Heinrich Himmler : A Life (66 page)

Pancke was deeply distressed by what, in his view, were unjust reproaches and responded with a self-assured and angry letter: ‘From her youth my wife has been a National Socialist and at the age of 35 and as the mother of 4 children she has the maturity and experience of life not to need today to be instructed and directed by me.’
⁸⁰

Pancke’s anger was not surprising, for Himmler had on occasions expressed criticism of the behaviour of wives that in essence was aimed at the SS leaders themselves, who were, it was implied, incapable of instructing and directing their wives as he saw fit: ‘I disagree with several things about the way the wives of SS leaders appear in public,’ Himmler declared to the Gruppenführer in 1936, for example, ‘I am opposed to SS wives wearing make-up and going about with painted faces.’ Make-up, he claimed, was

merely the inferior tendency of those of lesser races [ . . . ]. And our foolish German women, precisely those of superior race, think they have to copy this stupid fashion. In my opinion, anyone who piles on make-up—and I’m never petty about this—anyone who gets herself up like a half-caste is completely forgetting that she is denying her own good blood. [ . . . ] I at any rate intend, if I encounter extreme examples in company, to speak to the women about it.

He was also ‘opposed to SS women smoking in public’. In Berlin, ‘this swamp and mass grave of our nation,’ he had in addition noticed that ‘the 16- and 17-year old daughters of party comrades, even sometimes of SS members, were already appearing prominently by invitation at large state festivities [ . . . ] If we do not wish to bring up a generation of good-for-nothings, I would like urgently to request that SS leaders, those in high positions in particular, bring up their children in a simple and austere fashion [ . . . ] The same goes for the sons.’
⁸¹

Himmler’s intervention in the married life of his men could take on drastic proportions. This was true in the case of Erwin Rösener, the Higher SS and Police Leader for the Alps: he approached Wolff in April 1942 with the request that he inform Himmler cautiously that Rösener’s second marriage had also broken down as the result of his being the prospective father of an illegitimate child. He was, he said, ashamed of appearing before the Reichsführer and saying to him, ‘Reichsführer, here I am for the second time, causing you this unhappiness’.
⁸²
After the divorce, and when Rösener had remarried, Himmler consistently exploited Rösener’s weakness and started to keep his marriage under regular surveillance. He admonished him to go
to Berlin at least every four weeks, ‘in order to maintain married life’, and made it abundantly plain that he would ‘not tolerate a third shipwreck’.
⁸³

Herbert Becker, a 56-year-old SS-Gruppenführer and police lieutenant-general, was called upon by Himmler in 1943 to respond to the question of whether his wife was involved in a lesbian relationship; private correspondence to which Himmler had access aroused this suspicion. In a three-page letter Becker challenged this accusation vigorously and assured Himmler that, as a result of a full and frank discussion with his wife, they had both decided not to abandon the marriage, as previously planned, but ‘to find a way back to a married life based on National Socialist principles’. Himmler was relieved. He wrote to Becker that he regretted having done his wife an injustice, and expressed the hope ‘that your marriage [ . . . ] may yet acquire true and lasting meaning and content through the birth of children’. He also immediately suggested a gynaecologist who might be helpful if there were complications.
⁸⁴

In 1936 and 1937 Himmler, with striking frequency, concerned himself with different aspects of sexuality, on which he made a variety of comments and statements. We have already seen that at the Gruppenführer meeting of February 1937 he had warned very insistently about the dangers of homosexuality that could result from any too pronounced ‘masculinization’ of the National Socialist movement. At that time, as a means of protecting the particular ‘at-risk’ group (16- and 17-year-old boys), he had recommended relaxed and innocent social contact with girls (dance lessons!), at the same time rejecting the notion that this would promote premature sexual relations among adolescents.

In the months that followed he appears to have given further intensive thought to these problems. What was to happen with these young people when they were a few years older? In June 1937 Himmler had the opportunity to present the fruits of his deliberations and researches to a particularly well-qualified panel, the Expert Advisory Panel on Population and Racial Policy. ‘We have attempted to use police resources,’ Himmler explained,

bringing in our own departments as well, in order to discover what is really happening. At what age do young German men and girls begin to be sexually
active? [ . . . ] We are almost all from middle-class backgrounds and want to look out into the world beyond our protected bourgeois upbringing. I am forced to say: it is completely different from what all of us have been told and from how we perhaps would like it to be. By the age of 22—I am using figures that are absolutely indisputable—the majority of men have been with a woman. Any officer, any soldier, can confirm this.

At this point Himmler permitted himself a small digression that makes clear how much he had abandoned his earlier self-stylization as a celibate—or rather, how concerned he still was to distance himself from this ideal he had held in his youth: ‘The fact still remains, however, that soldiers who have had, and are still having, a lot of experience with girls are often precisely the ones who are good soldiers. In the movement, during the time of struggle, we too found that the very prim and proper ones were not always the best fighters.’

This was not his main topic, however: ‘I merely want to state that sexual activity begins in the case of men—and the social context is of course an important factor here—between the ages of 18 and 21 and in the case of girls at 25.’ What was to be done? The ideal solution in Himmler’s view was certainly to marry early. He was, he admitted, in no doubt that most young men and women were not yet financially in a position to found a family, which was the reason why he had forbidden his own full-time SS men to marry early. Another, realistic solution had to be found: pre-marital sexual relations and illegitimate births had to become acceptable. (It goes without saying that the word ‘contraception’ does not occur anywhere in Himmler’s statements on this subject.)

He expounded the problem to the Expert Advisory Panel as follows: ‘I have come to the following conclusion: all the moral views we’ve had up till now that say, “All right, but not before marriage”, are not going to get us anywhere.’ As the SS’s highest authority for approving marriages, Himmler after all had relevant experience to draw on: ‘My SS men’s requests to marry land on my desk and every day I look at twenty because I want to keep in touch with what is being done in practice. [ . . . ] I have reserved the right to deal with any refusal of a marriage in the whole of the SS so that during the first decades, while a certain way of doing things is still getting established, the criteria set are not too stringent.’ Among the family trees in the applications there were few without some illegitimate children, he said, and so this matter should be ‘treated to some extent with Germanic generosity’. He summed up the conclusion he had drawn from all this as
follows: ‘I shall vigorously resist any legal or strong moral restriction on relationships between men and young women. In this I am certainly not alone, but am acting with the Führer’s approval, for I have had repeated conversations with him about this subject.’ And now he came full circle: ‘For anyone we restrict too severely will end up on the other side, in the homosexual camp.’
⁸⁵

Over a year before this, in April 1936, Himmler had made use of a stay in Gmund to put down on paper his thoughts about the problem of illegitimate births in relation to the SS.
⁸⁶
There is an evident difference between this memorandum, intended for internal purposes, and his remarks to the Expert Advisory Panel: in the case of the SS he wanted not only to accept illegitimate births but to promote them, as an integral part of a population strategy. Beyond that, the paper clarifies the extent to which, for reasons based on population policy, he condemned the hostile attitude of the churches to sexuality. For the SS was to assume the role of an avant-garde as far as population policy was concerned, by absolutely rejecting the church’s teaching on sexual morality. The time was not yet right, however, to go public with such ideas. He was to decide to take this step only after the beginning of the war.

‘Certainly not later than a hundred years from now,’ Himmler stated in the memorandum in question, ‘and perhaps much sooner, we shall be happy about every additional human being in Germany, and the time might come when we are heartily thankful for every battalion we can send to our eastern border to fight against Bolshevism.’ ‘Welcoming illegitimate children’, however, should never be allowed to ‘do damage to the institution of marriage’. He intended to set a requirement within the SS, he said, for ‘young men of 25 and at most 28 who have a paid position to marry, and once they are married, to have children’. It could not, however, be expected that young men and women should live ‘lives of sexual abstinence’ up to this point.

However commendably motivated, no allegedly moral laws instituted by Christianity provide a solution for this. They merely have one purpose for Christianity, namely, to make it indispensable as an institution with the power to forgive the sins of others. [ . . . ] In the SS I intend once and for all to part company with this dishonesty and in doing so I hope to set the whole of the German nation an example. My ideas are moving between the two poles of marriage on the one hand and the sure knowledge on the other that in most cases men and young women follow nature’s imperative.

By this means he was hoping, he continued, to obtain ‘200–300 children per year from every battalion of the Verfügungstruppe’. ‘I not only resolve to do all I can to raise our SS men’s illegitimate, in most cases highly talented, children of good race and make them soldiers and officers or, alternatively, superior wives for our nation, but I shall expend an equal amount of effort on giving the girls in question [ . . . ] an honoured place beside the married mothers.’ In the case of SS families who had the ‘misfortune’ not to be able to produce sufficient children of their own, it should become ‘an accepted custom to take in illegitimate or orphaned children of good blood and bring them up’. Indeed, they should receive ‘the number of children that should be the norm for an SS family’, namely ‘between four and six’.

Meanwhile, however, Himmler had also made a practical start towards ensuring ‘racially high-quality’ offspring from extramarital relationships: in September 1936 he announced in a circular to all SS leaders the founding of the Lebensborn association, which had in fact taken place in December 1935.
⁸⁷

By contrast with the formulation chosen for its statutes,
⁸⁸
supporting ‘racially and eugenically high-quality families with many children’ played only a subordinate role in the association’s activities.
⁸⁹
What it was actually doing above all was looking after single mothers, to whom Lebensborn, with its special maternity homes, offered the chance of giving birth far away from their normal environment and keeping it secret. If desired, the baby became the association’s ward.
⁹⁰
In addition to single mothers, the homes were also available to married women, in particular to wives of SS men.

In every case the basic precondition for acceptance into the homes was an examination of both the mother and the father by an SS doctor, using the same racial criteria that prospective wives of SS men had to satisfy. The SS doctors were committed to confidentiality beyond the normal medical demands ‘by a particular obligation imposed by the Reichsführer-SS’. In cases where ‘special circumstances’ applied, Himmler reserved the right to keep the birth and the father’s identity completely secret.
⁹¹

Though to the outside world the Lebensborn was an association, it was firmly integrated into the SS organization, reporting to the Race and Settlement Main Office. In 1937 its administration was part of the remit of the SS administrative head, Pohl. On 1 January 1938 the Lebensborn was taken out of the Race and Settlement Main Office and subordinated to the Personal Staff. The association’s council was reorganized, and Himmler put
himself at its head.
⁹²
The organization was financed by compulsory levies on SS members. Those who were childless had to pay the most, while anyone with four or more children, whether legitimate or illegitimate, no longer had to contribute.

The Lebensborn opened its first maternity home in August 1936 in Steinhöring in Upper Bavaria. Six more were opened up to the outbreak of war. Head of the medical team for the whole of the Lebensborn was Himmler’s former family doctor in Munich, Gregor Ebner, like him a member of the Apollo duelling fraternity and a friend on first-name terms with the Reichsführer.
⁹³
The existence of the Lebensborn homes gave rise to all sorts of rumours about their purpose. The Lübeck woman who sent in a request to the SS for information about the nearest SS ‘copulation home (
Begattungsheim
)’
⁹⁴
was not an isolated case, and to this day in fact the Lebensborn is associated with the notion of a ‘breeding institution’.

Himmler now also gave his attention to gaining support within the SS for extramarital procreation, naturally in a moderate form: he attempted to convey to his men that they did not have to marry the first person who came along: ‘The sort of girl you meet at dances and parties is not the sort you marry,’ he explained to the Gruppenführer in November 1936, two months after he had announced the founding of Lebensborn: