Heinrich Himmler : A Life (83 page)

If Himmler had simultaneously to defend his public support for illegitimate births and the mass murders in Poland, this was not by chance. In both cases, albeit in very different spheres, his ethnic policy had come up against what were still widely accepted ethical boundaries and he had determined to ignore them.

This was also true, as has already been indicated, of his private life. The Reichsführer-SS took his own ‘Procreation Order’ to heart and planned to have children outside his marriage. While he was not among those who risked their lives at the front, his self-image as a soldier made it appear to him as his duty to procreate during the war, even if in doing so he was forced to break with convention.

At the beginning of 1936 Hedwig Potthast had become Himmler’s private secretary,
¹²⁸
responsible, among other things, for the distribution of the Reichsführer’s gifts as well as for his role as godfather.
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She was 23 years old at the time and the daughter of a Cologne businessman. After training as a secretary qualified in foreign languages she had got a job in Koblenz, but in 1934 transferred to the Gestapa in Berlin. At some point Himmler and Hedwig Potthast became intimate. At Christmas 1938, as she told her sister three years later, they had confessed to each other that they were hopelessly in love. During the next two years they had thought carefully about whether there was any ‘decent’ way by which they could be together—Himmler did not want a divorce, out of consideration for his wife—until in the end they decided to have children within a sort of second marriage.
¹³⁰

Thus, Himmler probably decided to have children with Hedwig Potthast in 1940, the year in which he publicly supported illegitimate births. The letter also reveals that Himmler wanted to inform his wife of his extramarital relationship only after children had been born. On 15 February 1942 Hedwig’s and Himmler’s son, Helge, was born in Hohenlychen, the sanatorium headed by Himmler’s schoolfriend Gebhardt.
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According to Hedwig Potthast’s own statement, she gave up her job as Himmler’s secretary at the beginning of 1941. To begin with, Himmler sent her to live in Brückenthin in Mecklenburg, very near to a manor house, the home of Oswald Pohl and his second wife, Eleonore, who was a friend of
hers.
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In 1942 she moved to Berchtesgaden, where she gave birth to a second child by Himmler on 20 July 1944, who was given the name Nanette-Dorothea.
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Unfortunately, we know hardly anything about the relationship between Hedwig Potthast and Heinrich Himmler. In view of Himmler’s full diary the couple cannot have seen much of each other, and they cannot possibly have lived together. Presumably he did not reveal the secrets of his work, his plans, and projects to her any more than he did to his wife, Margarete. One cannot assume that because she had been his private secretary he let her in on official secrets.

Ill. 20.
After his relationship with his wife deteriorated Himmler tried to develop a close and loving relationship with his daughter Gudrun. He kept in close touch with Gudrun and during the war kept her regularly informed about his daily life. From time to time she was allowed to accompany him on official trips (here together with the chief of Himmler’s personal staff, Karl Wolff).

On the outbreak of war Margarete had looked for a task in which she could engage. As a trained nurse she began work in a Red Cross hospital,
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but soon experienced friction and problems with the doctors.
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At the beginning of December 1939 the Red Cross appointed her supervisor of its
hospitals in Military District III, Berlin–Brandenburg, which were mainly involved in treating transports of wounded soldiers;
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‘my train stations’, as she proudly called them.
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This responsible task also involved trips to the occupied territories, where, as usual, she commented on the land and its people. For example, in March 1940 she noted on a journey to Poland: ‘Then I was in Posen, Ł
ó
ódź, and Warsaw. This Jewish rabble, Polacks, most of them don’t look like human beings and the dirt is indescribable. It’s an incredible job trying to create order there.’
¹³⁸
‘These Polish types’, she wrote in the same month, ‘don’t die so easily from infectious diseases, are emune [
sic
]. Almost incomprehensible.’
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In April 1941, on a visit to inspect Red Cross establishments in Alsace, she proved how sharp her racial antennae were: ‘Very poor population. Sloping foreheads.’
¹⁴⁰

Margarete found out about Heinrich’s new liaison at the latest by February 1941. She felt humiliated and bitter.
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When an acquaintance divorced her husband because he had made another woman pregnant, she commented in her diary: ‘Men think of doing that only when they’re rich and successful. If not, their not-so-young wives have to feed them, help them, or stick it out with them. What times we live in!’
¹⁴²
However, Heinrich Himmler regularly visited Gmund, where Margarete was now living with their daughter Gudrun, in order to make sure everything was all right. His meetings with Margarate must have been tense. Margarete, at any rate, did not look forward to them: ‘Now Heini’s coming, there’ll be a lot of trouble. One can’t look forward to anything. I will and must put up with it all for the sake of my child.’
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He too was more concerned about his daughter during these visits. He telephoned Gudrun, whom he still called Püppi, every second or third day;
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both of them sent letters to each other more or less every week,
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and he sent her photos which documented his life in his headquarters or on trips and which he provided with appropriate captions.
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They had a close and loving relationship, and after 1945 Gudrun Himmler tried as hard as possible to keep these memories alive, refusing to distance herself from her father.
¹⁴⁷

The Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt
=
RSHA), established shortly after the outbreak of war, provided Himmler with a central organization with which to subject Germany and the occupied territories to a regime of repression and terror during the coming years. The initial impetus for the creation of the Reich Security Main Office came from Heydrich. From the beginning of 1939 Heydrich had been aiming to complete the unification of the security police and SD within a new organizational structure, and in particular to establish a distinct career path for its members and to transfer the whole organization onto the books of the Reich budget.
¹

In February 1939 Heydrich instructed his colleague Walter Schellenberg to produce a plan for a reorganization of the security police and the SD. Schellenberg followed the principle that the security police should become the state protection corps by ‘being absorbed into the SS’, ‘and not the other way round’.
²
This was a pointed reference to the views of Werner Best, the administrative chief of the Gestapo, whose aim was nothing less than to turn the leadership of the SD into civil servants.
³

At the core of this dispute was the question of who would have control over this organization designed for political repression and created through a merger between the security police and the SD—lawyers or ‘political fighters’—and during the following months this produced a major clash. In view of Himmler’s well-known hostility to lawyers Best’s position had little prospect of succeeding, and in 1940, partly as a consequence of this conflict, Best left Heydrich’s sphere of operations. However, Heydrich and Schellenberg failed in their attempt to create a structure that would preserve the autonomy of the SD and secure the leadership of the SD/SS vis-à-vis the security police, at least in the form in which they envisaged it.
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While this basic issue was being fought over, the headquarters of this unified organization of repression began to take shape. In July 1939 Heydrich announced the creation of a Reich Security Main Office, which he based on a plan drawn up by Schellenberg, who was also responsible for the title; and on 27 September 1939 Himmler officially established it by issuing an edict.
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The outbreak of war, however, prevented the realization of Heydrich’s and Schellenberg’s far-reaching ambitions. In the final analysis, what emerged was an organizational torso; lawyers and SD leaders were employed side by side and the SD continued to be financed by the Reich Treasurer of the NSDAP. Himmler, however, did not give up the idea of a ‘state protection corps’, and in 1941–2 attempted to realize his aim with the aid of a ‘Führer Edict concerning the SS and Police’, but without success.
⁶

The Reich Security Main Office was initially divided into six—from March 1941, seven—Offices or
Ämter
. Apart from the Administration Office that initially had one and then two departments, the Reich Security Main Office was composed of the Gestapo (Office IV), the criminal police (V), SD Home Affairs (III), the SD’s foreign intelligence service (VI), as well as the Office for Research into and the Combating of Opponents (to begin with Office II, then Office VII). There were major changes in March 1941, not only as a result of the division of the Administration Office but above all because of the transfer of responsibilities from Office II (VII) to other Offices.

During the first years of the war the five operational Offices of the RSHA were organized as follows: Office IV, the old Secret State Police Office (Gestapa), which continued to be under the direction of Heinrich Müller, contained five departments—A: political opponents; B: religious confessions, Jews, Freemasons, émigrés, pacifists; C: protective custody; D: occupied territories; and E: counter-intelligence.
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The reorganization of the RSHA in March 1941 had a major impact on Office IV. A new department for Churches and Jews was created. This was above all the result of the fact that the churches’ department in the Research Office (VII) had been disbanded and its work was now to be continued by the Gestapo. In the course of this reorganization Eichmann’s section ‘Emigration and Evacuation’ was now transferred from department IV D4 to the newly formed department IV B4 (Jewish affairs/evacuation affairs).
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Office V, under Arthur Nebe (which was identical with the Reich Criminal Police Office), initially consisted of six departments, which were
consolidated into four in March 1941: crime policy and prevention; operations; police records and tracing; and the Institute of Criminal Technology. The establishment of an Institute of Criminal Biology in December 1941 underlined the great importance that the Kripo continued to assign to prevention based on ‘the biology of heredity’. Finally, in 1943 an Institute of Criminal Medicine was established, based in Vienna.
⁹

Office III (SD Home Affairs), under Otto Ohlendorf, which essentially emerged from Central Department II1 (Assessment of the Various Spheres of National Life) of the SD Main Office, consisted of four departments responsible for issues of ethnicity, legal and constitutional matters, culture, and the economy. The SD Home Affairs Office produced the ‘Reports from the Reich’, the detailed monthly reports on the population’s ‘mood and bearing’, and had the task of watching out for developments in the individual ‘spheres of life’—such as culture, the economy or ‘ethnic matters’ (
Volkstum
)—that ran counter to Nazi aims and reporting them to the appropriate authorities.
¹⁰

Office VI (SD Foreign Affairs), the successor to Office III of the SD Main Office, was the largest Office in the RSHA, with a total of eight departments and thirty-eight sections,
¹¹
and was headed by Heinz Jost. Born in 1904, he was a lawyer by profession, had been a party member since 1927, and was a senior official in the SD.
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Nevertheless, the foreign department of the SD achieved only modest successes during the first two years of the war. It succeeded in building networks of agents in the important neutral countries, namely Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal, as well as in Italy, Germany’s ally, and it worked closely with the secret services of the south-east European countries. However, it failed to achieve significant espionage successes against Great Britain, the United States, or the Soviet Union.
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Office VII (Research into and the Combating of Opponents) was initially composed of the departments: Basic Research, Ideological Opponents, Domestic Issues, and Foreign Issues. In March 1941 the work of Office VII, whose head, Franz Alfred Six, was simultaneously pursuing his academic ambitions,
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was reduced to ‘scholarly’ research on opponents, while various sections involved in combating opponents using intelligence methods were transferred to the Gestapo. Others which were involved in the
active investigation
of opponents were assigned to the Home Affairs and Foreign Intelligence Offices.
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