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

Introduction

This study of Heinrich Himmler completes the trilogy of biographies we have written about Hitler’s principal assistants in the establishment and control of the Third Reich. The general desire to understand the exact nature of this régime and of the individuals who created it has become more pressing during the past few years, now that both Germany and the world outside have to a great extent overcome the shock to our common humanity inflicted by the Nazis, which either paralyzed or inhibited clear thinking during and immediately after the war. While the Germans have had to come to terms with themselves as the society which enabled Hitler to win control of the state and to establish a modern form of tyranny that eventually covered almost the whole of Europe, the other European powers and the United States have also had to search their consciences in order to discover to what degree they connived at the consolidation of Hitler’s rule.

Our aim in writing these biographies, as well as our other book The July Plot which examines the German resistance movement in its weaknesses as well as in its strength, has been to discover as much as we could of the real nature of the men who helped to create Nazism and to examine all the facts known about them. We are opposed to the sensational kind of interpretation which classes Hitler, Göring, Goebbels and Himmler simply as ‘monsters’, a term used largely by the popular press to separate these much-hated men from ourselves and so comfort their readers. But the fact remains that these ‘monsters’ and their colleagues were for a considerable while circulating freely in both German and European society. They were liked or disliked, despised or feared, accepted socially or avoided in just the same way as other politicians, diplomats and soldiers. The Nazi leaders cannot be voided from human society simply because it is pleasanter or more convenient to regard them now as outside the pale of humanity. The thousands of men and women who worked with them were for the most part their admirers or their willing colleagues, while the influential Europeans and Americans who either actively favoured them or else tolerated them as a rather grim necessity in European politics who should not be opposed by any show of force, are not so far removed from those who actively cheered them in the streets.

The Nazi Party, as Alan Bullock has pointed out in his admirable biography of Hitler, had no political philosophy; their attitude to power was solely that it was something to be won by any means that could be improvised, irrespective of the moral issues involved. It was Hitler’s utter unscrupulousness in handling the political leaders of other countries that preyed on their weakness and took a contemptuous advantage of their traditional sense of values in diplomacy. This lack of scruple is by no means uncommon in many human activities. Indeed, his unscrupulous brilliance was the very aspect of Hitler’s character that excited widespread popular admiration and sympathy between 1933 and 1938, both inside and outside Germany.

The nature of the régime and of the public reaction to it sprang directly from the characters of the men who created it. Though this is in a sense true of all régimes, none in recent history has been so hastily and casually constructed as Hitler’s Third Reich. Both policy and administration were largely concocted as a result of the individual whims of the various leaders, and of intuitive decisions taken at random in response to the mood of the moment or an urgent need to out-smart some opponent. The sufferings of the German people and those they were led to inflict on others twenty years ago were largely the result of the personal psychology of Hitler and of the three men whose lives we have attempted to reconstruct and interpret.

In each case we have tried to approach the task of writing these biographies with as little prejudice as possible. We have described in turn the development of Goebbels, Göring and Himmler through their childhood and adolescence; we have shown how they came to join the Nazi Party and discussed the particular contribution they made to it during its early formative period. There could scarcely have been three more different men than these in temperament and social background, nor could the particular parts they played in supporting Hitler during the years of his power have been more divergent. It has been a profound and at times a shattering experience to retread the familiar path of German history from 1923 to 1945 and interpret it as it was conceived and to a large extent actually created by these men, each of whom in varying degrees formed an individual empire in his own image within the larger empire built by Hitler.

We contend that the twelve years of Nazi rule in Europe offer us as clear a warning for the future in human terms as the explosion of the two atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the Nazis themselves who finally forced us to use violence against them when the provocation offered by their actions became too outrageous to be endured. But far too many people favoured what they stood for at the time, or still hanker after their memory today, for us to be sure the warning has been more than superficially taken by the world as a whole. For this reason alone it seems to us necessary to tell the story of these men’s lives without bias or false emphasis, in order to show as precisely as possible what drove these leaders of a great country to behave in the way they did, and what, above all, they have in common with the rest of us, who profess now so readily to detest them.

It has been an illuminating experience for Heinrich Fraenkel to discuss in Germany the character and actions — or often the inaction — of Himmler with men and women who had to work closely with him. In preparing this biography, as with those of Goebbels and Göring, we have gone wherever possible to the sources of first-hand evidence. We have also been greatly assisted by Himmler’s daughter Gudrun and his brother Gebhard, both of whom entertain memories of him which remain affectionate. They still find it very hard to reconcile the image of the man they knew so intimately with the public image of Himmler which was inspired by a fear and a hatred that became universal. It has been our task to try to achieve this reconciliation, to try to understand why this simple, unassuming man became a mass-murderer convinced of the essential rightness of his actions.

Himmler’s contribution to the theory and practice of Nazism was that of a conscientious pedant who had always hankered after being a soldier but had ended by becoming a policeman. His brief career as a commander-in-the-field at the end of the war proved a complete disaster, though not in his own view, since he had to be induced to resign. But in its own strict terms, Himmler’s career as Hitler’s Chief of Police was a triumphant success, and it could be argued that Nazism found its most complete and practical expression in the repressive activities of Himmler’s secret forces. During the war the work of the S.S. and the Gestapo became by far the surest weapon in the exercise of Hitler’s tyranny. It was the extension of this work into the field of mass extermination in order to fulfil a false dream of racial purity which obsessed both Himmler and his master, that made the system become unmanageable. It was destroyed in the act of undertaking the slaughter of others under Himmler’s direct instruction. Death choked itself through its own excesses.

In the curious grouping of rival ambitions that gradually surrounded and isolated Hitler during the final maniacal period of his rule, Himmler’s power was the most secret, Göring’s the most flamboyant, and Goebbels’s the most self-proclaimed. Goebbels’s vociferous contribution was that of the eternal campaign-manager who wanted to be acknowledged the dictator of Germany’s civilian life while Hitler controlled the war. His volatile, egocentric nature demanded the satisfaction of constant public appearance and constant flattery; he enjoyed being at the centre of a whirlpool of incessant action. He wanted above all to be recognized both by Hitler and the German people as the second man of the Third Reich, Hitler’s indispensable manager-of-state.

For Göring the failure of the Luftwaffe meant the passing of his personal glory as the most popular and colourful figure in the Nazi régime, the jovial air-ace. Alternately elated and deflated by his drug addiction, he also needed to feel indispensable and enjoy the satisfaction of collecting endless offices of state from the master of whom he stood in so great an awe that eventually it verged on panic. Depressed by the failure of the Luftwaffe, Goring turned increasingly to the consolation of his great art collection, amassed by gift, by purchase, but most of all by plunder, until it reached at the end of the war an estimated value of £30 million. In spite of this gradual fall from Hitler’s favour, he remained until the last days the Führer’s nominal successor; his real power declined after 1943 in the eyes of everyone except himself as he became increasingly self-indulgent and less and less involved in the direction of the war or the conduct of the economy.

It remained for Himmler, the idealist without ideals, at once the most diffident and the most pedantic man in the Nazi hierarchy, persistently uncertain of himself and yet perpetually militant and power-loving, to accumulate in secret the ultimate control of Germany. Looked at from his own point of view, it was Himmler’s personal tragedy that while loving the thought of power so dearly he proved so utterly incapable of using it to any positive ends once he had acquired it. It remained a dead weight in his hands and a constant source of anxiety. While the very mention of his name struck terror into the hearts of millions of people, he himself was nervous to the point of timidity and became utterly speechless if Hitler chose to reprimand him. He cowered behind his own autocracy, and lost all powers of initiative in the face of personalities stronger or more persistent than himself, especially those on whom he came to depend, such as Heydrich, Schellenberg or Felix Kersten, his masseur, the only man who could relieve him of the chronic cramp in his stomach which was exacerbated by worry and despair. Yet it was Himmler who towards the end held most of what trump cards there were left in the hands of Nazi Germany, and who was regarded by many as the certain successor if Hitler collapsed.

The more one learns about the character and behaviour of these men, the more extraordinary does it seem that less than a quarter of a century ago they would have become under Hitler the joint masters of Europe and have held a great part of the world to ransom. Yet this, as we all know, is what happened. To us it seems best now to regard this black history as a warning. In our new world there are many emergent states and many longer established nations without the natural self-discipline to resist men similar in nature to the Nazi leaders should they emerge and either stride or slip to power. Such men are not always easy to recognize for what they are until it is too late. This certainly was the case with Himmler. Hitler at first appeared an absurd fanatic, Goebbels a posturing mob-orator, Göring a good-natured ass, Himmler a nonentity. Yet none of them proved to be what they had seemed, or they would never have won by their wits alone the supreme power in a great nation.

Our aim in writing this series of biographies is therefore to examine what particular qualities they and the men they chose to serve them actually possessed. Also, the reasons for their ultimate failure are as significant and absorbing as the explanation of their initial success. Within the space of only eight years they rose from insignificance and comparative penury to become the absolute masters of Germany. Twelve years later they were dead and utterly discredited. This story is unique in modern history, and it happened not in some lawless period of the past but in the middle of our own century.

Heinrich Fraenkel has made numerous visits to Germany on research for this book. He has interviewed many people, some of them prominent in the S.S. or former members of Himmler’s staff who have asked to remain anonymous. Owing to Himmler’s methodical nature, vast quantities of private papers, official correspondence and secret memoranda have survived and are held in the various official archives we have indicated. Many new facts have come to light during the past two years from captured documents recently handed over by the American government to the German Federal Archives at Koblenz. These and other files have been studied and what they have shown has helped to complete this portrait of Himmler.

Although this is the first detailed biographical study of Himmler, we must express our great indebtedness to the published works of Gerald Reitlinger, whose researches into the activities of the S.S. and the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe, which he published in his two books The Final Solution and The S.S., have been indispensable to us in that they throw so much light on Himmler himself. Willi Frischauer’s study of Himmler has also been useful in points of detail, though his book is devoted at least as much to the S.S. and its activities as to Himmler the man.

We have received valuable assistance from Fraulein Gudrun Himmler, Himmler’s daughter, and from Gebhard Himmler, Himmler’s elder brother; also from the former S.S. General Karl Wolff, at present serving a sentence following his trial in Munich, where he was visited on a number of occasions by Heinrich Fraenkel. Others who have kindly given us significant information include Count Schwerin von Krosigk, Hitler’s Minister of Finance, Dr Otto Strasser, who employed Himmler as an assistant during his initial work for the Party, Dr Werner Best, who became during the Third Reich the Governor of Denmark, Frau Lina Heydrich, widow of the former S.S. leader, Josef Kiermaier, Himmler’s bodyguard, Fraulein Doris Mähner, one of Himmler’s secretaries, Dr Riss, head of the Erding Law Court, and Colonel Saradeth, both former fellow-students of Himmler in Munich, Dr Otto John, Frau Irmgard Kersten, widow of Felix Kersten, Himmler’s masseur, and Colonel L. M. Murphy and Captain Tom Selvester, the British officers in charge of Himmler after his arrest. We must also acknowledge the generous help given us by the staff of the Wiener Library in London, and in particular by Mrs Ilse Wolff, and by the staffs of the German Federal Archives at Koblenz (in particular Dr Boberach), the Institut für Zeitgeschichte at Munich (in particular Dr Hoch), the Berlin Document Center, the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlog Documentatie at Amsterdam (in particular Dr de Jong), and the International Red Cross Tracing Centre at Arolsen (in particular, Dr Burckhardt). Once more, we would like to thank Mrs M. H. Peters who undertook the arduous task of typing the manuscript of this book.

ROGER MANVELL