), a sanatorium in which similar cases were treated.

When Erwin Rösener, Higher SS and Police Leader for the Alps, was examined in May 1944, a specialist in internal and nervous illnesses came to the conclusion: ‘this particularly strong and healthy 42-year-old man presents with a state of nervous exhaustion that on the one hand derives from excessively prolonged pressures without a break and that on the other was already apparent and made worse as a result of autonomic dysfunctions consequent on a malfunctioning thyroid. We therefore have here a state of exhaustion attributable to his having consumed his very considerable reserves of strength.’
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In August 1944 a medical report recommended that Rösener be admitted to the Höhenvilla in Carlsbad.
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At the end of 1944 the doctors diagnosed Karl Gustav Sauberzweig, commander of the Croat SS Volunteer Mountain Division, as having a ‘distinct state of excessive nervous excitability tending [ . . . ] towards psychosis’: ‘He tries to be on his own; he does not wish to see anyone else; the sound of gunfire or the sight of blood distress him; his powers of concentration are distinctly deficient and he fears having to take responsibility, etc., etc.’
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In 1942 Himmler was forced to pension off the head of his Personnel Main Office, Walter Schmitt, as he was suffering from urinary frequency, attributable, according to a medical report, ‘to a general neurosis that perhaps was worsened by his professional work’.
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In addition, Richard Hildebrandt, Higher SS and Police Leader for the Vistula and responsible for annexed Polish territory, complained in 1942 of ‘dizziness’ and ‘tiredness’; the doctor who examined him could find no organic cause.
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In cases in which a specific medical diagnosis could not be reached the Munich specialist for internal medicine, Dr Karl Fahrenkamp, who took particular account of psychological causes, was frequently consulted.
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Fahrenkamp’s special position was also demonstrated by the fact that inside the Personal Staff a department F was set up for him that in turn supported an ‘Estate for Experimental Nutrition’ near Salzburg. In addition, before 1940 Fahrenkamp conducted experiments on plants at Dachau concentration camp, and in 1942 he set up a laboratory in the neighbouring training camp, in which, amongst other things, herbally based cosmetics and beauty products were produced; because these goods were produced within the SS the strict government controls on cultivation could be circumvented.
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Himmler was one of the grateful recipients of these products—skin-care products, mouthwash, and suchlike
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—and was also one of Fahrenkamp’s patients.
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In November 1941 Himmler assured Fahrenkamp ‘that I am eternally grateful to you for treating my men, who are extremely difficult patients, with such skill and common sense’.
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As Himmler attributed his own stomach problems to psychosomatic causes, Fahrenkamp’s patient reports gave him access to highly interesting material that allowed him to compare the course of his own illness with that of his SS leaders.

The 45-year-old Waffen-SS General Felix Steiner, for example, seemed to Fahrenkamp to be ‘a very closed and inaccessible man, who answers serious questions with a smile and a certain self-irony’. It was his view ‘that in this case a very vigorous man with a rigid military bearing arrives already wearing a mask and that behind this mask is concealed a sort of depression that under no circumstances’ is to be shown.
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In the case of Ulrich Greifelt, head of the Four-Year-Plan Office in the Personal Staff, Fahrenkamp’s findings, set down on the eve of Greifelt’s forty-second birthday, were as follows:

Damage to the sight of the left eye as a result of flying. In 1918 quit his career as an officer. Through extraordinary efforts made a new career as technical director of a large factory. Lost this post in 1932 through no fault of his own. Has always worked hard [ . . . ] Herr G. suffers greatly from inner agitation and sleeplessness. Is unable to fall asleep and wakes up again early. Becomes very tense about new tasks but does not know why. Psychologically, his enjoyment of life is severely impaired. [ . . . ] Herr G. is depressed by two changes of career, in particular because he was forced to leave a sphere of activity he found very satisfying.
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Werner Lorenz, head of the Coordination Centre for Ethnic Germans, struck Fahrenkamp as someone who, although organically healthy, was nevertheless a ‘tired, exhausted man’. He suspected ‘psychological causes [ . . . ] as factors in his present condition [ . . . ] SS-Obergruppenführer L. says that you, Herr Reichsführer, know about his personal family circumstances.’ It was, he continued, ‘obvious that this refined and very alert man, whom I did not feel has a very robust constitution, is experiencing the effects of a psychological depression in the form of lassitude and exhaustion.’
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Many SS leaders reacted to illness and pain with ‘severity’ towards themselves, such as Heinz Johst, for example, commander of the security police in the Baltic States, who announced to his Reichsführer in July 1944 that, as a result of the long-term effects of diphtheria, he was suffering from serious heart complaints and circulation problems: ‘Because of the situation, I have tried up to now to tackle the condition through my own vigour. Increasingly bad attacks of dizziness and now disturbances to my vision mean I can no longer do this.’
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Wilhelm Rediess, Higher SS and Police Leader in Königsberg, complained in October 1939 to Fahrenkamp of serious headaches on the left side, and in general admitted to having a ‘very tired and preoccupied mind.’ The doctor stated that he found Rediess to be a ‘healthy and strong man’ and therefore concluded that the complaints must ‘be caused by a general exhaustion’. Fahrenkamp continued that advising him was ‘difficult because he is more brutal with himself than anyone can be without in the long run damaging his overall fitness. However obvious it is that even pain can be conquered by force of will, medical experience shows that this attitude has its limits and one day, despite every effort of the will, good health gives way to illness.’ Prevention, he writes, should not be confused with ‘being soft’, as Rediess believed.
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Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, as Higher SS and Police Leader for Russia Centre, responsible amongst other things for ‘combating partisans’ and for the mass murder of Jews, suffered a physical and mental breakdown in March 1942. The Reich Medical Officer Grawitz reported to Himmler:

At the moment I have some concern about his frame of mind: from fear of his haemorrhoid problems SS-Obergruppenführer v. d. Bach had already been going without food for many months, both quantitatively and qualitatively, during the eastern deployment; I have already reported repeatedly that the delayed and somewhat halting process of recovery was caused by the serious physical, nervous, and psychological exhaustion in which the patient arrived for treatment. Now that
he is beginning to recover physically he is torturing himself with notions of inferiority (‘exaggerated sensitivity to pain, lassitude, lack of will power’) and with his anxiety about being fully fit for service very soon and able to put himself at your disposal again, Reichsführer.

Grawitz’s assumption was that although Bach-Zelewski would quickly be fit again, he would nevertheless ‘grapple for a considerable time with various manifestations of depression’.
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Von dem Bach-Zelewski, whom Daluege in 1933 judged to be ‘loyal and honest, very impulsive, in many cases unrestrained’, and suitable for promotion only if ‘his impulsive nature is held in check in his work and by his own efforts’,
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was anxious above all not to admit to himself the seriousness of his illness and to appear to Himmler as unchanged and still healthy. In a letter to his Reichsführer he claimed to have been wrongly treated at first, and only after that to have suffered a physical and mental breakdown:

It is untrue that I entered the field hospital completely exhausted and battle-weary. As your old fighter, whose energy is returning more strongly each day, I will not accept such a distortion of the facts, despite assertions of this being made at my bedside all day long. [ . . . ] I after all submitted to the operation only because the doctors estimated that a full recovery would take four weeks and I wanted to be 100 per cent fit again for the major battles in the spring. Up to fourteen days after the operation I was in daily contact with Mogilew by radio and courier [ . . . ] Only when the cramps began, and my body and then my mind began to be poisoned because my intestines had been put out of action, was there anything like a breakdown. It was less the appalling physical pains that caused the collapse than my conviction of having had the wrong treatment and the threat of the disgrace of dying in a hospital bed at a time when every soldier has the right to a decent soldier’s death. [ . . . ] Reichsführer, I will prove to you this year that your old warriors cannot be kept down even by such experiences.
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Himmler assured him immediately that he had ‘never been in any doubt that you are still your old self’.
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Seemingly somewhat restored, von dem Bach-Zelewski plunged again into the fray.