Read Heinrich Himmler : A Life Online
Authors: Peter Longerich
In May 1938 VoMi tried to establish an organization to include all the ethnic Germans in Poland but failed as a result of the diversity of the various associations.
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After the Munich Agreement of November 1938 the Germans managed to gain official recognition for the ethnic Germans in Slovakia, established a German Party sympathetic to Nazism, and secured the appointment of the leader of the German ethnic group as a state secretary.
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Thus, up until the outbreak of war Himmler’s influence on ethnic activities remained indirect and informal. It sprang from the authority he exercised over the leading VoMi functionaries and their effective control over the ethnic German organizations. VoMi was not yet an integral part of the SS empire but only an extended arm of it.
The fact that Himmler was anxious to enlarge the activities of the SS to include ethnic matters was clearly linked to the leadership role which he envisaged the SS playing in the revival of the ‘Germanic race’ and the impending expansion of the Reich. If the German Reich was to be determined
in future by ethnicity and race, then it was necessary to secure the adhesion of ethnic German minorities to Nazi Germany. Himmler’s plan to surround the Reich with a ring of 100 million Germanic peasants is clearly relevant here. Furthermore, by involving the SS in ethnic policy it would be possible to extend the range of the concept of a comprehensive ‘state protection corps’, with the SS acting in diplomatic crises as the defender of ethnic Germans, for example through encouraging the formation of ethnic German ‘self-defence leagues’. Indeed, this actually occurred during the Sudeten crisis and in the Free City of Danzig during the preparations for war.
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Himmler’s good personal relations with Ribbentrop, to whom Hitler had given various special diplomatic assignments, and who since 1935 had had a ‘Bureau’ at his disposal for this purpose, provided the Reichsführer-SS with further opportunities for acquiring diplomatic influence.
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Himmler considered that it was his achievement to have drawn Ribbentrop into politics during the negotiations preceding the formation of the Hitler government at the turn of the year 1932–3.
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As early as May 1933 he had appointed Ribbentrop SS-Standartenführer, and he kept promoting him, for the last time on 20 April 1940 to Obergruppenführer.
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From 1937 onwards the Ribbentrop Office and the SD Main Office cooperated closely,
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and the Himmler and Ribbentrop families were good friends. For example, on 2 February 1938, two days before Ribbentrop’s appointment as Foreign Minister, the Ribbentrops stayed the night with the Himmlers,
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and, during a stay in a clinic in February 1939, Margarete Himmler noted with gratitude that her friend had telephoned.
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When, in June 1933, his former adjutant, Josias, Hereditary Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont, was appointed to the Foreign Ministry’s personnel department, for Himmler this represented the first step towards the SS’s infiltration of the diplomatic service. In June 1934 the Hereditary Prince left the service, but in the meantime he had ensured that of the ten attachés who had been appointed to the personnel department since he had joined five were members of the SS.
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After the Hereditary Prince’s dismissal the official in the NSDAP’s liaison staff responsible for foreign affairs, SS-Standartenfuhrer Herbert Scholz, was appointed to the Foreign Ministry. Scholz, who was soon transferred to the German embassy in Washington as an attaché, saw his role during his future career as being to act as a representative of the SS. In February 1939, after meeting him, Himmler asked Scholz to propose ‘suitable people in the diplomatic service based in
the United States’ for membership of the SS. In January 1940 he recommended two people in the embassy.
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Up until February 1938 there is evidence of 50 out of a total of 500 senior officials in the diplomatic service being members of the SS. Around half of these diplomats, who were very often attachés at German embassies, joined the SS between September 1936 and February 1938, evidently following increased efforts at recruitment by the SS.
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Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath was appointed an SS-Gruppenführer in September 1937.
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On 13 September the head of the Foreign Organization of the NSDAP and state secretary in the Foreign Ministry, Wilhelm Bohle, was admitted to the SS by Himmler at the party rally. Bohle recruited numerous functionaries of the Foreign Organization (i.e. Nazi sympathizers among ethnic Germans abroad) into the foreign service, most of whom were in the SS. After he left the Ministry in 1941 Bohle ensured that the Foreign Organization would continue to provide intelligence for the SD, and gave Himmler information concerning foreign service personnel.
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Thus, with the appointment of Himmler’s friend Ribbentrop to the post of Foreign Minister on 4 February 1938, initially it looked as if Himmler had secured a significant increase in influence over German foreign policy. Ribbentrop not only brought with him twenty members of his office, who were simultaneously members of the SS,
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but suggested that the new state secretary, Ernst von Weizsäcker, and Ernst Woermann, who had been appointed head of the political department, should also be admitted to the SS. On 30 April 1938 Himmler acceded to this request.
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In March 1938 he placed another intimate in the Foreign Ministry in the shape of Wilhelm Keppler, who was appointed a state secretary and the Foreign Ministry’s special representative for Austria. The two men had got to know each other at the beginning of 1933 when they were arranging the meeting between Hitler and Papen in Ribbentrop’s house, and since then Keppler and Himmler had used the intimate ‘du’ form of address with each other. Keppler, who had initiated the donor organization ‘The Friends of the Reichsführer-SS’, had also been a member of the SS since March 1933.
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In November 1939 Himmler strengthened the bonds between the two still further when, in his capacity as Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of the Ethnic German Nation, he gave Keppler the job of dealing with all matters concerning the property of the refugee Baltic Germans.
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Emil Schumburg, the head of the Foreign Ministry’s department dealing with Germany (Referat Deutschland) and a member of the SS since October
1936,
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increasingly took on the role of a ‘liaison officer’
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for Himmler. However, soon this close cooperation with the SS appears to have aroused Ribbentrop’s suspicion. According to a report by the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, Schumberg’s ‘frank, invariably helpful and positive cooperation with us’ had led ‘the new leadership of the FM’ ‘to marginalize Dr Schumburg’.
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It did not, in fact, come to that;
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however, as Müller’s reference to ‘the new leadership of the FM’ suggests, Ribbentrop’s appointment as Foreign Minister did not actually increase Himmler’s opportunity to influence foreign policy in any way. On the contrary, Ribbentrop, who always reacted very sensitively to anyone encroaching on his responsibilities, resisted Himmler’s attempts at infiltration and their personal relationship began to cool quite markedly.
Himmler, however, still retained the right to appoint police attachés to German embassies, who could then act as the extended arm of the Gestapo and SS abroad. Thus, he installed one of these special representatives in Spain. In May 1936, in other words, shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, criminal commissar Paul Winzer, a member of the SS since 1933, was assigned to the German embassy in Madrid at the express wish of the Chief of the German Police in order to investigate Spanish communism and anarchism. In November 1936, again at Himmler’s express wish, he became an official liaison officer to the Spanish political police and finally acted as a police attaché at the embassy.
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During the following years he expanded his office quite considerably; by the end he had twenty staff, of whom some were deployed in the Spanish protectorate of Morocco to act as the ears of the SD in North Africa.
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By the outbreak of war Himmler had appointed police attachés to the German embassies in Rome, Tokyo, and Belgrade.
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When, after the outbreak of war, Hitler ordered that all personnel employed at German diplomatic missions should be subordinate to the Reich Foreign Minister,
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Himmler worked out a deal with Ribbentrop to the effect that his representatives at the various missions were permitted to have their own separate line of communication to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA).
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In August 1940 the head of the SD Foreign Department, Heinz Johst, made an agreement with the desk officer in the Foreign Ministry responsible for liaising with the SS, Rudolf Likus, that the SD was permitted to run its own intelligence service, so long as reports with any diplomatic significance were sent to the Foreign Ministry’s department dealing with Germany. Moreover, the SD was entitled to act abroad on its own responsibility.
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Himmler also attempted to acquire influence over German foreign policy by utilizing links to foreign police forces. Fascist Italy was the most obvious partner. On 30 March 1936 a German–Italian police conference was held in Berlin. Led by Himmler, the German delegation consisted of Heydrich, Werner Best, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, as well as other representatives of the police and the Foreign Ministry. The Italian delegation included the police chief Arturo Bocchini and other high-ranking police officers. The main topic of the conference was cooperation in the fight against communism. In October a German delegation led by Himmler reciprocated with a visit to Rome, where Himmler was received by Mussolini.
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Further bilateral police conferences with communism as their target took place during the following months with Finland, Bulgaria, and probably with Hungary, and contacts along the same lines were established with Poland and Yugoslavia.
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Between 30 August and 3 September 1937 Himmler hosted an international police congress attended by representatives from Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia. According to a Foreign Ministry statement, he discussed with them how ‘the fight against Communism could be boosted’, and above all how ‘Germany could take the lead [. . .] in this vital campaign in which they were all involved’.
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Himmler considered the topic of the conference to be so sensitive that he ordered that no information about the conference should be released.
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The Italian delegation was once again led by Police Minister Bocchini, and he invited Himmler to make an official visit to Italy in October 1937.
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Himmler and Bocchini got on so well that after the end of his official visit the Italian police chief invited his German colleague to stay on for a private holiday in Italy lasting several weeks. Beforehand Himmler had to take part in the obligatory ceremonies in Munich to commemorate the 9 November putsch, but a few days later he and his wife departed on the only big foreign holiday the couple ever had. This was reason enough for Margarete to begin a diary, which she enthusiastically kept during the journey, though unfortunately only occasionally adding further entries.
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‘We arrived in Rome at midday on 14.11.37’, she noted. We learn that the couple had travelled in a saloon carriage and were received by Bocchini personally. During the days that followed they visited the sights: the Colosseum, Castel Gandolfo, the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Capitol and the Vatican, the Roman forum, where Himmler impressed his wife with his
‘knowledge of history’. And then Margarete noted a small victory: ‘Thanks to the kindness of the police we were able to go for a drive in the Vatican park in our car with the SS pennant.’
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On 17 November they went on to Naples. Unfortunately, Himmler had ‘a stomach upset’. Neverthless, the following day they visited Herculaneum and Pompeii, where—and that was naturally particularly interesting—‘mosaic floors with a swastika’ had been excavated. Margarete Himmler noted her impressions of the country and its people without any inhibitions. ‘In Italy they take cooking very seriously. Apparently there are no drunkards here; they are used to drinking wine.’ ‘One comes across children everywhere; what a blessed country it is.’
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On 19 November she continued her tour of Naples in the company of Eugen Dollmann. Dollmann, a historian who had been living in Italy since 1928, had come into contact with leading Nazis, including Himmler, through his acquaintanceship with the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach. He acted as Himmler’s interpreter during his trips to Italy. In fact Dollmann had a special place among Himmler’s representatives abroad. Attached to the German embassy, he was not answerable to the police liaison officer, Herbert Kappler. In future his reports would keep Himmler up to date with developments in Italy.
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In the meantime, Himmler had spent a very disagreeable day—according to Margarete, he had ‘driven up Vesuvius, where it rained and was very windy’. In the afternoon they went on to Cosenza in Calabria, a trip of 350 kilometres involving several breakdowns, arriving after midnight. On the following day the Himmlers visited the fortress that dated back to the Hohenstaufens and then went on to Taormina in Sicily. And here they began a fortnight’s holiday, reading, playing bridge, and bathing. Himmler played a lot of tennis. They also made trips, for example to Syracuse, where they visited the ‘catacombs with a Franciscan guide. He was a sly one who didn’t answer any of H’s questions.’ At the beginning of December they went on to Palermo, where Himmler, always on the lookout for ‘Germanic’ remains, bought some antiquities.