Heinrich Himmler : A Life (64 page)

In August 1937, in a perplexing instruction, he encouraged full-time SS leaders to marry young: ‘I require full-time SS leaders to marry early.’ He went on, however, in the next sentence to say that on principle people in this group would not be allowed to marry before the age of 25. Aspiration and reality—in this case the relatively modest financial circumstances of SS members—diverged dramatically.
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In April 1938 Himmler came up with a further suggestion: he asked the Race and Settlement Main Office to consider ‘if the medical questionnaire for prospective wives of SS men could not have the questions added: Does the person in question have prominent cheekbones? Has she a Mongolian eyelid crease?’
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Ill 16.
As the supreme guardian of the ‘clan order’ of the SS Himmler made efforts to incorporate wives into the ‘SS family’. There was no strict separation of private and professional life for Himmler or for his men. On this SS wedding photo Himmler is seen on the right next to the bride. On the left is the head of the Race and Settlement Main Office, Walther Darré, and behind him the Chief of Himmler’s Personal Staff, Karl Wolff.

During the war the procedure for approving marriages was further simplified. On 1 September 1939 Himmler ordered that, in the event of mobilization, it should be shortened in such a way that approval could be sent out from the Race and Settlement Main Office ‘within a few hours’.
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In January 1940 he directed that the documents normally required on submission of the request could also be sent in after the war and the ‘marriage provisionally approved’.
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‘At the start of the war,’ he confided later to the Higher SS and Police Chief for the Elbe, Obergruppenführer Udo von Woyrsch, in March 1943,

I had to confront the huge question: should I give very strong backing to the men’s willingness to marry and make it possible, without being in a position in wartime, where training for battle claims most of one’s attention, to give the men adequate instruction about racial laws, life experience, and all the things necessary to make a successful union of two biologically well-matched people? Or should I stick to very strict selection by refusing a certain number of requests to marry? If I had done the latter I would have put an enormous brake on the willingness to marry precisely of young soldiers at the front. I therefore decided to limit the formalities, give a powerful boost to marriage, and to accept the mistakes that are made by individual SS men in wartime to a much greater extent than in peacetime.

The most important thing, Himmler continued, ‘that I can and will achieve is to ensure as far as possible that every SS man who dies in the war has a child’. If the number of children became ‘larger in total, I will accept what from a breeding point of view might be called poor results, which always do occur in the wider population’. Precisely because it was wartime, he said, he worked on the principle: ‘Better to have a child of any kind than no child at all.’
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A few months later he reiterated this position when the head of the Marriage Office, SS-Brigadeführer Otto Heider, suggested that, in view of the large number of marriage applications that did not meet the strict racial demands of the SS, an attempt should be made ‘to influence SS men’s choice of partner and by this means to achieve an element of “breeding”’. Himmler replied that Heider should be in no doubt that he ‘was fully aware of these matters’. It would be ‘one of our most important peacetime tasks to instruct and direct all young SS men so that they choose a biologically appropriate future wife and mother of their children. [ . . . ] But during the war this was impossible.’ The Reichsführer considered it more important, the reply said, ‘for SS men simply to reproduce than for the Reichsführer to
forbid them to marry hastily and thereby prevent children from being born’.
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In 1941 the Clan Office stated that since 1931, when the Marriage Order was issued, a total of more than 40,000 ‘provisional decisions’ had been made, of which the office had been able subsequently to finalize only about 1 per cent because of the volume of work.
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This situation never fundamentally changed: in fact, in the first six months of 1942 there were an additional 5,590 ‘provisionally’ processed applications. In January 1942 the Clan Office made 522 decisions: eighteen approvals, nine rejections, forty-three cases of ‘leave given on the applicant’s own responsibility’; 452 decisions were merely ‘provisional’.
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Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1941 Himmler’s assiduity was shown by his requirement that the medical questionnaire include the ‘shape of the legs’ under the three headings of ‘straight, bow legs, knock knees’, and subheadings ‘slim, medium, and fat’.
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Whenever Himmler dealt personally with requests to marry he did not confine himself simply to rejecting or approving the application. Rather, he used the opportunity to intervene in a sustained and detailed way in the personal affairs of his men and their partners. His reactions and comments are revealing about his attitude to the opposite sex, his position regarding sexuality—and, last but not least, about the state of his own marriage.

In August 1940 Himmler was sent the marriage request of an SS man who wished to marry a Czech woman, who had been designated ‘of good race’ by the race inspectors. Himmler viewed the matter as a question of principle, in other words, from a racist perspective. As he wrote to the Higher SS and Police Leader von dem Bach-Zelewski, from a ‘purely national point of view such a marriage should of course be rejected’, but on the other hand, ‘from a racial perspective the SS man’ had made ‘absolutely the right choice, for it would be good to remove this woman of good race from the Czech nation and incorporate her as a mother of Nordic blood into the German nation’. To achieve this, the couple should move to Reich territory and not return for the foreseeable future to the bride’s home town.
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He would make a final decision on the case at the end of the war.
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When approving requests to marry women from ‘alien’ or slightly dubious ‘ethnic German’ backgrounds, Himmler frequently stipulated that
the couple should move away from territories that were occupied, annexed, or had a politically problematic ethnic mix to the so-called Old Reich territory.
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His conditions could be much more stringent, however. Rottenführer G., a member of the guard unit at Dachau KZ, asked for permission in 1942 to marry Lucie B., the mother of his three children. Both were natives of the Warthegau. Himmler withheld permission for the foreseeable future, as the woman ‘is not in a position to bring up G.’s children as Germans. G. has only himself to blame for this refusal, as he failed to teach B., whose father is German and mother is Polish, to master the German language and use it all the time.’

Himmler, however, held out hope for the marriage, if Frau B. and her children submitted to a programme of Germanization, which Himmler set down in detail: the children were to be transferred immediately by the Race and Settlement Main Office to a ‘good German children’s home’, where the ‘purely German and other aspects of their upbringing’ were to be monitored. ‘An SS leader from the Race and Settlement Main Office near the children’s home is to be given personal responsibility for checking on and visiting the children. He should take a kind interest in them, as would an uncle with his nephews and nieces. The mother, Frau B., if she really wants to marry the father of her children, is to be sent for a year to a mothers’ school run by the NS Women’s Organization (
Frauenschaft
).’ She would not be allowed to marry G., Himmler continued, until she had been given a positive assessment there: ‘My decision should be communicated to G. by his commanding officer personally in a long, very positive, and kind conversation.’
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By contrast, Obersturmführer Adalbert K., a member of the Death’s Head division, was transferred ‘to the east immediately’ in 1943 on Himmler’s orders for having submitted a request to marry ‘a girl who was admittedly good-looking’ but who came from a strongly nationalist Czech family.
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In this case Himmler decided clearly in favour of the ‘national point of view’. Even in the case of Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny, who had played a decisive role in organizing the deportations of the Slovakian, Greek, and Hungarian Jews, the Reichsführer took the view that, given that the prospective bride regarded herself as an ‘ethnic Hungarian’, though ‘of good race’, the most important factor was whether she had the right ‘attitude to Germany’.
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Himmler was indignant when couples wishing to marry did not submit their applications until the bride was about to give birth. Such behaviour,
Himmler informed an applicant in February 1943, was ‘reckless and un-chivalrous (
unritterlich
)’, and he requested him, he said, ‘to make up for his past recklessness by conducting his marriage in a decent and chivalrous manner’.
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An Oberscharführer who had made a girl pregnant while aware that her hereditary health was compromised and had then submitted a request to marry was dismissed by Himmler from the SS.
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Where the bride lacked ‘reproductive capability’, Himmler invariably intervened in both word and deed. Thus, Frau F. received the following communication in July 1941 from the Personal Staff of the Reichsführer-SS: ‘As the results of examinations so far indicate that in your case we must anticipate a lack of reproductive capability, before making a final decision the Reichsführer-SS has ordered that you be sent to Prof. Dr. Clauberg for hormone treatment.’ The SS was to bear the costs.
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When the treatment proved successful, Himmler approved the marriage.
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On numerous occasions Himmler’s guiding principle was: first children, then marriage. ‘Fate itself’ should decide, as he put it.
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He seems to have enjoyed insisting on this principle when the potential father came from the so-called more exclusive social circles. One example is the case of SS-man Adrian Count A., a member of the propaganda squad—in Himmler’s view, ‘rather an odd character and his fiancée seems even odder’. Himmler came to the decision: ‘At his age, for the SS to approve a marriage makes sense only if the wife has a reasonable prospect of having children. In the case of this woman that seems extremely doubtful.’ Accordingly there was ‘only one possibility, namely that the Count should take steps before the marriage. If they are successful, I shall be more than willing to approve the marriage. This method, tried and tested in countless German peasant villages, might bring success even in such an elevated family as the Count’s.’
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Himmler made a similar judgement in 1942 in the case of Franz Alfred Six, head of an office in the Reich Security Main Office. He requested that Six should be informed in Himmler’s name ‘that he could give him leave to marry only when it is clear that his fiancée is expecting a child. The Reichsführer-SS wishes this personal discussion to be conducted in a very kind manner and for it to be made clear to SS-Hauptsturmführer Six that his fiancée, as he is aware, had syphilis in 1928 and a marriage without children would be pointless for him.’
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If Himmler considered that an applicant had chosen a very inappropriate bride, that man was liable to face serious repercussions. On 27 September
1942 he asked the chief of the SS Leadership Main Office, Hans Jüttner, to summon SS-Hauptscharführer Konrad H. and tell him ‘that as far as his choice of bride, Fräulein Emma B.—this painted Czech girl—is concerned, I think he has taken leave of his senses. By making this choice H. has shown that he was clearly responsible for his two divorces, one as the guilty party and the other as jointly guilty. But he has also shown that he has not the remotest understanding of the principles of the SS.’ In addition, Himmler called on Jüttner to see to it ‘that in order to cool his passion Herr H. is moved to the healthy air of the front’.
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On 17 June 1943 Himmler wrote to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, asking him to inform SS-Sturmbannführer Wilhelm B., an official of the Alsace Gestapo, that Himmler was refusing his request to marry (the 38-year-old wished to marry Frau Z., who was considerably older). The applicant was, in addition, to be informed of the following:

I am abiding by my refusal, as I consider your marriage as a 38-year-old German man to a 50-year-old woman to be as irresponsible as your saying you refuse to marry again because you have suffered a disappointment. [ . . . ] You have not yet served at the front and therefore, like everyone who is given that opportunity, you must see to it that the sacrifice of many hundreds of thousands of lives at the front was not in vain and that the gaps they left in the nation are filled in future by children.