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

IV. Secret Rivals

The subtle balances of power between the Nazi leaders at the beginning of the war are not easy to measure. After his successes in Austria and Czechoslovakia, Hitler withdrew himself from the others, becoming more arbitrary and autocratic in his procedure and less susceptible to advice or pressures designed to change his line of action. If Ribbentrop and Himmler rather than Goring or Goebbels were said to be in favour of war during 1938-9, this was due solely to their more ready response to Hitler’s will. They blindly supported and encouraged his advance towards war and had none of the reservations about Germany’s readiness for full-scale hostilities which occupied Göring’s mind. Goebbels after the summer of 1938 had been temporarily in disgrace with the Führer because he had asked to be relieved of his duties so that he might divorce his wife and marry the Czech actress, Lida Baarova. After his experiences with Roehm and Blomberg, and later with Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army who had had a troublesome divorce and married a young girl, Hitler was tired of seeing the love affairs of his subordinates interfere with their concentration on the grand strategy that he now had in mind. Himmler’s discreet liaison in Berlin with his secretary Hedwig was to be far less disruptive. According to Lina Heydrich, Himmler indeed became a different man as a result of his orderly love affair. Hedwig even led him to abandon the little chain which secured his pince-nez to his ear, and influenced him to wear his hair with a less severe cut.

Himmler’s relationship with Heydrich during the first year of the war became deeply involved. When Himmler had first appointed Heydrich to the S.S., they had both been young men, Himmler thirty-one years old and Heydrich twenty-seven. Even now, at the beginning of the war, Himmler was still not yet forty and Heydrich thirty-five. The closer observers of these two very different men, such as Gisevius, Kersten and Höttl, differ very little in their assessment of Heydrich.¹ To Höttl, who worked for Heydrich and later for Schellenberg on the forgery of passports and banknotes, Himmler was a mediocrity in comparison with Heydrich, who had little use for his commander’s obsessions, racial or otherwise, and rapidly learned how to exploit the power delegated to him. In the end, according to Höttl, he undermined Himmler’s position to such an extent that he achieved direct access to Hitler and, had he lived, might well in 1943 have been appointed Minister of the Interior by the Führer in order to break, or counterbalance, the power accumulated by Himmler. However, Heydrich’s position in relation to Himmler was weakened, not strengthened, when in September 1941 Hitler, without consulting Himmler, appointed him Deputy Reich Protector in Czechoslovakia. Heydrich was instructed to master that unhappy country, which was proving rebellious under the comparatively weak rule of Reich Protector Neurath, who had been Hitler’s Foreign Minister before the appointment of Ribbentrop. Neurath was forced to leave matters entirely in the hands of Heydrich.

Heydrich’s gradual movement towards comparative independence came during the first two years of the war. Himmler, who was never a man for immediate action, delegated to him an increasing number of the monstrous tasks required by Hitler, and even tolerated a situation in which Heydrich reported direct to the Führer or to Goring. Himmler, it must always be remembered, was a sick man who from 1939 to the end of his life could only find relief from his physical and psychological tensions through Kersten’s expert massage.

It is a profound mistake to underestimate Himmler, the very mistake, in fact, which allows such apparently insignificant men as he to win extensive power in politics or industry. Behind the rimless pince-nez, the trim and correct moustache, the receding, obstinate chin, and the narrow, sloping shoulders there was a man of passionate beliefs, whose attitude to power was not to luxuriate in it like Goring, or to fulfil the ambitions of an orator and political demagogue like Goebbels, but to realize a self-conceived, Messianic mission on behalf of the Germanic race.

But with his particular temperament and poor physique, he never could become a man of action. There can be no doubt that he always wanted to prove himself in this way; he saw himself as a uniformed policeman and soldier, even as a commander in the field, but he lacked both the mental and physical stamina for these things, and in the end he only made himself ridiculous. But by that time Heydrich was dead. During the years preceding 1939, while the S.S. was being developed, and during the first two years of the war, it was Heydrich who was astute enough to supply Himmler with ideas and the means to carry them out, becoming his alter ego until the point was reached when he was able to break free and make his own bid for power, serving directly under Hitler.

According to his long-suffering wife, Lina Heydrich, who was as ardently Nazi as Magda Goebbels and like her enjoyed attending smart parties given for smart Nazi wives, her husband would come home cursing the stupidity and waste of time which Himmler’s racial and other beliefs imposed on the administration of the S.S. Once he had seized power over Himmler, he did not fail to let him see the contempt he had for all this crazed mythology. For Heydrich it was not the theory but the practice that mattered; as he saw it, there was no need for elaborate theories on which to base the obvious necessity to persecute all those whose mere existence impeded ‘Aryan’ dominance. But whatever open differences there were between Heydrich and Himmler, Heydrich was always careful to keep their formal relationship unimpaired.

According to Gisevius, who for a brief period worked under him, Heydrich was ‘diabolically clever’, keeping himself always in the background and using roundabout ways to achieve his aims. His methods of terrorism were kept as secret as possible. He had a ‘peculiarly murderous bent’, teaching his men ‘the by-laws of applied terror’, one of which was, as Gisevius put it, to ‘pass the buck’. He practised his oppression always in the name of discipline, justice, or the needs of being a good German, leaving it to Himmler to preach the more high-flown doctrines that in the end led to the same oppression of the same people. In all the Nazi leadership, as Gisevius points out, it was the experts in violence who rose to the top: ‘The dominant trait of all of them was brutality. Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich… thought and felt only in terms of violence.’ Schellenberg, who served Heydrich and Himmler for twelve years, has left the best description there is of Heydrich:

According to Schellenberg, Heydrich became the ‘hidden pivot around which the Nazi regime revolved’, and his keen intelligence and forceful character guided the development of the whole nation:

His only failing, according to Schellenberg, who both admired and feared Heydrich, was his ungovernable sexual appetite, which he indulged without caution or restraint.

In 1940 he established his own high-class brothel, the notorious Salon Kitty, a mansion rented by the S.D. in the Giesebrechtstrasse, just off the Kurfürstendamm in the west end of Berlin.² Salon Kitty had nine bedrooms, in all of which concealed microphones were installed connected to a monitoring room in the basement. This was a pleasant means of spying, primarily on diplomatic visitors to Germany. Schellenberg is careful to point out that his responsibilities ended with supervision of the recordings, while Artur Nebe, the Chief of the Criminal Police, controlled the women, because in the past he had been connected with the vice squad. Important diplomats, such as Ciano, were early induced to visit Salon Kitty by Heydrich and others who knew the establishment’s secret uses, and their conversation while drunk or making love was recorded on tape. In February 1941, Heydrich invited Kersten to visit the house, remarking that it had been opened in agreement with Ribbentrop to save their foreign guests from becoming the victims of the worst type of prostitutes; although it had to be subsidised, he believed it would soon become self-supporting. He was, he said, even contemplating opening a similar establishment for homosexuals. According to Schellenberg, Salon Kitty was established without the knowledge of Ribbentrop, and the Foreign Minister had visited it himself before he learned who was in control of the management.

Kersten had the opportunity of seeing Heydrich primarily through Himmler’s eyes; though he had some direct dealings with Heydrich, he avoided him because he knew that he was under suspicion because of his growing intimacy with Himmler. Although, like Schellenberg, Kersten praises Heydrich’s striking Nordic appearance, the brilliance and polish of his speech ‘in the concise military manner’, and his remarkable ability to expound his arguments to Himmler in such a way as to force the decision he wanted from him, he also sees certain weaknesses of character that Schellenberg either overlooks or chooses to ignore. While Himmler treats Heydrich with ‘open friendliness’, Heydrich addresses his chief with ‘quite inexplicable servility’. ‘Yes, Reichsführer, certainly, Reichsführer, yes, yes, indeed,’ is his response once Himmler raises objections. Although Heydrich is ‘far more dynamic’, and outclasses Himmler every time in the way he can present his arguments, 'Himmler seems to possess some sort of secret power over Heydrich, before which Heydrich submits unconditionally.’ Himmler’s adjutants, Wolff and Brandt, both themselves in a position to exercise influence over Himmler, seemed to Kersten to have a poor opinion of Heydrich, whom they saw as a man operating entirely in a selfish vacuum, without a friend or supporter, either man or woman. No one trusted him: everyone tried to avoid him.³ Among his great weaknesses was his hatred of being beaten or unsuccessful in sport, and in order to prove his skill in action he joined the Luftwaffe and won the Iron Cross after making sixty operational flights.

Kersten observed that Himmler had his own methods of resisting the resolute personality of Heydrich. He records that he had seen Himmler ‘quite overwhelmed’ by Heydrich’s powerful arguments, but nevertheless he had also seen him telephone Heydrich’s office afterwards and leave instructions with the subordinates to hold up any measure to which he had been led to acquiesce in Heydrich’s presence, using now the need to consult Hitler as his reason for delay. In this way Himmler preserved his superior position and postponed making decisions, a habit which was to increase with him during the war to such an extent that it helped destroy him.

It was not until after the death of Heydrich that Himmler, still carefully shielding himself behind Hitler, admitted to Kersten that the hold they had on Heydrich was knowledge that there was Jewish blood in his family; Hitler had decided that the knowledge and ability Heydrich possessed were best kept active in the service of the Party, while the need to atone in their eyes for the taint in his blood would make this Nordic officer a more valiant persecutor of the Jews than any so-called pure-blooded Aryan. It pleased both Hitler and Himmler to make Heydrich their principal agent against the race to which in some part they imagined he belonged. Read Machiavelli, said Himmler in conclusion. A few days later he added that Heydrich had always suffered from a sense of inferiority, that he had been ‘an unhappy man, completely divided against himself, as often happened with those of mixed race’.

‘He wanted to prove the Germanic elements in his blood were dominant’, said Himmler. ‘He never really found peace.’

Himmler lit a cigar, and gazed at the receding veils of smoke.

‘In one respect he was irreplaceable,’ he added. ‘He possessed an infallible nose for men. Because he was divided himself, he was sure to sense such divisions in others. They were right to fear him. For the rest, he was a very good violinist. He once played a serenade in my honour. It was excellent.’

But Heydrich was dead, and it was easy, therefore, for Himmler to be either cynical or sentimental about him. There was no doubt about the tension and perhaps even the jealous possessiveness in their relationship; they had risen together as self-made men who had used their wits to gain advancement, and each had been and indeed still was dependent on the other. Those around them, trained to be watchful for weakness, were only too ready to dramatize what they observed in the behaviour of their superiors. To Schellenberg Himmler appeared, as to so many others, like an exacting headmaster, insisting on precision, industry and loyalty with a ‘finicky exactitude’, yet fearing to express an opinion of his own in case he should be proved wrong. He preferred others to take the responsibility off his shoulders, and receive the blame. ‘This system’, wrote Schellenberg, ‘gave Himmler an air of aloofness, of being above ordinary conflicts. It made him the final arbiter.’ But it also revealed a grave weakness of character in a man so prone to accumulating power.

This weakness was shown in his lifelong subservience to Hitler. ‘Look at Heini — he’ll crawl into the old man’s ear in a minute’, Schellenberg heard one of the adjutants whisper when Hitler was talking endlessly to Himmler, who listened with rapt attention. When Kersten asked him whether he would kill himself if Hitler ordered him to do so, Himmler replied, ‘Yes, certainly! At once! For if the Führer orders anything like that, he has his reasons. And it’s not for me as an obedient soldier to question those reasons. I only recognize unconditional obedience.’ One of the characteristics of Himmler’s nature was that, having gained power, he was most loath to use it except when he was certain no risk was involved. The death of Heydrich only intensified his isolation and his weakness of character in the face of Hitler.

Matters had been very different three years earlier, when Hitler’s troops poured into Poland after the devastating raids inflicted by Goring’s Luftwaffe. The S.S. fighting formations, some 18,000 men, took part in the war which was virtually over by 18 September. Himmler, travelling in his special armoured train known as Heinrich, left for the north on 13 September, taking Ribbentrop with him. They followed Hitler’s own train and another housing the High Command up to the Danzig area. Himmler was for long to resent having no control over the use of the S.S. formations, and it seems that their casualties were heavy. All the Reichsführer S.S. was able to do was accompany Hitler on formal inspections of the battlefronts, and he followed him back to Berlin on 26 September.

Heydrich did not travel with Himmler in this vain pursuit of military command; the S.D. was represented on the train by Schellenberg, who was at first received rather coldly by both Himmler and Wolff, Himmler’s Chief of Staff. Schellenberg seized the opportunity to gain Himmler’s favour, and at the same time to study the atmosphere and character of the men at the top. On the way back from a flight over the burning city of Warsaw, Schellenberg’s efforts to impress Himmler at length succeeded; he was invited to take supper with the Reichsführer S.S. and given confidential information about the secret agreement between Germany and Russia for the partition of Poland. They also decided to investigate Hitler’s private physician, Dr Morrell, whose panic while accompanying the Führer to the battlefronts had not impressed the Reichsführer.

Walter Schellenberg was, as we have seen, one of the intellectuals of the S.S. He had been educated in a Jesuit school; his university training in law and medicine at Bonn was over by the time he was twenty-two. His alert intelligence and quickness of observation fitted him for the various missions of espionage which he describes with such zest and self-satisfaction in his memoirs. As he gained the confidence of Heydrich and Himmler, he advanced his position in their service, and his value to us includes not only his detailed accounts of the more entertaining activities he undertook for the S.D., but the descriptive analyses he has left of his colleagues and, in particular, of Heydrich and Himmler. In the various departments into which Heydrich divided the S.D., Schellenberg worked in A.M.T., or Department IV, specializing in counter-espionage inside Germany and the occupied countries. Later, in June 1941, he was to take over Department VI, which co-ordinated Foreign Intelligence, and when Canaris’s Intelligence Service for the High Command was disbanded in 1944, Schellenberg’s responsibilities were expanded to include this work as well. At the height of his career after Heydrich’s death, he was to become one of the closest of Himmler’s advisers, and he worked hard for some action independent of Hitler to end the war and to ease the situation in the concentration camps.

Schellenberg was soft-spoken, even ingratiating in his manner; he wanted his superiors to like him. He claims he was for a brief period attracted to Heydrich’s neglected wife, Lina.⁴ For him intrigue was a profession, and his pride in it survived the war and is present in every chapter of his fascinating and exciting autobiography. In the use of intrigue he was as guilty as any of his associates, but he remains a far more engaging rascal than they.

Meanwhile Heydrich had achieved his private ambition by flying sorties with the Luftwaffe. Later in September he visited Himmler in his train, and he took charge of security arrangements for the victory celebration in Warsaw. On 27 September, he was rewarded by being made head of the Reichsicherheitshauptamt, the Reich Chief Security Office (R.S.H.A.).⁵ This was to give him a far greater measure of independence in his relations with Himmler, and opened up for him the means of direct access to Hitler. R.S.H.A. gave Heydrich control of Mueller’s Gestapo, Nebe’s Criminal Police or Kripo, the German C.I.D., and the S.D., which now became an official organization of the State as distinct from the Party. It was R.S.H.A., still nominally under Himmler, that moved into action in Poland, using special formations of S.S. men and police known as the Einsatz, or Action Groups, to carry out the duties assigned them. ⁶

On 6 October, the day following his victory parade among the ruins of Warsaw, Hitler made the notorious speech in the Reichstag in which he attacked Poland and challenged her allies: ‘The Poland of the Versailles Treaty will never rise again’, he declared. The mass movement of population was forecast in order to knit the German peoples together and sever them from contamination by the Jews, of whom large numbers living in Poland were already at the mercy of Heydrich’s raiding groups. On 7 October, Himmler’s fortieth birthday, Hitler appointed him head of a new organization, the Reich Commissariat for the Consolidation of German Nationhood (R.K.F.D.V.), with the essential task of creating colonies of Germans in areas from which Jews and other alien and unwanted people had been expelled. Himmler’s friends celebrated the day by dedicating to him a handsome volume published in his honour — Festgabe zum 40 Geburtstage des Reichsführers S.S. (A Memorial Address to the Reichsführer S.S. on the Occasion of his Fortieth Birthday) — in which he was singled out as the man primarily responsible for building a new order in Europe to meet the needs of German expansion.

Himmler was himself to describe what happened less than a year later, after the fall of France. Notes in Himmler’s handwriting survive for a lecture given to the Supreme Army Commanders on 13 March 1940. In this speech he made his policy for Poland absolutely clear — that the Slavs were to be dominated by the Germanic leadership, that their living space was to be appropriated so that they might never again attack Germany in time of weakness, that their inferior blood meant there must be no mixing of the races. ‘Executions of all potential leaders of resistance’, scribbled Himmler in his angular, spidery hand. ‘Very hard, but necessary. Have seen to it personally… No underhand cruelties… Severe penalties when necessary… Dirty linen to be washed at home… We must stay hard, our responsibility to God… A million workslaves and how to deal with them.’

The fearful winter of 1939—40 saw whole communities of men and women uprooted from their homes in order to fulfil a compulsory emigration plan for which no proper provision had been made. The chain of callous orders passed down the line from Himmler’s and Heydrich’s offices until they reached the local Action Groups, who had been trained to carry out orders without consideration for the consequences to the human beings they evicted. Over 250,000 people of German origin living in Russian-occupied Poland and the Baltic States were by agreement to be transferred to German-occupied Poland, while as the result of an order made by Himmler on 9 October, double that number of Jews and rejected Slavs had to be moved away east to make room for them. Later, by 1943, the numbers exchanged were increased to 566,000 racial Germans brought in from the eastern and south-eastern areas and 1,500,000 Poles and Jews expelled.⁷ In November Darré, Reich Minister of Agriculture, was given by Himmler at his own request the task of re-settling the German immigrants on confiscated Polish farms. He wanted to play his part in the great racial migrations which were the outcome of the theories he had taught Himmler ten years before. That he failed in this self-appointed task was perhaps inevitable in view of the vast, complex, overlapping and rival administrations imposed on the torn body of Poland by Hans Frank’s cruel administration, and the mutually antagonistic organizations of the military and of Himmler’s and Heydrich’s police. The S.S. commanders were Friedrich Krueger, a former expert in street-fighting and gun-running, and the peculiar alcoholic sadist whom the S.S. had first enlisted in Austria, Odilo Globocnik, whom Himmler had finally to remove because of his persistent thieving.

Historians have been at pains to find some date for the original conception of genocide in the minds of the Nazi leadership. The casual massacre of Jewish people by the S.S. or the Action Groups began with the war itself, but by January the mass evacuation of Jews from the western provinces had reached proportions which made a high death rate inevitable in the chaos of overloaded and unheated wagons that were shunted around in railway sidings, until the bodies of adults and children alike fell frozen to the ground when the doors were finally thrust open. In December Eichmann was ordered by Heydrich to try to bring some order into the handling of the deportation. The migration of Jews from Germany itself was about to begin when Goring interposed, as President of the Reich Defence Council, to stop the movement because of the rumours of death and suffering which were circulating among the diplomatic corps in Berlin. Meanwhile, Hitler accepted a plan presented to him by Himmler to enslave those Poles in the west who could not be evacuated, depriving them of their property and their children of education, unless they were racially suitable for removal and integration into Germany through Lebensborn, which first tested them and then placed them with foster-parents.

The formal acceptance of genocide as Nazi policy did not happen until early in 1941, and was then directly linked in Himmler’s mind with the coming invasion of Russia. But by that time his racial prejudice had found outlets which prepared both him and his agents for the supreme test with which they would be faced in 1941. In October 1939 he was required by Hitler to assist in a nation-wide euthanasia programme for the insane, which by 1941 had led to the ‘mercy-killing’ of some 60,000 German patients in mental institutions. ⁸ Though the idea was Hitler’s, originating in a scribbled note to Philip Bouhler, the head of the Führer’s Chancellery, the S.S. was responsible for supplying doctors to carry out the task, while Viktor Brack, a friend of the Himmler family and Bouhler’s liaison officer with the Department of Health, was put in charge of the administration. The relatives of the people selected for destruction knew nothing of what was happening, and the notification of the cause of death was falsified. Extermination centres were set up under strict guard, and the S.S. doctors and their nursing and ambulance staff underwent their initial experience of selecting, transporting, gassing and cremating large numbers of helpless people.

The first extermination programme, which was under the medical direction of Karl Brandt, was therefore an arbitrary act by Hitler against the Germans themselves, and was only brought to an end by a telephone call in August 1941 from Hitler to Bouhler after public protests had been made, more particularly by the Churches.⁹ For once the Führer had been made to think again as the result of public pressure. Himmler himself became increasingly uneasy about the reaction against the mercy-killings, and in December 1940 he expressed this view to Brack. But the euthanasia programme was not stopped until August 1941, when other work was planned for Himmler’s selected medical teams. A much larger extermination programme was beginning by then in Russia. The euthanasia centres were not closed down, but used for the destruction of mental patients from the concentration camps or from among the large numbers of foreign workers brought into Germany. Brack was perfectly prepared to extend the work of euthanasia to extermination of prisoners who were listed as defectives when the point was reached at which there was no difference whatsoever between the operations.

Brandt, questioned in connection with his part in the extermination of the insane at the Doctors’ Trial after the war, said:

A second form of experience for Himmler’s doctors began in 1939 when the first recorded medical tests were made involving the use of men in the concentration camps. Liquid war gases, mustard and phosgene, were applied to the skin of selected prisoners and their symptoms were observed and photographed up to the time of death. Reports on their observations were sent by the doctors to Himmler, who ordered further experiments to be carried out on a larger scale. Later, in 1942, there was even to be argument as to whether or not payment should be made for prisoners used in these experiments. One doctor, insulted by this idea, wrote in a report: ‘When I think of our military research work conducted at the concentration camp Dachau, I must praise and call special attention to the generous and understanding way in which our task was furthered there and the co-operation we were given. Payment for prisoners was never discussed. It seems as if at Natzweiler camp they are trying to make as much money as possible out of this matter.’ According to one witness, the subjects suffered such appalling pain ‘one could hardly bear to be near them’. Nevertheless to show their goodwill to the Reichsführer S.S., the prisoners at Buchenwald sent him a valuable Christmas present of a green marble desk set made in the camp sculpture shop, where objets d’art were produced by artist-prisoners for the S.S.

In Himmler’s mind the preservation of life and the administration of death were indivisible. In the same month when the eviction of the Jews started in Poland and the S.S. doctors began killing the insane in Germany, Himmler issued his Lebensborn decree of 28 October 1939, in which he said:

Himmler pledged himself and the S.S. to care for all children of pure blood, whether legitimate or not, whose fathers died fighting for Germany. However, he ordered the hanging of a Polish farm labourer for having had sexual relations with a German woman, while women who allowed Polish prisoners or workers sexual liberties were given severe prison sentences. This was race pollution.

Himmler watched over his S.S. organization during the war with all the care of a foster parent. The S.S. were still supposed to rank as an order of chivalry and the officers to behave like knights. In April 1942 Himmler signed an order exhorting his men not to seduce girls out of frivolity and so deprive the nation of potentially fruitful mothers. All seductions were to be reported to him personally. Later, in 1943, he was appalled when he learned there were no less than 244 cases of gonorrhoea in the Leibstandarte S.S. Sepp Dietrich hastened to inform him of other facts, and Himmler was able to write in July about the ‘pleasingly large number of illegitimate children’ in the Leibstandarte. ‘I want the names of all those children as well as of their mothers,’ he added. Pedantic regulations were also compiled to control the conduct of the women serving with the S.S. units; their spare time had to be kept occupied, according to Himmler’s ideas, with healthy sport and cultural opportunities. As for homosexuality among S.S. men, this he regarded as equivalent to sabotage.

In return for loyal and deserving service, Himmler initiated a welfare scheme for his men, giving exactly the same personal attention to the details of individual cases in this field as in any other. Widows of S.S. men with children were pensioned; Himmler did not spare himself in sending numerous comforting letters and even small presents of chocolate to such women and their children. Similar pains were taken to look after men invalided out of the S.S.; details of their health, their diet, their needs poured through the S.S. typewriters; the surviving mass of letters and memoranda often bear the personal comments and initials of the Reichsführer S.S. himself. Like a good headmaster, Himmler gave every teacher on his staff and every boy in his school individual attention as far as was possible, no matter how many hours of work it cost. For example, considerable correspondence passed between Himmler and a Secretary of State in the Ministry of Agriculture as to whether or not his monthly contribution to Lebensborn might be reduced to one mark or not.

Even in time of war, Himmler began to plan for the future. What kind of flats should be provided for a peace-time S.S., each man fathering not less than six children? When such men died, should not their graves be marked by a Teutonic cross, in contrast to the soft and sexless symbol of Christianity? S.S. leaders should possess their coats of arms as befits ‘Teutonic brothers’.¹² Discipline must be self-administered; it was unthinkable that an S.S. man should endure the normal military or civil forms of justice. According to Himmler, an S.S. man should never get himself into difficulties by buying goods on an instalment plan. ‘An S.S. man doesn’t buy what he cannot afford,’ Himmler boasted. ‘An S.S. man is the most honest soul on earth.’ He prided himself that there were no locks on the cupboards in S.S. barracks.

Mother Crosses were presented to S.S. wives who had given birth to seven or more children. The Reichsführer S.S. concerned himself deeply in all matters of maternity, carefully vetting the pedigree of girls who were said to be pregnant by S.S. men before he would grant them the necessary permit to marry. Himmler never ceased to be obsessed by the problems of fine breeding. Hours passed throughout the war while he sat poring over the individual pedigrees of girls with whom S.S. men were involved. What about reviving the old Teutonic myth that copulation conducted on the gravestones of one’s ancestors was once said to endow any child so conceived with the brave Teutonic spirit of his forefathers? Special leave was to be given to married S.S. men to encourage procreation, though not necessarily on gravestones. If the men could not be sent back to their women, then the women were to be brought to their men. It is typical that a substantial file survives in which a case of adultery between an S.S. man and a soldier’s wife is weighed most carefully; Himmler finally decided in favour of the young couple, and sent the woman who had informed on their activities to learn her lesson in a labour camp.

In his conduct of the Lebensborn movement, Himmler’s racial obsessions combined with his genetic fantasies and reflected the strange humanitarianism that always lurked in Himmler’s nature and which he satisfied through his relations with children, beginning with his own and extending to his nation-wide family of godchildren. The parents of German children of pure race who shared his birthday were encouraged to invite Himmler to become a godfather. Special two-page forms were issued so that the stringent scrutiny that preceded the conferring of this honour could be conducted. But Himmler’s desire to be the godfather of future generations of pure Germans was also developed through the Lebensborn movement. In Himmler’s eyes children of sound racial background should be rescued from parents who for political or other reasons were undesirable, and placed in the rehabilitation centre of a Lebensborn home.

These homes were staffed by women leaders most carefully chosen for their disciplined and devoted nature; they combined the character of nurses, welfare officers and political educators for the mothers and children in their care. Mothers in the Lebensborn homes were not allowed to entertain men, though, wrote Himmler in an order dated 11 January 1941, on very special occasions they could entertain male guests who ‘might be offered a cup of coffee, but be given no opportunity for intimacy’. All cases of extreme indiscipline had to be brought to Himmler’s personal notice. The mothers were also required in 1941 to eat porridge and fruit for breakfast, and Himmler ordered statistics to be compiled about their resulting blood pressure. The consumption of porridge, said Himmler, was a status symbol in Britain. When the women complained that the porridge would make them fat, Himmler wrote on 12 December 1941:

He instanced the slim figures of Lord Halifax and Sir Nevile Henderson as proof that porridge did not fatten such men of breeding. The regular health statistics of both mothers and children became required reading at Himmler’s office. ‘Any racially good mother is sacred to us’, wrote Himmler.

The Lebensborn movement which had begun to provide welfare centres for orphans and unmarried mothers with their children, was extended during the war. Himmler established special S.S. homes and institutions to take over young children in the occupied territories who had the right racial characteristics. Writing in June 1941, Himmler outlined his plan in a letter to one of his officers:

Childless families worried Himmler. In a letter written in April 1942 he advocated the infertile partner in a childless marriage allowing the potentially fertile one to copulate outside the marriage for the sole purpose of begetting children. But these childless families became of increasing importance from 1942 as centres of adoption for the large numbers of children with Germanic characteristics stolen by the S.S. from the occupied territories.

In a later speech given on 14 October 1943, Himmler felt free to go much further. He said, speaking of the Slav nations: ‘Obviously in such a mixture of peoples there will always be some racially good types. There I think it is our duty to take their children, to remove them from their environment, if necessary by stealing them… Either we win over any good blood that we can use for ourselves and give it a place in our people or… we destroy this blood.’ The political purpose of this aggregation of German stock was quite clear:

The number of children up to the age of twelve who were removed in this way will never be known. Though most came from Poland, there were cases of adopted children from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Russia. This wholesale Germanic adoption was limited by the scale of the organization that could be set up in wartime to deal with it, but an affidavit sworn after the war by Dr Hans Hilmar Staudte, a lawyer attached to the Lebensborn movement, claimed that between two and three hundred children were adopted for Germanization in the Warthegau administrative district of Poland. After testing they were placed with German foster parents whose name they were given, their own first names being kept as far as possible in their German form. The children, of course, were taught to speak German, and in effect became Germans. The problem of tracing individual cases still continues to this day in the International Tracing Centre at Arolsen.

Early in 1943 Himmler’s fancy was taken by two blond and blue-eyed Russian boys he saw in Minsk. These children were in effect adopted for a while by Himmler and his aides: after having been cleaned and schooled a little, they were sent by air to join Himmler on his train. They travelled for a while with him and there was much S.S. correspondence over the loss of one of their overcoats in Munich. Then they were placed in a school to be trained in the proper ways of the Reich.

The national reaction to Lebensborn was often critical. Because the homes were full of unmarried mothers many people thought they were brothels set up for the S.S. The Church in particular opposed the homes. In a speech given to an intimate circle of high officials much later in the war, during May 1944, Himmler spoke informally about the Lebensborn movement and the attacks that had been made upon it, and on himself for advising his S.S. men to procreate:

At the time he was making this speech about the procreation in the S.S., Hedwig, Himmler’s recognized mistress, was in the last stages of pregnancy with her second child. She gave birth to a daughter, who was named Nanette Dorothea. Her son Helge had been born on 15 February 1942.¹⁴

The establishment of this second family placed a strain on Himmler’s deliberately restricted income. Schellenberg throws some light on this situation. Himmler, during a period of truce with Bormann, with whom he was later to form a kind of tactical relationship, asked for a loan of 80,000 marks from Party funds, ostensibly to build a house. Bormann granted him the loan, but at a very high rate of interest which Himmler could scarcely afford to pay out of his official salary. Schellenberg was astonished at this extraordinary arrangement which he found ‘incomprehensible’, and made his own observation on Himmler’s domestic problems:

When Schellenberg suggested a mortgage would be cheaper than the loan, Himmler rejected the suggestion with an ‘air of resignation’. It was, he said, ‘a completely private matter and he wanted to act with meticulous rectitude; in no circumstances did he want to discuss it with the Führer’. Meanwhile, he supported his family at Gmund, and although his wife knew of his liaison with Hedwig, he maintained formal good relations with her for the sake of their daughter Gudrun.

In November 1939, Himmler had assigned a special mission to Schellenberg, who abducted from Venlo, a town just across the Dutch frontier, two British Intelligence officers with whom he had been in contact, posing as an anti-Nazi German officer. The British agents, Captain S. Payne Best and Major R. H. Stevens, were accused of being involved in an attempt on Hitler’s life at Munich on 8 November. Though is is now widely assumed that the attempted assassination had been pre-arranged with Hitler’s approval, seven men lost their lives in the explosion that occurred after the Führer and other leaders had left. Hitler needed this excuse for propaganda to stir the German people against the Allies and to show what desperate enemies Himmler’s agents had to face. On 21 November Himmler announced that the British Intelligence service was behind the plot, and that prisoners had been taken.

The Venlo incident itself was to become one of the more entertaining spy stories of the war, both Schellenberg and Captain Payne Best giving their own detailed accounts of what happened. Both the British officers spent the next five years in concentration camps, and Schellenberg was promoted to S.S. Major-General for his efforts in having captured them. Schellenberg’s specialization in foreign espionage led to the practice of placing S.D. and Gestapo men as attaches in various German legations and embassies abroad, which enabled Himmler once more to encroach on Ribbentrop’s territory. In March 1940, as a follow-up to the Venlo incident, Schellenberg enabled Himmler to present a detailed report to Hitler establishing the close connection that existed between British and Dutch military Intelligence. Hitler was later to use this incident to help justify his attack on the Netherlands for violating their neutrality.

In the early months of 1940 Hitler was preparing for the assault on the West. The loss in February of the plans for the campaign against Holland and Belgium — when a special courier who was carrying them made a forced landing in Belgium owing to poor visibility — caused consternation among the Nazi leaders. While Goring raved at the carelessness of the Luftwaffe and dismissed the commander of the Air Fleet whose officer had done the damage, Himmler, according to Schellenberg, was so excited and confused he was quite unable to give clear instructions about the immediate necessity to draw up security regulations for the Army.

Himmler’s military ambitions were still frustrated. The S.S. fighting forces acquired their official title of Waffen or Armed S.S. during the Western offensive, in which only two S.S. divisions served alongside some eighty-seven divisions of the Army. They were given favoured positions in which to display their ruthlessness in battle, while the special armoured S.S. regiment, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler under Sepp Dietrich, played as spectacular a part as possible in the fall of Rotterdam and Boulogne. Theodor Eicke’s Death’s Head division made up of German camp guards behaved with shameless ferocity, as the massacre of British troops at Le Paradis in May 1940 showed; the celebrated Private Pooley was one of only two survivors.

But in spite of this activity by the S.S., Himmler seems to have taken no direct part in the campaign, which lasted from April 1940, with the initial occupation of Denmark and Norway, to 21 June, when the conquest of Belgium, Holland and France was complete and the armistice was signed by Hitler in the Forest of Compiègne, a ceremony at which Himmler was not present.

While Heydrich had sprung once more into his Luftwaffe aircraft to enjoy aggression in the field — from which he sent Himmler a postcard on 5 May promising to be back at his desk within eight days — the Reichsführer S.S. trundled west in his armoured train, once more following in the wake of Hitler. He managed to send a letter to ‘Mein lieber Heydrich’ on 15 May explaining that he had spent some days at the Führer’s headquarters and adding, with an ironic reference to the Polish campaign, ‘the only difference is that we are at a different place’. The close of the letter throws some light on his feelings for Heydrich. ‘I think about you very much. I hope everything is going well. And I wish you renewed success, happiness — and everything good. Love from Wölfchen and Haschen. Yours, Heinrich Himmler.’ Then he placed a formal order that Heydrich was to send a daily report by telephone stating what he had done and how he was. Heydrich was to fly with the Luftwaffe until the end of the campaign in June, and be present to enjoy all the fruits of victory in Montmartre. He spent July in the urgent preparation of plans for the control of Britain by the Gestapo and S.D. after the conquest in the autumn. On 27 September S.S. Colonel Professor Dr Franz Six, former head of the faculty of economics in the University of Berlin, was appointed to head the Action Group activities in Britain which would follow immediately upon the invasion.

Meanwhile Himmler was facing certain difficulties in extending his wartime powers. Hitler was determined to restrict the members of the Waffen S.S. to some four divisions (at most about 5 per cent of the armed forces), while Himmler himself was personally committed to such high standards of selection that the average recruit to the German Army fell far below his Nordic ideal. It was during 1940 that Himmler and his sport-and-nature-loving Chief of Staff for the Waffen S.S., Gottlieb Berger, decided that all men of Nordic race might qualify for admission to their forces, whether they were German or not. By the end of 1940 there was a so-called Viking Division in the Waffen S.S. under the German divisional Commander, Felix Steiner, and volunteers from Holland, Denmark, Norway and Finland had begun to join. By the closing months of the war, in 1945, there were thirty-five Waffen S.S. divisions, most of them substantially recruited from the occupied countries. Himmler made his racial theories work in his favour, and they enabled him to fulfil his ambitions of commanding on his own account a substantial body of men separate from the regular Army, over which he exercised no influence except for a few disastrous months during 1944 — 5. In a private memorandum that survives, dated 13 April 1942, Himmler insists that all the German leaders and sub-leaders of these foreign S.S. units must receive special ideological training and report to him personally before taking up their duties. They must, he says, have ‘a firm faith in our ideal’.

On 7 September 1940, Himmler went to France to address the officers of the S.S. Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler at Metz. Only a month before, on 6 August, Hitler had told the S.S. in a speech that their future role was to be that of a volunteer élite force whose duties would be strictly those of a political police, while three weeks before that, from the public platform of the Reichstag, the Führer had shown his favour to the victorious Army by creating twelve new field-marshals. Himmler felt aggrieved and made insidious remarks about the attitude of the Army to the S.S. during the course of a speech in September, the chief aim of which was to state in no uncertain terms the importance of the S.S. to the welfare and advacement of the State, and of the S.D. to its internal security. He knew that many men in the wartime S.S. did not understand the ideals for which he had struggled since 1929, and he realized that the forcible deportations, ‘the very difficult task out there performed by the Security Police supported by your men’, seemed distasteful to some of them. So he went on to tell them why this must be done:

Himmler talked next about the necessity to improve political education in the Waffen S.S., so that the activities of the S.D. would be better understood; they must realize, he said, that the duties of the S.D. man were ‘very, very difficult’, and ‘very, very valuable’. Then he began to tell them of his vision of the future, his dreams of S.S. garrisons ‘safe-guarding the race’ by establishing settlements outside Germany and extending ‘our Lebensraum’ into colonies set up, for example, in South Africa, in the Arctic, and in the West. ‘The first two years of peace will be decisive for our future’, he said. ‘Peace begun with an iron hand… We must start an unheard-of education of ourselves. It is necessary that obedience be granite-like.’ What is done after the war, ‘during Adolf Hitler’s life, will live on for centuries to come… If we make a mistake, the mistake too will live on for centuries.’

Even guard duty in the camps over ‘the scum of mankind’, said Himmler, will form ‘the best indoctrination on inferior beings and the inferior races. This activity is necessary, as I said, to eliminate these negative beings from the German people, to exploit them for the great folk community by having them break stones and bake bricks so that the Führer can erect his grand buildings. If the good blood is not reproduced’, he went on, ‘we will not be able to rule the world … A nation which has an average of four sons per family can venture a war; if two of them die, two live to transplant the name.’ Then he concluded: ‘The ultimate aim for these eleven years during which I have been the Reichsführer S.S. has been invariably the same: to create an order of good blood which is able to inspire Germany… an order which will spread the idea of Nordic blood so far and wide that we will attract all the Nordic strain in the world, and take away that blood from our adversaries, absorb it so that never again… will Nordic people fight against us.’ This, he said, was the ‘great common goal’ for which the S.S. was ‘a means to an end — always the Reich, the ideology, created by the Führer, the Reich, created by him, the Reich of all Teutons.’

Himmler’s absence from the victory celebrations in France was largely due to his continued ill-health. From the time of the first treatment he had been given by Felix Kersten, the masseur, he had experienced a relief that seemed magical to his strained nerves. Kersten was two years older than Himmler, and very different from him in temperament. After a hard life in his youth, he was determined to enjoy the wealth and position that his highly specialized and lucrative practice among the European aristocracy had brought him. According to his own account, he was born in the Baltic provinces, in Estonia, had studied agriculture in Holstein, managed a farm in Anhalt, served in the Finnish Army during the war against Russia in 1919, becoming as a result a Finnish citizen, and had then entered the Veteran Hospital of Helsinki suffering from rheumatic fever. It was here that his outstanding gift for massage had been discovered. He had determined to make healing through massage his career, labouring, he claimed, as a longshoreman and dishwasher in order to pay for his medical studies. He had first gone to Berlin in 1922; there he had studied at the University and then trained under the celebrated Chinese physician, Dr Ko. Kersten claimed that Dr Ko ‘declared he had never met anyone with hands like mine. He said my sense of touch was nothing short of miraculous.’ So great was the Chinese doctor’s confidence in Kersten that he allowed him to take over his practice in Berlin when he returned to China in 1925.

Kersten delighted in attending the distinguished patients who sought him out, and had established himself at The Hague at the personal invitation of Prince Henry of the Netherlands, who had become one of his patients in 1928. In 1934 he had bought his German estate of Hartzwalde some forty miles north of Berlin, intending eventually to return and become a ‘gentleman farmer’. In 1937 he had married a beautiful girl from Silesia who was barely half his age.

This was the man who on 10 March 1939 had first met Himmler, and had been more than surprised to find him a ‘narrow-chested, weak-chinned, spectacled man with an ingratiating smile’. Left for a few minutes among Himmler’s books, he had seen many volumes on German and medieval history, on Henry the Fowler and Genghis Khan, and on Mohammed and the Mohammedan faith. In his bedroom, he saw that Himmler was reading the Koran in a German translation, a book he kept constantly by him. Kersten, a man of the world, had thought him at the time ‘a pedant, a mystic, and bookish’. Moreover, ‘his hands were soft’.

At the first examination they discussed his symptoms, the immediate cause of which appeared to be ptomaine poisoning that had excited an old nervous complaint originating from severe typhoid fever contracted during the First World War. As a child, Kersten learned, Himmler had suffered from paratyphoid, and as a youth from dysentery and jaundice. Kersten turned back Himmler’s shirt and felt the sensitive area round his stomach. His touch, Himmler said, was ‘like balm’, and he urged Kersten to treat him. Kersten realized he could bring Himmler temporary relief, but never cure him.

Kersten was a man who combined a profound dedication to his unique skill as a masseur with a desire for wealth and social success. He was a fortunate man, whose great gift of healing brought him the gratitude of many people who were in a position to give him the kind of life the more worldly side of his nature enjoyed. His successful treatment of Rosterg, a German potash magnate, had enabled him to acquire his estate of Hartzwalde when Rosterg had given him 100,000 marks. It was at Rosterg’s earnest request that he had first agreed to examine Himmler in 1939.

Before the war began, Kersten had attended him both in Berlin and at Gmund and had grown familiar with the weak and opinionated nature of his patient. He knew that Himmler wanted war as much as Hitler, and he had already learnt how to argue with him on such subjects unscathed. Kersten was, however, notoriously without interest in politics; but he was, after all, not German, and therefore immune from German law and discipline. He could still have withdrawn from treating Himmler when war began, as his wife and friends begged him to do. But when he sought the advice of his contacts in the diplomatic corps at the Finnish Embassy in Berlin, they urged him to stay with Himmler, whose conversation after treatment, free from any sense of discretion, might well prove of the greatest value if what he revealed were passed on to the Embassy. Irmgard Kersten, who was German, liked best to live at Hartzwalde, and when Stalin overran Estonia, Kersten’s native land, and declared war on Finland, the country whose nationality he had taken, it was to Hartzwalde that Kersten brought his father, who was approaching ninety, to live out his life in Germany.

Himmler was not in a position to force Kersten to attend him until the spring of 1940, when he confined him to Hartzwalde and refused him a visa to return to his patients in Holland. A few days later it was Himmler who broke the news to him that Germany had invaded Holland; he had been refused his visa to protect him from the consequences of the invasion. Again the officials at the Finnish Embassy urged him to stay with Himmler rather than leave Germany. This contact with Himmler, they said, was work that could be of the greatest national importance.

On 15 May 1940 Kersten had received his first order to join Himmler’s armoured train and attend the Reichsführer as his official staff doctor. Here he had treated Brandt, Himmler’s secretary, as well as Himmler, and begun another association at headquarters of which he was later to make full use. But from the summer of 1940 until the autumn of 1943, when he managed to persuade Himmler to let him live in Stockholm, he was in effect at the Reichsführer’s complete disposal, though he treated such other patients as he could reach in Germany. Himmler demanded that he give up his home and contacts in The Hague. His services even became a point of barter between Ciano and Himmler, and Kersten won from Himmler the most unusual privilege of using the Reichsführer’s own postal channel for private correspondence, an arrangement supposed to be connected with his love affairs. In fact he used it for keeping in touch with his underground contacts in Holland.

It was in August 1940 that he obtained his first release for a man in a concentration camp — one of Rosterg’s servants who had been imprisoned solely for political reasons. Later, before leaving Holland, he had secured the release of one of his friends, an antiquarian called Bignell, on the strength of a telephone call to Himmler, who was at the time in urgent need of treatment. Kersten soon learned the technique of flattering Himmler and appealing to the right side of his vanity in these moments when, through the relief he could bring, he had the upper hand. The requests gradually became habitual; as Himmler put it himself: ‘Kersten massages a life out of me with every rub.’ Heydrich and the leaders of the S.S. grew jealous of this alien influence in Himmler’s private life. Only Kersten’s special place in Himmler’s favour spared him from interrogation and arrest by the Gestapo; Heydrich’s suspicions of him never relaxed.

The concentration camps remained directly under Himmler’s control. At the beginning of the war, according to Kogon, there were more than a hundred camps with their numerous satellites, though Dachau remained the symbol for all. Other large camps included Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, Flossenbürg, Ravensbrück for women, and Mauthausen near Linz, in Austria. At the height of the war there were some thirty principal camps, some being nominally more rigorous than others. After the war had begun, new camps were set up in the occupied territories, such as Auschwitz and Lublin in Poland and Natzweiler in the Vosges, while others, such as Bergen-Belsen, were established in Germany. Kogon estimates that not less than a million people were held in the camps at any one time during the war, with an increasing flow both in and out as the exterminators developed the pace of their work.

Discipline was constantly tightened. Hoess was still at Sachsenhausen when Himmler paid a visit unannounced during January 1940. He complained bitterly that a working party of prisoners and their guards had failed either to recognize him or salute when he had passed them in his car, and as a result of this incident the Commandant was dismissed. Six months later, in June 1940, Hoess was to be promoted Commandant of Himmler’s new camp at Auschwitz.

The fact that a million men and women existed in the camps at Himmler’s mercy led in the first place to the organized medical experiments which, though practised on a relatively limited scale, seem more horrifying than the act of extermination itself. That some 350 qualified doctors (one doctor in every 300 then practising in Germany) should have been prepared to take active part in this fearful misuse of the bodies of helpless men and women seems a greater degradation of humanity than the spectacle of Hoess, the ex-criminal Commandant of Auschwitz, faithfully obeying his orders beside the gas-chambers.

At a trial known as the Doctors’ Case and held before a Military Tribunal in Nuremberg from December 1946 to July 1947, twenty-three of these doctors were permitted to defend themselves before the court. The majority of the experiments undertaken by the doctors at the direct instigation of Himmler were in fact calculated murder under the guise of collecting medical data, and most of them meant the infliction of indescribable agonies on the patients. At their trial, the representative doctors who were accused of having done these things mustered their great excuse — the doctrine of obedience: ‘At that time I was Rascher’s subordinate. He was a staff surgeon of the Luftwaffe’ — and the doctrine of war, ‘the absolute necessity of victory in order to eliminate evil elements’. A professor who worked on the typhus vaccine experiments at Natzweiler defended his actions through which ninety-seven prisoners died by citing a single loss of life that had occurred among a group of men under sentence of death who had volunteered in America to assist in experiments to trace the cause of beri-beri fever.

Himmler’s direct participation in this most cruel work is proved by surviving letters and memoranda.¹⁷ The principal experiments occurred during the period 1941—4. They began, as we have seen, with Himmler giving his consent as early as 1939 for the use of prisoners to test mustard gas and phosgene, tests which were later to be conducted by a Professor of Anatomy who held an officer’s rank in the S.S. These experiments were directly associated with Himmler’s Institute for Research and Study of Heredity, the Ahnenerbe, which was directed by Wolfram Sievers, a former bookseller, who on Himmler’s orders in July 1942 set up an Institute for Practical Research in Military Science as a department of Ahnenerbe. Sievers wrote to Hirt: ‘The Reichsführer S.S. would like to hear more details from you at an early date about your mustard-gas experiments … Could you not some day write a brief, secret report?’ These tests involved the infliction of burns on the victim’s body which spread from day to day and often led to blindness and death. Post-mortem examination revealed that the intestines and lungs were eaten away.

Dr Sigmund Rascher, a former staff surgeon of the Luftwaffe and an officer in the S.S., had no difficulty in May 1941 in obtaining from Himmler, who had sent him flowers on the birth of his second son, the favour of having certain prisoners put at his disposal for his low-pressure, high-altitude experiments which, as he warned the Reichsführer S.S., would involve the risk of death. ‘I can inform you that prisoners will, of course, be gladly made available for the highflight researches’, wrote Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s secretary. There were additional reasons for Himmler’s interest in the doctor. Rascher’s mistress, who was fifteen years older than her lover, claimed she had given birth to three children after her forty-eighth year; she was also a personal friend of Marga Himmler. There were, it is true, certain racial difficulties in her ancestry which had prevented her marriage until Himmler intervened to clear the way for her, and he willingly became the godfather of Rascher’s remarkable offspring.

Rascher’s experiments, nominally undertaken on behalf of the Luftwaffe, took place mainly during 1942 at Dachau, and Rascher sent reports on their outcome to Himmler; the reactions of the men placed in the Luftwaffe’s low-pressure chambers loaned to Dachau were filmed. In all, nearly 200 men were submitted to these experiments, and over seventy died as a result. Both the reports and photographs survive and were used in evidence during the various trials at Nuremberg. Himmler’s direct personal interest in the experiments is proved by his notorious letter to Rascher dated 13 April 1942:

Himmler’s enthusiasm proved in the end, like Rascher’s, to be that of an amateur. The experiments were considered useless in the eyes of doctors more expert than Rascher, including Himmler’s own medical adviser, Professor Gebhardt, who considered the reports ‘completely unscientific’. The low-pressure chamber was eventually withdrawn from Dachau in March 1942 in spite of Rascher’s strenuous opposition. During the Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg, a doctor who was accused of assisting Rascher in his experiments but found not guilty, was asked whether he had any scruples about them. He replied: ‘I had no scruples on legal grounds. For I knew that the man who had officially authorized these experiments was Himmler… Consequently, I had no scruples of any kind in that direction. In the sphere of what one may call medical ethics it was rather different. It was a wholly new experience for us all to be offered persons to experiment on… I had to get used to the idea.’ He satisfied himself that experiments of this kind had happened abroad, and that sufficed. Rascher, on the other hand, wrote to Himmler: ‘Your active interest in these experiments has a tremendous influence on one’s working capacity and initiative.’

In August Rascher, under the supervision of a medical specialist began a second series of tests; these concerned the effects of freezing on the human body and they were considered useful because German pilots were often precipitated into the sea. The experiments were supposed to determine how men subjected to extreme cold could be revived. At the Doctors’ Trial, another of the accused who was found not guilty, gave evidence of a conversation he had had with Himmler:

Rascher’s reports began to come in by October 1942, and a conference on the subject attended by nearly a hundred medical officers of the Luftwaffe followed in this same month. After this, one supervising specialist declined to take any further part in the experiments in which around 15 men out of the 50 or so used had already died. Rascher then continued the experiments on his own, and the deaths increased to between 80 and 90. The men, either dressed in flying uniform or stripped, were immersed for periods of up to one and a half hours in water kept a few degrees above freezing. Himmler, again taking a personal interest in the experiments, wrote to Rascher on 24 October: ‘I am very anxious as to the experiments with body warmth’ — though Rascher in a report from Dachau dated 15 August had suggested dispensing with these because the reaction of the frozen men was too slow. Himmler also showed his indignation with those who were criticizing Rascher’s use of human beings. ‘I regard as guilty of treason’, he wrote, ‘… people who, even today, reject these experiments on humans and would instead let sturdy German soldiers die… I shall not hesitate to report these men.’

Four prostitutes were sent from the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück to supply the animal warmth in which Himmler believed, but one of these girls unfortunately turned out to be German. Rascher remonstrated with her, but she said she had volunteered for six months’ brothel duty in order to secure her future release from the camp. ‘It hurts my racial feelings’, wrote Rascher to Himmler on 5 November, ‘to expose as a prostitute to racially inferior concentration camp elements a girl who has the appearance of a pure Nordic.’ So the experiment went on without her, and Himmler came to see the results personally at Dachau on 13 November. In the same month, he wrote to a senior officer in the Luftwaffe, asking for Rascher’s release from the Luftwaffe so that his work could be continued solely under the S.S. ‘These researches’, he wrote, ‘… can be performed by us with particular efficiency because I personally assumed the responsibility for supplying from concentration camps for these experiments anti-social elements and criminals who only deserve to die.’ Now, he went on to complain, Christian medical circles were beginning to protest, and the experiments would best be conducted by the S.S. alone, with a ‘non-Christian physician’ acting as liaison officer between the Luftwaffe and the S.S. He singled out a Dr Holzlöhner as the principal troublemaker.

Rascher was eventually released from the Luftwaffe so that he could maintain his practices in secrecy. His experiments at Dachau continued, and he sent a detailed report dated 12 February 1943, pointing out how the prospects and fulfilment of sexual intercourse between the frozen men and the prostitutes substantially quickened the return of warmth. He then went on to ask Himmler for yet another favour: could he be removed to Auschwitz — ‘the camp itself is so extensive that less attention will be attracted to the work. For the subjects howl so when they freeze!’ Himmler was conducting other experiments at Auschwitz, and Rascher stayed at Dachau until he was arrested with his wife in 1944 for child abduction: the three children whose birth had so impressed their godfather Himmler had all been misappropriated. According to evidence given at Nuremberg, Himmler prevented any investigation of Rascher’s case; he remained under arrest and was shot at Dachau before the arrival of the Americans. According to Gebhardt, his wife was hanged at the same time ‘at Himmler’s suggestion’.

Although Rascher in the end proved to be a criminal sadist who took particular delight in causing intense suffering under the mask of science, he was only one of many who worked to satisfy Himmler’s obsession with medical experiment. During 1942—4 the work went on in a number of camps. In addition to the experiments with mustard gas and phosgene, which as we have seen began as early as 1939, Professor Gebhardt, Himmler’s personal physician and consultant surgeon of the Waffen S.S., took charge of the sulphonamide tests on women at Ravensbrück, which was only eight miles from his orthopaedic clinic at Hohenlychen. These tests were initiated by Himmler as a response to the Allied use of sulphonamides and penicillin, knowledge of which was reaching the German soldiers and affecting morale. In May 1942 Himmler held a conference at which Gebhardt and the Chief of the S.S. Medical Service were present, and undoubtedly Heydrich’s death in Prague from gangrene influenced the decision taken by Hitler and Himmler to order the experimental infection of Polish women under sentence of death at Ravensbrück with gas-gangrenous wounds. This work was supervised by the chief of the S.S. Medical Service and Gebhardt, and various sulphonamide preparations were tested on these ‘rabbit girls’, as they were called. Dr Fritz Fischer, one of Gebhardt’s assistants at Hohenlychen and a senior medical man working on these experiments, which inflicted the most fearful pain on the victims, said at the Doctors’ Trial:

From Himmler’s point of view as expressed at his conference in May, the women were being granted ‘an excellent chance of reprieve’.

Among the worst experiments in the camps were those that developed from the cruel, clumsy attempts to achieve methods of mass sterilization. These began as early as the autumn of 1941, when it became clear that the extermination of the races in the East could be effected most easily by such means. A scheme for sterilization by drugs was presented to Himmler in October 1941 by a specialist in venereal disease. ‘The thought alone that the three million Bolsheviks at present German prisoners could be sterilized so that they could be used as labourers but be prevented from reproduction, open the most far-reaching perspectives’, he wrote. Himmler was interested and authorized that ‘sterilization experiments should in any case be carried out in the concentration camps’. All experiments in sterilization drugs proved abortive, but Viktor Brack had already, in March 1941, sent Himmler a report on ‘experiments with Röntgen castration’, recommending the use of ‘high X-ray dosages’ which ‘destroy the internal secretion of the ovary, or of the testicles, respectively’. Exposure to the rays, Brack pointed out, would take only two minutes for men and three for women, and could be administered without their knowledge while, for example, they filled in forms at a counter. Severe burns would result, however, within a few days or weeks and ‘other tissues of the body will be injured’. Brack presented his scheme again a year later, in June 1942, stating that ‘castration by X-ray… is not only relatively cheap but can also be performed on many thousands in the shortest time’.

The following year the experiments began in Auschwitz and its subsidiary camp at Birkenau, where young Polish Jews were operated upon by X-ray, which caused them great pain in spite of which they were forced to continue at work. Subsequently many of them were castrated by normal means so that their testicles could be examined. These experiments continued until the end of April 1944, when Brack’s successor reported to Himmler that mass sterilization by X-ray could no longer be considered practicable.

Another experimenter, a professor from Upper Silesia, was given the opportunity to attempt sterilization of women prisoners in Ravensbrück, though Rudolf Brandt wrote to him on 10 July 1943: ‘Before you start your job, the Reichsführer would be interested to learn from you how long it would take to sterilize a thousand Jewesses’. He envisaged checking results by ‘locking up a Jewess and Jew together for a certain period and then seeing what results are achieved’. The professor’s method was to inject inflammatory liquid into the uterus, the results of which could be examined by X-ray. It was administered without anaesthetics, and children were among the victims. The numbers may now never be known who suffered from these cruel and fearful tests. Evidence was given at the Doctors’ Trial by a few survivors.

In 1943 the experiments were extended to epidemic hepatitis virus research at Sachsenhausen. ‘I approve that eight criminals condemned in Auschwitz [eight Jews of the Polish Resistance Movement condemned to death] should be used for these experiments’, wrote Himmler to a doctor on 16 June 1943. ‘Casualties must be expected’, he had been warned a fortnight earlier. Phlegmon was artificially induced by doctors at Dachau, the subjects chosen in this case being Catholic priests; Gebhardt claimed that he had protested to Himmler about this, but that the Reichsführer S.S., eager to ‘dig up old popular remedies out of the rubbish heap’ as a challenge to the academic medicine which he despised, had refused to have the work stopped.

Ravensbrück was so conveniently near to Gebhardt’s clinic at Hohenlychen, that he took advantage of experiments in bone transplantation which had been developed in the camp, with the ‘special approval’ of Himmler, to steal the shoulder-blade of a female prisoner and transfer it to one of his private patients.

In the autumn of 1943 Himmler personally intervened in a dispute about the choice of subjects for the typhus vaccine experiments at the special centre which had been set up in Buchenwald under Grawitz in 1941. Himmler’s instructions were that only persons under sentence of at least ten years’ penal servitude were to be used. Similar experiments were undertaken at Natzweiler camp in 1943 under the initial supervision of a professor of hygiene. In July 1944, Himmler authorized the use of gypsies for testing the possibility of drinking sea-water; since he regarded the gypsies as scarcely human, he added that ‘for checking’ three other, more normal people, should be added to the subject-list.

The process of extermination that had begun with the insane in 1940 was continued in the case of many mentally defective and deformed children; Himmler’s orders, as far as defective children in the camps were concerned, were quite explicit; they must be done away with along with other ‘incurables’. In June 1942 Himmler gave consent to the ‘special treatment’ of tubercular Poles. Only in 1943, when the working capacity of all prisoners was regarded as important, was a special order from Himmler circulated to the Camp Commandants that ‘in future only insane prisoners can be selected for Action 14f 13’, the reference number for euthanasia. ‘All other prisoners unfit for work (persons suffering from tuberculosis, bedridden invalids, etc.) are definitely to be excluded from this action. Bedridden prisoners were to be given suitable work which can be performed in bed.’ There is evidence, however, that the extermination of sick and unwanted prisoners did in fact continue.

In July 1942, as we have seen, an Institute for Practical Research in Military Science was founded by Himmler inside his Ancestral Heritage Community, the Ahnenerbe. This Institute, working in close association with the Reich University of Strasbourg, began to assemble the collection of skeletons and skulls of Jews under the supervision of an expert on anatomy, who on 9 February 1942 had urged Himmler to help his researches by enabling him to procure ‘the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars who personify a repulsive yet characteristic subhumanity’. Himmler formally agreed on 23 February, and by the autumn Sievers, the manager of Ahnenerbe, was able to report to Eichmann in a memorandum headed ‘Assembling of a skeleton collection’ that a consignment of 115 persons, including 30 Jewesses, was to be made available. They were gassed the following year at Oranienburg by Joseph Kramer, who subsequently described under examination, with the cold exactitude of a good technician, precisely how he and his men carried out their tasks. The gas was provided by Hirt, and the bodies were sent direct to the Institute for preservation in tanks. A witness at the Institute described the first delivery, the remains of the thirty murdered Jewesses: ‘The bodies were still warm when they arrived. Their eyes were wide open and glazing. Their eyeballs were bloodshot, red and protuberant. There were also traces of blood about the noses and mouths… There was no sign of rigor mortis.’ Consignments of male bodies followed at intervals.

Himmler was very proud of the research that he had instituted and his relationship to the Ahnenerbe organization. Giving his evasive evidence during the Doctors’ Trial, Gebhardt said:

Thus Himmler, who was too reserved a man to extend his power over the surface of Germany in the flamboyant manner of Goring, sent his roots deep into the subterranean earth of the camps, creating there a life-in-death for a vast but hidden community that was to absorb and destroy millions of Europeans, and most of all the Jews. This was to become the secret empire of death rejected by the conscience of the German people who, though they were in varying degrees aware of its existence, did so little to oppose it. Himmler, armed with the executive savagery of Heydrich, largely severed himself and his activities from the attention of the other leaders, leaving them to exercise control over the life of Germany and its captured territories while he developed the processes of death in order to purify the race he believed he was born to make paramount. He sank himself deeper and deeper into his racial obsessions and their outward manifestations in the Lebensborn institutions, the researches of the Institute for the Study of Heredity, and the overwhelming task of eliminating the suffocating presence of the Jews and Slavs in Eastern Europe. From the West he was for some while largely excluded because of Hitler’s desire to come to some sort of favourable terms with this area while he crushed opposition in the East through the invasion of Soviet Russia. Only later was Himmler permitted to extend the full measure of his persecution to the resistance movements in the West.

Himmler’s differences with the other leaders, particularly with Göring and Ribbentrop, were caused by his encroachments on what they regarded as their privileged territory. Himmler’s information services were in some ways superior to those of either Goring or Ribbentrop because the men he employed, such as Schellenberg, were often of superior skill and intelligence. At the time of the Battle of Britain, Himmler’s assessment of British aircraft production was over double that of Goring, whose easy optimism that he could destroy the Royal Air Force in a matter of days was partly based on his estimate that the output of planes in Britain was only some 300 a month. Goring did not welcome the challenge of such contradicting figures, nor did Ribbentrop approve of Himmler’s interference in foreign affairs. They differed in 1940 over policy in Rumania, and in October Himmler was sent by Hitler on a further mission to Spain to try to involve Franco in the war. During the same period he went to Norway to strengthen the campaign against the growing resistance movement; he introduced the fearful system of persecuting men and women opposed to Germany by arresting their dependent kinsfolk and children and holding them as hostages.

Ribbentrop equally resented the extension of Himmler’s Intelligence services abroad under Schellenberg, and his attempts to influence German policy in the occupied countries. The breach in the relations between the two ministers came to a head in the winter of 1941-2, when, according to Frau von Ribbentrop, Himmler even ‘tried to enlist my husband in his personal intrigues… My husband considered it impossible from the point of view of foreign relations that Himmler should succeed Hitler’. Ribbentrop in his Memoirs summarized his points of difference with Himmler at the time, including among them Himmler’s uncompromising attitude to freemasonry and the Church, his treatment of the Jews, and his evil influence in such countries as France, Denmark and Hungary. He complained that his ambassadors were kept under surveillance by the S.D., and that secret reports on them were sent direct to the Führer. Ribbentrop bitterly resented the fact that this was done behind his back, especially when these reports led Hitler to take decisions based on what he called ‘false information’. He complains that in Rumania, for example, Himmler supported Horia Sima after he had decided in conference with Hitler that the man they should support was Antonescu.¹⁸

In an attempt to force Ribbentrop’s hand, Schellenberg contrived one of those Machiavellian tricks in which he took such delight in order to discredit Ribbentrop’s own secret service. He was, he claimed, under instruction from Himmler ‘to do my best to destroy this organization.’ He succeeded in feeding certain of Ribbentrop’s agents with false information about the Polish Government in exile in London, and then sat back to count the days until the erroneous reports arrived on Ribbentrop’s desk and were duly forwarded to the Führer. Such tactics were hardly calculated to bring Ribbentrop and Himmler closer in their personal relations.

In January 1941, Himmler made an effort to extend his power and that of Heydrich over the German Courts of Justice by asking Hitler to hand over their control from the Ministry of Justice to Frick’s Ministry of the Interior, where the Secretary of State, Wilhelm Stuckart, was a member of the S.S. and under Himmler’s influence. Hitler, wary as ever when asked to dispose of power, failed to respond, and the courts themselves remained outside the control of the Gestapo until the end of the war.

Himmler’s control of criminals and political police affairs was, however, complete. Each Gau, or administrative province in Germany, had its Higher S.S. Leader, the counterpart of the Nazi Gauleiter himself but directly responsible to Himmler and Heydrich. As the rule of the Reich spread, these S.S. Leaders were appointed in places as far apart as Oslo and Athens, Warsaw and The Hague. In Russia they were attached to each of the Army Groups. These men were supreme in all matters which they were able to call criminal and political, and answerable only to their headquarters in Berlin.

More complicated by now were his relations with Heydrich, who, when he had left his desk in May 1940 to fly with the Luftwaffe over the stricken people of France, had only himself two years left to live. Of these the first fifteen months were to be spent in preparing the Action Groups for the war against Russia in the summer of 1941 and in perfecting the extermination system in the camps set aside for that purpose by Himmler, while the last nine months were spent in his duties as Reich Protector in Czechoslovakia, where he was to be assassinated in May 1942. During this time it is plain that he considered himself Hitler’s favourite, ear-marked for promotion to a ministerial level, outflanking Himmler in the movement to the top of the hierarchy. Meanwhile Himmler was treated as an ally by his most powerful subordinate, and they worked closely together on the plans to take control of Russia.

On 13 March 1941 Hitler issued a directive signed by Keitel concerning the coming campaign in the East. This directive disturbed the High Command; it stated that ‘in the area of operations the Reichsführer S.S. is entrusted, on behalf of the Führer, with special tasks for the preparation of the political administration, tasks which result from the struggle which has to be carried out between two opposing political systems. Within the scope of these tasks, the Reichsführer S.S. shall act independently and under his own responsibility.’¹⁹ Not content with giving Himmlerthe task of purging Communism from Russia, and Goring, as plenipotentiary of the Four Year Economic Plan, responsibility for stripping individual territories of food and other products valuable to Germany, Hitler the following month suddenly salvaged Alfred Rosenberg, the old-time Party intellectual, and appointed him Minister for the future occupied territories of the East, an appointment so ludicrous that it can only be explained as a formal attempt to counter the combined and growing power of Himmler and Heydrich or the potential greed of Goring’s agents.

During the period of intense preparations for the invasion of Russia, which were developed at the same time as those for the mass extermination of the unwanted peoples, Himmler and Heydrich had to establish plans for the Action Groups which would be acceptable on the one hand to the Army and, nominally at least, to Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg constantly tried to intervene in the plans that Heydrich was preparing, though Himmler contemptuously ignored his existence. These differences brought Heydrich and Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful aide, closer together, for Bormann disapproved of Rosenberg, who had wild ideas of playing the part of a Baltic-German liberator of the Russian people from Soviet tyranny. As for the Army, Schellenberg was required in June to use his legal diplomacy in order to negotiate suitable terms with General Wagner, representing the High Command; the plan he devised and which was finally signed released the Security Police and the S.D. from Army control outside the immediate fighting area, leaving them free to conduct the campaign in their own way. The Army, in fact, was expected to assist them in carrying out their atrocities.

When the invasion, after much postponement, finally came on 22 June 1941, Heydrich once more disappeared in order to fly with the Luftwaffe, and his plane on one occasion was seriously damaged by Russian flak. He managed to bring the aircraft back near the German lines, and landed it, crawling to safety with his leg injured. This exploit won him the Iron Cross, First Class, from Hitler, but Himmler must have been distraught at the news of the danger he had been in. While Heydrich flew on his missions over Soviet territory, his Action Groups began their fearful massacres, shooting, hanging and terrorizing prisoners, Communist officials and partisans, as well as whole Jewish and gypsy communities.

After the war, Otto Ohlendorf, one of Himmler’s intellectuals and an officer in charge of an Action Group, made a sworn statement which reveals in terrible detail how these commando security squadrons went to work:

Later in his statement, Ohlendorf said that he was prepared to confirm the affidavit given by another Action Group commander that he had been responsible for the deaths of 135,000 Jews and Communists during ‘the first four months of the programme’.

The ferocity with which Hitler, Goring and Himmler planned their assault on Russia is unique in history. Goring, in a directive to his agents dated 23 May 1941, the first of the series that were to make up the notorious Green File on the economic exploitation of Russia, spoke of ‘the famine which undoubtedly will take place’, and accepted as inevitable that ‘many tens of millions of people in this area will become redundant’. So enthusiastic was Himmler to equip his men for Russia that as early as February he had made a special journey to Norway, where he travelled to the northern areas to visit his police units and to survey the needs for campaigning during the Russian winter. When he came back, he ordered Pohl to obtain the currency to buy stoves and furs in Norway for his men.

In March, the following month, Himmler summoned Heydrich, Daluege, Berger and a number of senior officers to his retreat at Wewelsburg. Wolff was also present, and so was Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, an expert on partisan warfare who was later to be called as a witness for the prosecution before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. According to Bach-Zelewski, Himmler declared at this secret conference that one of the aims of the Russian campaign was ‘to decimate the Slav population by thirty millions’.²¹ Wolff prefers to remember this statement in another form, namely that Himmler considered war with Russia would result in millions of dead.

The decision to adopt genocide as an active and fully organized policy in the purification of Europe for the ‘Aryan’ race was undoubtedly reached in 1941. There is a fundamental distinction between the practice of genocide and the callous and deliberate cruelties that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of unwanted people from the time of the occupation of Poland and the exchanges of population that followed. Wolff declares that Himmler was deeply oppressed by the decision that he was to be ultimately responsible for this crime, the greatest that any one man has ever committed in recorded history against his fellows. Kersten confirms this.²² The decision in favour of genocide was preceded by a vaguely conceived ‘final solution’ in the form of despatching millions of the European ‘sub-humans’ to Madagascar, following an enforced agreement with the French to use the island for this purpose; this idea had sprung from the early policy of encouraging Jewish emigration from Germany during the middle ’thirties. The Madagascar project, first discussed openly in 1938, was kept alive (in theory, at least) until the end of 1940, since during that year Eichmann himself was detailed to prepare a plan to set up an autonomous Jewish reserve under a German police-governor on the island, to which some four million Jews should be sent. Both Heydrich and Himmler approved the plan, but according to the Dutch edition of Kersten’s Memoirs, Hitler had already abandoned this idea shortly after the capitulation of France, and had told Himmler he would have to undertake the progressive extermination of European Jewry.²³ It was not, however, until February 1942 that what was by then the fiction of the Madagascar project was officially abandoned in a memorandum sent by Hitler to the Foreign Office.

The decision to practise organized mass extermination, a national policy of genocide, seems to have been arrived at only after secret discussions which were inevitably dominated by Hitler. According to both Wolff and Kersten, Himmler was often very disturbed during this period, as if absorbed in a problem he was unable to discuss with anyone around him.

During the summer a firm decision was reached. On 31 July 1941, Goring sent his carefully worded directive to Heydrich, who was entrusted with the administrative planning for the extermination.

According to Lammers, Head of the Reich Chancellery, while giving evidence at the Nuremberg Trial, the nature of the final as distinct from the total solution was made known to Heydrich by Goring verbally. There can be little doubt that Heydrich knew it in any case, and he appointed Adolf Eichmann his principal deputy in the matter. Eichmann was also responsible to Himmler, who had retained his direct control over the concentration camps, some of which were to be set aside as centres for extermination. Giving evidence at his trial in Israel in 1961, Eichmann claimed that even as late as November 1941 he ‘did not know any details of the plan’, but that he ‘knew one was being drawn’.²⁵

Heydrich’s assistant, Wisliceny, gave evidence at Nuremberg in January 1946 which implied that Eichmann received definite orders from Himmler during the spring of 1942. At a meeting in Eichmann’s office at the ‘end of July or the beginning of August’, the killing of Jews in Poland was discussed:

This order, said Wisliceny, was sent by Himmler to Heydrich and to the Inspector of the Concentration Camps; it was classified top secret and dated April 1942. Eichmann went on to explain that ‘the planned biological destruction of the Jewish race in the Eastern territories was disguised by the wording “final solution”…’ and that he personally ‘was entrusted with the execution of this order’.

Long after the final decision had been taken, Himmler remained deeply oppressed. During a period of treatment by Kersten in Berlin, he admitted on 11 November after considerable pressure that the destruction of the Jews was being planned. When Kersten expressed his horror, Himmler became defensive — the Jews had to be finally eradicated, he said, since they had been and would always be the cause of intolerable strife in Europe. Just as the Americans had exterminated the Indians, so the Germans must wipe out the Jews. But in spite of his arguments, Himmler could not hide the disturbance of his conscience, and a few days later he admitted that ‘the extermination of people is unGermanic’.

Auschwitz, near Cracow in Poland, became the principal centre for Himmler’s extermination plan. It had once been the site of an Austrian military encampment built on marshy ground, where winter fog rose from the damp earth. Himmler transformed this military establishment into a concentration camp for the Poles, and it was officially opened on 14 June 1940, with Lieutenant Rudolf Hoess as its first Commandant. Joseph Kramer, who later had charge of Belsen, was his adjutant.

Hoess, who became one of Himmler’s most closely trusted agents, was to survive the collapse of Germany. Although held prisoner in May 1945, his true identity was not suspected until some months after his initial release. When he was once more taken into custody, he admitted his identity and signed a statement on 16 March in which he declared: ‘I personally arranged on orders received from Himmler in May 1941 the gassing of 2 million persons between June-July 1941 and the end of 1943, during which time I was Commandant of Auschwitz.’ He was very frank and co-operative, giving his lethal evidence at Nuremberg with all the impersonal self-confidence of a good and modest steward. Later he was handed over to the Polish authorities and while waiting his trial wrote in longhand his autobiography, perhaps the most incredible document to come from any Nazi agent. While, for example, Schellenberg relishes his intricate acts of espionage for Heydrich and Himmler, writing his story as if it were a thriller, Hoess is perpetually modest, melancholy and moralizing. The spirit of his Catholic upbringing taught him the supreme virtue of obedience.

Hoess represents himself as a simple, virtuous man who liked hard work and soldiering, and felt oppressed by the criminal underworld with which he was forced to associate.²⁷ At Dachau he disliked the methods used by Eicke, and while confessing that his ‘sympathies lay too much with the prisoner’, he admits that he ‘had become too fond of the black uniform’ to admit his inadequacy and relinquish the work. ‘I wished to appear hard’, he writes, ‘lest I should appear weak.’ When he went to Sachsenhausen as an adjutant, he took charge of the execution of an S.S. officer who by an act of humanity had let a prisoner escape. ‘I was so agitated’, he recalls, ‘that I could hardly hold the pistol to his head when giving him the coup de grace.’ But executions became a matter of routine, and Hoess learned to hide his head in the sands of obedience. His exemplary conduct led to his promotion as Commandant of Auschwitz. Here, he says, ‘I lived only for my work… I was absorbed, I might say obsessed… Every fresh difficulty only increased my zeal.’ But this idealism was betrayed by the ‘general untrustworthiness that surrounded me’. His staff, he claimed, let him down, and he became powerless against the corruption and ill-will of his subordinates. He took discreetly to drink; his wife tried to help him by building up a social life in their home at the camp, but ‘all human emotions were forced into the background’.

In November 1940 Hoess reported his plans for Auschwitz to Himmler, who brushed aside his Commandant’s fears and grievances, and only became interested when the discussion turned on making Auschwitz into an agricultural research station, with laboratories, plant nurseries and facilities for stock breeding. As for the prisoners and their welfare, Hoess was left to ‘improvise’ as best he could. It was not until March the following year that Himmler paid a visit to the camp, accompanied by his officials and some ‘high executives of I.G. Farben Industrie’. Glücks, the Inspector of Concentration Camps, arrived in advance and ‘constantly warned me against reporting anything disagreeable to the Reichsführer S.S.’ When Hoess tried to impress on him the desperate overcrowding and lack of drainage or water supply, Himmler merely replied that the camp was to be enlarged to take 100,000 prisoners, so as to supply labour contingents to I.G. Farben Industrie. As to Hoess, he must continue to improvise.

This was the man to whom Himmler entrusted his special confidence in June 1941 when, as Hoess put it, he ‘gave me the order to prepare installations at Auschwitz where mass exterminations could take place… By the will of the Reichsführer S.S., Auschwitz became the greatest human extermination centre of all time.’

According to Hoess’s detailed account of this meeting, Himmler explained to him that he had chosen Auschwitz ‘because of its good position as regards communications and because the area can be easily isolated and camouflaged’. He told him that Eichmann would come to Auschwitz and give him secret instructions about the equipment that would have to be installed. Hoess has left a full and frank account of the experiments for which he and Eichmann were responsible and which had led to the construction of the gas-chambers during the following winter. By the spring of 1942 the organized killings were to begin as a routine operation at Auschwitz; Russian prisoners-of-war were used during the test period. ‘The killing… did not cause me much concern at the time’, wrote Hoess. ‘I must even admit that this gassing set my mind at rest.’ Hoess did not relish the violence of the blood-bath caused by other forms of killing, and Himmler had warned him that trainloads of deported Jews would soon be on their way.

It has been suggested that Himmler deliberately chose a camp in Poland as the principal centre for genocide in order that German soil should not be contaminated by the destruction of so much impure flesh.²⁸ Other subsidiary centres of mass extermination were also set up in Poland, such as Treblinka. Auschwitz, however, had the double task of providing forced labour for synthetic coal and rubber plants built in the district by I.G. Farben while at the same time preparing for human mass destruction. Hoess, far more anxious to fulfil his quota of death than to send slave labour to factories at some distance from the camp, went to visit the Commandant of Treblinka: ‘He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas and I did not think his methods were very efficient’, wrote Hoess after the war.

A vast mass of documents — statements by innumerable witnesses, the endless records of the interrogations and the examinations conducted before and during the war crime trials — have become the basis for many studies of the extermination and concentration camps during the peak period of the war. What emerges from these terrible, pitiful stories, which few read except for scholars and research workers, is the sheer muddle in which this carnage was conducted. The administrators such as Eichmann and Hoess were in the end utterly unable to control the grafters and the sadists on whom they had to depend to carry out the work of the camps, the selection and destruction of the victims and the mass cremation of the bodies. The S.S. élite, living in their barracks or married quarters nearby, either took no part in the proceedings or remained as aloof as possible from the hell they had created and which it was their duty to maintain. The bodily control of the captives passed increasingly into the hands of the Kapos, who were hardened criminals or renegade prisoners; their conduct was in the end far more savage than that of the S.S., whose morale grew slack in the increasing chaos as the tide of the war turned against the Nazis. On top of this morass of suffering sat Himmler at his desk, doing what he conceived to be his duty in circumstances of increasing strain and difficulty.

From September 1941, Eichmann took full charge of the extermination schedules, drafting orders for Heydrich, controlling the transportation of the Jewish population and organizing a succession of conferences at which the detailed administration of death was determined. But on 27 September Heydrich achieved a major promotion. He was appointed Acting Reich Protector in Czechoslovakia, displacing von Neurath, who was weak and ailing. He was promoted S.S. General, and gained in one step the rank and privileges of a Minister. After the comparative poverty of his position in Germany under Himmler, he could now live in luxury in Prague.

It seems clear that Bormann, Heydrich’s principal ally among Hitler’s close advisers, had encouraged this appointment rather than Himmler who, according to Schellenberg, was ‘not enthusiastic about it’ but decided not to stand in the way because he did not want to offend Bormann. There could be no clearer indication than this of the ascendancy of Bormann at Hitler’s court since Hess’s sudden flight to Scotland the previous May; for Himmler himself was in high favour with the Führer, while Goring, owing to his growing self-indulgence and the failure of the Luftwaffe to maintain its aggressive reputation, was losing his former influence. In many respects Himmler was becoming the most powerful man in Germany under Hitler, though he never made a display of his position in public. Power for him was always a secret force.

His attitude to the new appointment of Heydrich was therefore a mixed one. He was no doubt pleased to have provided the Führer with a distinguished servant, and the affectionate feelings that he always had for his Nordic model were satisfied by his success; at the same time he regretted the measure of independence that Heydrich had now won, and the loss of his daily advice, on which Himmler had come absolutely to rely. Heydrich, however, had no intention of severing himself from his duties in Berlin, for he retained his office as head of R.S.H.A. and he travelled constantly between Prague and Germany. The register of phone-calls between Himmler’s office in Berlin and Heydrich’s in Prague is a further measure of the dependence of the Reichsführer S.S. on his energetic and decisive officer. There is no doubt, too, that Himmler felt some dismay at the progress of a man who he was intelligent enough to recognize was in certain respects his superior. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, he kept in the closest touch, and Heydrich’s departure for Prague was preceded by several conferences with Himmler, mostly about the Eastern Front.

The departure of Heydrich for Prague was the cue for Schellenberg to change his allegiance. Schellenberg both admired and hated Heydrich, who he had reason to believe disliked him. Applying his professional subtlety to his master, he had climbed within seven years from a youthful apprentice attached to the S.S. to become, on the day Russia was invaded, head of Amt. VI, the Foreign Intelligence Service of the S.D. A born intriguer, he saw that it would now be wise to reorientate his services in the direction of Himmler; he realized that in some respects he might perhaps be able to replace Heydrich as Himmler’s special confidant, in spite of the fact that he was so different in character. As he put it himself: ‘Many of my opponents spread the libel that I was really Heydrich’s “double”… However, in time this malevolent propaganda faded away, and a new myth was discovered in which Heydrich was replaced by Himmler.’ Schellenberg claims that he was given the responsibility of drafting Hitler’s proclamation to the German people about the war on Russia, working against time through the night while Himmler and Heydrich besieged him with ‘phone calls. ‘Himmler made me nervous’, wrote Schellenberg. ‘As soon as Hitler asked him a question or said something to him, he would run to the telephone and bombard me with questions and advice.’ Schellenberg was already beginning to enjoy the experience of Himmler’s dependence upon him, and his promotion followed rapidly.

Appointed Acting Head of the S.D. Foreign Intelligence Service on 22 June, the day Russia was invaded, Schellenberg spent the next two months in preparing a memorandum on the Political Secret Service abroad which, when it was completed, apparently impressed the Reichsführer S.S. sufficiently for him to impose it on the leadership of the S.S. and the Party in the form of an order, thus, as Schellenberg puts it, ‘acting as a propagandist for my ideas’. During the next four years Schellenberg was to draw very close to Himmler and, in the guise of his special adviser, try to make him adopt policies and lines of action originating in his own devious brain.

He enjoyed the fruits of office in forms which might even seem exaggerated for a secret agent in an American thriller. He describes with glowing excitement the luxurious carpets in his executive suite, the trolley-table holding his telephones and linking him direct to Hitler’s Chancellery, the microphones concealed at every point of the compass, in the walls and lamps and under the desk, the alarms controlled by photo-electric cells, the big mahogany desk with its built-in automatic guns which could spray the room with bullets. Guards could be summoned at the press of a button to surround the building and block the exits, while his car was equipped with a short-wave transmitter through which he could reach his office and dictate to his secretary. Even his own body was equipped for sudden death; when engaged on missions abroad, he wore an artificial tooth containing enough poison to kill him in thirty seconds.

Since July Himmler had spent a considerable time during the summer at the Russian front. He had set up his headquarters in the Soviet Military Academy at Zhitomir in the Ukraine, a hundred miles north of Hitler’s headquarters known as Werwolf at Winnitsa. From Zhitomir, Himmler kept in touch with the work of the Action Groups and the Police and, to a lesser extent, with the Waffen S.S., whose four famous divisions, the Adolf Hitler (formerly the Leibstandarte), the Das Reich, the Death’s Head and the Viking, fought brilliantly during the campaign until the reverses of the winter led to serious losses. But what Himmler was primarily concerned with was the work of the Action Groups behind the front, whose massacres of Jews, gypsies and political commissars began as soon as prisoners fell into the hands of the advancing Germans.

Heydrich, meanwhile, was dividing his attention between his duties in Berlin and in Prague, where, after initiating a brief, punitive reign of terror against the resistance movement immediately on his arrival in Czechoslovakia, he made it clear to the puppet government under President Hacha that he now expected maximum co-operation with Germany.²⁹ Heydrich’s intentions in Czechoslovakia were in line with Himmler’s policy for Eastern Europe: the extermination of undesirable racial elements and the Germanisation of the rest of the Czechs and their territory; this policy had been determined in 1940, a year before Heydrich’s appointment, and approved by Hitler in full consultation with the Sudeten German Karl Hermann Frank, who was now S.S. commandant for Prague. On 2 October, Heydrich outlined his plans at a secret conference of Nazi administrators in Prague. Bohemia was by right German territory, and was to be re-settled by Germans; the Czech people of good race would be Germanized, the rest exterminated or sterilized. He then outlined the permanent racial plan for Europe, through which the Nordic races of Germanic origin would be federated under German control: ‘It is clear that we must find an entirely different way in which to treat these peoples from that used for peoples of other races, the Slavs and so on. The Germanic race must be seized firmly but justly; they must be humanely led in a similar way to our own people, if we want to keep them permanently in the Reich and to merge them with us.’

In this, Heydrich was echoing the thoughts of Himmler. As the Germans moved east, he said, they would turn the inferior races they did not destroy into helot armies, stretching from the Atlantic seaboard to the Ural mountains, to protect the Greater Reich from the peoples of Asia. The East, with its slave labour, would produce the food for the Aryan West.

In his dealings with the Czechs, Heydrich added, it would be wise to practise a certain tact now that the strong arm of the S.S. was being shown. ‘I personally, for example,’ he said, ‘shall maintain pleasant social relations with these Czechs, but I will be careful not to cross certain barriers.’ He then concluded with a careful reference to the Final Solution (Endlösung), warning his listeners to keep the matter to themselves; he would need, he said, a complete racial picture of the Czech people obtained by compiling under various guises a national register of the entire population:

Heydrich, less than a week after taking up his appointment, was already speaking like an established Nazi leader. Though the ideas he put forward were those familiar enough in Himmler’s mythology, he spoke now in the first person. In the signal he had sent by teleprinter to Hitler’s headquarters in Russia on 27 September notifying his arrival in Prague, he had ended by making it quite clear that ‘all political reports and messages will reach you by the hand of Reichsführer Bormann’. There was no longer any question that he would communicate with the Führer through Himmler; according to Schellenberg, who had been invited by Heydrich to celebrate the news of his appointment over a bottle of champagne, Bormann had told Heydrich the Führer had greater responsibilities in store for him if he were successful in Czechoslovakia. He believed, therefore, as he had said at the secret conference in Prague, that he would not be in Czechoslovakia for long. He was, after all, still head of R.S.H.A., and he had no intention of cutting himself off from Berlin. A ’plane stood by constantly to carry him to and from Germany, but he took his wife and children to Prague and installed them in the beautiful and luxurious country seat assigned to the Protector at Panenske-Breschen, twelve miles from the capital. As a bribe for good conduct he increased the rations of Czech workers and adopted the pose, once the initial purge was over, of being Czechoslovakia’s friend while attempting to increase the efficiency of her industry for the benefit of Germany. In spite of his ceaseless schedule of work, the regular journeys to Berlin, the frequent visits to Hitler in the Ukraine, he made a point of appearing to patronize the arts in Prague while subsidizing the performance of German opera.

Himmler was constantly in touch with him, and it was Heydrich, not Himmler, who controlled the lunch conference organized by Eichmann on 20 January 1942 at Wannsee, at which the various phases of the Final Solution were debated with the usual cynical circumlocution. The various claims of death by overwork, deportation to the East, sterilization and extermination were gone over for the 11 million Jews and part-Jews whom Heydrich estimated lived in Europe both within and beyond the territories under Nazi rule. The only Jews to be spared temporarily were those engaged in war work, at the urgent request of Goring’s Ministry. Everyone present, leaders of the S.S. and government officials alike, pledged their assistance, and Thierack, the Minister of Justice, formally blessed the proposals and surrendered all jurisdiction over the Jews to the S.S. Cognac was served and the speakers grew loud and merry. Heydrich who, according to Eichmann when testifying in 1961 at Jerusalem, summoned the conference out of vanity and a desire to consolidate his power over the fate of the Jews, then left for Prague, where on 4 February he called another secret conference of his assistants in order to explain his long-term plan for Czechoslovakia; mass deportations of the millions who were not selected for Germanization. Under guise of a nation-wide check for tuberculosis conducted by racial specialists, the first steps in the national racial survey were begun.

With equal speed, Eichmann set about his work. On 6 March he held a conference to resolve the difficult transport problems connected with the evacuation of the Jews to the east and to debate the problem of organizing the sterilization of Jews involved in mixed marriages and their offspring. Heydrich, confined now for longer periods in Prague, left R.S.H.A. matters to Eichmann and his staff. In the spring, when Schellenberg was visiting him, he seemed more than ordinarily worried. Hitler, he said, ‘was relying more and more on Himmler, who… could exploit his present influence with the Führer.’ He no longer seemed willing to accept Heydrich’s advice, and Bormann, he now felt, was jealous of him and hostile. ‘Apparently there had been differences between him and Himmler, who had become jealous.’ Both Bormann and Himmler resented the fact that Hitler had been prepared to confer with Heydrich alone, and Heydrich was certain by now that Bormann, his former supporter, was starting an intrigue against him.

This was the situation when Heydrich, who was very careless of his personal security, left his castle to be driven to the airport shortly after two o’clock on the afternoon of 27 May. Waiting for him near a sharp turn in the road were two Free Czech agents from Britain, who had been dropped by parachute the previous December to wait for final orders to attempt his assassination; one had a Sten-gun and the other a special grenade. At the crucial moment the Sten-gun jammed, and the second agent flung his grenade at the car. Heydrich, who seemed for the moment uninjured, got out of the car and pursued his assailants, firing his revolver while in their attempt to escape they dodged between two street cars that had drawn up. Then Heydrich suddenly collapsed; he had in fact suffered internal injuries at the base of his spine from the explosion of the grenade. The Czech police arrived and hustled Heydrich, who was in great pain, to hospital. The two agents both escaped at the time, but they died three weeks later resisting arrest.

Both Hitler and Himmler were at their separate headquarters in East Prussia when the news that Heydrich was seriously injured reached them from Frank. According to Wolff, who was with Himmler, the Reichsführer burst into tears, and then drove with Wolff to see Hitler at Rastenburg, some thirty miles distant. They decided at once to send their court physicians by air to Prague in a fervent attempt to keep Heydrich alive. None of them could save Heydrich from the gangrene set up by his wounds, and a week later he died, surrounded by doctors. Gebhardt described the frantic scene at the Doctors’ Trial:

Meanwhile, a heavy vengeance was being taken on the Czechs by Frank at the order of Himmler. All life and movement was stopped in the city overnight on 27 May, and a million crowns reward was offered for news which would lead to the arrest of the assailants. Hostages were arrested in the tradition already well-established by the Nazis, who used the occasion as an excuse to rid themselves of people they knew to be hostile; hundreds were killed and thousands arrested. Himmler’s teleprinter to Frank read: ‘As the intellectuals are our main enemies shoot a hundred of them tonight.’

On 6 June the first in a succession of funeral ceremonies took place in the presence of Himmler, who was the principal mourner and personally took charge of Heydrich’s two young boys who accompanied him. Frau Heydrich, who was pregnant, remained in her castle. Then the body was taken on a train under guard to Berlin, to lie in state at R.S.H.A. headquarters. At three o‘clock on 8 June, Himmler led Hitler forward to open the obsequies over the coffin at the Chancellery, to which the body had been taken for its final display. Hitler laid a wreath of orchids beside the man he said ‘was one of the greatest defenders of our greater German ideal,… the man with the iron heart’. Afterwards, he touched the heads of the two little boys whom Himmler was holding by the hand. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra played Wagner’s Funeral March, and Himmler delivered the final lengthy oration on Heydrich’s career before the body was taken to the Invaliden Cemetery for burial.

The following night, at the command of Hitler, the special vengeance of the Führer was visited on the Czech people at the village of Lidice, and upon their children. The Chief of the Security Police in Prague wrote the history of Lidice himself in the Gestapo order sent to the Resettlement Office in Lodz on 12 June:

Immediately after the death of Heydrich, Himmler himself, following an agreement with Hitler, took over temporary command of R.S.H.A., announcing this to the senior officers present while Heydrich’s body still lay before them in state. According to Schellenberg, he used the occasion to make a severe criticism of each man in turn, except for Schellenberg himself, whom he referred to as ‘the Benjamin of our leadership corps,’ saying that Schellenberg would in future be required to work more closely with him. Schellenberg admits to blushing at the praise accorded him when the others, so much older than he, were blamed. By assuming Heydrich’s command of the S.D., Himmler ensured that no one but himself had control of the secret safe in which so much damaging evidence existed about the Nazi leadership.

As for Himmler’s attitude to Heydrich, we have his remarks to Kersten that have already been quoted. Perhaps, after all, it was a relief to be rid of so dangerous a man, who had shaken himself free from proper subordination. Two months after Heydrich’s death, Himmler called Schellenberg to his office and stood beside him face-to-face with the death-mask of the dead man. Then he said, in a deeply serious voice, ‘Yes, as the Führer said at the funeral, he was indeed a man with an iron heart. And at the height of his power fate purposefully took him away.’ He nodded his head in approval of his own words and, says Schellenberg, his small, cold eyes glinted behind their pince-nez like the eyes of a basilisk.