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

I. Chaste Youth

At the turn of the century, Professor Gebhard Himmler was already at the age of thirty-five a well-placed and well-respected schoolmaster in Munich. He was a studious, pedantic man, very conscious of the social prestige he had gained from the patronage of the Bavarian royal household of Wittelsbach. For when he had finished his education at the University of Munich, where he studied philology and languages, he had been appointed tutor to Prince Heinrich of Bavaria. Only after this period of service was finished had he taken up teaching in Munich.

In his restricted and very bourgeois world, he remained highly conscious of this link with a royal house. His surroundings, the heavy furniture, the ancestral portraits, the collection of old coins and German antiquities, all reflected his serious and respectable turn of mind and the need he felt to distinguish himself in middle-class society. His father had been a wandering soldier with only meagre resources, but his wife, Anna, who came from Regensburg, had brought him a modest amount of money, since her father was in trade. So it was in a comfortable second-floor flat on the Hildegardstrasse in Munich that Anna Himmler gave birth to her second son on 7 October 1900.¹ When their first child, Gebhard, had been born two years earlier, he had been named after his father, but for the second son the special privilege was reserved of being called after no less a person than Prince Heinrich himself, who graciously consented to act as godfather to the child of his old tutor. The draft of a letter dated 13 October 1900 and written in the Professor’s immaculate script with its stiffly sloping loops still survives; in it he expresses the hope that the Prince will honour the family with his presence and partake of a glass of champagne. ‘Our small offspring’, writes the Professor, ‘on the second day of his sojourn on this earth, weighed seven pounds and two hundred grammes.’²

The upbringing of the Himmler brothers — a third son, Ernst, was born in December 1905 — followed the routine of the period. With a schoolmaster for father, the masculine dominance natural in German households was all the more evident in their lives, especially when the boys attended their father’s school in Landshut, the small town to which the family moved in 1913 on the Professor’s appointment to a joint-headmastership.

Landshut is a pleasant place some fifty miles north-east of Munich with the water of the River Isar flowing through its centre. It had a castle and sufficient history to encourage young Heinrich’s growing interest in national tradition and in the ancestral pictures and other mementoes his father collected to show their family’s link with Germany’s past. Professor Himmler did everything he could to encourage serious interests and self-discipline in his sons; he had a willing and assiduous pupil in Heinrich, who always remained devoted to both his parents in his own formal way. He was never to lose touch with them all their lives.

The first personal note by Heinrich to survive is a fragment of a diary he kept during 1910 in Munich. In a typical entry on 22 July he wrote: ‘Took a bath. The thirteenth wedding anniversary of my dear parents.’ It is a diary in which he simply adds up the smaller facts of his life from taking baths to going for walks, and he is careful always to show his respect for adults by entering their correct titles. The impression he gives already is that he has a painstaking primness of nature.³

The sections of Himmler’s early diary that survive increase in length and scale during the later years of his youth, and so reveal more about his mind and character. The principal period they represent includes the first year of the war, when he was a schoolboy of fourteen in Landshut, and the period of his adolescence and young manhood in Munich, when he was from nineteen to twenty-two years of age, and then again when he was twenty-four. The total span of the diary covers ten important and formative years in his life, but the entries themselves are intermittent and survive in notebooks that cover only occasional periods of a few months in any detail. Nevertheless, they are of the greatest interest because they reveal so much of the nature of their author.

Although the war seems at first to have affected life at Landshut very little — Himmler’s diary is full of the records of peaceful walks and church-goings, of working on his stamp collection and doing his homework — it is evident that the war news excited him sufficiently to make him enter up various events which he copied from the newspapers. Occasionally he bursts out into schoolboy slang. He notes on 23 September that Prince Heinrich has written to his father, and that the Prince has been wounded. But the initial German victories fill him with enthusiasm for the war, and on 28 September he says how he and a schoolboy friend ‘would be so happy if we could go and slog it out’ with the English and French. But principally he lives the normal life of a schoolboy — attending Mass, going out with his brothers to visit friends (‘had tea with the Frau President, who was very gracious’), playing games and practising on the piano, for which it seems he had little aptitude. He pours scorn on the grumbling and timid people of Landshut who so dislike the war — ‘all the silly old women and petty bourgeois in Landshut… spread idiotic rumours and are afraid of the Cossacks who, they think, will tear them limb from limb.’ On 29 September he notes that his mother and father went to the railway station to help hand out refreshments to transports of wounded soldiers. ‘The entire station was crowded with inquisitive Landshuters who cut up very rough and even began to fight when bread and water were given to seriously wounded Frenchmen who, after all, since they are prisoners, are worse off than our chaps. We took a walk in town and were frightfully bored.’ On 2 October he is roused to enthusiasm by the mounting statistics of Russian prisoners. ‘They multiply like vermin’, he writes. ‘As for the Landshuters, they are as stupid and chickenhearted as ever.’ ‘Whenever there is talk about our troops retreating, they wet themselves,’ writes Himmler, in an attempt to be vulgar, and he continues the following Sunday, after church, ‘I use dumbbells every day now so as to get more strength.’ On 11 October, a few days after his fourteenth birthday, he refers to an army exercise in his locality, and how he ‘would have loved to join in’.

The diaries of this earlier period already begin to reveal that, in spite of his frequent walks, his swimming, and other exercise, he is constantly complaining of heavy colds and suffering from feverishness and stomach upsets. He seems to have been a diligent, not brilliant, pupil at school; he refers frequently, among other subjects, to history, mathematics, Latin and Greek, and to the homework he has to do. He practised assiduously at the piano, but unlike his elder brother, he had no talent at all as a pianist; it was years, however, before he asked his parents to allow him to give up this impossible task. He was also studying shorthand, and began in 1915 to use it for the entries in his diary. But after September 1915 he seems virtually to have given up the diary until a year after the war, in August 1919, when the entries are suddenly resumed.

To judge from his schoolboy enthusiasm, Himmler’s one idea was to grow up and join the Army. His elder brother became seventeen on 29 July 1915, and Heinrich records how on that very day ‘he enters the Landsturm’, that is, the Reserve Army. ‘Oh, how I wish to be as old as that’, writes Heinrich, ‘and so able to go to the front.’

He had to wait until 1917 before he too could volunteer. The draft of a letter written by his father on 7 July survives to show how he used his influence with the Bavarian royal household to ask that, while his son might be regarded as a future officer-cadet, he should at the same time be allowed to remain at school long enough to matriculate before being conscripted. The application form he filled in, dated 26 June, also survives; this was designed to secure his son’s eventual acceptance for training as an Army officer.

Himmler did not in fact formally matriculate until 18 October 1919, two days before he began the study of agriculture in the Technical High School of the University of Munich. Meanwhile in 1917 he had been called up; he served in the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, training at Regensburg, his mother’s home town. Much later, Himmler was to claim that he had led men into action during the First World War,⁴ but this does not accord with an application for military papers that is still preserved in his own handwriting; this is dated 18 June 1919, and makes it clear that Himmler had been released from the Army on 18 December 1918 without having received the military documents due to him following the completion of a course for officer-cadets in Freising during the summer of 1918, and another as a machine-gunner in Bayreuth during September. He needs these papers, he claims, because he is about to join the Reichswehr, having served meanwhile in the local Landshut Free Corps.

Himmler therefore did not qualify as an officer in time to serve on the Western Front, but continued what military activities he could after the Armistice in 1918. It is clear that in spite of his weak health soldiering appealed to him, but meanwhile during the difficult post-war years — Bavaria had for a while a Communist state government during 1919, and the effects of inflation were soon to be felt — he had to qualify for some civilian occupation. It was then that he decided to study farming. By the time he resumed his diary more fully in August 1919, he was already working on a farm near Ingolstadt, a small town on the Danube to which the family were to move from Landshut during September, when Professor Himmler took up a post as headmaster.

Himmler’s work as an apprentice farmer was not to last long; on 4 September he suddenly felt ill. At the hospital in Ingolstadt it was found he had paratyphoid fever. When he recovered he was told he must leave the farm for at least a year, and on 18 October he was accepted as a student in agriculture at the University of Munich. The diary also makes it clear that for the time being he had to give up his hopes of serving as a reservist either in the Army or in the Free Corps movement. He managed, however, to join the traditional student fencing fraternity.

Himmler was to remain a student in Munich until August 1922, when at the age of twenty-one he gained his agricultural diploma. What remains of his diary during this three-year period shows that he was anxious to live the life of the conventional student, persistently seeking out fencing partners until he had received the traditional cut in the face during his last term at college, and making enthusiastic friendships which enabled him to indulge in earnest intellectual discussions. He also believed in enjoying himself, and he even learned dancing in his youthful determination to become a social success. He found the dancing lessons troublesome: ‘I’ll be glad once I know it’, he writes on 25 November. ‘This dancing course leaves me absolutely cold and only takes up my time.’

He lived in rooms where no food was provided, and he took his meals at the house of a certain Frau Loritz, who had two daughters, Maja and Käthe. Although he went home frequently at weekends, and remained on close terms with his brother Gebhard, he soon fell in love with Maja in Munich. ‘I am so happy to be able to call this wonderful girl my friend’, he writes in October, and again the following month: ‘had a long talk with her about religion. She told me a great deal about her life. I think I have found in her a sister.’ Some of his entries are enigmatic: ‘we talked and sang a little. It gives one plenty to think about later.’ But apparently this slight love affair soon drifted into an unimpassioned friendship, even though in November he ‘talked to Maja about relations between man and woman’, and after a discussion on hypnotism he claims to himself that he has considerable influence over her.

It was, apparently, an uneasy time for him. He was restless, and dreamed of leaving Germany eventually and working abroad. Though he often had to work in the evenings, he began to study Russian in case his future travels took him east. His closest friend, apart from his brother Gebhard, was a young man called Ludwig Zahler, a companion from his days in the Army, with whom he talked endlessly, but whose character evidently disturbed him. ‘Ludwig seems to me more and more incomprehensible’, he writes, and then two days later, ‘I have now no more doubts about his character. I pity him.’

He shows that he also had some doubts about himself. ‘I was very earnest and depressed’, he records in November, after an evening with Maja. ‘I think we are heading for serious times. I look forward to wearing uniform again.’ Less than a week later he confesses to himself, ‘I am not quite sure what I am working for, not at the moment at any rate. I work because it is my duty. I work because I find peace of mind in working … and overcome my indecision.’

At the time he was writing these entries at odd moments in his diary, Himmler was only nineteen, but already he reveals qualities in his nature which were to remain unchanged throughout his life. Although he enjoys a narrow social life with a small circle of friends, he instinctively avoids any human relationship that commits him too deeply. The force that drives him is what he believes to be his duty, and this leads him to work hard at his studies, and force his unhealthy body to succeed in the accepted exercises, such as swimming, skating and, above all, fencing. His conventionalism becomes in itself a kind of passion; he is gregarious without any real warmth, and he is only prepared to seek the companionship of girls on the understanding no passion enters into his relationship with them. He still attends Mass, and, in his spare time, practises shooting with Gebhard and Ludwig against the future when he can, once more, ‘wear uniform’. He is an ardent nationalist in politics, and seriously alarmed by events in the east.

The diaries lapse again between February 1920 and November 1921, and again between July 1922 and February 1924. The final phase of his life as a student followed much the same pattern, broken by minor military exercises as a reservist and clerical duties for a student organization known as Allgemeiner Studenten Ausschuss. His ambition to farm in the east has, however, changed; he considers Turkey now to be more suitable, and he travelled to Gmund, where he was later to establish his lakeside home on the Tegernsee, to meet a man who knew something of the prospects in Turkey. He is, however, still uncertain about his own character. In November 1921, in his twenty-second year, he writes: ‘I still lack to a considerable degree that naturally superior kind of manner (die vornehme Sicherheit des Benehmens) that I would dearly like to possess.’

His relations with girls are still platonic. He mentions meeting a girl from Hamburg on the train, and remarks in his diary that she was ‘sweet and obviously innocent and very interested in Bavaria and King Ludwig II’. His friend Ludwig, who worked in a bank, tells him that Käthe thinks he despises women, and Himmler says she is right. Then he adds:

Although he mentions many girls in his diary, it is with increasing primness and resistance. He still attends church, and he moralizes after eating in a restaurant on how the beauty of the waitress will inevitably lead to her moral downfall and how, if he had the means, he would love to give her money to prevent her from going astray. He mentions a coolness, even a breach, in his relations with Frau Loritz and Käthe, whose ‘feminine vanity’ he considers a waste of his precious time. In May 1922 he notes in the diary how shocked he had been to see a little girl of three permitted by her parents to ‘hop round in the nude’ before his shocked gaze. ‘She ought at that age’, he says, ‘to be taught a sense of shame.’

The recollections of certain fellow students complete the portrait of Himmler in his youth that his diaries contain.⁵ He is remembered as being meticulous in his studies and awkward in his social relationships. He wore his rimless pince-nez even when duelling, he recited Bavarian folk poetry rather badly, he avoided association with girls except those who expected to be treated with formality and politeness, and he never made love like his fellow students where love was to be found. He told his brother Gebhard he was determined to remain chaste until marriage, however much he might be tempted. Yet he was socially ambitious, putting himself forward as a candidate for various student offices for which he seldom received more than an unflatteringly small number of votes. The student society in which he tried most to shine was the Apollo club, which had a cultured rather than a sporting or merely beer-swilling membership. The members of Apollo were mostly ex-service men and senior graduates, and the president of the society at that time was a Jew, Dr Abraham Ofner. Although Himmler, a junior member of Apollo, was studiously polite to Dr Ofner and the other Jewish members, he was already strongly anti-Semitic in feeling, and he joined in violent discussions as to whether Jews should not be excluded from the society. In politics he is remembered as inflexibly right-wing, a natural if not very efficient member of the Free Corps formed to oppose the Communist infiltration into post-war Bavarian administration. We are left with a picture of a small man, prosaic and platitudinous, concealing his shyness under a certain arrogance. He disguised his fear of seeming unable to fulfil the hot-blooded life of a student by displaying excessive diligence in his work and making it quite clear he was determined to take part in the various right-wing, militaristic movements of that unsettled time. His exactness of habit seems to amount to a mania, for he never ceases to record when he shaves, when he has his hair cut, even when he has a bath. All these experiences take their due place alongside the duelling and the military exercises, and the serious discussions of religion, sex and politics. He notes down the comparative beauty of his dancing partners with exactly the same calm, meticulous cataloguing that he shows when he notes the cutting of his hair or the shaving of his beard:

Himmler used his diary to castigate himself at those times when he seemed to fall short of his own very modest ideal. He complains that he talks too much, that he is too warm-hearted, and that he lacks self-control and a ‘gentlemanly assurance of manner’. He enjoys helping people, visiting the sick and, occasionally, assisting and comforting old people, going home to visit the family: ‘they think I’m a gay, amusing chap who takes care of things — Heini will see to it’, he writes in January 1922. It is plain that, like many people, he sought recognition and a place in his social and family circle by involving himself as much as he could in other people’s affairs. At the same time, a certain genuine kindness of heart has to be allowed him. But always he sought for popularity and for acceptance in student circles, though his primness of manner and his weak constitution, which prevented him from drinking beer without upsetting his stomach, led his fellow-students to look down on him and to make fun of his excessive diligence.

As a church-goer he remained regular in his habits at least until 1924, though the signs of religious doubt begin to appear much earlier in his diaries. ‘I believe I have come into conflict with my religion’, he writes in December 1919, ‘but whatever happens I shall always love God and pray to Him, and remain faithful to the Catholic Church and defend it even if I should be expelled from it.’ In February 1924 he is still attending church, but refers to his discussions of ‘faith in God, religion, doubts (immaculate conception, etc.), confession, views on duelling, blood, sexual intercourse, man and woman’. The subject of sex exceeds even religion in its attraction, no doubt because of his conviction that abstinence from intercourse was morally binding before marriage. He seems to have remained virgin until the age of at least twenty-six, and he evidently experienced the pangs of unsatisfied sexual desire. After one of his frequent discussions of sex with his friend Ludwig, the bank clerk, he wrote in February 1922:

Another tribulation was lack of money. He disliked increasingly being dependent on his family for his maintenance, though he learned how to eke out the allowances he received from his father, and measure most carefully his very modest expenditure on clothes and food. His letters to his parents that have been preserved show how he enumerated each small detail of what had to be done in the way of mending and repairs, as well as small needs for additional sums of money. His letters are always respectful, affectionate and formally gushing:

The character of the man is in everything he writes, as well as in the fact that these letters, like so much else from the period — receipts, lists, drafts, ticket-stubs, and so on — survived through his care the holocaust of Germany.

Correctness was all. On 5 November 1921 he attends in hired morning dress the funeral of Ludwig II of Bavaria; a few weeks later he calls formally on the royal widow, who was the mother of his godfather; on 18 January 1922 he takes part in a nationalist student ceremony to commemorate the founding of the German Empire. A week later, on 26 January, he attends a rifle-club meeting in Munich with Captain Ernst Roehm, who, he says in his diary, is ‘very friendly’. ‘Roehm pessimistic about Bolshevism’, he adds laconically.

Roehm was still active in the Army. He was thirteen years senior to Himmler and was soon to become the principal influence in bringing him more fully into contact with politics. Along with his elder brother Gebhard, Himmler was to join the local nationalist corps led by Roehm and called the Reichskriegsflagge, the paramilitary contingent which was later, in November 1923, to join forces with Hitler in the Munich putsch.

Meanwhile Himmler had graduated on 5 August 1922. His studies at the Technical College had included chemistry and the science of fertilizers, as well as the generation of new varieties of plants and crops. His immediate need for work was relieved by an appointment as laboratory assistant on the staff of a firm in Schleissheim specializing in the development of fertilizers. Schleissheim is barely fifteen miles north of Munich; this meant that Himmler did not lose touch with the centre where Hitler was breeding his own particular form of nationalism which had already led to the formation of the National Socialist Party. Although Himmler could not have escaped knowing something of Hitler and his political activities in Munich, the first mention of him in what survives of the diaries does not occur until February 1924, five months after the putsch. Among the many rival or parallel nationalist groups of the period, Himmler, like Goebbels, was initially affiliated to a group that did not come immediately under Hitler’s growing influence.

He was, however, already developing his anti-Semitism, a feeling common enough among the right-wing Catholic nationalists in the south. From 1922 anti-Jewish sentiment grows stronger in Himmler’s diary, although on one occasion he softens a little towards a young Austrian-Jewish dancer he met in a night-club with a friend called Alphons, who had managed to persuade him to indulge in this most unusual expedition. He noted that she had ‘nothing of the Jew in her manner, at least as far as one can judge. At first I made several remarks about Jews; I absolutely never suspected her to be one.’ He made sentimental excuses to himself on her behalf, no doubt because she was pretty and gave him a pleasant shock by admitting she was no longer ‘innocent’. He is less indulgent to a fellow-student and former fellow-pupil at school, a Jew named Wolfgang Hallgarten⁶ whom he calls Jew-boy (Judenbub) and a Jewish louse (Judenlauser) because he had become a left-wing pacifist. From now onwards there are occasional references to the ‘Jewish question’ in the diaries.

This was in July 1922, shortly before he left college and began to earn his living. Official records show that he did not formally apply to join the Nazi Party until August 1923, four months before the unsuccessful putsch, in which he was to play a minor part as ensign to Roehm’s contingent, the Reichskriegsflagge.⁷ Roehm’s men did not take part in the notorious march through the streets of Munich led by Hitler and Ludendorff; he had been made responsible for occupying the War Ministry in the centre of Munich. A photograph of Himmler survives in which he can be seen standing near Roehm holding the traditional Imperial standard and peering open-mouthed over the flimsy barricades of wood and barbed-wire. He had come specially from Schleissheim to take part in this exciting event, and its failure cost him his job though not his liberty.

The two days of the Munich putsch first brought together in a common action the future Nazi leaders, Hitler, Goring, Roehm and Himmler. But whereas Himmler stood in the background holding a flag, Göring, the former ace flier, marched beside Hitler and Ludendorff on 9 November, the day after Hitler’s attempt at a coup d’état during a meeting addressed by leading Bavarian ministers in the hall of the Bürgerbräukeller, the great tavern of Munich. Roehm, by now a close associate of the Nazi movement, had agreed to march on the military headquarters of the Ministry of War on the Schoenfeldstrasse, where they barricaded themselves in with barbed-wire and set up machine-guns for their defences. It was the only successful action of the coup. Roehm and his men occupied the building and stayed there during the night of 8/9 November, while Hitler and his storm-troopers spent the hours of darkness in the grounds of the Bürgerbräukeller before the decision was reached to march on the centre of the city the following day and link up with Roehm, who alone among the leaders of the putsch did not behave like an actor in a melodrama. The march, which began around eleven o’clock, led by Hitler flourishing a pistol and Ludendorff looking grim and important, involved some three thousand storm-troopers crossing the River Isar and progressing for over a mile to the Town Hall in the Marienplatz. After this another mile had to be covered through narrow streets before the Ministry of War was reached. It was then that armed police finally stopped the march, and in the scuffle that followed Hitler was slightly injured and Goring badly wounded in the groin. Only Ludendorff strode on, oblivious of the bullets and sure of the iron weight of his authority. But he was arrested; Roehm and his men were forced to surrender some two hours later. They had been living in a state of siege in the Ministry since dawn, when infantry forces of the regular Army had put a cordon round the building.

The times were too uncertain for violent recriminations. The Nazi Party was banned; Himmler lost his job, and was forced to return home cap-in-hand. Home now meant Munich, to which the family had moved back in 1922. Roehm, whom Himmler still regarded with respect and affection as his superior officer, was confined like the other leaders of the unsuccessful putsch. On 15 February 1924, Himmler asked permission of the Bavarian Ministry of Justice to visit Stadelheim prison where Roehm was held. He rode out on his much-prized motor-cycle, taking with him some oranges and a copy of Grossdeutsche Zeitung. ‘Talked for twenty-minutes with Captain Roehm’, he recorded when he got back. ‘We had an excellent conversation and spoke quite unreservedly.’ They discussed various personalities, and Roehm was grateful for the oranges. ‘He still has his sense of humour and is always the good Captain Roehm’, remarks Himmler.

At the trial of the conspirators that followed on 26 February and lasted for over three weeks, Hitler acted as if he were the accuser, and the trial degenerated into a soft formality. Though Hitler was found guilty and served a nominal sentence, Roehm was completely discharged even though he too had been pronounced guilty of high treason. Hitler was confined in Landsberg castle; Roehm pursued his own plans for founding a revolutionary military movement while Hitler, dictating Mein Kampf, deliberately let his underground party disintegrate in his absence. By the time Hitler was released, owing to the favour shown him by the Bavarian Minister of Justice, Franz Gürtner, Roehm was no longer an acceptable figure in Hitler’s party. By April 1925 he felt bound to send Hitler his resignation as leader of the storm-troopers.

Himmler meanwhile had also been active. Much to his family’s annoyance, he refused to seek work: he wanted, he said, to leave himself free to engage in politics. Corresponding most closely to the disbanded Nazi Party were the nationalist and anti-Semitic groups of the extreme right known as the Völkische movement. Prominent among their supporters were Ludendorff, Gregor Strasser and Alfred Rosenberg; the Völkische groups were collectively a powerful element in the Bavarian government, and in 1924 they managed to draw sufficient support in the Reichstag elections to secure themselves thirty-two seats. Strasser, Roehm and Ludendorff were among those who became members of the Reichstag.⁸

The sight of such success naturally attracted Himmler. With time on his hands, he took part in the Völkische campaigns in Lower Bavaria. He began to gain experience as a member of a team of speakers at political meetings; he toured the smaller towns and the villages in the area of Munich and spoke on ‘the enslavement of the workers by stock exchange capitalists’ and on ‘the Jewish question’. ‘Bitterly hard and thorny is this duty to the people’, he writes after difficult meetings in the countryside attended by peasants and communists. Along with the other speakers he would mingle with the audience and encourage individual argument. The groundwork of his initial political experience was therefore laid in the same hard school as that of young Joseph Goebbels, who was about to be drawn into the same sphere in politics and address similar political meetings in the industrial area of the Ruhr.

Hitler’s name barely appears in the surviving diaries. On 19 February 1924 Himmler notes that he reads aloud to some friends from a pamphlet called Hitlers Leben, but with the departure of Roehm he had to find another leader to whom he might offer his services and from whom, if possible, also obtain paid work.

He rejoined the Nazi Party on 2 August 1925; it was during this period that he also joined the staff of Gregor and Otto Strasser, the Bavarian brothers who were among the principals in the reconstruction of the Nazi movement. The Strassers had a family druggist establishment in Landshut. They remained uneasy partners to Hitler who, after his release from Landsberg on 20 December 1924, began at the age of thirty-five to gather once more the reins of leadership into his own hands. While the Strassers were for compromise with other nationalist groups, Hitler was determined to lay the foundation of a new and vigorous political party over which he had full personal control. In the very month of his release from prison, the Nazi-Völkische alliance lost all but fourteen of its thirty-two seats in the Reichstag after the second election of the year, but Hitler, to the exasperation of the Strassers and Roehm, did not seem to care. Once he had obtained the removal of the ban on the Nazi Party, he was prepared to lose the support of the anti-Catholic Völkische groups. All that concerned him was to make a new start, to reform the Nazi Party under his own undisputed leadership. This he announced at the end of February 1925, and his platform included a virulent campaign against the Marxists and the Jews.

Himmler had obtained his appointment nominally as a secretary, but actually as a general assistant prepared to undertake any duties assigned to him. According to Otto Strasser, his brother welcomed Himmler because, as he put it, ‘the fellow’s doubly useful — he’s got a motor-bike and he’s full of frustrated ambition to be a soldier’.⁹ He was responsible for surveying the secret arms dumps which were kept concealed in the country districts away from the eyes of the Inter-allied Control Commission. Himmler, aged twenty-four, enjoyed this underground activity; it filled him, says Otto Strasser, with nationalistic pride, and he preferred it to the office work which he had to carry out for Gregor Strasser who, as well as being a Reichstag Deputy, was in charge of Party activities in the district of Lower Bavaria, a position he had held since 1920. Gregor Strasser was a vigorous orator and a tireless organizer. At this stage Hitler could not spare him and, in spite of the growing differences between them, it was by mutual consent that the Strassers finally moved the main sphere of their activities to the north. Otto Strasser, whose particular flair was for journalism, moved to Berlin and founded there the northern Party newspaper, the Berliner Arbeiterzeitung.

During 1925 Goebbels and Himmler met at Landshut during the course of their work for the Strassers. It soon became apparent that while Goebbels was the brilliant speaker and potential journalist, Himmler’s talent lay rather in desk-work and other, more pedestrian, activities. It has been assumed, based largely on loose statements made by Otto Strasser, that Himmler was displaced in the Strassers’ service by the vain and volatile young man from the Ruhr.¹⁰ This was far from the case. Goebbels, during his frequent visits south, became increasingly fascinated by Hitler, who soon recognized his talents and, during 1926, flattered him into accepting the difficult post of Gauleiter, or party organizer, in Berlin. Previously, however, Goebbels had spent the greater part of his time in the Ruhr when he had not been engaged in special conference work for Strasser or Hitler in other parts of the country. Himmler, on the other hand, consolidated his own position in Lower Bavaria during 1925 to a sufficient extent to be able to write as follows at the end of the year to Kurt Lüdecke, one of Hitler’s supporters who was soon to leave for America:

According to Lüdecke, Gregor Strasser laughed when he was told of the letter, saying in effect that Himmler was getting fanatical about the Jews. ‘He’s devoted to me, and I use him as secretary’, he added. ‘He’s very ambitious, but I won’t take him along north — he’s no world-beater, you know.’

Himmler’s ambitious diligence, however, won him the position of Strasser’s deputy as district organizer in Lower Bavaria, working of course under Hitler’s shadow in Munich. He also became second-in-command of a small corps numbering some two hundred men and known as the Schutzstaffel, or S.S. The S.S. was originally a group formed in 1922 before the Munich putsch and called the Adolf Hitler Shock Troops, a special bodyguard of tough men who kept close to Hitler on public occasions and guarded him from attack. According to his official record Himmler had joined the S.S. in 1925, receiving the S.S. number 168. The reformed S.S. marched past Hitler at the second Party gathering in Weimar in 1926, and they were given a special ‘blood-flag’ for their services to their leader in the November putsch. These services had been to wreck the printing presses of the Social Democrat newspaper in Munich.

The main task for Himmler in the Party offices at Landshut, where a portrait of Hitler frowned down on his activities, was to increase the Party’s supporters. His initial salary was 120 marks a month, and the local S.S. were sent out to collect subscriptions and canvas advertisements for the Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. In 1926 he was made Deputy Reich Propaganda Chief, and this gradual accretion of subordinate offices led to a modest increase in his salary. Yet he seems to have made little impression at this stage other than by being a willing and dutiful administrator. There are glimpses of him in Goebbels’s excited diary during the period of Party expansion before he went to Berlin — on 13 April 1926, for example, during a speaking tour, he writes: ‘with Himmler in Landshut; Himmler a good fellow and very intelligent; I like him’. On 6 July, ‘ride on the motor-bike with Himmler’; and, on 30 October, ‘Zwickau. Himmler, gossip, slept.’¹² Goebbels, aged twenty-eight and eaten up with vanity, regarded Himmler as the local manager of his star speaking tours.

He did, however, travel to Berlin, and it was during one of these visits to the capital in 1927 that he finally became involved with the woman whom he was later to marry. She was a nurse seven years older than himself; she was of Polish origin and her name was Margarete Concerzowo. Marga, as she was called, owned a small nursing-home in Berlin, and had unorthodox ideas about medicine which appealed to Himmler and excited afresh the discussions of his student days. She was interested in herbal cures and homoeopathic treatments, and their discussions set up a longing in Himmler to work once more in the open air. These two seemed at this stage in their relationship to be made for each other, in spite of the difference in their ages. Both worshipped efficiency, thrift and the rigorous neatness of a parsimonious life. Both felt they needed the comforts of marriage and domesticity, and both believed that their common interests in such matters as medicine and herbs amounted to love. Marga sold her nursing-home and decided to use the money to acquire a property in the country.

They married early in July 1928. One of Marga’s coy and excited letters, written eight days before their marriage, survives in Himmler’s carefully preserved files, and relates to the house and smallholding they bought with her money in Waltrudering, some ten miles outside Munich. In her joy at the thought of marriage, she hastily calculates what they are spending and whether or not they can avoid taking out a mortgage. In the margin Himmler coldly notes that her totalling is out by 60 marks. Nevertheless, Himmler, her ‘naughty darling’, will soon be hers, as she goes on to remind him.¹³

The smallholding at Waltrudering became a modest enterprise and was left largely in the hands of Marga Himmler. They kept about fifty hens, and they marketed produce and agricultural implements; it made a little money over and above Himmler’s salary, which stood now at around 200 marks a month. The following year Marga gave birth to her only child, their daughter Gudrun.

This year, 1929, became the turning-point in Himmler’s life. On 6 January Hitler issued an order appointing him Reichsführer S.S. in place of the commander Erhard Heiden, whose deputy he had been. It was a far-seeing appointment. Something in this clerk-like man with his military ambitions and scrupulous self-discipline must have revealed to Hitler that he had in him the kind of perfectionism necessary to create a reliable counter-force to the undisciplined mob of storm-troopers who roamed the streets in the name of the Nazis.¹⁴