Heinrich Himmler : A Life (65 page)

Immediately after this communication B. was to be ‘transferred to the territory where the most difficult anti-partisan fighting was going on and to stay there for two years until he grows up or until his injuries land him in hospital’.
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Himmler could also show kindness. In individual cases, for example if petitioned by the bride-to-be, he could actually be persuaded to review his previous marriage prohibition.
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In another case Himmler discovered that the fiancée of an SS-Sturmführer had been unfaithful. He imposed a year’s ‘self-examination’ on her, during which a child was to be conceived; after that, he said, he would be prepared to approve the marriage.
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Himmler’s counsels or requirements, as has been indicated, often affected the most private areas of a marriage. He sent a message to one bride-to-be that, although leave to marry would be granted, she was to be subjected to an examination by the SS doctor, Brustmann, because of her ‘excess weight’, as this might be ‘attributable to a malfunctioning of the ductless glands’.
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An Untersturmführer whose marriage he approved was nevertheless informed:

‘In the view of the Reichsführer-SS, B.’s bride, who seems to be a painted doll, is not suitable for an SS man.’
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Obersturmführer Werner K. was in turn told that ‘his fiancée should not paint herself in that way. It is not the done thing in the SS.’
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Gunner Richard A., on the other hand, was to ‘suggest to his fiancée that she would [ . . . ] look more beautiful if she lowered her eyebrows’.
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On this evidence, women’s use of cosmetics was a difficult subject. Himmler was not prepared to approve the marriage of SS man B. until the bride was pregnant, as in spite of a four-year engagement B. had not managed to wean her off ‘make-up and dressing up’.
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Rottenführer Z., however, was advised ‘to father no more children after the child his fiancée is expecting at the moment. I believe this solution to be the best as otherwise both run the risk of marrying healthy partners and then, despite this, not having healthy children because of their own impairment.’
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Himmler gave two people who wished to marry, but who were both confirmed as having a serious hereditary ‘impairment’, the advice to marry but to ‘have themselves sterilized at the same time’.
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Even in the case of racial examinations Himmler reserved the right to adjust the results. In the case of a girl who, when examined, was designated as an ‘uneven cross-breed’, with western and eastern Baltic racial elements, mixed with some Dinaric ones, Himmler noted on reading through the documents: ‘This girl is 1.68 metres tall, which in a woman absolutely indicates Nordic blood. The skin is pinkish-white, which is not strong evidence of western Baltic, eastern Baltic, or Dinaric racial origin. The head is of medium width and oval and there are no prominent cheekbones. The occiput is moderate and the colour of the eyes greenish.’
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On another occasion he reached the verdict that ‘Frl. X.’s facial features are typically Slav’, and recommended the examiner, one Oberführer Berndt,

to take a course in racial theory. I assume that his medical appraisal of 16. 2. 43 stems from ignorance and not from exaggerated solicitude based on a misunderstanding of the nature of comradeship. To identify in Frl. X. the predominance of Dinaric racial characteristics with an element of Baltic is more than strange. The main comment to be made here is that Herr SS-Oberführer Berndt will perhaps learn in his first remedial lesson in racial theory that only an eastern Baltic race is known in the terminology of that science.
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In February 1940 he made the following criticism:

Frl. L.’s medical questionnaire seems to me very peculiar and determined by an absolutely provincial point of view. She was examined on 18. 12. 1939 by an SS doctor, Dr M.. I find it incomprehensible how a woman aged 30, 1.74 metres tall, weighing 64 kilos, with pinkish-white skin, grey eyes, light blond straight hair, and categorized as Nordic on the basis of the predominant racial component, should make a very mediocre impression on the doctor. This so-called SS doctor in my view examined Fräulein L. not as a doctor but as a philistine from Insterburg.

Himmler in fact suspected that the woman, who wished to marry an SS doctor who was still married, was the victim of small-town tittle-tattle. Casting the net of suspicion more widely, he continued: ‘If the same young woman had come to him anonymously he would probably have had a better impression. As it was, no doubt every gossip-monger in East Prussia knew what was going on.’ He reserved the right to dismiss the doctor for incompetence.

Himmler exploited this incident to expound the principles underlying marriage and the admissibility of ‘decent’ separations: ‘I know precisely how the Führer regards this matter. [ . . . ] When a couple separates it makes no sense to prevent another couple from forming and having children. In these matters too I would ask you when making judgements to attempt to reach a more profound understanding of the laws made by the Führer and under his leadership, such as the new divorce law, and not to stick rigidly to ways of thought that are in the final analysis profoundly Christian.’ And he added: ‘People should behave in a manner that is decent and chivalrous, and if they no longer get along together my view is that they should separate in a decent and chivalrous manner. I don’t need to labour that point.’
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Himmler therefore turned down requests from SS men to marry considerably older women, if there was no prospect of children. In such cases he typically asked the applicant’s superior officer ‘to inform him in a kind and comradely manner that he considers his marriage to Fräulein X. to be unsound from an ethnic point of view’.
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The refusal could, however, be delivered in a less ‘friendly’ form: ‘After R. [ . . . ] was dissuaded from marrying a woman of 43, he is now attempting to marry a woman of 42½. Although I can see he has improved by six months, I consider this tendency to be positively aberrant. Saying he is too old to have more children shows that R. is as yet unaware of the attitude and views an SS man must have with regard to these matters in life.’
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If a child had already been born or the woman was pregnant he took a softer line:

It is of course correct that marriages in which the man is so much younger than the wife are biologically undesirable, as they can lead to the wife quickly ceasing to have children—at an age when the husband can still father children—and as a result there is a considerable risk of divorce. During the war, where soldiers on short leaves have less time than they have in peacetime to choose a partner, my view is that marriage to a woman who is carrying his child must be permitted and all doubts put aside.
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He was not prepared to give Oberscharführer Willy M. leave to marry a woman eleven years older until she confirmed ‘conclusively’ that she was pregnant. In this instance Himmler also ordered the applicant to come to Berchtesgaden so that he could communicate the decision to him in person and reprimand him ‘most severely’ for the ‘immature and arrogant behaviour’ he had displayed during the application process.
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To be in a better position to gauge the likelihood of a pregnancy in such cases, he turned in August 1942 to the director of Lebensborn (Spring of Life) with the request that he should ‘establish in an appropriate manner when the women giving birth at Lebensborn started menstruating and up to what age they might have children’.
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In 1942, ‘in spite of serious misgivings’, Himmler gave a 17-year-old Unterscharführer leave to marry a woman fourteen years older than him (she was expecting his child), though not without adding a piece of personal advice for the applicant:

You and your fiancée must nevertheless be in no doubt that in ten years at most this marriage will undergo a severe test, as, purely biologically and in accordance with nature’s laws, the trajectories of men’s and women’s lives diverge at this point. Embark on this marriage if you are convinced that your future wife has the human qualities that in some form or other fate will demand of her. If difficulties arise, you and your wife have my permission to approach me for a solution, should I be spared till then.
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In another case on which he also reached a decision in 1942, Himmler had already refused the request of a Hauptscharführer to marry on the grounds that the woman was too old. Then, however, he changed his mind after receiving a personal letter from the woman. Himmler replied that he was gratified by the ‘very decent attitude’ that emerged from the letter, and particularly by the woman’s willingness to ‘release [the Hauptsturmführer] immediately and without hesitation if he should ever be obliged to demand this in order to preserve the nation’. Then his tone became more personal:

I can put myself in your position very easily. I simply ask you, in view of the great love that binds you to this man, to be clear in your own mind even today that for you a time may come when fate, in accordance with the laws of nature, tears apart the threads it has woven round the two of you, or when you, showing kindness and understanding, will be forced to be very generous. Delightful as the idea is of including children not your own in your family, in the majority of cases, and in spite of all the love and care your husband may show towards them, they will not be able to replace the child of his own blood he might have fathered.
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The timing of this letter was probably no accident. Himmler, who of course was himself married to a woman considerably older than himself, knew the problems he describes from personal experience. At any rate, in 1942 he became the father of a child born out of wedlock.
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Yet what purpose was served by this minute examination of individual cases, the imposition of these conditions with their far-reaching consequences, if the process was, as we have seen, for the most part a farce and Himmler was unwilling to treat the whole matter so rigorously that it turned into a massive impediment to marriage for his men? On the one hand, the examples set out here indicate that Himmler quite clearly took a strongly voyeuristic interest in these procedures, as is evidenced in particular by his obsessive demand for details, and not least by his obvious curiosity with regard to female anatomy. Evidently he derived pleasure from intervening in other people’s most intimate concerns and controlling and organizing them in a confident manner—as he had done in his youth. One is reminded in this connection of the love-letters he wrote for a friend, or of the ‘Paula affair’ of 1923, when he tried to engineer the breaking-off of his brother’s engagement. Yet again, the manner in which he fulfilled his duties as Reichsführer-SS was closely linked to his personal inclinations: for on the other hand, the process for approving marriages gave Himmler a further opportunity to discipline and educate his men. In the clan order of the SS getting married was not a private matter—and, as we shall see, nor was being married.

When examining requests to marry, Himmler, for example, directed particular attention to any available divorce judgements. If his men had behaved in an ‘unchivalrous’ manner when the previous marriage was
dissolved, he was implacable. He disapproved of the fact that Obersturmführer C., who wished to remarry, had petitioned for divorce from his first wife, naming her as the sole guilty party, even though the marriage had clearly broken down. But that was not all: ‘I consider it unchivalrous and outrageous for an SS man to demand marital relations of his wife shortly before she is due to give birth.’ In addition, C.’s ‘appearance is peculiar from a racial point of view (I merely draw attention to the shape of the mouth)’. Himmler ruled that C. should be ‘dismissed from the Waffen-SS and the General SS after the war’, but for the time being—and that meant ‘immediately’—he was to be ‘transferred to a Waffen-SS anti-aircraft division at the front’.
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In the case of Oberscharführer H., a member of the Waffen-SS, Himmler immersed himself in two divorce judgements issued against H., from which it was clear ‘that he mistreated and abused his wife’. H. should ‘be in no doubt’, Himmler threatened, ‘that I shall intervene if he mistreats and abuses his third wife’. Such behaviour would not lead to divorce but rather to ‘years of disciplining and instruction’ by the Reichsführer, ‘to rid him of his violent temper and inculcate the self-control and kindness towards others required if people are to live in communities’.
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In autumn 1939 Himmler dismissed Günther Tamaschke, the commandant of the female concentration camp of Lichtenburg, for neglecting his wife.
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In November 1937 he declared to the Gruppenführer that ‘another thing’ he would ‘not tolerate’ was ‘when any leader—I noticed a Standartenführer or Oberführer recently who fell into that category—is henpecked. I have often made myself clear on this matter: leaders who are incapable of leading a unit of two, in this case himself and his wife, are incapable of greater things.’ Himmler called on the Gruppenführer to take such people in hand.
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Occasionally he did this personally. Brigadeführer Hermann Behrends was urged to ‘take the lead’ in his marriage,
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and Günther Pancke, his Higher SS and Police Leader in Denmark, had also to submit to a lecture on how his wife, who lived in Brunswick, was leading an overly extravagant life. ‘In addition, I would ask you to instruct your wife to the effect that she should not go round proclaiming her opinion loud and clear in all kinds of places about this or that political event in the Gau or about the Gauleiter. I also consider it unnecessary for you as a dutiful husband to come charging down from Denmark by car after every air raid on Brunswick, in order to report to her. You have no idea how much people are talking about this!’
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