Heinrich Himmler : A Life (68 page)

In 1936 Himmler prescribed four as being the ‘smallest number of children to be expected of a good and healthy marriage’.
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On occasion he spoke, in reference to Hitler, of four sons.
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Himmler personally attended to the creation of the right circumstances in which his men could use their leave to father children: wives of SS men were to be given the opportunity to holiday near the places where their husbands were deployed, in order to boost the birth rate, as he decreed in an order of October 1942.
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To one childless wife of an SS man Himmler provided the services of a healer.
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On the other hand, if the wife’s family tree revealed a ‘non-Aryan’, he demanded that already married SS men should have no more children.
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The results of Himmler’s efforts to produce more marriages and children among the SS were extremely meagre, in fact positively pitiful. According to the SS Statistical Yearbook for 1938, a mere 39.7 per cent of the SS were married. Taking into account that only some 2.5 per cent of the under-25s were married, this means that among older SS men only 57.3 per cent were married.
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The number of children per married SS man was a mere 1.1. Apart from this, only very few SS men had responded to Himmler’s call to bring children into the world outside wedlock: a total of 741 unmarried SS men had, according to the figures, produced in all 811 illegitimate children up to this point.
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For the war period there are no equivalent statistics, and yet Himmler’s constant lament about the lack of children produced by his men, and his attempts to encourage them to father a new generation, even if partly illegitimate, show clearly that the fertility of SS members had basically not altered at all. But SS members disappointed Himmler’s expectations with regard to marriage and children not only in terms of quantity but also of quality: the procedure for approving marriage requests broke down, as we have seen, because it was impracticable, while the Reichsführer’s notions of breeding never got off the ground. The ‘clan order’ was above all a construct of Himmler’s imagination.

Even in his private life he indulged this illusion of a ‘clan order’. Anyone, relative or friend, who was close to him was gradually integrated into the
‘order’. His parents may have observed the beginnings of his political career with a sceptical eye, but by the early 1930s at the latest they looked upon their son’s career with pride. His father collected newspaper cuttings, mostly from the
Völkischer Beobachter
, containing mentions of his son,
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and in 1932 he even worked his way through a copy of the second volume of
Mein Kampf
that Heinrich had given him. His final comment on it was that Hitler was a man who engaged his interest and whom he viewed with true admiration.
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In 1933 both parents became members of the NSDAP.
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Even in the years that saw Himmler advance to the position of chief of a terror apparatus surrounded by an aura of horror, no shadow seems to have fallen on the relationship. Although in the period that followed Himmler senior repeatedly approached his son in the name of petitioners who were frequently suffering from his persecution, the two also carried on an avid correspondence during these years about their family history.
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When Gebhard Himmler died in 1936 Heinrich organized a grand funeral, attended by an official SS delegation, which in many respects resembled a state funeral.
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Himmler’s younger brother Ernst, who had completed his university course in electrical engineering in 1928, got a job in 1933 with Heinrich’s help with the Berlin radio and at the same time joined the SS. He had already become a member of the NSDAP in 1931. In the Reich broadcasting organization Ernst quickly rose to become deputy technical director and then, in 1942, director.
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In 1937 Himmler approved a loan for his brother, who in the meantime had established a family, from an SS fund and thus enabled him to buy a house that had formally belong to a trades union.
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Ernst, in turn, supplied Heinrich on various occasions with internal information from the world of broadcasting and from other areas his professional activities gave him knowledge of, not scrupling even to make a denunciation.
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The oldest of the Himmler brothers, Gebhard, who since 1925 had been teaching at a college of further education, also advanced his career during the Third Reich. In 1933 he became leader of the Bavarian Further Education Association, and the same year joined the NSDAP. He insisted, however, on his membership dating from May 1932, the date when his wife joined, because as a civil servant he had at that point not been permitted to become a member. In June 1934 he joined the SS and in 1935 he became head of a college of engineering in Munich.
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In 1939 he entered the Reich Education Ministry as a desk officer and in 1944 became head of the department responsible for further education throughout the
Reich.
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Within the SS he rose to the rank of Standartenführer, though Ernst made it only as far as Sturmbannführer. In their careers it is clear that both brothers succeeded in getting to the top of their respective professions. Both took trouble to keep in close touch with Heinrich: in 1944 Ernst and Gebhard, as his ‘technical brothers’, offered to give Himmler the benefit of a comprehensive account of their views on the future development of military technology.
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The fact that Himmler arranged for his schoolfriends Falk Zipperer and Karl Gebhardt to work for him professionally, the one as a legal historian, the other as director of a clinic, has already been mentioned. He maintained his friendship also with Alois Rehrl, ten years his senior, on whose estate he had done his agricultural work placement in 1921–2. It goes without saying that Rehrl, like Zipperer and Gebhardt, joined the SS.
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It was probably at the end of the 1920s that Himmler met a man with whom he established a particularly close friendship: the völkisch writer Hanns Johst, already mentioned, who was a National Socialist and, as chair of the Reich Writers Chamber, a powerful Nazi state functionary in the field of literature.
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From 1934 onwards Johst addressed Himmler in letters as ‘my friend Heini Himmler’,
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and although he was ten years older, called Himmler his ‘big brother’.
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They paid each other frequent visits (Johst lived on Lake Starnberg, not far from Himmler’s home on Lake Tegern), played badminton, bathed, and fished in their leisure time, travelled together, and went on tours of inspection.
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In 1935 Himmler accepted Johst into the SS, giving him the relatively high rank of Oberführer; Johst was repeatedly promoted in the years following, finally becoming a Gruppenführer on 30 January 1942.
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The extensive correspondence between the two was marked on Johst’s side by an exuberant and at times emotive and high-flown style, in which he expressed his unbounded admiration for Himmler’s life’s work and his leadership style; indeed, he positively idolized him. After recovering from an appendectomy in 1940, he wrote to his friend that he was ‘happy to be an SS man and that on top of that life has given me our friendship, Heini Himmler, which makes this dubious existence of ours worth living’.
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In 1943 he praised Himmler’s rhetorical gifts in the most exalted terms: the Reichsführer was a ‘typically masculine speaker’. ‘What you say lives and works on the level of insight, [ . . . ] enriches us with your vision [ . . . ] even more: it makes us resemble you and transforms us from being mere listeners to being followers.’
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Johst gave Himmler poems and books with a personal
dedication,
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and published various contributions, for example to the
SS Guidance Booklets
and to
Das schwarze Korps
, in which he praised the SS and its leader in the most elevated poetic language.
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Himmler responded to Johst’s effusions in his more reserved manner, but he did repeatedly make efforts to show appropriate appreciation of the outpourings of emotion that he inspired. Himmler also revered Johst, as the writer possessed abilities he himself lacked. In March 1942 Himmler assured Johst how important their correspondence was to him: ‘You may be confident that your letters are always precious to me. They are like emissaries from a world I greatly love but which, because fate has chosen to put me where I am, remains closed to me for most of my time and most of my life. I am all the more delighted to receive regular salutations from the intellectual world of our blood, which you embody as one of Germany’s finest.’
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Though each wrote in his own typical manner, the friends exchanged what can almost be called love-letters.

Another, and very close, relationship of Himmler’s is noteworthy. From 1939 onwards the Reichsführer was a patient of the celebrity masseur Felix Kersten, a Baltic German who after the First World War had acquired Finnish nationality. Through intensive massages Kersten was capable of relieving Himmler’s physical pains, at least for a time. Under the hands of the masseur, who, two years older than Himmler and with a massive frame, exuded an atmosphere of calm, Himmler relaxed generally, and Kersten took advantage of the treatments to build up a relationship of trust with the Reichsführer.
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Whether Himmler really allowed him access to his more intimate thoughts, as Kersten asserted in his memoirs, or whether Kersten made up these conversations after the war must remain in doubt; at any rate, Kersten was to take on an important role, particularly in the final phase of the war, in setting up foreign contacts for Himmler.

It is evident that the more Himmler established his position as Reichsführer-SS and extended his power, the more the boundaries between his own family and personal life and his official function became blurred. While on the one hand he made his brothers, his closest friends, and even his favourite writer SS leaders, on the other he treated SS members in many respects like members of an extended family. Adopting the pose of a strict and solicitous father, he educated, commended, punished, admonished, and pardoned his men. The rigid notions he held, and prescribed for his men, about marriage partners, sexual morality, and family planning reflected strongly his experiences as an individual, including the shortcomings he saw in his own marriage. A certain
voyeuristic tendency was also involved in his interventions in the private lives of others.

His ideas on the virtues and values of the SS, which he was constantly relaying formulaically to his men, reflected his efforts to replace the emotional void he sensed in his relationships with others with a dense network of rules of conduct. And if he constantly admonished his men to be ‘decent’, it is not difficult to see behind this his own exertions to keep under control the emerging desire to be allowed for once not to be ‘decent’. His ambivalent attitude to this matter expressed itself in particular through his repeated and explicit bans on treating enemies ‘decently’.

Himmler had succeeded in establishing his personal predilections, foibles, phobias, and hostilities securely within the SS. He tried as hard as he could to develop an SS cult out of his passion for the Teutons, and in large measure he drew on the Ahnenerbe to bolster his quasi-religious speculations about God and the cosmos. Amalgamated with the police to form a state protection corps, his SS persecuted a range of ‘subhumans’ that, in his view, were setting about a final conflict with the ‘Aryan race’. These were made up of a collection of enemies, all of whom had some kind of close connection with his own life history: communists, Freemasons, politically engaged and morally censorious Christians, Jews, and homosexuals.

As a consequence, Himmler carried over his personal beliefs to an astonishing extent into the organization he headed; leading the SS was not for him simply a political office, it was part of who he was. The task he had set himself in life was to create a strong internal organization for the SS, to extend it and to guarantee its future through his Germanic utopia. By working tenaciously to fulfil the tasks Hitler had entrusted to him, and by linking them adroitly, Himmler built up a unique position of power, which he shaped in line with his own idiosyncratic ideas.

‘Sometimes’, Himmler remarked at a meeting of SS-Gruppenführer in February 1937,

National Socialists dream that one day we shall conquer the world. I’m all in favour of that, even if we’re not talking about it at the moment. But I’m convinced that we must do it in stages. At the moment we wouldn’t have the numbers to populate even another province, a zone, or a country half the size of Germany. It ought to be obvious that we can’t simply take over a population, that if we have to take over a province that is not ethnically German, then it will have to be cleared out down to the last grandmother and the last child and without mercy—I hope there’s no doubt about that. I hope there’s also no doubt about the fact that we shall then need a population and a population of high racial quality in order to be able to settle it there and breed from it, so that we can begin to surround Germany with a hundred million Germanic peasants. This will then enable us to set out once more on the path to world domination, which was our position in the past, and really to organize the earth according to basic Aryan principles so that it’s in better shape than it is now.
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Thus, the fantasy of this fine Aryan world, which Himmler was outlining here, was a long-term objective to be achieved ‘in stages’. The addition of the 100 million settlers required—Himmler had already mentioned the same number in a speech in 1931
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—had to be largely secured by an expansive population policy, an effort that would take several generations. In 1938 Himmler prepared the SS leadership for a ‘conflict’, a ‘fateful hour’ that would ‘confront Germany in the next 30, 50, 100 years and with which we ourselves might be faced’.
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