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

III. The Élite

During the period he was gradually increasing the range of his power and influence, Himmler had realized it was no longer either proper or practical for him to continue as a farmer. The small-holding in Waldtrudering had been sold, and he had removed his wife and family, who now included an adopted boy called Gerhard as well as his five-year-old daughter Gudrun, to Lindenfycht at Gmund at the head of the beautiful lake of Tegernsee, some twenty-five miles from Munich.¹ When he took control of the Gestapo in April 1934, he moved his official residence to Berlin and settled in a villa at Dahlem, a fashionable suburb where Ribbentrop also lived. His headquarters in Berlin were at the Prinz Albrechtstrasse, where Goring had established the Gestapo; Heydrich’s headquarters were set up near-by in the Wilhelmstrasse.

Himmler’s domestic life was meagre. He had no strong feeling for the woman he had married; his passionate devotion was to his work in Berlin, and this led to a gradual separation which, although it was never made formal, was none the less real.² Marga stayed in Gmund, and this remained to the end of Himmler’s life his solidly bourgeois family home. Marga’s frequent letters, no longer sentimental as they once were, are full of domestic chatter about the weather, her husband’s clothes, the losses and gains in the vegetable and fruit garden and complaints of his infrequent visits: ‘We look forward to your visit… Don’t bring along so many files and other things to read. We want a bit of your attention too.’ From as early as 1931, she began to address him in her letters as ‘Mein Lieber Guter’, and when he is away she seldom fails to remind him, as always, that the housekeeping money is due. Marga was undoubtedly a good and frugal housewife, scraping the last penny of value out of the money her husband gave her, but her husband’s long absences hardened her. Her social station in life did not rise with his, since she could not come to town and share it with him. As early as October 1931 she writes naively about the good news for the Nazis, adding, ‘How I’d like to be present at all these great events.’ But Himmler kept her as firmly as possible in the background. She was, nevertheless, very conscious of being the Herr Reichsführer’s wife, and dealt with the local tradespeople on those terms, driving as hard a bargain as she could in the process. They much preferred to deal with Himmler, who, when they encountered him during one of his visits, seemed to them far more human and less socially pretentious. He loved his daughter Gudrun, and it was to see her rather than Marga that he came to Gmund.

Marga had two sisters, Lydia and Bertha; Bertha on 19 April 1936 received an official letter from her brother-in-law which began:

He accused Bertha of making adverse remarks about Heydrich and saying that when he, Himmler, was absent from Berlin she had to run the office for him.

Himmler’s relations with his parents during their final years were friendly and correct. He set his father the task of research into the family ancestry, and a letter about this, sent by the old man from Munich in February 1935, begins: ‘My dear Heinrich, this time your father does not come to you with a request but to give you something’, while his mother scribbles a postscript saying how proud she feels to see her son’s name and picture so often in the papers. But, she adds, he should not work too hard; he must look after himself, and come and see them soon in Munich.

Himmler called to see his parents whenever he could and sent them for drives in his official car, carefully noting that the cost of the fuel should be deducted from his salary.

Himmler’s removal to Berlin preceded by barely a month Hitler’s sudden and savage assault on Roehm and his associates at the head of the S.A. We know that the decision to undertake this purge was not taken lightly, for Roehm, in spite of his threatening ambitions and his moral corruption, was a man towards whom Hitler still felt loyalty and even friendship. It is possible that he was afraid of him. At this early stage in his career as dictator he disliked taking any violent, widespread and public action which might lead to consequences he could not wholly foresee and which he feared he might be unable to control. But Himmler and Goring were determined to be rid of Roehm and break the influence of the S.A., and they joined together in the common cause to persuade Hitler that the commander of the S.A. and his dissatisfied forces were planning a coup d’état.

Roehm had made difficulties for himself by using the place he had won in Hitler’s Cabinet to urge that the S.A. (which now numbered 3 million men) and the regular Army should be merged under a single command that he clearly wanted to assume himself. Hitler, who had his own eye fixed on Hindenburg’s Presidency now that the old man was within a few months of his death, had struck a secret bargain with the High Command of the Army and Navy, agreeing that he would disband the S.A. if they would acquiesce to his becoming President. The S.A., in fact, was no longer of use to him, and its unruly presence in the state was a constant embarrassment now that the campaigns in the streets were won and the sureties of power lay in gaining final control of the armed forces themselves. He had in any case promised Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden, when they had visited Germany on 21 February as Ministers of State, that he would demobilize two-thirds of the S.A. and permit an Allied inspection of the rest.

Heydrich’s files were gutted for evidence that would blacken Roehm and the commanders of the S.A. in the eyes of Hitler, and prove they were conspiring with other acknowledged dissidents, such as the subtle and devious Schleicher, whom Hitler had displaced as Chancellor, and Gregor Strasser, who had in 1932 attempted to draw a radical section of the Nazi party away from Hitler’s authority and was now living in retirement. According to an affidavit made by Frick, Hitler’s Minister of the Interior, and filed at the time of the Nuremberg Trial, it was Himmler rather than Goring who finally determined Hitler to take action.³

Himmler had spent the first weeks of the new phase in his command touring the principal centres where his S.S. detachments were stationed and addressing them on the subject of loyalty to the Führer. In Berlin, Heydrich was preparing for Goring the lists of those members of the S.A. who should be seized. On 6 June, Heydrich’s S.D. was proclaimed by Hitler the official Intelligence office of the Party, from whom no information they required should be withheld. S.A. leaders in Berlin and the south were kept under constant watch.

The pace of events that led to the bloody climax of 30 June began to quicken. Hitler ordered Roehm to give all his storm-troopers a month’s leave from July 1st, and Roehm himself, with Hitler’s agreement, went on a nominal sick-leave to Bavaria on 7 June. He maintained a formal contact with Hitler, who even promised to visit him for further discussions on 30 June. After a conference with Hitler in Berlin on 20 June, Himmler claimed he was shot at while driving in his car to the interment of the body of Carin, Goring’s first wife, in the mausoleum Goring had built at his great country estate of Carinhall, named after her.⁴

At the Nuremberg Trial, Eberstein described how ‘about eight days before 30 June’ he was summoned and told that Roehm was planning a coup d’état. Himmler ordered him to hold his S.S. men ‘in a state of quiet readiness’ in their barracks. Eberstein also gave an account of how the local executions were conducted under orders from Heydrich:

Himmler during the period immediately preceding the purge kept in touch with the War Office, and in particular with Walter von Reichenau, a general in Army Administration who was prepared to work with the Nazis.

Between 21 and 29 June, Hitler toured restlessly from place to place on a variety of official duties, while in Berlin Himmler held a conference of the S.S. High Command on 24 June, while the Army was put on an alert on 25 June. On the same day Heydrich began, with the help of a few chosen officers of the S.D., to prepare the final lists of marked men both in the S.A. and outside it. In the middle of the wedding-feast of Gauleiter Terboven of Essen, for whom both Hitler and Goring acted as witnesses, Himmler arrived from Berlin with urgent news that action must be taken with as little delay as possible. This was no doubt part of Göring’s and Himmler’s scheme to keep Hitler in a state of alarm; after further conference, they left Hitler and returned to Berlin to carry out the final preparations for the purge.

Hitler was finally goaded into action during the small hours of 30 June, when he flew to Munich before dawn and drove by car to the sanitorium at the Tegernsee, where he roused Roehm from sleep, accused him of treachery and had him arrested. Himmler’s special detachment of guards commanded by Sepp Dietrich, the Leibstandarte, whose duty it was to protect Hitler, had been sent south to give all necessary aid, but Hitler, unable or unwilling to face the summary executions that were due to follow, retired to the Brown House, the Party headquarters in Munich. Confusion followed, for Hans Frank, the Bavarian Minister of Justice, was unwilling to execute men in the mass without trial merely because their names were on a typed list provided by Goring and Himmler and underlined in pencil by Hitler. Roehm himself was not finally shot until 2 July.

In Berlin, Goring and Himmler had neither time nor desire to observe the formalities of justice. They had their lists, they had their prisoners, and the executioners, squads of Göring’s private police, stood waiting to shoot their victims at Gross-Lichterfelde. The scene in Göring’s private residence at Leipzigerplatz, where he and Himmler identified the prisoners as they were brought in, accused them of treason and summarily ordered them to be shot as soon as their names had been ticked on the lists, has been described by eye-witnesses — in particular by Papen who, as Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor, Goring thought it wise to protect. He sent his adjutant, Bodenschatz, to bring him to the Leipzigerplatz, where he could be placed under guard. As soon as Papen arrived, Himmler gave the signal by telephone that the Vice-Chancellery could be raided. Bose, Papen’s press counsellor, was shot and his personal staff arrested. When Papen was finally given permission to leave, he found his office occupied by S.S. men and a state of violent confusion existing between them and Goring’s own police. Finally Papen was put under house arrest with an S.S. guard, whose captain said he was responsible to Goring for the Vice-Chancellor’s safety. Without doubt Himmler and Heydrich, new to the exercise of such absolute power, would have had him shot. Goring was more diplomatic.⁶

The orgy of killing that spread throughout Germany during the weekend started from Göring’s headquarters. When they learned that Hitler accompanied by Goebbels was flying to Berlin from Munich, Goring and Himmler gathered their typed sheets together and drove with Frick to the Tempelhof airport to deliver an account of their stewardship. The sky was blood-red as the plane landed, and Hitler, sleepless for forty-eight hours, silently shook hands with the men, who clicked their heels as he greeted them, and then inspected a guard of honour lined up on the tarmac. The scene, unforgettably described by Gisevius who was present, had its own Wagnerian melodrama. Himmler, obsequious but officious, pressed his list of names under Hitler’s bloodshot eyes. While the others stood around at a discreet distance, the Führer ran his finger down the record of the dead or those about to die, while Goring and Himmler whispered to him. Then, with Hitler in the lead, the executioners moved off to the waiting cars, moving silently like a funeral procession in order of precedence.

Goebbels hastened to suppress reports of the mounting deaths in the German press, which was by now under his complete control. Only representatives of the foreign press, who had been hastily convened earlier that afternoon by Goring, were given a bare outline of Roehm’s alleged conspiracy by the man who had invented it. The assassinations did not stop until the following day, which was Sunday, when Frick, unburdening himself to Gisevius, finally expressed his horror at the behaviour of Himmler and Göring. He then went to warn Hitler, who had by now had some sleep, that the S.S. might well offer an even more sinister threat to his security than the S.A. But the Führer only wanted to relax at a tea-party he was giving in the garden of the Chancellery.

For Himmler and Heydrich, the provincials from the south, the massacre of 30 June was a rapid initiation into the ways of Hitler’s court. Heydrich was created a lieutenant-general of the S.S. with effect from the date the men he had listed had begun to face the firing-squad. Goring received the personal congratulations of Hindenburg, sent from his deathbed. On 26 July the S.S. was formally given its independence by Hitler. When Hindenburg eventually died on 2 August, Hitler merged the offices of President and Chancellor and made himself Der Führer, Supreme Head of the State, and also Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Reich. The Army was immediately required to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler in person.

On the day before Hitler’s proclamation of the independence of the S.S., their associates in Vienna murdered the Austrian Federal Chancellor, Dr Dollfuss, as part of an abortive attempt to seize Vienna for the Austrian Nazis. Hitler at once disowned any part in this plot that had failed, not because he disapproved of what had been attempted but because it had been both ill-timed and unsuccessful. As would be expected, there is no exact record that either Himmler or Heydrich were directly involved in the instructions given to the S.S. in Austria. It must at least have shaken Hitler’s confidence in the discretion of his S.S. commanders. Although they remained strictly silent at this stage, when Hitler chose to dissociate himself from the assassination, they were at a later and more favourable time after the Anschluss to hear the Austrian S.S. men who died during the course of the putsch proclaimed as martyrs by Rudolf Hess. In July 1934, however, when Hitler was still involved in the aftermath of the Roehm purge, this bloody act by his adherents in Austria compromised still further the heroic reputation he was attempting to build up in the world outside Germany. It is not known whether he reprimanded the men he had so recently promoted into the select ranks of the Nazi leadership, but at the very least, Himmler must have carried some responsibility for the indiscreet murder of the Chancellor, since the Austrian S.S. obtained their arms from the S.S. in Germany. Among the men arrested in Austria was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a lawyer whom Heydrich had employed as his agent. After Heydrich’s assassination in 1942, Kaltenbrunner was to take over the responsibilities Heydrich had exercised in Berlin.

Now that the S.S. was an entirely independent force, responsible through Himmler only to Hitler himself, Himmler became absorbed in consolidating its membership and carrying still further his growing obsession with their racial purity and their loyalty to his idea of establishing them as a special Order in the Party and the State. His concern was more for the quality of the S.S. than for their numbers. As we have seen, he had already begun, before 30 June, to remove those men who had been too hurriedly recruited after the seizure of power and who failed to pass his stringent tests. According to Eberstein at Nuremberg, during the period 1934-5 some 60,000 men were released from the S.S. Nevertheless, the S.S. was kept at a strength in the region of 200,000 men and represented a formidable force which made the Army, already divided in its attitude to Hitler, increasingly anxious. But Himmler’s natural caution always made him wary of stirring up trouble. He preferred to work in secret, though he was always prepared to make public statements about the high standards he exacted from the S.S. and its undying dedication to Hitler.

From 1934 the S.S. was forbidden to take part in any troop manoeuvres with the Army, although some of its members were Army reservists, nor did its members openly receive a specifically military training. Nevertheless they were armed with small-calibre rifles and were trained to shoot. They were now vigorously selected for their Nordic excellence. As Himmler put it, the S.S. was to be ‘a National Socialist Soldier Order of Nordic Men’.

As Gisevius said when giving evidence at Nuremberg,⁷ ‘The members had to be so-called Nordic types… if I am not mistaken, the distinguishing characteristics of men and women went as far as underarm perspiration.’ The moral deception involved in recruitment was, Gisevius claimed, often irreparable; men joined frequently out of an honest desire to assist a force dedicated, as it seemed, to order and decency in contrast to the degenerate hooliganism of the S.A., only to find themselves later involved in the criminal practices imposed on them by Heydrich and Himmler. Large numbers of the S.S. were part-time men who pursued their normal activities, except for special occasions and national emergencies, giving only spare time to their S.S. duties. The oath taken by every man on entering the S.S. was: ‘I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer and Reich Chancellor, loyalty and bravery. I vow to you, and to those you have named to command me, obedience unto death, so help me God.’⁸

Heydrich had in 1932 founded a leadership school at Bad-Toelz in Bavaria, a centre for training which was to be maintained, with considerable variation in its curriculum, until well into the years of the war. Heydrich was as much concerned with the intelligence as he was with the physique of the S.S. leader. Sport, gymnastics and other activities that imposed the meaning of discipline on the students were the basis of their education, together with the Nazi version of history, geography, militarism and racial consciousness.

Himmler was determined to establish a centre for the S.S. leadership which would be worthy of the racial purification they represented. Though Himmler’s mind had moved far from the Catholicism in which he had been brought up, the self-dedication of the Catholic monastic orders influenced him in devising his plans for this centre. Even Hitler compared him with Ignatius Loyola. Walter Schellenberg, who had studied both medicine and law at the University of Bonn and was one of the bright young intellectuals who joined Heydrich’s S.D., was later to become one of the inner circle of men who made a study of Himmler and learned how to control him. In his Memoirs he writes: ‘The S.S. organization had been built up by Himmler on the principles of the Order of the Jesuits. The service statutes and spiritual exercises presented by Ignatius Loyola formed a pattern which Himmler assiduously tried to copy.’⁹ The Jesuitical ideal in Himmler’s mind merged with his medieval vision of the Teutonic knights, whose combination of religious observance and brutalized chivalry inspired him to found a similar S.S. Order of Knights in a Germanic castle of their own.

The Order of Teutonic Knights founded at the close of the twelfth century with the combined aim of conquest and conversion, had its centre in the castle of Marienburg, which became the residence of the Grand Master of the Order. The Teutonic Knights boasted alike of their valour and their statesmanship, their self-denial and their skill as administrators, and at the height of their power in the fourteenth century they stretched their conquests through Poland as far as the Baltic States. The image of the Grand Master became a part of Himmler’s obsession, but his mind, incapable of largeness of thought or inspiration, could only absorb simplified concepts from past history out of which he attempted to create dogmas for the present. He began to see himself as Grand Master of a modern Teutonic order designed to rid Nordic German society of degenerate infiltration by Jewish blood. Like the medieval Teutonic Knights, he also looked east towards that other great threat to German purity, the inferior Slav races with their evil communist doctrines. As he put it himself in 1936: ‘We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevistic revolution of sub-humans be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without.’¹⁰

For inspiration he founded the new Teutonic castle of Wewelsburg in the forests near Paderborn, an ancient town in Westphalia with historic associations that went back to Charlemagne. Wewelsburg was built on the foundations of a medieval burgh; it was designed for him by an architect called Bartels and took a year to construct, at a cost of some 11 million marks.

According to Schellenberg, the castle was run like a monastery and a hierarchic order of leadership after the pattern of the Catholic Church was imposed on those members of the S.S. privileged to visit Wewelsburg for the regular retreats organized by Himmler, who was, in Jesuitical terms, General of the Order. Each member of the secret Chapter had his own chair with a silver name-plate, and ‘each had to devote himself to a ritual of spiritual exercises aimed mainly at concentration’, the equivalent of prayer, before discussing the higher policy of the S.S.¹¹

Wewelsburg was Himmler’s only indulgence in the kind of luxury with which most of the Nazi leaders were surrounded. The castle was as magnificently appointed in the medieval manner as Carinhall, Göring’s vast residence north of Berlin which he was extending and reconstructing at the same time as Himmler was building Wewelsburg. The design and association of the rooms were supposed to conjure the spirit of Germany’s greatness; each was named after an historic figure such as Frederick the Great, and a collection of relics of the past was assembled in the castle’s museum. Himmler’s own room was named after Heinrich I, Henry the Fowler, the king who a thousand years before had been the founder of the German Reich.

The S.S. leaders, whether they were intellectuals or not, had to submit to these historical charades in order to please Himmler, who gave more and more of his time to the detailed study of such useless history as his power increased. Himmler had in him the makings of a recluse, a ruthless anchorite devoted to his studies and determined to remake mankind in the particular image conjured up by his eccentric scholarship. The great tragedy of our time is that for several years he possessed the power to experiment in Europe at the cost of millions of lives.

He had become by now violently anti-Catholic and anti-Christian, substituting for the faith in which he had been reared a facile acceptance of those particular superstitions, such as astrology, that suited his Germanic prejudice.¹² The Catholic Church came under attack in Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Guards), the illustrated weekly journal of the S.S. which began publication in April 1935 with the S.S. chronicler Gunter d’Alquen acting as editor under the special direction of Heydrich.

Himmler founded at the same time an institution known as the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) for research into Germanic racial origins.¹³ Himmler made himself President of this Society, and its director was Professor Dr Walther Wuest, whom Himmler made an honorary captain in the S.S. The institute had a special task to link the present with the past by investigating the claims of the Nordic peoples of belonging to Indo-Germanic stock and to revive the spiritual and cultural heritage of this, the noblest race on earth. Ahnenerbe undertook, for example, extensive archaeological excavations of Germanic remains at Nauen and Altkristenberg, and even sent an expedition to Tibet. To pay for these researches Himmler turned once more to his friend Keppler, Hitler’s economic adviser, who founded a society of industrialists called the Friends of the Reichsführer S.S. which subscribed large sums to support Himmler in this work.

The supervision of the concentration camps passed to Himmler and the S.S. after the Roehm purge. Heydrich took charge of this work and made Eicke, now a brigadier-general of the S.S., his Inspector of Camps. The Death’s Head Unit, which Eicke had trained for Himmler, took charge of those camps which had been established on a permanent basis, such as Dachau, the so-called model camp in the south, Buchenwald, founded centrally near Weimar in 1937, and the northern camp of Sachsenhausen, near Berlin-Oranienburg. The base camps and their subsidiaries multiplied with the development of tyranny until their establishment reached nearly a hundred centres before the war, and afterwards extended over the whole of occupied Europe with the spread of Hitler’s conquests.

The record of these camps, in which between five and six million Jewish victims alone are estimated to have died by the end of the war, became the ultimate indictment of the Nazi system. Their continued existence over a period of twelve years makes our century, which should have been the most civilized, one of the worst in human history. A pathological fear of the camps and what was done in them to helpless people spread all over Germany and occupied Europe; even to admit knowledge of them at the time they were in operation became a lasting inhibition in the minds of most German people. Open recognition of detailed facts which were first made known at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg after the war and have been elaborated at subsequent trials is still avoided by the majority of people both inside and outside Germany.

The principal author of this extended act of human degradation was Himmler, who believed his task to be a necessary duty in which human feeling had no proper place. Suffering was inevitable when a mass-deterrent on this scale had to be created, and he believed the guardians in the camps were more the victims of necessity than those whom they oppressed. It would be quite wrong to think that Himmler had no conscience and no pity; but his real pity was given to the men and women of his Death’s Head units who had to have this fearful burden placed upon them. It became a constant anxiety that preyed upon him and eventually destroyed his health. His feelings about this, the worst of all his tasks, he was eventually to let loose on Kersten, the man who relieved his pain and became as a result the confidant of his most secret thoughts.

During this early phase, however, Himmler took great pride in the concentration camps. In October 1935, after receiving birthday congratulations from Hitler, he conducted Hess and other distinguished guests round the show places of Dachau, where the following month a unit of the S.S. additional to the Death’s Head specialists were to be housed in cheerful barracks built for them by the prisoners. This new unit shared some garrison duty with the camp guards, but their main purpose was to undergo military training. The base camps had married quarters attached to them, and even in the worst phases of the history of the camps during the war the wives and families of the S.S. guards had to accustom themselves to the experience of living near these centres of torture and death.¹⁴

After the Roehm purge, the para-military nature of the S.S. was soon to be developed. Hitler had to watch not only those who were critical of his regime abroad and might have been prepared to take action against him, but also the High Command of the German Army, which still had the remnants of power to depose him if the will could be turned into the deed. The period of his gradual open defiance of the Allies and of the terms imposed by them in the Treaty of Versailles was about to begin, and the pattern of training for the S.S. changed in accordance with the stages through which Hitler’s successful defiance of the Allies and his subjection of the High Command were to pass. In January 1935, he regained the Saar by plebiscite; in March he announced conscription for the Army and the open establishment of an Air Force, Goring’s Luftwaffe; in June Ribbentrop, then Ambassador in Britain, succeeded in bringing off the Naval Pact which permitted Germany to develop a limited naval fleet; while in December came the shady dealings over Ethiopia which were in the end to leave Mussolini free to proceed with its conquest.

Hitler decided the S.S. should provide a full division of men trained for war, and he induced the Army to accept this anomalous position by making it part of the plan for conscription. In November 1934 a lieutenant-general in the Army, Paul Hauser, was selected to take charge of this aspect of S.S. training. Hauser took over Heydrich’s leadership school at Bad-Toelz and turned it into the first of a number of highly disciplined establishments for training officer cadets. According to Reitlinger, Hauser after the war regarded his S.S. school at Bad-Toelz as an ideal model for the training of NATO officers. His school represented the beginning of Himmler’s Waffen S.S., the military section of the S.S. corps which was later to become an international force when the S.S. spread its recruitment among the more ‘suitable’ races in the conquered territories.

Himmler’s relations with Hitler, with Goring, Frick, and Schacht, the banker who became Hitler’s Minister of Economics in 1934, with the Army High Command, and above all, with his principal officer, Heydrich, were governed by the opportunism which controlled the actions of all the Nazis, whatever the level of the position they held in the Party or the leadership. Opportunism is the peculiar vice of politicians, and the Nazi mentality, with its complete rejection of any kind of political morality, forced the pace of the intrigues by means of which they tried to outwit each other. Hitler was quite prepared to squander the limited talents of his commandants, ministers and advisers by allowing them to undermine each other’s powers while leaving him supreme as the final arbiter of what after all should be done.

Himmler’s place in this strange and ugly administration was still circumscribed on the one hand by Frick, the weak but obstinate bureaucrat who was Minister of the Interior, and on the other by the High Command of the Army, who disliked the continued existence outside their control of a quarter of a million men in S.S. uniform just as they had disliked the larger, but far less well disciplined forces of Roehm. As far as the bureaucrats were concerned, now that Goring’s attention was diverted from the political police in his pursuit of other interests, Himmler and Heydrich made short work of Frick and of Guertner, the Minister of Justice, both of whom sought during 1934-5 to restrain them and their agents in the S.S. and the Gestapo from seizing any person they wished and holding them in ‘protective custody’. Frick even attempted to draft a law, initially limited to Prussia, giving prisoners in the camps a right of access to the courts. When this draft was put on the agenda of the Prussian Ministerial Council by Göring, Himmler was invited to attend the meeting, though he was not a member of the Council, and he saw to it that the draft was rejected. His victory over Frick was complete, when on 2 May 1935, the Prussian court of Administration accepted that the activities of the Gestapo were outside their jurisdiction.

It was not, however, until 10 February 1936 that Hitler finally decreed that the Gestapo was a special police organization with powers that extended to the whole of Germany. The following June Himmler was made Chief of the German Police in the Ministry of the Interior, so confirming by right of decree what had been the practice for a considerable period owing to the absence of any effective opposition. Frick, though technically Himmler’s superior in police matters, gave up the hopeless task of attempting to interfere with him.¹⁵

Another open critic of Himmler was Schacht, the banker, who was a ruthless and ambitious autocrat. Having been made Minister of Economics by Hitler, he was determined to conduct his affairs in his own way, though he was eventually to be superseded by Goring. Gisevius states that he went to Schacht’s residence and at his request searched it with an engineer for hidden microphones when the Minister suspected that Heydrich’s agents were spying on him and recording his sharp-tongued remarks; they found a microphone built into the telephone. Schacht in his memoirs, My First 76 Years, claims that Himmler had threatened him at the time he had accepted office, and had even gone so far as to tell him to resign; Schacht sent a curt message back that he would resign only when the Führer told him to do so and that the S.S. should keep out of his way.

The strategy adopted by Himmler and Heydrich against the High Command of the Wehrmacht was even more insidious and led up to the notorious cases against Blomberg and Fritsch early in 1938. Werner von Blomberg, Hitler’s Minister of Defence until he was dismissed in 1938 for marrying a prostitute without knowing of her police record, was ostensibly an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler. Blomberg was tall, white-haired and smooth-faced, a man with insufficient intelligence or guile to match the cunning of those determined to be rid of him. His effective opposition to the extensive militarization of the S.S. when conscription was introduced by Hitler in 1935 was sufficient to make Himmler his enemy.

Werner von Fritsch had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht in 1934 without Blomberg’s approval; indeed Fritsch and Beck, his Chief of Staff, who was later to be closely involved in the Army plot against Hitler’s life, were rumoured to be un-co-operative, and opposed to the introduction of conscription, though Hitler continued to have confidence in them. The rumours were instigated by Himmler, and Goring, who by 1935 wanted Command of the Army for himself, was by now prepared to take any suitable opportunity to denigrate both Blomberg and Fritsch. The atmosphere in Berlin vibrated with gossip about putsch and counter-putsch.

On 19 January 1935, Blomberg, as part of an attempt to restore friendly relations, invited both Goring and Himmler to address the High Command in the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy, but they used the occasion to make it clear to the Army that a military putsch would be illegal. Nevertheless Blomberg went even further in his efforts to appease Himmler; he invited him in the following month to address a gathering of Army officers in the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten in Hamburg. Conscription, though still unannounced, was already agreed and Himmler took his revenge on Blomberg by announcing that the S.S. in time of war would have to be increased in numbers to fight the enemy inside the frontiers of Germany while the Army fought abroad; in this event the S.S. could resist any treacherous stab in the back on the home front such as happened in 1918. As he spoke of the ideal men he had enlisted in the S.S., he seemed to be challenging the racial purity of the officers in his audience.

In January 1935 Blomberg had appointed Canaris as the Chief of Military Intelligence, the Abwehr, an office which Heydrich, who had carefully informed on Canaris’s predecessor, would have liked to absorb into the S.D., though this was hardly possible at the time. Thus began the uneasy relationship between Heydrich and his old naval instructor which covered the divergent political exploitation of their two Intelligence services. An initial working agreement, known as the Ten Commandments, limited Canaris’s operations to military and not political espionage. A superficially friendly social atmosphere was re-established, and Heydrich was able to relieve the tension once more by playing his violin in Canaris’s family circle. But the Admiral soon grew to fear Heydrich and his ultimate influence on Hitler and was prepared to receive secret information from such men as Helldorf, the Chief of Police in Berlin, about the activities of both Himmler and Heydrich.

Himmler’s interest was by now no longer limited to Germany. He thought of those Germans who lived abroad, and in 1936 came to terms with Ernst Bohle, head of the foreign organization of the Nazi Party, which was concerned with spreading Nazism among Germans outside the Reich and establishing whatever proved possible in the way of espionage by setting up agents for Heydrich’s S.D. abroad. Out of this intrusion into fields which, if they belonged properly to any department, were the concern of Canaris for Military Intelligence or of the Foreign Office, arose the curious incident of the Tukhachewski plot against the Stalin regime and the forged documents which Heydrich supplied to the Soviet government.

Marshal Mikhail Tukhachewski was at this time Deputy Defence Commissar of the Soviet Union, and had been in 1926 the principal Russian signatory of the protocols which had introduced German military experts into Russia. The story, as it has been reconstructed subsequently from statements and admissions by various men involved, ¹⁶ seems to have been that Heydrich heard late in 1936 that Marshal Tukhachewski and other generals in the Russian High Command were planning a military putsch against Stalin. Two lines of action were possible to make use of this information; the first was to support the putsch, the other to see that knowledge of it reached Stalin in such a form that the largest possible number of Russian generals should be arrested and tried for treason. Canaris, who also knew of the plot, favoured the first line until a more opportune time came to use the second; Himmler and Heydrich wanted to exploit the second line of action immediately. Later Heydrich claimed that Hitler authorized the forging of documents by Behrens of the S.D. and a Russian political agent who was in the pay of the Germans. The ‘documents’ which were actually used as evidence in the subsequent secret treason trial in Moscow in 1937, bore the forged signatures not only of the Russian generals, but of the German officers with whom they were represented as being in touch. These papers were sold by Heydrich to Stalin through Russian agents. Stalin is said to have paid 3 million gold roubles for the evidence of his generals’ treason; but he marked the money, since he rightly assumed that it would be used by the Germans to pay their agents in Russia, and that this would enable the police to trace a number of S.D. spies. Later it also emerged that Stalin may well have planned the whole operation and made use of the S.D. to provide him with the evidence he needed to convict Tukhachewski and his associates.

The final stage in the modification of Himmler’s power did not come until the summer of 1936. This was preceded by the legal recognition of the Gestapo in a Prussian statute of 10 February in which a clause was inserted that no judicial appeal could be instituted against any decision made by the Gestapo; its activities were absolute. By a succession of decrees starting on 17 June, Himmler was, as we have seen, made Chief of the German Police, an office still separate from that of the Reichsführer S.S.¹⁷

Himmler celebrated his new appointment with an odd ceremonial on 2 July at which he commemorated the thousandth anniversary of the death of Heinrich I, the protagonist of German expansion in the East. This took place at Quedlinburg, a town in the region of the Harz mountains which had been founded by Heinrich.

In his speech about one of the ‘greatest Germans ever’, as Gunther d’Alquen called him in a glowing description of the event, Himmler praised the ‘clever, cautious, tenacious politician’ in terms he felt also suited himself. He used the occasion to attack the influence of the Church in German history; Heinrich, he said, had refused to allow the Church to interfere in State affairs. According to Himmler, this Saxon Duke known as Henry the Fowler, who became the founder of the German state, ‘never forgot that the strength of the German people lies in the purity of their blood’.¹⁸

In an article published in the same year, Himmler impressed once again on readers, whom he addressed as fellow peasants, that the precious heritage of blood in the German race must be maintained by force:

The S.S. themselves, he wrote, stood side by side with the German peasant stock, and were ceaselessly vigilant to protect the noble German blood:

Himmler’s immersion in the past did not limit his interest in the future. He always urged his S.S. men to procreate in order to increase the number of pure-blooded German stock in Europe. This advice culminated in Himmler’s celebrated edict published in October 1939, in which he exhorted the S.S. to conceive children before going into battle. He watched the S.S. birthrate most carefully, but statistics for August 1936 which have been preserved show that the average size for S.S. families at that time was only between one and two children. At the same time, Himmler was determined to take care of the mothers of illegitimate children provided both they and their babies met the required racial standards.

In 1936 the S.S. became the sponsor of the Lebensborn (Fount of Life) maternity homes, in which Himmler took great pride and which, as innumerable surviving records show, he supervised personally down to the last detail. In taking responsibility for the welfare of these young Germans, the S.S. ensured that they were suitably indoctrinated from the very start of their education, and every man had to contribute to the maintenance of these homes with deductions from his pay, the main burden being borne by bachelors.¹⁹

Himmler was true to his own teaching. Conscious, no doubt, that many people thought his own appearance remarkably ‘un-Aryan’, he ordered elaborate researches to be undertaken into his ancestry. The files of memoranda on this subject still exist, and they continue well into the period of the war; the centre for this research was at Wewelsburg, from which statements supplemented by elaborate genealogical forms would arrive as each stage of the investigation back to the eighteenth century was gradually completed. Similar research was undertaken into the ancestry of Marga Himmler. As soon as Himmler’s interest became known, namesakes would write to him begging to be acknowledged as kinsmen of the Reichsführer S.S.

Himmler, an addict to detail, spent time in his office poring over letters and memoranda all concerned with proving the purity of his blood and that of his family, his staff and the men under his command. The surviving documentation on all this research, which represented years of painstaking work by large numbers of genealogists and clerks, and in many cases bitter heart-searching by those unable to prove their ancestry to be free of defilement, amounted to thousands of items in the bursting files of undestroyed Nazi history. After the war had already begun, Himmler intervened personally to reprimand an S.S. man who had accepted refreshments from the father of a Jew he was escorting from a concentration camp, and in April 1940 he sent a long letter of sympathy to another S.S. man at the front who had put on paper the terrible shock he received when he had discovered he possessed Jewish blood. He wrote antedating ancestral purity by a further century:

Himmler softens the blow he so sympathetically deals by adding that if the man were to die at the front, the S.S. will look after his wife and children.

During the war Himmler formed a permanent association with a girl called Hedwig who was his personal secretary and by whom in 1942 and 1944 he had two further children, Helge, a son, and Nanette Dorothea, a daughter. Hedwig was the daughter of a regular soldier, who had been at the time of her birth in 1912 a sergeant-major in the German Army. In 1936 she was awarded the standard sports certificate, the Deutsches Sportabzeichen, for her achievements in swimming, running and jumping. Nevertheless, researches into her ‘Aryan’ ancestry were initiated and continued into the years of the war.²⁰

In spite of the fact that in 1937 Himmler solemnly went through the routine of qualifying for his own S.S. sports badge, forcing his inadequate body to run and to jump until he was persuaded by his adjutants that he had reached the necessary standards, his health was far from good.²¹ He had been suffering from acute headaches for some years, and his congenitally weak constitution produced stomachcramps, the intensity of which was increased by nervous tension resulting from continued worry over his responsibilities. He feared he might be developing cancer, the disease from which his father died.²² It was Wolff who, knowing his suspicion of orthodox treatment, persuaded him in 1934 to undergo massage, and Franz Setzkorn, a nature healer, was called in to soothe away the pain. It was not until 1939 that a man was found who was able to bring more lasting relief to the strained nerves which made Himmler’s stomach twist with cramp and his head feel like a ball of fire. This was Felix Kersten, the cosmopolitan Finnish masseur whose second home before the war was in Holland. Kersten’s reputation for alleviating nervous pains had enabled him to maintain a lucrative practice in Berlin, near to which he had bought a country estate in 1934 called Hartzwalde. At this stage, however, they had not met.

In the middle of January 1937 Himmler was once more invited to address officers of the Wehrmacht during a course of political instruction designed to prepare them for the war which Hitler had decided was inevitable.²³ He did not spare them the detailed explanation of his views. He began by tracing the history of the S.S. from its original formation in 1923 as shock troops to support Hitler, and its reformation in 1925 in squadrons set up in various cities to patrol meetings. But from these small beginnings, said Himmler, the noble ideal of an elite corps had sprung. ‘I am a strong believer in the doctrine that, in the end, only good blood can achieve the greatest, most enduring things in the world’, said Himmler. In recruiting his S.S. men:

For this reason, Himmler continued, very exacting standards were set for the recruiting of the S.S., including a minimum height, 1·7 metres, and the careful examination of portrait photographs by Himmler himself, who was determined to detect ‘traits of foreign blood, excessive cheek-bones’. Special burdens were placed on those selected — ‘valuable personnel is never trained by means of easy service’ — and in spite of the economic hardships of the time, the S.S. men were expected to provide their own uniforms. Now, in 1937, the ranks of the S.S. stood at 210,000; only one in ten of those who applied to join were accepted. When a young man of, say, eighteen years wanted to become an S.S. man, ‘we ask for the political reputation of his parents, brothers and sisters, the record of his ancestry as far back as 1750… . We ask for a record of hereditary health,’ and for ‘a certificate from the race commission’, which was made up of S.S. leaders, anthropologists and physicians, who conducted a full examination of the candidate. If he was only eighteen, the minimum age for consideration, he spent three months as an applicant, then after taking the oath to the Führer he became a recognized candidate for the S.S., spending a year obtaining his sports diploma and a further two years of military service in the regular Army. He then returned to the S.S. and was ‘with special thoroughness instructed in ideology’, learning among other things about the S.S. marriage law. Then, but only then, according to Himmler, was he finally accepted into the S.S.

Himmler did not refrain from putting himself on exhibition. ‘The Reichsführer of the S.S.,’ he said, ‘is just as much an S.S. man in the sense of the S.S. organization as the common man of the front. On this 9th of November he is being awarded the dagger, and this is the occasion when he promises to abide by the marriage law and the disciplinary laws of the S.S.’

Himmler then laid stress on the importance of good health. City life with its rush made men ‘grow pale and fat… which is never good for the State. If we desire to remain young we have to be sportsmen.’ He went on to describe how he expected men to practise in using both left and right hands equally in learning to fire pistols and rifles, or in putting the shot; everyone from eighteen to fifty years of age must train to keep fit.

Ideological training went along with physical training. ‘Weekly periods of instruction are held during which pages from Hitler’s Mein Kampf are read. The older a person, the more steadfast must he be in his ideology.’

He then described the various divisions into which the S.S. were divided, including the S.D.: ‘the great ideological Intelligence service of the Party and, in the long run, of the state,’ and the Death’s Head units, which ‘originated from the guard units of the concentration camps’. The prisoners in the camps he described as ‘the offal of criminals and freaks, for the most part, slave-like souls’. To attempt to indoctrinate such people was a waste of time; just to train them to keep themselves clean was as much as need be done. ‘The people are taught to wash themselves twice daily, and to use the tooth brush, with which most of them have been unfamiliar. Hardly another nation would be as humane as we are.’

After dealing with the objective of the Security Service, he turned to the S.S. marriage laws. ‘No S.S. man can get married without the approval of the Reichsführer S.S. A physical examination of the bride and guarantees for the bride’s ideological and human character are required. In addition, a genealogical table up to 1750 is required; this results in tremendous work. It is our concern that our men get married.’

He went on to describe how he was at that moment in process of unifying the German police system — ‘We now have for the first time in German history a Reich Police.’ The importance of the police in time of war was paramount, fighting in ‘a fourth theatre of war, internal Germany,’ against the insidious forces of ‘Jewish-Marxist-Bolshevist influence… It is the obligation of the S.S., and the police to solve positively the problem of internal security.’

He ended the speech with further references to the supreme racial struggle in which Germany was engaged:

This speech, as the generals present must have realized, was a direct challenge to the Army and must have reminded them of Roehm’s assaults on their authority, though coming now from a source which was far more powerful, secret and sinister than anything Roehm had represented. The speech had the support of Hitler and was circulated, in a shortened form, as an official document, while the full text, taken down in shorthand, was smuggled abroad and published later in the year in an anti-Nazi journal. By that time, Hitler had favoured Himmler still further by announcing on 15 May that decisions issued from his office should have the same validity as ministerial decrees.

By the summer Berlin was seething with rumours that the S.S. were planning a putsch against the High Command. Fritsch, the Chief of Staff, was under surveillance by Heydrich’s agents, while Blomberg was about to cause his own downfall. When Hitler held his notorious staff conference on 5 November, neither the field-marshal nor the general was enthusiastic in response to his extraordinary outburst about the necessity for war with the Western Powers and the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia. When Blomberg, after consultations with Goring, approached Hitler with the request that he might marry a typist with whom, at the age of sixty, he had become infatuated, Hitler consented with good grace and, along with Goring, even acted as a witness of the wedding on 12 January 1938.

The main facts of the disgraceful sequel to this marriage are well known, though accounts differ considerably about the nature of the complicity of Goring, Himmler and Heydrich in Blomberg’s downfall. The dossier proving that the bride’s mother kept a brothel and revealing that Frau Blomberg had herself a police record for prostitution emerged immediately after the wedding from the office of Count Helldorf, the Police President of Berlin. When Helldorf saw it he decided not to give it to Heydrich; he tactfully took the papers first of all to General Keitel, Blomberg’s counsellor at the Ministry, whose son had recently married Blomberg’s daughter. Keitel refused point-blank to handle the matter, and it was decided the papers should be sent next to Goring. According to Gisevius, Goring had some knowledge of the matter from the start, though there is other evidence that contradicts this. Josef Meisinger of the Gestapo, before his execution in Poland in 1947, claimed that he had faked the evidence against Blomberg’s young wife, using her mother’s record for the purpose, and that only Heydrich knew the forgery was on file waiting to be used once the wedding was over. If this were so, it seems most unlikely that Himmler was unaware of it. Whatever machination was used, the result was the same; Blomberg was disgraced and forced to retire.

This isolated Fritsch, about whom Heydrich also held damaging evidence implying that the general was a homosexual. Meisinger had also been in charge of this work. A professional blackmailer called Schmidt had been interrogated about Fritsch in 1935 and had claimed that he was blackmailing him for homosexuality. Schmidt was produced once again by Heydrich, Himmler and Goring to disgrace their second victim. Fritsch was directly charged with homosexual practices by Himmler in the presence of Hitler on 26 January; Schmidt was called in to identify Fritsch. Hitler did not want to act too hastily; he put Fritsch on indefinite leave pending some form of enquiry into the charges, while Himmler attempted to blacken him still further in the sight of the Führer by suggesting he would be the cause of a military demonstration against the regime when Hitler addressed the Reichstag on 31 January.

Meanwhile, during further interrogations of Schmidt, their principal witness, the Gestapo officials made a terrible discovery. It appeared that he had made a mistake in his deposition of 1935; the military gentleman from whom he had been exacting payments had been a retired cavalry officer called Captain von Frisch. Gestapo officials went at once to interrogate this officer at his house on 15 January, and found this new testimony was only too true. The Gestapo’s primary case against Fritsch was now destroyed.

At a meeting with Beck and Rundstedt of the General Staff, Hitler finally agreed to allow official enquiries to be made jointly by the Army and the Ministry of Justice into the evidence against Fritsch. He insisted, however, that the enquiries were to be conducted in association with the Gestapo. This enquiry placed both Himmler and Heydrich in a most difficult position. The assessors now had the legal right to interrogate Schmidt, who was in the hands of the Gestapo. Himmler, naturally enough, had been opposed to any further enquiries from the start of the campaign by the Army to initiate them. Nebe, who appears to have been in touch with both sides in the struggle over Fritsch, had already given Gisevius a hint of the truth about the Gestapo’s dilemma. The assessors were therefore encouraged to insist that the Gestapo hand their witness over. In the end, after close questioning, Schmidt unwillingly gave the assessors the address of the house where, he claimed, Fritsch had retired to fetch the money his blackmailer was demanding from him. The assessors visited the address, and found in a neighbouring house the Captain von Frisch who was the cause of the Gestapo’s embarrassment. He was in bed seriously ill. During the visit the Captain’s housekeeper admitted that the Gestapo had been there the previous month; she even remembered the date, 15 January. As soon as the Gestapo were informed of this visit, they took the Captain from his bed and placed him under arrest.

Hitler had by now announced the major changes in the High Command and in certain posts. He abolished the Ministry of War and assumed control himself of the organization, the O.K.W. or Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, which replaced it. These changes had been made public by him in a broadcast on 3 February, and in the course of a meeting of the principal officers of the new High Command the following day he went into great detail about both the Blomberg and the Fritsch cases. Ultimately he agreed to a special Court of Honour being convened on 11 March under the presidency of Goring, as the most senior officer in the armed forces.

Everyone was aware that the Fritsch case had broader implications than the reputation of a senior officer who had been wrongly used. According to Gisevius, the determination to turn the occasion into an exposure of the Gestapo was spreading to a wide circle of influential men, ranging from Admiral Raeder and Brauchitsch, whom Hitler had made his new Commander-in-Chief, to Guertner, the Minister of Justice, and Schacht, who had finally resigned from his Ministry the previous November because he could no longer tolerate Goring’s interference in economic affairs. If, as Jodl noted in his diary on 26 February, both Raeder and Guertner believed Fritsch to be guilty, their sole interest in the case would be to expose the Gestapo. Blomberg, in one of his final interviews with Hitler, had gone so far as to say that Fritsch was not ‘a man for the women’.

Fritsch, who was a Prussian nobleman as well as an officer who believed in strict military formality and etiquette, behaved illadvisedly during the intervening weeks before the Court of Honour. He therefore to some extent played into the hands of his enemies. If, as Gisevius claims, he was ‘an absolutely honourable man’, he should have formally denied the charges and then left the dispute entirely in the hands of his lawyers and later of his defence counsel, once he knew the Army was on his side and that a judicial enquiry followed by a Court of Honour was to take place. However, after Himmler’s vicious denunciations he did not wait even to be retired; he insisted on resigning, which not only made him appear guilty but created legal difficulties when the Army proposed to set up a Court of Honour in which the details of the evidence against him could be subject to official examination. He further jeopardized his position by admitting he had once taken ‘a needy Hitlerjunge’ into his household, and then, as an ill-considered demonstration of his innocence, went on his own initiative to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation. In February he decided to challenge Himmler, whom he regarded as his principal enemy, to a duel at pistol-point.²⁴ Rundstedt, to whom he entrusted his formal challenge for delivery to Himmler, considered the whole situation impossible, and never delivered it. He eventually gave it to Hossbach, Hitler’s adjutant, who kept it as a curiosity. It would be interesting to know what Himmler’s reaction might have been had he received it.

Faced with Schmidt’s admission to the assessors, Heydrich decided the Gestapo had better lie its way out of the difficulties. He had been directly responsible for the accusations levelled at Fritsch in Hitler’s presence on 26 January, ten days after the discovery by his investigators that Schmidt was in error over the two similar names. Heydrich categorically denied that any Gestapo official had been to Frisch’s house on 15 January, and he then had Schmidt brow-beaten into a further admission that he had taken money from both men, and that therefore both Frisch and Fritsch were guilty. The unfortunate Frisch was prised out of the Gestapo’s grip and placed at the disposal of the Minister of Justice. He admitted his guilt and confirmed that he had been a victim of Schmidt’s blackmail. The final ordeal proved too much for him; he collapsed and died.

Himmler and Heydrich were now dependent on Schmidt and the Gestapo witnesses keeping to the lies they had been ordered to tell while giving their evidence before the Court of Honour on 11 March. Brauchitsch, Raeder and two Senate Presidents of the Supreme Court in Leipzig were to sit in judgment; Goring, as President of the Court of Honour, would, according to custom in such tribunals, conduct the examination.

Everything was set for what promised to be an extraordinary scene. The judges, except for Goring, were opposed to the Gestapo, but Goring had power to conduct the proceedings in his own way. A great deal depended on Fritsch; he was obstinately convinced that his name would be cleared, but would he develop the occasion into an assault on the Gestapo now that he had been denied the satisfaction of shooting Himmler? Would the Gestapo witnesses be able to sustain their latest story? Would Schmidt break down, or would Goring protect him? Would Heydrich and Himmler be called as witnesses? Nebe told Gisevius that Heydrich was certain the Court of Honour would mean the end of his career. The situation was so tense that this case to determine whether or not a man was a homosexual became one of those rarer moments in the history of the Nazi regime when the pressures of resistance to Hitler might well have erupted on a scale sufficient to shatter the foundations on which his tyranny was based.

No one, however, had reckoned on what actually did happen. On 10 March, the day before the Court of Honour, after a month of growing political crisis in Vienna, Hitler gave orders for the Army to be prepared to invade Austria two days later. At the very moment the Court began its session Hitler was using Seyss-Inquart and other Nazi leaders in Austria to force Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, into an impossible position so that the Army should have an excuse to invade. Schuschnigg was proving intractable, and before noon Hitler ordered Goring, Brauchitsch and Raeder to abandon their proceedings and come at once to the Chancellery. Himmler, Heydrich and the Gestapo had won a temporary reprieve. That afternoon Goring began his celebrated conquest of Austria by telephone, and by the following day Austria was in Nazi hands and Himmler was in Linz supervising security arrangements for Hitler’s arrival that afternoon. Fritsch was forgotten in this hour of national triumph.

When the Court was reconvened a week later on 17 March, the whole political atmosphere had changed. Hitler was once more the hero, the great leader, and there was no longer any heart in the military opposition to make a stand against him. It is unlikely, in any event, that Fritsch would have had either the stamina or the effrontery to press his attack home until the Gestapo witnesses were discredited; all he was concerned about was the formal recognition of his innocence. In the end it was Goring himself who decided on the tactics to adopt to protect the Gestapo. He determined to sacrifice Schmidt, whom nobody was concerned to protect, and, by using his authority to bully and threaten him, forced admissions from him which, had they been used to charge the Gestapo with dishonourable treatment of its witness, could have put the case in its proper perspective. But having at least achieved, on the second day of the examination, an admission from Schmidt that he had been lying about Fritsch, Goring hastily called on Fritsch to make a closing statement in his defence, following which he was acquitted.

Both Himmler and Heydrich were far too preoccupied establishing a reign of terror in Austria with the aid of their allies, the Austrian Nazis, to be in attendance at the Court during 17 and 18 March. They left their Gestapo agents to survive as best they could. But both of them had been deeply concerned during January and February; Heydrich’s wife has testified to her husband’s tension during this time, and Schellenberg has told the story of how Heydrich, in a fit of nerves, asked him to dine at his office and came armed because he expected the Army to ‘start marching from Potsdam’. Himmler’s reactions were even more extraordinary. Describing Himmler during the earlier stages of the enquiry, Schellenberg wrote:

Himmler was sufficiently prepared for the Austrian putsch to have ready a new and special uniform of field grey in which to invade Austria. Accompanied by his staff and S.S. bodyguards, all heavily armed, he flew south to Aspern aerodrome, near Vienna. With him was his adjutant Wolff, Walter Schellenberg, who had been in charge of co-ordinating intelligence reports from Austria, and the Austrian official in the S.D., Adolf Eichmann, now a specialist in Jewish affairs, who had prepared lists of the large number of Austrian Jews Himmler was determined should be given no chance to cause trouble.²⁶

The weather was bad and made the flight to Vienna in the overloaded plane unpleasant, and Schellenberg records that Himmler discussed with him the administration of the new state of Ostmark, as Austria was now to be called. They were standing in the rear of the plane when Schellenberg noticed Himmler was leaning against the aircraft door and that the safety-catch was undone. He grasped him by his coat and flung him aside. When Himmler had recovered from the shock, he thanked Schellenberg and said he would be happy to do the same and protect his life for him some day.

Himmler and his entourage arrived at Aspern aerodrome before daybreak. They were uncertain of their reception in Vienna, but by the time they had arrived the struggle for Austria was already over. Hitler’s troops had crossed the frontier overnight and on behalf of the provisional government orders had been given by Seyss-Inquart to the Austrian Army that they were to offer no resistance to the invaders. Himmler, who was Hitler’s most senior representative in Austria, was met by the Austrian Chief of Police, Michael Skubl, whose feelings at having this duty to perform must have been bitter, since he had been appointed by Dollfuss on the very day of his murder by the Nazis. Himmler hurried by car to the Chancellery in Vienna to confer with Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Austrian S.S. Following exactly the procedure he had originated for himself in Germany, Himmler dismissed Skubl and put the police in the charge of Kaltenbrunner. Leaving the immediate control of Vienna in this man’s hands, Himmler left by air for Linz to supervise the reception to be given Hitler that afternoon in the town where he had lived as a child. With him went Seyss-Inquart, now the new Nazi Chancellor of Austria. On the same day Heydrich joined Kaltenbrunner in Vienna, and the Austrian capital began to experience the savagery of Nazi control.

The hysteria of Hitler’s reception in Austria — he had arrived on Saturday, and on Sunday with tears in his eyes had become President of Austria, which was created ‘a province of the German Reich’ by a legal enactment hurriedly put together — did not stop Himmler from warning the Führer against entering Vienna until every security precaution had been taken. He had himself returned there from Linz and set up his headquarters in the Imperial Hotel, while Heydrich commandeered the Metropole for the S.S. and S.D. headquarters. Together the unholy team went to work, Himmler and Heydrich of Germany, Kaltenbrunner and his colleague Odilo Globocnik of Austria.

Kaltenbrunner, who was in 1943 to be appointed successor to Heydrich by Himmler and who after the war was to stand trial at Nuremberg, was a lawyer who had turned to political intrigue. He was a huge man, coarse and tough, with small, penetrating eyes set in a wooden, expressionless face. He was excitable, and would slap the table with his hard, clumsy hands, which were discoloured with nicotine and reminded Schellenberg of the hands of a gorilla. He had joined the S.S. in 1932 and had been imprisoned by the Dollfuss Government for his activities. His associate Globocnik came from Trieste; he had been involved in robbery with violence and he continued to mix his criminal activities with politics even after Hitler had appointed him Gauleiter of Vienna.

The campaign of terror launched by these two men and the Austrian S.S. on behalf of Heydrich and Himmler was more fearful than anything that had yet happened in Germany; Seyss-Inquart himself was to admit after the war that 79,000 arrests took place in Vienna within a matter of weeks. Jews were evicted, humiliated and forced to scrub the streets. Many men of distinction among those opposed to the Nazis, both Jews and non-Jews, were to be sent to Dachau and other camps in Germany; the freight trains transporting prisoners crushed together in wagons became a regular service from Austria.

Schuschnigg and Baron Louis de Rothschild, the two most eminent men held in custody, were temporarily confined by Kaltenbrunner in the servants’ quarters on the fifth floor of the Metropole Hotel, and they were inspected there by Himmler. Baron Rothschild, who realized that Himmler was planning to ransom him, spoke with ironic reserve when the Reichsführer S.S. enquired after his welfare, while Himmler showed off his authority by taking Schuschnigg with him to inspect the attic lavatories and command in his presence that the ancient fitments should be replaced by something more modern and hygienic for his distinguished prisoners. Nevertheless, he refused to let Schuschnigg, who like himself was short-sighted, have the use of his spectacles, which had been confiscated.

This oppression was the immediate outcome of Hitler’s annexation of Austria. The Führer had come eventually from Linz to Vienna on Monday 14 March, staying one night only at the Imperial Hotel, where Himmler was also lodged; those Austrians prepared to be ecstatic were so: ‘never… have I seen such tremendous, enthusiastic and joyous crowds’, wrote Schellenberg. Nevertheless, he had to rush ahead of Hitler’s procession of cars touring the city in order to supervise the dismantling of explosive charges attached to a bridge on the route. Himmler had been right to be cautious.

The Jewish population of Austria was about 200,000, and their organized persecution and removal became a major undertaking. Himmler went in person to search for a site for a local prison camp, and found a suitable place near Mauthausen on the Danube, where a camp was built on the wooded slopes above a quarry by slave-labour brought from Dachau. Himmler decorated the wooden guard-house set on the granite walls with curling roofs in imitation of the guardhouses on the Great Wall of China.

The importance of Adolf Eichmann as the agent of Himmler and Heydrich in the organization of Jewish affairs dates from the Anschluss. This man was lifted out of the obscurity to which he had almost always clung when he was abducted from the Argentine in 1960 and put on trial in Israel. He had escaped from an American internment camp after the war. When he stood under the glare of the lights in his bullet-proof box, he was revealed as a small-minded, if able and energetic, administrator and he shared a bureaucratic urge for tidiness in his fulfilment of the orders he had been given to organize the extermination of the Jews in his power; an overriding sense of duty compelled him to carry out whatever he was required to do. He had begun his S.S. career in the Death’s Head Unit at Dachau, so he had few qualms about the spectacle of suffering in the camps, and it has been suggested that he was not averse to accompanying Heydrich on his frequent excusions into the city’s brothels. He travelled all over Europe to threaten, to harry or to cajole the inefficient or the reluctant agents of the S.S. to get their Jews destroyed. His concern was with the transport of the victims and the statistics of death, which in his enthusiasm he was prepared to exaggerate in his reports to his superiors. Only when hard-pressed at his trial did he admit that he hated the work he had been given to do.

At Eichmann’s own suggestion Himmler established the Office of Jewish Emigration in Vienna and put him in charge of it. As a result of Eichmann’s work more than 100,000 Jews left Austria between mid-1938 and the outbreak of the war. All but a few departed destitute, their wealth and property in Austria seized by the Nazis. Baron Louis de Rothschild was only permitted to leave after a year’s detention; the price of his freedom included the sacrifice of his steel rolling-mills to Goring, while the Palais Rothschild in Vienna became Eichmann’s headquarters. The Jews were encouraged to emigrate, but the price exacted for exit permits, stamped Jude, was the loss not only of money and possessions but the fulfilment of orders to leave the country for ever, disowned and stateless. It was Germany over again.

This was the period when Himmler first conceived the idea of commercializing concentration camps. It was the Anschluss with its enormous influx of prisoners that made it evident to him that so many idle hands were a scandalous waste of potential labour for the Reich. Up to the time of the Anschluss, the population of Himmler’s camps has been estimated by Reitlinger at an average of 20,000, and the prisoners’ principal tasks had been the construction and extension of the camps themselves, with barracks and other amenities for the S.S. By April 1939, the prison-camp population had grown to some 280,000.

While Eichmann was extracting the wealth of the Jews, Himmler was forming companies on behalf of the S.S. to exploit the new labour resources of the camps in quarrying stone and providing bricks and cement for the vast building projects which Albert Speer, Hitler’s young architectural adviser and future Minister of War Production, was encouraging the Führer to undertake.²⁷ The head of this business undertaking was Oswald Pohl, a man of working-class origin who in looks resembled Mussolini and whose sadistic greed in driving the human flesh under his control to the last flicker of productive energy made him one of the worst of Himmler’s scourges.

Hitler’s policy of divide and rule was extended now by Himmler to the administration of the camps. He had been careful in 1936 not to give Heydrich the entire control; both Eicke’s inspectorate office and Pohl’s business administration, the Verwaltungsamt, were from Heydrich’s point of view intrusive elements which directly interfered with his own free hand in the management of the prisoners. Since the destruction of ‘sub-human’ racial elements and of the enemies of the State was Heydrich’s aim, it conflicted with any interest, however low in character, which would lengthen the lives of the prisoners and give them any kind of encouragement through the provision of extra food. The attempt to commercialize the camps, which until the middle years of the war was to be a failure, was sabotaged from the start as a result of various rivalries that developed between those administering the camps. The supervision of their victims’ labour gave the Kapos, the habitual criminals placed by the S.S. in the camps and employed as bullies and watch-dogs, new opportunities for exploiting and torturing the prisoners.

At the notorious conference over which Goring presided after the November pogrom in 1938, Göring’s interest lay solely in preventing further loss to the Reich economy by the looting of property which, though occupied by Jews, was not always actually owned by them and was in any case insured against damage and theft. Heydrich’s interest lay solely in the statistics of destruction and in the avoidance of paying any compensation. He boasted that already in a few months 50,000 Jews had left Austria, while only 19,000 had left Germany. He wanted the Jews segregated and expelled from the German community as soon as possible. Heydrich had in fact done what he could in advance to make the pogrom effective; after consulting Himmler, who was in Munich, he had issued detailed instructions to the Chiefs of State Police on how their men should control the anti-Jewish demonstrations so as to prevent damage to German-owned property, and he followed the pogrom with further arrests of Jews whose presence in Germany offended his sense of decency and order.

Hoess, who by 1938 had been promoted adjutant to the commander of Sachsenhausen, recalls an inspection of the camp by Himmler during the summer of 1938. He brought with him Frick, the Minister of the Interior, who was paying his first visit to a concentration camp. Himmler was ‘in the best of humour and obviously pleased that he was at last able to show the Minister of the Interior and his officials one of the secret and notorious concentration camps’. He answered questions ‘calmly and amiably although often sarcastically’. Afterwards his colleagues were entertained to dinner.

His successful intrusion into Austria had given Himmler a taste for foreign affairs, and like Goring Himmler was to be used by Hitler, though in a minor capacity, to carry out his less formal diplomacy alongside the formal negotiations of the Foreign Office, which Ribbentrop had taken over early in 1938. Himmler had become one of Hitler’s close and more trusted subordinates. Though their relations remained punctilious, Himmler became to some extent a recognized companion who, unlike the generals who were doing their best to edge Hitler away from grandiose schemes for war, always supported Hitler’s policy without question and, when asked to do so, gave advice on how best to carry this policy out. It was Himmler who had led the delegation that received the Führer at Linz, and a few weeks later, in May, he was among those chosen to accompany Hitler on his state visit to Italy, where he had to stay along with the Führer in the Quirinal, the Palace of the King. ‘Here one breathes the air of the catacombs’, Himmler was heard to remark, and his observation was passed on to the King.

Nevertheless, Hitler felt Himmler was worth cultivating as a diplomat; he had been sent to Italy before in both 1936 and 1937 on goodwill visits, and had on each occasion taken Heydrich with him. Friendly relations had been established with Bocchini, Mussolini’s Minister of Police, and with Mussolini himself, who granted Heydrich a personal interview when Himmler fell ill during their first visit.

From 1938 Himmler used against both the Foreign Office and the High Command exactly the same secret strategy he had used to undermine Goring’s initial authority over the police. He maintained his friendly relations with Ribbentrop while at the same time he encroached on the duties of the Foreign Office, or duplicated them through the S.D. spy-ring abroad. Following talks with Hitler, in which the possibility that the Western Powers might use North Africa to counter-attack Europe once Germany had overrun it, Schellenberg, the most intelligent agent on Heydrich’s staff, was sent in the autumn of 1938 on an adventurous mission to West Africa to spy on the harbour facilities, while the following January Himmler made a report for his staff on conversations he had had with the Japanese Ambassador about a treaty to consolidate the Tripartite Pact, and an attempt which the Japanese were making to send agents into Russia to assassinate Stalin. In May 1939, Ciano reports that Himmler advised him that the Italians should establish a protectorate in Croatia, a policy in opposition to that of Ribbentrop, who wanted Yugoslavia to remain untouched. The following month, Hitler assigned to Himmler the difficult task of negotiating with the Italian Ambassador, Bernardo Attolico, for the resettlement of the Tyrolean Germans in the Reich. This was the first of these wholesale movements of population on racial grounds which appealed so strongly to Himmler’s sense of ethnology.

Meanwhile Himmler’s ambition in Czechoslovakia led him during 1938 to set up with Heydrich an organization of S.D. commandos who were to follow the German Army into the country ‘to secure the political life and national economy’, while inside the frontiers he hoped to gain personal control of the Free Corps organized by the Sudeten Germans, which Brauchitsch naturally expected to be the concern of the Army. Four days before the Munich Agreement, when it seemed certain Czechoslovakia would be invaded, he informed Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans, that he would come under his exclusive command, and he moved six battalions of his Death’s Head guards, two of them from Dachau, up to the frontier without authority from the High Command, who cancelled his orders to Henlein and gave a general instruction that the Death’s Head men were to be subject to military control. The order ended: ‘It is requested that all further arrangements be made between the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Reichsführer S.S.’

The Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938 resolved this particular deadlock. Hitler, as usual, was not greatly upset to find Himmler trying to spike the Army’s guns; it satisfied his intuitive sense of security. He had in fact as recently as 17 August decreed that Himmler’s special armed forces, the future Waffen S.S., were to be regarded solely as a Party force under Himmler’s command, and outside the control of either the Army or the Police; on 26 August Himmler was among the group that accompanied Hitler on an inspection of the Western fortifications. Perhaps these attentions led Himmler to exaggerate his authority. The part he had been expected to play, had the campaign against Czechoslovakia developed into invasion, was merely to provoke border incidents and to establish an immediate police control of the occupied territory in the wake of the Army. His plans, however, had now to be abandoned. According to Ciano, an acute if malicious observer, Himmler was ‘in despair because an agreement had been reached and war seemed to be averted’. But Hitler was determined to keep the S.S. Command and the Army firmly separate. By September 1939, Himmler would have control of some 18,000 men trained for the field (the S.S. Verfügungstruppen, which were in 1940 to be re-named the Waffen S.S.) in addition to the men in his Death’s Head units and the various branches of the S.S. and the Gestapo.

Himmler had caught the war-fever from Hitler, and joined with Ribbentrop in encouraging the Führer to go to any lengths to achieve the conquest of Europe. Goring and the High Command played the double game of appeasing Hitler by hastening the preparations for war, while at the same time doing everything in their power to postpone the outbreak of hostilities. In Göring’s case, he conducted the negotiations for both war and peace alongside each other, knowing full well that Germany was ill-prepared for campaigns which might well spread to both the Eastern and Western fronts. For Himmler, whose military sense was as small as his knowledge of strategy, war was merely an assertion of racial superiority, about which he had no doubts at all of the outcome. Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin at this period, wrote: ‘In September 1938, as well as in August 1939, Ribbentrop and Himmler were, in my opinion, his [Hitler’s] principal lieutenants in the war party,’²⁸ and, according to Henderson, Hitler’s actions often sprang from their fabrication of situations which were calculated to urge him to make war. Lord Halifax endorsed this opinion in a report written in January 1939 for submission to Roosevelt and the French Government. Goerdeler, one of the most prominent men in the German resistance, writing at the time of Munich, again coupled Ribbentrop and Himmler as the principal agents driving Hitler into war. It was fitting, therefore, that Himmler should accompany Hitler and Ribbentrop to Prague on 15 March after the fearful scene during the hours after midnight at the Chancellery in Berlin, when Hitler, Ribbentrop and Goring had forced the aged Czech President in the midst of a heart attack to capitulate and give up what was left of his country to the savage encroachment of Germany. Himmler made Karl Hermann Frank, a leader of the Sudeten German Free Corps and a State Secretary under the new German Protector, von Neurath, Higher S.S. and Police Chief. Frank, though nominally responsible to Neurath, was in practice responsible only to Himmler. In this way the security administration of Czechoslovakia was directed from Berlin, and the arrests began again.

The following June, Himmler was present at an important meeting of the Reich Defence Council at which high-ranking members from the civil and military authorities were present. Goring presided, and the subject was preparation for imminent war. Himmler pledged the use of the prisoners in his camps for war work.

An operation that formed a part of Himmler’s initial contribution to Hitler’s plan for the attack on Poland was named after him. It is ironic that Operation Himmler should have been a cruel act of deception involving a revolting atrocity. The general plan to stage faked incidents along the Polish frontier in order to provide suitable provocation for the invading forces had already been in Himmler’s mind when he had hoped to take part in an attack on Czechoslovakia, but in that case his deceits were not needed. Now in the case of Poland, they were to be developed on a considerable scale, and Heinrich Mueller, the head of the Gestapo, was put in charge of these operations. It was part of the plan that a number of prisoners from concentration camps should be dressed in Polish uniforms, given fatal injections by a doctor and at the right moment shot at until they were bordering on death. These victims were to be brought in under the code-words ‘canned goods’. Their bodies were to be photographed for publication and shown to press representatives accompanying the German Army.

The story of these faked attacks and of their attendant atrocities was revealed at Nuremberg after the war in an affidavit sworn by the S.D. man who led the principal raid on 31 August against the German radio-station at Gleiwitz, close to the Polish border.²⁹ Having affirmed this story at Nuremberg, he escaped and was not heard of again until he re-appeared under his own name in 1964, and sold the story to Der Stern. At Nuremberg, he told how he raided the station, taking with him a Polish-speaking German who broadcast a provocative speech against the Reich, and how at the last minute he deposited a dying man on the scene whom the Poles were supposed to have killed. This was Operation Himmler, the first criminal act with which the Second World War began on 1 September 1939 with the invasion of Poland.