Heinrich Himmler: The SS, Gestapo, His Life and Career

VIII. Self-Betrayal

Himmler climbed the curved steps from the lower levels of Hitler’s bunker and passed through the passageways and corridors flanked by heavy bulkheads to protect the Führer during the final defence of Berlin. Outside these sealed cells the earth trembled with blast that was slowly disintegrating the remains of the city.

Schellenberg, anxious as ever, had been vainly trying to make contact with Himmler who, after leaving the Bunker, was confined in Berlin by the heavy air attacks which were felling more buildings around him. He did not reach Wustrow, where Schellenberg was waiting for him, until the middle of the night. After some persuasion, he agreed to drive to Hartzwalde, where they arrived between two and three o’clock on the morning of 21 April.

Kersten met him outside the house and urged him to be both friendly and magnanimous with Masur; this was his greatest chance to redeem the honour of Germany and show the world while there was still time that a new and humane policy had at last replaced the repressions and cruelties of the past. Kersten knew that an argument such as this would raise some response from Himmler’s professed humanitarianism. As they went in, Himmler assured Kersten that all he wanted now was some agreement with the Jews.

This was the first time since he had come to power that Himmler had met a Jew on equal terms. He greeted Masur formally and said how glad he was that he had come.¹ They sat down, and immediately Himmler began to make a long, defensive statement about the attitude of the regime to the Jews as aliens in Germany, and how the emigration policy he had devised, which, as he said, ‘could have been very advantageous to the Jews,’ had been sabotaged by the other nations who would not receive them.

Masur was an experienced negotiator and he had come to achieve a particular object. He remained very calm and interposed a few occasional remarks to refute the more extreme of Himmler’s arguments. Only when Himmler said that the concentration camps were really training centres where if the work was hard the treatment had always been just, did Masur lose some measure of his patience and refer to the crimes that had been committed in them.

‘I concede that these things have happened occasionally’, Himmler agreed mildly, ‘but I have also punished those responsible.’

He complained bitterly of the false atrocity propaganda that the Allies were making out of the conditions at Belsen and Buchenwald, which he had ‘handed over as agreed’. He said:

Masur urged that all the Jews left alive in Germany should be released at once, and that a stop should be put to the evacuations. But as soon as he was faced with hard facts and terms of agreement, Himmler began to hesitate and avoided committing himself. Masur had to retire with Schellenberg to another room to determine the details of what should be done; since they had met the previous day, Schellenberg knew what Masur wanted. It was easier to reach such agreements apart from Himmler; he only gave way when he was alone with Kersten, who made him promise to implement the agreement he had already made the previous month to release from Ravensbrück for evacuation to Sweden a thousand Jewish women under the cover of their being of Polish origin. Himmler was still openly afraid that Hitler might discover what he was doing.

To the end of the conversation, Himmler attempted to justify what had been done both in Germany and in the occupied countries. Crime had been reduced, he said; no one had gone hungry; everyone had work. Hitler alone had the resolution to resist the Communists; his defeat would bring chaos to Europe. Only then would the Americans discover the terrible thing that they had done. With the help of Schellenberg and Brandt, who was also present, Kersten achieved the best measure of agreement he could about the number of Jews to be released and the strict observation of what had already been accepted by Himmler in the past for the relief of the Jews still left in captivity. Worried and irresolute, Himmler stayed on the edge of the conversation, resorting to generalizations about the situation and the humane things he had done; he withdrew himself from any discussion of the arrangements that were being undertaken on his behalf by Schellenberg and Brandt. At about five o’clock in the morning the meeting broke up, and Kersten took Himmler outside for a more private conversation.

It was then that Himmler suddenly asked him, ‘Have you any access to General Eisenhower or the Western Allies?’

When Kersten said he had none, Himmler went on to ask if he would be willing to act as his ambassador to Eisenhower, and go to him with the suggestion that hostilities against Germany should be stopped so that war on a single front against Russia could be undertaken.

‘I am ready to concede victory to the Western Allies’, he said. ‘They have only to give me time to throw back the Russians. If they would let me have the equipment, I can still do it.’

Himmler could not give up the image of himself as the Supreme Commander in the German Army. Kersten said he should talk to Bernadotte about peace negotiations. That was more in his province. Then having reassured himself that the Dutch cities and the dam were still intact and that Himmler would do all he could to prevent further bloodshed in Scandinavia, Kersten finally let him go. By sheer persistence he had won from him everything he could, and Schellenberg was anxious now to take Himmler on to see Bernadotte at Hohenlychen; the Count was anxious to talk to him before leaving that morning for the north.

They went down to the car together; Himmler offered his hand to Kersten and thanked him for all he had done. It was as if he knew they would not meet again, and he spoke formally:

‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the years in which you have given me the benefit of your medical skill. My last thoughts are for my poor family’, he added, as he said goodbye and drove away with Schellenberg.³

They arrived at Hohenlychen at six o‘clock and had breakfast with Bernadotte, who had driven to the nursing home from Berlin the previous evening in order to meet Himmler.⁴ Bernadotte was in a hurry to leave and only anxious to get Himmler’s consent for the release of the Scandinavian prisoners who had been gathered by the Red Cross in Neuengamme. But Himmler would not give way; he said angrily that the ‘tissue of lies’ about Belsen and Buchenwald had made him think again about the whole situation, and he ordered the total evacuation of Neuengamme.

‘It is outrageous’, said Himmler to Bernadotte, ‘that this camp which in my opinion was in model shape should have become the subject of these shameless accounts. Nothing has upset me so much as what the Allied press has published about this business.’

Bernadotte noted how tired and nervous Himmler was. He looked ‘spent and weary’, and said he had not slept for several nights. ‘He gave the impression of being unable to remain long in one spot and of darting from place to place as an outlet for his anxiety and restlessness.’ Nevertheless, he ate hungrily and as he talked tapped his front teeth with his fingernails—a sign of nerves, as Schellenberg explained in an aside to Bernadotte. He agreed to the women being evacuated from Ravensbrück, and to the Red Cross moving the Scandinavians as far as Denmark, where they must remain under the control of the Gestapo. This was to begin the following day, arranged by the Danes at the request of Bernadotte.

Himmler, worn out, left it to Schellenberg to ask Bernadotte whether he would take a message to Eisenhower. Bernadotte refused. ‘He should have taken Germany’s affairs into his own hands after my first visit’, he said. Schellenberg, who had travelled with Bernadotte part of the way to the airport, returned to Hohenlychen ‘filled with a deep sadness’, and had scarcely gone to bed to make up his lost sleep when Himmler summoned him. The Reichsführer was lying in bed looking utterly miserable and saying he felt ill. But he decided to drive to Wustrow, the car weaving its way through the columns of troops and refugees that filled the roads. ‘I dread what is to come’, he said. Just before getting to Wustrow they were attacked by low-flying aircraft, but they escaped uninjured. They dined and then talked far into the night. Himmler dreamed of founding a new National Unity Party unencumbered by the presence of Hitler.

Sunday, 22 April was the day when Hitler, immured in his Bunker and marshalling imaginary troops on territory already lost, finally decided he would stay in Berlin. The Russians had now entered the outskirts of the city. Goebbels and his wife with their six children were all summoned to join him in his concrete grave. Like an angry god in a paroxysm of self-pity, Hitler stormed at the world that had failed him and the traitors at his gates. Let them scatter to the south; he would die in the capital, he and his faithful friends.

Himmler was not among them. He had hurried away from Wustrow, which was also threatened by the Russians. He had gone back to Hohenlychen, where he had heard from Fegelein by telephone of Hitler’s intransigent decision. Hitler, he was told, was raving that the S.S. had left him in the lurch.

Gottlieb Berger was with him, as well as Gebhardt. The message touched Himmler’s loyalty on the raw, and Schellenberg, who had now gone north to join Bernadotte, was not there to protect him with his subtle advice.

‘Everyone in Berlin is mad’, he cried. ‘I still have my escort battalion — 600 men, most of them wounded or convalescent. What am I to do?’

Berger, a simple man, said outright that the Reichsführer should go with his remaining forces to Berlin and join the Führer. Himmler knew that Schellenberg would oppose this. He telephoned the Bunker again and, after discussion, compromised by agreeing to meet Fegelein at Nauen, a half-way point to Berlin, where the matter could be discussed more fully. This was action of a sort. Had he not said at lunch to Schellenberg before he had gone, ‘I must act one way or the other. What do you suggest?’

Himmler and Gebhardt in two separate cars; Gebhardt wanted to go to Berlin to be confirmed personally by Hitler in a new appointment of some value in the approaching times, that of head of the German Red Cross. For Himmler, Berlin was a place to be avoided, though he still wanted to court the affections of Hitler by offering to send him his escort to die as martyrs among the rubble. But Fegelein failed to meet him at Nauen; he never arrived. The two cars waited at the cross-roads in the darkness of the Sunday night for two hours, while Himmler nursed his uncertainties. Eventually they agreed that Gebhardt should continue the journey to see Hitler in Berlin, taking with him a message from Himmler, who would meanwhile return to the shelter of the nursing-home. So loyalty was satisfied. Gebhardt was received by Hitler late that night and confirmed in his appointment, while Hitler accepted Himmler’s generous offer of the blood of his men. It was very simple. Gebhardt asked if there were any message he might take from the Führer to Himmler. ‘Yes,’ said Hitler, ‘give him my love.’

He was followed by Berger, who was about to fly south to keep watch for Himmler on the behaviour of Kaltenbrunner. Berger’s simple loyalty was expressed so tactlessly that he had to witness another paroxysm of the Führer’s rage — the shouting, the face flushed purple, the trembling limbs, the semi-paralysis of the left side of his body. It was an experience he was not to forget as he flew south along with many others, officials, staff officers, members of the household and secretariat, all hurrying from Berlin with the sound of the Russian guns in their ears. Everyone who possibly could was getting out of the capital through the narrowing territory which still offered an escape-route to the south.

Himmler retired to the comparative safety of Hohenlychen, and turned his mind once more from the Führer to Bernadotte. According to Schellenberg, Himmler had sent him north with a definite message of surrender to the Western Powers offered in his own name. Schellenberg eventually met Bernadotte at Flensburg the following day, 23 April, the day on which Goebbels announced on the radio that Hitler would lead the defence of Berlin and Goring in Obersalzberg was pondering over the best form of words for the message he was to send Hitler, offering to take over the total leadership of the Reich.

It was arranged that Bernadotte and Himmler should meet that night in Lübeck. The conference began by candlelight in the Swedish consulate; the electricity supply had failed, and an air-raid delayed the discussions. They went down to the public air-raid shelter, where Himmler, Minister of the Interior and commander of the Gestapo and the S.S., talked unrecognized to the small group of Germans who came in from the street for protection against the attack. Bernadotte watched him. ‘He struck me as being utterly exhausted and at a nervous extremity’, he wrote subsequently. ‘He looked as if he were mustering all his will power to preserve outward calm.’

When they went upstairs sometime after midnight, Himmler gave his view of the situation. Hitler might already be dead; the capital in any case could not last much longer, and it was only a matter of days before Hitler would be gone. ‘I admit that Germany is defeated’, declared Himmler. Bernadotte has left a record of the next part of their conversation:

At the end of their discussions, Bernadotte asked Himmler what he would do if his proposals were rejected.

‘In that event’, he replied. ‘I shall take over the command of the Eastern Front and be killed in battle.’

Himmler set down his proposals in a letter for which Bernadotte had asked so that he might have them in writing to hand to Günther, the Swedish Minister. The letter was carefully drafted by candlelight. This day, said Himmler as he handed the letter to Bernadotte, was the most bitter in his life. Schellenberg and Bernadotte then prepared to return to Flensburg, leaving Himmler to ponder (as Schellenberg told Bernadotte later) whether he should shake hands or not with the Allied Supreme Commander, or merely offer him a formal bow.⁵

In the Bunker, Hitler had received Goring’s carefully worded signal as a brutal affront. He called him a traitor and dispossessed him of his rank and offices, ordering his arrest by the S.S. in the south. This sudden defection by Goring, as Hitler was led to see it by Bormann, who was still anxious to destroy his rivals even during these last moments of the regime, left wide open the problem of a successor. Though he knew nothing of this, Himmler regarded himself by now as the only possible claimant. ⁶ Hitler is recorded as saying in March that Himmler was not on sufficiently good terms with the Party to succeed him, and ‘was anyway useless, since he is so inartistic’, a view that echoes the opinion of Goebbels. Himmler, however, was already dreaming of the shadow government with which he might continue as head of state under the Western Allies, and most of the remaining Nazi ministers and war leaders, including Doenitz, Speer and Schwerin von Krosigk, feared that Himmler would usurp the succession.

The next three days, 24 to 26 April, were days of waiting. Fearing that he might be cut off by the Russians at Hohenlychen, Himmler moved to Schwerin, where Doenitz had set up his headquarters for the defence of the north. Each day the front closing round Berlin moved forward on the map like ink seeping through blotting paper, but Hitler stayed on in the Bunker directing forces which were no longer capable of either attack or resistance.

On 27 April, Schellenberg received a message that sent him hurrying to meet Bernadotte at Odense airport in Jutland, where he arrived late because of the bad weather; he had gathered in any case that Himmler’s proposals had not been well received in Britain and America, but had decided not to pass this on in case Himmler might relapse once again into faint-heartedness. Bernadotte offered to drive with him to Lübeck to see the Reichsführer. As soon as Himmler heard that his offer had not been eagerly received, he ordered Schellenberg to report to him. With all his subtle plans in a state of collapse, Schellenberg drove south in fear of his life. He took the strange precaution of telephoning Hamburg and arranging to take the astrologer Wilhelm Wulff with him to this dangerous interview. It always calmed Himmler to have his horoscope read.

But it needed more than an astrologer to know what the fates were preparing for Himmler on the other side of the world. The story of the leak to the international press of Himmler’s discussions with Count Bernadotte has only recently been told in a detailed statement by Jack Winocaur, at that time director of the British Information Services in Washington.⁷ Winocaur was on the staff attending the three-month session of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, starting in April 1945 at San Francisco. The British delegation included Anthony Eden, the then Foreign Secretary, who at a private delegation meeting on 27 April is reported by Winocaur to have said quite casually: ‘By the way … we’ve heard from Stockholm that Himmler has made an offer through Bernadotte to surrender Germany unconditionally to the Americans and ourselves. Of course, we are letting the Russians know about it.’ The British and American Ministers in Washington had reported the offer during the early hours of 25 April to Churchill and Truman, both of whom regarded it as an attempt by Germany to split the Allies, and they arranged at once for Stalin to be informed. A reply was sent that surrender could only be acceptable if it were offered to all the Allies simultaneously.

Winocaur, who was one of the men in charge of British press relations at the conference, knew nothing of this background at the time, but felt that Eden’s momentous statement to the delegates should be passed on to the press. After some hesitation, entirely on his own initiative, he gave the news overnight to his friend Paul Scott Rankine of Reuters on the strict understanding that the source should not be revealed. Rankine sent a press cable to London breaking the news in an exclusive statement soon after one o’clock in the morning of 28 April.

While Schellenberg was during the morning of 28 April successfully calming Himmler with the aid of his favourite astrologer, the Allied press was pouring out the news of the Reichsführer’s independent attempt at negotiations. Completely unaware of this, Himmler attended a military conference in Rheinsberg convened by Keitel. At this meeting Himmler presided, which showed that he regarded himself as Hitler’s deputy and successor.

In the late afternoon Bernadotte heard the news of the negotiations on the clandestine radio, and realized that Himmler was finished as a negotiator. Doenitz also heard the report and telephoned enquiries to Himmler, who immediately denied the story as it had been put in the broadcast, but added that he had no intention of issuing any public statement himself. According to Schellenberg, he then spent part of the day deciding how best to order the evacuation of German troops from Norway and Denmark.

It was not until nine o‘clock that night that a monitor report on a broadcast put out by the B.B.C. gave Himmler away to the Führer in the bowels of the Bunker. According to one observer, Hitler’s ‘colour rose to a heated red, and his face became virtually unrecognizable’.⁸ Then he began to rage at this treacherous betrayal by the man he had trusted most of all. The men and women hemmed in the Bunker were convulsed with emotion, and ‘everyone looked to his poison’. Himmler’s arrest was ordered; he followed Goring into the limbo of the dispossessed. ‘A traitor must never succeed as Führer’, screamed Hitler.⁹ He took his revenge on the only associate of Himmler he had in his power. This was Fegelein, the brother-in-law of the woman he was about to marry and Himmler’s unfaithful subordinate at Hitler’s headquarters. He had tried to desert, but he was dragged back, taken upstairs into the Chancellery garden and shot around midnight on the barest suspicion that he had known something of Himmler’s treachery.

Hitler ordered Göring’s successor as head of the Luftwaffe, Field-Marshal von Greim, to leave the Bunker and fly during the night under Russian fire to Doenitz’s headquarters, which were now at Ploen. Greim, who had been wounded in the foot during his hazardous flight into Berlin in a light aircraft, flew north in the same ’plane piloted by Hanna Reitsch, who was a dedicated Nazi. They took off from the avenue leading up to the Brandenburg Gate. This strange pair did not arrive at Ploen, which was on the Baltic coast some 200 miles north-west of Berlin, until the afternoon of 29 April, having landed in the early hours of the morning at Rechlin.

At Ploen they found an uneasy balance of power in force between Doenitz, Commander-in-Chief of the northern armies, and Himmler, Commander of the S.S. and the police. According to Schwerin von Krosigk, Doenitz and Himmler had talked the matter over and agreed that each of them was ready to serve under the Führer’s acknowledged successor. Doenitz imagined this must be Himmler, and so, for that matter, did the Reichsführer himself.

During 29 April no official statement reached Doenitz that Himmler had been dispossessed of his rank and power by Hitler, although an ambiguous signal arrived from Bormann at 3.15 on the morning of 30 April: Doenitz was to ‘proceed at once and mercilessly against all traitors’. Only Greim had received a definite instruction to arrest Himmler, an order which he was powerless to carry out unaided by Doenitz, who was still certain Himmler would at any moment become his Führer. There is no record of when Greim met Doenitz or what exactly he said to him. Neither of them knew that Hitler’s testament was already composed and signed, or that Doenitz was to be appointed Führer with Karl Hanke, Gauleiter of Breslau, as Reichsführer S.S. and Paul Giesler, Gauleiter of Munich, as Minister of the Interior.

The isolation of Hitler in Berlin was now complete. His final craving for vengeance against Goring and Himmler, the men who had served him in their own way for the best part of two decades, was frustrated by the confusion that surrounded the last days of his life. While Goring was kept in nominal confinement in the south by an embarrassed unit of S.S. men, Himmler remained free in the north, a political buccaneer who did not even know until after Hitler’s death that his authority had been swept from beneath his feet. With his remaining staff, his escort of S.S. men, and his fleet of cars, he moved in uneasy orbit round the Grand Admiral’s headquarters at Ploen with no particular duties to occupy his time except the maintenance of his position and the salvage of his power.¹⁰ It was not until late in the afternoon of 30 April that Doenitz learned in a signal sent by Bormann from the Bunker in Berlin of his unwanted elevation to Führer of a Germany on the verge of disintegration. Bormann’s signal was worded evasively and did not even reveal that Hitler had died by his own hand at 3.30 that afternoon: Doenitz merely knew that he, and not Himmler, had been nominated Hitler’s successor: ‘In place of the former Reich Marshal Goring the Führer appoints you, Herr Grand Admiral, as his successor. Written authority is on its way. You will immediately take all such measures as the situation requires.’

Doenitz, surprised and alarmed, sent a loyal message back to the Leader he did not know was dead. ‘If Fate… compels me to rule the Reich as your appointed successor, I shall continue this war to an end worthy of the unique, heroic struggle of the German people’, he said in the stifled language of loyalty. One of the three copies of Hitler’s testament, signed at four o’clock in the morning of the previous day and witnessed by both Goebbels, the new Reich Chancellor, and Bormann, was already on its way. A special messenger had left the Bunker at noon on 29 April, but was, in fact, never to reach Doenitz at Ploen.

Meanwhile, Bormann and Goebbels, without any reference to their new Führer, were trying during the night of 30 April to make favourable terms with the Russian commanders. Bormann sent another evasive signal to Doenitz saying he would try to join him at Ploen and adding that ‘the testament is in force’. It was Goebbels who finally sent Doenitz an explicit signal at 3.15 in the afternoon of 1 May, telling him of Hitler’s death twenty-four hours after it had happened. He named the principal ministers in the new government, but made no mention of Himmler, or of the fact that he and his wife were preparing to die that night after killing their sleeping children.

Himmler no longer found himself welcome at Ploen. His exclusion from any form of office was a severe shock to him, and Doenitz did not hide his disapproval of Himmler’s attempts to negotiate with the Allies. Schellenberg travelled through the night of 30 April along the roads blocked with army transport and refugees only to find Himmler at his new headquarters at the castle of Kalkhorst, near Travemunde. He had just gone to bed. It was then four o‘clock in the morning of 1 May. He learned from Brandt what had happened and of Himmler’s despair after a late-night conference with Doenitz, during which he had proposed himself as second Minister of State.¹¹ Doenitz had evaded this offer, though he was still afraid Himmler might use his police escort to regain his lost power. Himmler, says Schellenberg, was ‘playing with the idea of resigning, and even talking of suicide’.

At breakfast the following morning he was ‘nervous and distracted’, and in the afternoon they went together to Ploen. Schellenberg by now was solely concerned to please Bernadotte. He planned to use Himmler’s remaining influence to secure from Doenitz a peaceful solution to the German occupation of the Scandinavian countries. By this means he felt he would earn the gratitude of the Allies and secure his own future when he took refuge in Sweden. Himmler, anxious to be present at the conferences called by Doenitz, was prepared to support the peaceful withdrawal of German forces from Norway. He also admitted to Doenitz that he had in fact been attempting to secure peace through Sweden. This finally discredited him in the eyes of the Grand Admiral.¹²

May Day saw the beginning of the surrender of Germany. Mohnke, the commander of Himmler’s S.S. regiment which he had sent to cordon Berlin, was captured by the Russians while attempting to escape from the Bunker; at ten o’clock that night a broadcast from Berlin proclaimed officially that Hitler was dead. Kesselring surrendered in north Italy and, on 2 May Doenitz began the first stages of his own surrender to Montgomery without any further consultation with Himmler. Kaufmann, the Gauleiter of Hamburg, in spite of the order he had received, opened up the city to the British forces.

Meanwhile Himmler maintained the façade of power, and it was still formidable. Accompanied by his escort of S.S. men, he moved around in his Mercedes like some medieval warlord. While he was preparing to follow Doenitz on 1 May to Flensburg, on the borders of Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark, he received an unexpected offer from Léon Degrelle, the renegade commander of the Belgian and French fascists enrolled in the Waffen S.S., who had retreated from the Russian front with what was left of his men.¹³

Degrelle was determined to make a bold finish to his fighting career in the eyes of Himmler, who no longer wanted to see him, though he was quite prepared to add his men to the diminishing forces at his command. He sent word to Degrelle to join him at Malente, near Kiel, and on the way the Belgian commander in his Volkswagen powered by potato schnapps caught up with the Reichsführer S.S. driving at the head of his column of Mercedes and lorries. Himmler, wearing a crash-helmet, was driving his own car, and they broke the journey at Malente. By now Degrelle had little to offer his leader; the Belgian S.S. units had scattered to Denmark. Himmler’s sole concern was to keep up with Doenitz, and Degrelle followed the fleet of cars and lorries on the journey north to Flensburg.

As they were approaching Kiel, a daylight raid began. Himmler kept calm and shouted, ‘Discipline, gentlemen, discipline’, as his staff, both men and women, dived for safety in the mud, in which the girls had the shoes sucked from their feet. Degrelle left the scene as the officers and their aides struggled back with their vehicles after the raiding planes had gone. He went directly north through Kiel while Himmler’s convoy retreated in search of some less hazardous route to Flensburg.

That night Himmler was joined on his journey by Werner Best from Denmark.¹⁴ They sat together in the Mercedes which Himmler still drove, and they spent the tedious hours of travel in talk. They were frequently held up by air-raids and did not reach Flensburg until early in the morning of 3 May.

Himmler, as always, was careful what he said. Hitler had not been quite himself, he admitted, during the past six months, and Bormann had increased his hold over him. He had issued Himmler with impossible commands on the Russian front and had refused even to discuss the idea of peace. On the other hand, Himmler said he was certain that if he had been allowed to have only half-anhour’s conference with Eisenhower he could have convinced him of the necessity of joining forces with the Germans to drive back the Russian invaders. Before they parted in the morning, Best said he was going back across the Danish border before his appointment with Doenitz later that day.

‘But what are you going to do yourself, Reichsführer?’ asked Best.

‘I don’t yet know’, was all Himmler could find to say, but he asked Best to take the S.S. women staff with him over the nearby border into Denmark, where they would be able to wash and get themselves food before returning to their duties.

Himmler’s indecision was shown even more in a conversation he had with Schwerin-Krosigk, who had become Foreign Minister in the place of Ribbentrop and therefore retired to Flensburg.¹⁵ He discovered Himmler in a mood of despair, an unwanted adviser at the headquarters of the new Führer.

‘Graf Schwerin, what ever is to become of me?’ he asked.

Schwerin-Krosigk did not know what was to become of anyone; Germany scarcely had need of a Foreign Minister. It seemed to him that to help organize the evacuation of Germans from the east was the only practical thing they could do for the moment. But he tried to give a serious answer to Himmler’s question.

‘As I see it, there are three courses open to you’, he said. ‘The first is to shave off your moustache, disguise yourself in a wig and dark glasses, and try to disappear altogether. I expect, even so, you would soon be discovered, and your end would scarcely be glorious. The second course is to shoot yourself, though as a Christian I can’t advise you to do this; you would have to decide such a thing for yourself. What I really recommend is the third course: drive straight to Montgomery’s headquarters and say, ‘I am Heinrich Himmler, I want to take full responsibility for everything the S.S. has done.” As to what will happen then, who can say? But if it proves the end for you, it will at least be the most honourable way out.’

Himmler decided to act as a kind of elder statesman in Doenitz’s cabinet at Ploen for as long as he could. He was plainly unable to accept the fact that he no longer held the offices to which he had been formerly attached. His immediate retinue still amounted to some 150 staff officers and assistants. But neither Doenitz nor Himmler knew the full terms of Himmler’s rejection by Hitler. The messenger from the Bunker had failed in his mission of bringing the Führer’s testament to his successor, and Bormann, as everyone then believed, had been killed while trying to escape from the Bunker on the night of 30 April. Had they been able to read the carefully typed terms of Hitler’s denunciation they would at least have known what the Führer had felt about his former Minister: ‘Goering and Himmler, by their secret negotiations with the enemy, without my knowledge or approval, and by their illegal attempts to seize power in the State, quite apart from their treachery to my person, have brought irreparable shame on the country and the whole people.’ All they knew in fact was what Greim, the wounded leader of the Luftwaffe, and his devoted pilot, Hanna Reitsch, may have told them of Hitler’s paroxysms of anger, and what Goebbels’s signal indicated about the distribution of the principal offices of state, which neither Bormann nor Goebbels had arrived to take up. Doenitz, concerned only to rid himself of the past and surrender in a manner becoming an Admiral of the Fleet, was most unwilling to have a man of Himmler’s reputation serving in any cabinet of his own making. Yet he dared not in the circumstances entirely disregard him, so he put up with his presence at the council table without confirming him in any office.

When on 4 May Montgomery’s terms for unconditional surrender were discussed, Himmler’s views were aired along with those of Doenitz’s other advisers. He felt that the troops in Norway should be surrendered to Sweden to save them from captivity in Russia, and that some concessions might be gained if an offer were made to surrender peaceably the many places outside Germany still held by German troops. Schellenberg, resolutely travelling between Sweden, Denmark and Germany in his efforts to obtain agreement to a peaceful resolution of the German occupation of the Scandinavian countries, turned not to Himmler but to Doenitz and Schwerin-Krosigk when he at length arrived at five o’clock that afternoon after a fearful journey from Copenhagen. The following day, 5 May, he left again for Denmark, saying goodbye to Himmler, in whom he was by now no longer interested.

On 5 May Himmler gathered his own leaders and advisers around him, including S.S. Obergruppenführer Ohlendorff of the Security Office, S.S. Obergruppenführer von Weyrsch of the Secret Police and S.S. Obergruppenführer von Herff, a general of the Waffen S.S.; Brandt was also there, as was Gebhardt, who had left his patients at Hohenlychen in the care of the Russians. To them and their colleagues he solemnly recited policies so utterly out of keeping with the situation they can scarcely be credited; only a prolonged blindness to reality through shock can account for them. He, for one, was not going to give up and commit suicide. He would, he said, establish his own S.S. government in Schleswig-Holstein in order to conduct independent peace negotiations with the Western Powers. He then began to distribute new titles to his followers as his partners in founding an entirely new Nazi regime.

Himmler’s rejection by Hitler, however, was followed on 6 May by his rejection at the hands of Doenitz, who personally gave Himmler his formal dismissal in writing:

Along with Himmler, Doenitz dismissed Goebbels, who was dead, and other Nazi ministers who still remained like ghosts from an horrific and evil past.¹⁶ He also forbade the continuation of resistance by diehard Nazis of the S.S.

But Himmler would not leave. After 6 May he haunted Flensburg along with his staff, his guards and his equipment, a monstrous survivor without a domain. He told Schwerin-Krosigk he would carefully consider his advice, but he still had obstinate dreams of maintaining his individual power. He went to the Nazi Commander of the German forces in Schleswig and Denmark, Field-Marshal Ernst Busch, in the vain hope of finding in him an ally. But Busch only wanted to get the arrangements for his own surrender concluded. So Himmler returned to the headquarters he had set up in Flensburg from which, one by one, his retinue were melting away.

On 8 May he reduced his fleet of cars to four and made a first gesture of self-abrogation by shaving off his moustache. He wondered where he could go in order to escape unwelcome attention. While Ohlendorff advised him to surrender and answer the world’s outcry against himself and the S.S., he considered, naturally without reaching any firm decision, whether he should take refuge with his friend the Prince of Waldeck, an autocratic general who had charge of the S.S. establishment on his estate at Arolsen.¹⁷

At length, on 10 May, Himmler and his remaining entourage left Flensburg and set out for Marne at the Dicksander Koog on the east coast of Schleswig-Holstein.¹⁸ It took them two days to get there, and they slept either out in the open or inside railway stations during the remaining days of their flight to the south. Himmler could think of only two things, how he could have saved his position and bargained with the Western Allies, and what was happening now to his two families in the south.

Eventually four cars reached the mouth of the Elbe, and it proved impossible to take them further; the distance across the water was about five miles. Reluctantly the little group of S.S. refugees, no better off now than hundreds of thousands of Germans wandering homeless on the roads, abandoned their vehicles and crossed the Elbe; they were ferried over the estuary unrecognized in a fishing boat with other refugees for the price of 500 Marks. There was nothing for them to do now but walk, passing the nights in peasant farmsteads and covering a few miles each day on foot. During the next five days they tramped slowly south through Neuhaus to Bremervorde, which they reached on the morning of 21 May. They had travelled in all little more than a hundred miles from Flensburg.

They were a strange contingent. In addition to Kiermaier, the group still included Brandt, Ohlendorf, Karl Gebhardt, Waffen S.S. Colonel Werner Grothmann and Major Macher. They had removed the insignia from their uniforms and pretended to be members of the Secret Field Police, a branch of the Gestapo, making their way to Bavaria. Himmler wore a patch over his eye like a pirate and carried a pass that had once belonged to Heinrich Hitzinger, a man whose identity papers Himmler had kept by him after he had been condemned to death by the Peoples’ Court in case they might prove useful.

At Bremervörde they realized they needed travel documents to pass through the check-point set up by the British Military Authority. Kiermaier confirmed this with the local District Councillor. They then decided that Kiermaier should apply to the British for these travel permits while another member of their party stood outside to watch the result and warn Himmler if Kiermaier were arrested. Since the Secret Field Police were in any case on the British Army’s black list, Kiermaier was kept in custody. When he did not reappear, Himmler and his companions slipped away.

Captain Tom Selvester was in command of 031 Civilian Interrogation Camp, which was based near Lüneburg.¹⁹ Since large numbers of German troops were trying to make their way home, they were constantly being stopped at check-points set up by the British and held as prisoners-of-war while their documents were examined. If there was any doubt about their identities, they were sent on for further questioning to an Interrogation Camp of the kind Captain Selvester controlled. Here they were paraded outside the Commandant’s office, and then sent in singly to account for themselves. After this they were searched, and their possessions carefully listed.

It was at two o’clock in the afternoon of 23 May that a convoy arrived at the 031 Interrogation Camp with a party of suspects who had been arrested earlier on at a check-point on a bridge near Bremervörde. After a while the men were paraded as usual, but around four o’clock Captain Selvester was told there were three men in the party who were giving some trouble and were insisting on seeing the officer in charge without delay. Since the prisoners were usually very docile and only too anxious to create a good impression, Captain Selvester’s curiosity was immediately aroused, and he ordered these three men to be sent to him one by one. Captain Selvester has described what followed:

Captain Selvester immediately placed his office under armed guard, and sent for an officer from the Intelligence Corps to help him. After he had arrived, the two officers asked Himmler to sign his name in order to compare it with a signature they had in their records. Himmler, thinking he was being asked to present them with a souvenir, appeared very reluctant to write his name, but eventually he agreed to do so provided the paper was destroyed immediately after it had been examined.

The next stage was to search the prisoner; in Captain Selvester’s own words:

‘This I carried out personally, handing each item of clothing as it was removed to my sergeant, who re-examined it. Himmler was carrying documents bearing the name of Heinrich Hitzinger, who I think was described as a postman. In his jacket I found a small brass case, similar to a cartridge case, which contained a small glass phial. I recognized it for what it was, but asked Himmler what it contained, and he said, “That is my medicine. It cures stomach cramp.” I also found a similar brass case, but without the phial, and came to the conclusion that the phial was hidden somewhere on the prisoner’s person. When all Himmler’s clothing had been removed and searched, all the orifices of his body were searched, also his hair combed and any likely hiding place examined, but no trace of the phial was found. At this stage he was not asked to open his mouth, as I considered that if the phial was hidden in his mouth and we tried to remove it, it might precipitate some action that would be regretted. I did however send for thick bread and cheese sandwiches and tea, which I offered to Himmler, hoping that I would see if he removed anything from his mouth. I watched him closely, whilst he was eating, but did not notice anything unusual.’

Meanwhile, word had been sent to 2nd Army Headquarters about Himmler’s arrest. While Captain Selvester was waiting for senior Intelligence officers to arrive from Luneburg, he offered Himmler a British Army uniform in exchange for the clothes that had been taken from him. This was all that was available, but when Himmler saw what he was required to put on, he refused; it seemed he was afraid he would be photographed in the uniform of the enemy and that the picture would be published. The only clothing he later accepted were a shirt, underpants and socks; so he was given an Army blanket to wrap round his half-clothed body.

Captain Selvester was obsessed by the thought of the missing phial. For the whole of the time Himmler was in his charge, he watched him as closely as possible. He has described the curiosity this strange man roused in him:

Later that evening, around eight o’clock, Colonel Michael Murphy, the Chief of Intelligence on General Montgomery’s staff, arrived to interrogate Himmler. He told him that he intended to search him and his bodyguards. But Himmler re-asserted who he was, evidently expecting to receive special treatment. He had, he insisted, a letter for General Montgomery. Colonel Murphy cannot recollect ever seeing this letter.

Apart from the phial found in the lining of his jacket, no other trace of poison was discovered on Himmler’s person. Colonel Murphy decided that Himmler should be taken over to Second Army Headquarters. He was taken there by car, a drive of about ten miles, escorted by Colonel Murphy and another Intelligence Officer. That was the last that Captain Selvester saw of him.

Colonel Murphy writes:

Himmler was taken to the interrogation centre which had been set up at a house in the Uelznerstrasse, and put in the charge of Sergeant-Major Edwin Austin, who was not told at first the identity of the prisoner. But, according to his own account which he broadcast the following day for the B.B.C., Austin recognized him immediately he saw him standing in the room to which he had been led.²⁰ He still wore only the army blanket over his shirt and underpants.

Austin, who had previously failed to prevent the S.S. General Pruetzmann from committing suicide when he had crushed a capsule of cyanide between his teeth, was determined not to allow Himmler to commit suicide by the same means. He pointed at once to a couch in the room.

‘That’s your bed. Get undressed’, he ordered, speaking in German.

Himmler did not seem to understand. He stared at Austin, and then spoke to the interpreter.

‘He doesn’t know who I am’ he said.

‘Yes I do’, said Austin. ‘You’re Himmler. Nevertheless, that’s your bed. Get undressed.’

Himmler still tried to stare him out, but the sergeant asserted his authority and stared back at him. Himmler dropped his eyes and gave in. He sat down on the couch and started to take off his underpants.

Then Colonel Murphy and Captain C. J. L. Wells, an army doctor, came in to carry out the routine inspection of their prisoner. They still suspected that Himmler was carrying poison. When he had stripped, they searched all over his body — his ears, his armpits, his hair, his buttocks. Then the doctor ordered him to open his mouth, and, in the words of Colonel Murphy, ‘immediately he saw a small black knob sticking out between a gap in the teeth on the right hand side lower jaw’.

‘Come nearer the light’, said the doctor. ‘Open your mouth.’

He put two fingers into the prisoner’s mouth. It was then that Himmler suddenly turned his head aside and bit down hard on the doctor’s fingers.

‘He’s done it’, shouted the doctor.

Both the colonel and the sergeant jumped on Himmler and threw him to the ground, turning him on his stomach to prevent him swallowing. The doctor held him by the throat, trying to force him to spit out the poison. The struggle to preserve his life by using emetics and a stomach-pump lasted a quarter of an hour; every method of artificial respiration was used. ‘He died,’ said the sergeant, ‘and when he died we threw a blanket over him, and left him.’²¹

Two days later, Himmler was buried in an unmarked place near Lüneburg; his body had been wrapped in army blankets and wound in camouflage netting secured with telephone wire. Sergeant-Major Austin, who in civilian life had been a dustman, dug him a secret grave.