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

V. Final Solution

Whatever doubts there may have been in Himmler’s mind and conscience, there is no sign of them in the meticulous decrees and orders he despatched secretly to his officers. In these he weighed with a fearful exactitude how he might best dispose of the human raw material in his hands. After the Wannsee conference of January 1942, he made the parsimonious Oswald Pohl, who from 1939 had been in charge of the economic administration of the camps, head of a new department of the S.S. which gave him added incentives to develop the slave-labour programme. Pohl was told he must exploit the prisoners to the full as a means not only of helping Germany’s war production, but of making profits for the exclusive benefit of the S.S.

Pohl, who had been a paymaster captain in the Navy, did his best to serve his masters in carrying out the impossible task of forcing efficient work out of dying men and women; indeed, he built himself a staff some 1,500 strong solely for this purpose. In the same month, on 20 February, Himmler issued a directive that ‘special treatment’ should be given to any prisoners who proved themselves undisciplined by refusing to work or by malingering. ‘Special treatment is hanging’, explained Himmler with a frankness unusual in such orders, but he added, ‘It should not take place in the immediate vicinity of the camp. A certain number, however, should attend the special treatment.’

On 15 December 1942, Himmler wrote to Pohl on the problem of feeding the prisoners:

In January 1943 Himmler issued personally very detailed instructions for executions in the concentration camps.¹ These included the following clauses:

In June 1944 he was forced to remind his S.S. men of the regulations he had made against taking snapshots of these executions. ‘In time of war’, he added to this reminder, ‘executions are unfortunately necessary. But to take snapshots of them only shows bad taste, apart from being detrimental to the interests of our Fatherland. The enemy might well abuse photographs of this kind in his propaganda.’

Himmler’s concern with his own independence grew. In March he tried to establish munition works in certain camps, but Speer, the new Minister for Armaments, forestalled this; as Speer himself said when giving evidence before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, ‘uncontrolled arms production on the part of the S.S. had to be prevented… It was Himmler’s intention to exercise his influence over these industries and in some way or other he would undoubtedly have succeeded in getting them under his control.’² Speer was only prepared to make use of prisoners on his own terms, and he saw to it that Hitler rejected Himmler’s schemes. Those prisoners who were eventually used in the armaments works were made to fulfil a sixty-hour week. But the death-rate at the camps was so great and the number available for work diminished so rapidly that on 28 December Himmler was forced to send out another directive: ‘The Reichsführer S.S. has ordered that the death-rate absolutely must be reduced.’³

During the first six months of the following year, Himmler replenished his diminished labour forces by taking into custody some 200,000 foreign conscripts who had committed petty offences, on the grounds that as a result they came properly under his jurisdiction. He was in a position to kidnap this large force of slave-workers from Speer as the result of a hard-fought agreement with Otto Thierack, Hitler’s recently-appointed Minister of Justice, following a discussion between them at Himmler’s Field Headquarters at Zhitomir on 18 September.

Thierack, a judge of the Nazi People’s Court, had been made Reich Minister of Justice at the suggestion of Goebbels, and his instructions had been to create a system of law favourable to the Nazis. Among the points of agreement noted by Thierack’s aide after the meeting with Himmler were:

(These ‘anti-social elements’ included persons under protective arrest — Jews, gypsies, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles with more than three-year sentences, Czechs and Germans with more than eight-year sentences.)

As conditions in the camps became less and less controlled, the opportunities for private, in the place of public, looting increased. For example, by special orders from Himmler, the first dated as early as 23 September 1940, gold teeth were to be removed from the bodies of prisoners who had died, while the living had the dental gold taken from their mouths if it seemed ‘incapable of repair’. The gold was supposed to be deposited along with all other confiscated valuables in the Reichsbank in favour of an account held by the S.S. under the cover-name of Max Heiliger; the Reichsbank during the middle years of the war endeavoured to pawn the piles of unwanted valuables for hard cash.⁵ Speaking of this macabre treasure-trove in the course of a speech made in October 1943, Himmler said: ‘We have taken from them what wealth they had. I have issued strict orders which S.S. General Pohl has carried out, that this wealth should, as a matter of course, be handed over to the Reich without reserve. We have taken none of it for ourselves.’ He added that S.S. men who stole would be shot. It soon became apparent, however, that this macabre treasure-trove was receiving only a proportion of its rightful booty and that unscrupulous men in every rank at the camps were stealing. Globocnik, for example, amassed a fortune in Lublin during 1943, and Himmler was forced in the autumn to send an official investigator to enquire into the smuggling of gold, which was rife in Auschwitz. Prisoners were often more valuable for the gold in their teeth than for the labour of their hands.

With the development of his business sense, Himmler realized that another source of money lay in the outright sale of Jewish liberties. At the end of 1942 he was approached with the suggestion that a whole S.S. division could be financed in Hungary by the sale of emigration permits to Jews in Slovakia; Himmler was known to be in favour of compromise with his policy of extermination in certain cases where the financial gain to the Reich far exceeded the disadvantage of the survival of certain Jews. A memorandum written in December 1942 and signed by Himmler reads: ‘I have asked the Führer about the absolving [Loslösung] of Jews against hard currency. He has authorized me to approve such cases, provided they bring in genuinely substantial sums from abroad.’

Eichmann, however, regarded such dealings as a sign of weakness, and opposed them. The attempt to bargain over Jewish life and liberty in this way eventually centred on the so-called Europa Plan, which Eichmann’s representative Wisliceny first negotiated on behalf of the S.S. in the semi-independent state of Hungary, where Jewish refugees were congregating. At Eichmann’s trial, Yoel Brand, a Zionist resident in Budapest, gave evidence of the many meetings he had had, some with Eichmann himself, in which the price of liberty for Jews was discussed. ‘At one of these meetings,’ said Brand, ‘I was told that Himmler was very much in favour of Eichmann’s proposal. Himmler, I was told, was in fact a good man and did not want the extermination of the Jews to continue.’ Little was to come out of these negotiations; like the thirty pieces of silver, they proved in the end the price of betrayal. Only in the final losing stages of the war was Himmler, urged on by Kersten and Schellenberg, to give ground and conduct his own hard bargains with the Jews through their agent Masur.⁶

The policy from 1942-4 was extermination — extermination through work for those prescribed as medically fit for labour, immediate extermination for those who for reasons of age, ill-health or infirmity were held to be waste material. Himmler was to make his policy implacably clear in a speech he made at a meeting of his S.S. major-generals held at Posen on 4 October 1943, ⁷ speaking of the ravages and loss of life in Russia, he said:

Later in the speech he made a statement which was to be the most open expression of his determination to eliminate the European Jews who lay in his power that he was ever to make at a formal conference. The ambiguous terminology of genocide — the ‘final solution’, the ‘special treatment’, the ‘night and fog’ symbolism⁸ — were for once set aside, and the fanatic exterminator was revealed through Himmler’s own words:

At another conference that took place earlier the same year, in April at the University of Khahov, Himmler addressed a similar audience made up of the commanding officers of the S.S. divisions serving in Russia. To them he spoke of ‘the great fortress of Europe’ they were privileged to defend and increase. ‘It is here in the East that the decision lies; here must the Russian enemy, this people numbering two hundred million Russians, be destroyed on the battlefield, and one by one they must be made to bleed to death … Either they must be deported and used on labour in Germany for Germany, or they will just die in battle.’

Then he referred to the task of extermination which, he said, ‘is exactly the same as de-lousing; getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. We shall soon be de-loused.’ The need of the future was to incorporate all the Nordic peoples into the Germanic Reich. ‘I very soon formed a Germanic S.S. in the various countries’, he said, referring particularly to Flanders and the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark. ‘We very soon got Germanic volunteers from them’, whether the leaders in these countries liked it or not. He asked his officers to tolerate the ignorance of the German language in those of German race whom he incorporated into the S.S.; they must assist the newcomers to learn the language. One day, he forecast, he would bring together the mass of German stock from all over the world, ‘still more of those overseas, in America, whom one day we must fetch here by the million… We have only one task, to stand firm and carry on the racial struggle without mercy.’

At Posen, he also looked into the future; he spoke with the burning tongue of the prophet to men who listened uneasily to dreams in which few of them had any faith and which they regarded as superfluous at this critical stage in the war. They were beginning to realize, after the retreat in North Africa in 1942, the fall of Stalingrad the following January, the collapse of Mussolini and the Allied invasion of Italy that had just begun, that this had developed into a war which would be increasingly difficult to win. But Himmler’s voice went on relentlessly: ‘If the peace is a final one, we shall be able to tackle our great work of the future. We shall colonize. We shall indoctrinate our young men with the laws of the S.S. organization… It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be from this racial superstratum of the Germanic people. In twenty or thirty years we must really be able to present the whole of Europe with its ruling class.’ He had, he said, asked the Führer on behalf of the S.S. for the privilege of holding Germany’s frontier furthest to the East: ‘We shall impose our laws on the East. We will charge ahead and push our way forward little by little to the Urals.’ This would keep the S.S. hard; death would always remain a possibility facing an S.S. man.

Himmler’s determination to win his own peculiar version of the war was never stronger than during this period. He was hardened by many events, the reversals of the war, the death of Heydrich, the great challenge to his authority made by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, the revolt of the students at Munich, and the Communist conspiracy in Germany of the Red Orchestra, the Rote Kapelle.

The Rote Kapelle was the name given to a network of German spies serving the Russians; many of its agents were discovered to be Germans from well-connected families, and many were working in the various Ministries. Their leader, Harold Schulze-Boysen, an unstable man who had been a poet and left-wing revolutionary in the nineteen-twenties, was working during the war in a department of Göring’s Air Ministry which specialized in ‘research’ through telephone-tapping. This was a department which naturally enough had excited Himmler’s suspicion.

Schellenberg was sent in March 1942 to Carinhall, Goring’s luxurious country mansion to which the leader of the Luftwaffe retired increasingly to avoid the consequence of his lost authority. He came to ask Goring to permit this work to be taken over by the S.D. Goring, according to Schellenberg, received him dressed in a toga but carrying his marshal’s baton; fingering jewels in a cut-glass bowl, he went into a trance and managed to avoid reaching any decision likely to satisfy Himmler. The Reichsführer immediately made Göring’s department the subject of an enquiry, which according to one observer was stopped by Hitler in July to avoid a public scandal. Goring hoped to close the matter amicably by giving Himmler honorary flier’s wings in August, but this was the month in which the whole network of the Rote Kapelle came to light through the independent investigations conducted by Admiral Canaris’s Military Intelligence department, the Abwehr, though the actual arrests of over a hundred agents were eventually undertaken by combined units made up of Canaris’s Field Police and the Gestapo. In spite of the fact that the Gestapo was permitted by Hitler to prepare criminal proceedings, Himmler realized that his vast organization had failed to be the first to uncover the Rote Kapelle, the existence of which caused a scandal far exceeding the actual importance of this spying organization. Schellenberg in his Memoirs is careful to take the main credit for uncovering the conspiracy for himself and, as always, presents the story in its most colourful form.

The students’ revolt in the University of Munich followed in February 1943, very soon after the series of trials of the Rote Kapelle agents. The students were led by Hans Scholl, a medical student, and his sister Sophie, and they distributed anti-Nazi propaganda not only in Munich but in universities elsewhere in Germany. A vicious speech made by the Gauleiter of Bavaria, Paul Giesler, in which he insulted the women students by ordering them to produce illegitimate children with the help, if necessary, of his adjutants, led to open demonstrations in the University and in the streets of Munich. But Hans and Sophie Scholl were betrayed and, after being tortured by the Gestapo, they were tried by Roland Freisler, Hitler’s counterpart to the notorious seventeenth-century British Judge Jeffreys, and condemned to death along with others who had supported them. According to Hassell, the former ambassador who became a member of the German resistance movement, Himmler was driven to order a stay of execution in March in order to avoid turning his victims into martyrs, but in fact he hesitated so long in making up his mind that his order arrived too late to save them.

The challenge from the Jews themselves to Himmler’s authority came from the Warsaw Ghetto, an area of some two and a half square miles in the city, containing the medieval Ghetto.⁹ Round this the Nazis had built a high wall, and herded into this besieged and starving community a vast population of some 400,000 Polish Jews. In March 1942 Himmler outlined his initial scheme for the partial resettlement of the Polish Jews in a speech the full text of which does not survive;¹⁰ there had been over three million Jews in Poland when Germany had begun the invasion, and though large numbers had fled east or been killed by the Action Groups, some two million still awaited death, including those in the Warsaw Ghetto.

When the policy of extermination came into full force during the summer of 1942, Himmler ordered the total ‘resettlement’ in concentration camps of the Polish Jews; the result was that between July and October over three-quarters of the Warsaw Ghetto’s inhabitants were transported to camps and asphyxiated, most of them at Treblinka, the death-camp some sixty miles away. This number was as much as the limited transport or inadequate gas-chambers would allow. In October Himmler decided to turn the Ghetto itself, now reduced to some 300,000 square yards with some 60,000 survivors, into a concentration camp, but in January 1943, by which time a million Jews had been killed in six months, he spared the time to make a surprise visit to Warsaw to investigate the black market in Jewish labour which he had learned was now common practice, involving the S.S. and businessmen alike. It was, of course, inevitable that Globocnik himself was involved, the builder’s foreman whom Himmler in 1939 had misguidedly reinstated as Higher S.S. Leader and Chief of Police for the Province of Lublin after his period of disgrace for illegal speculation. Himmler discovered that 24,000 Jews registered as armaments workers were in fact working illegally as tailors and furriers. He was filled with righteous indignation: ‘Once more I set a final term for the resettlement: 15 February’, he ordered.

The first revolt in the Ghetto began on 18 January, four days after Himmler’s visit. The Jews involved in planned resistance had for long been engaged in smuggling arms from the outside world, and combat groups fired on and killed S.S. men and militia in charge of a column of deportees. This moment of resistance was suppressed with heavy casualties, and Himmler determined that the Ghetto must as soon as ever possible be totally destroyed.

In April S.S. Lieutenant-General Stroop, the police chief in Greece, was sent by Himmler to Warsaw to evacuate the 56,000 Jews still congregated in the restricted area of the Ghetto. He entered with armoured cars on 19 April, and to his utter surprise he found that the Jews were able to put up a resistance that lasted for thirty-three days. To oppose the Jewish combat units Stroop had a very mixed force of some 2,000 men, many untrained as soldiers, and made up of Poles and Lithuanians as well as two training battalions of the Waffen S.S. Himmler, angered once more by these open signs of resistance, ordered that the Ghetto be treated as partisan territory and combed out ‘with ruthless tenacity’.

Gradually the Jews, both armed and unarmed, were rounded up; section by section the area was taken and the buildings destroyed. Refugees and partisans were either flooded or smoked out of the sewers, and the Jews not already killed or needed for immediate work were sent to Treblinka to be gassed. The Ghetto area became a stretch of charred and burning debris in which the last victims strove to hide. By 16 May Stroop regarded the action as completed, and the ostentatious report he prepared for Himmler entitled The Warsaw Ghetto is no More, still survives; it is typed on paper of the finest quality and, accompanied by many photographs, bound in leather for preservation. Himmler’s response was to order the destruction of all ghettoes; the debris of the Warsaw Ghetto was to be levelled to the earth and the area turned into a park. It was not until September 1944 that the action against the other Polish ghettoes was finally completed.

Himmler described the action in the Warsaw Ghetto in a speech made shortly afterwards.¹¹

On 23 March 1943, Dr Korherr, who acted as the statistician of Jewish resettlement for Himmler, presented him with a report entitled The Final Solution of the Jewish Question, which contained the figures up to the end of 1942. According to Korherr, omitting Russia and Serbia, 1,873,549 European Jews had by then either died, emigrated or been deported, including the victims of Himmler’s ‘special treatment’. Himmler expressed his satisfaction with the report, ordered the omission of any reference to ‘special treatment’, and added that he regarded the report as ‘extremely good as camouflage’, though ‘at present it must neither be published nor communicated to anyone’.¹²

Himmler’s need to rid himself of the Jews became an obsession. The ghosts of those still living haunted him more than the ghosts of those now dead; there were Jews everywhere around him, in the north, in the west, in the south, in the areas where his power to reach them was at its weakest. Only in the east was he strong, where his gas chambers were strained to their limits and his ovens choked with the dead. On a visit paid by Himmler in October 1941 to Ohlendorf’s Action Group headquarters in Nikolaeiev he was accompanied by Quisling’s Chief of Police from Norway, and he made use of this visit to reprimand Ohlendorf for sparing the Jews of the local agricultural areas; he was also very concerned about the number of Jews who escaped from the region of Odessa and infiltrated themselves among the Rumanian Jews, many of whom were deported by the Rumanians themselves to a small Jewish reserve in the Transdniestra region in former Russian territory, which by agreement with Germany had been allocated to her Rumanian allies. Many of these Jews managed to survive the war, and German relations with Rumania were in any case to be the cause of dispute between Himmler and Ribbentrop.¹³

Rumania’s Jewish population was one of the largest in Europe, amounting before her territory was readjusted to 750,000, and the record of her treatment of them before and during the period of political unrest and civil war preceding the German intervention in the country is as terrible as that of the Nazis themselves, whose Action Groups took over where the Rumanians themselves left off in the areas of Bukovina and Bessarabia, which were in 1940 ceded back to Rumania by Russia. But the small population of Jews in their pocket of Transdniestrian territory became the subject of a fearful bargaining which went on throughout the rest of the war, and involved in the end the World Jewish Congress, the Swiss Red Cross, the British (as the chilly custodians of Palestine) and the obstructive American State Department. All became involved in the greed of Antonescu and the tactics of Eichmann, who disapproved of the whole tenor of such proceedings, which in his view only compromised the ‘cleanliness’ of the ‘final solution’.

In Bulgaria Himmler was also thwarted; the Jews, though persecuted and deprived of their property, were never deported, and even in Slovakia, after a period of large-scale deportations, the puppet government managed to halt them between July 1942 and September 1944, when the Germans themselves briefly resumed the exodus. During this period, as we have seen, the negotiations for the sale of Jews by Wisliceny and Himmler were still being conducted not only for this territory but for Hungary as well, where Eichmann was to emerge in 1944 from his shell of anonymity and live a high life in Budapest with his horses and his mistress, while supervising the deportation of some 380,000 Jews under the code name Action Hoess. Reitlinger estimates Hoess gassed over 250,000 Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz during the summer of 1944, though Hoess himself boasted the number was 400,000.

Meanwhile, Himmler had not been inactive in the north and west. In July 1942, at the height of the war, he paid a personal visit to Finland to try to enforce the deportation of more Jews. At the same time he visited Reval in Estonia, and from there sent a firm directive to Berger, his liaison officer at Rosenberg’s ministry controlling affairs in the eastern territories, in order to stop the publication of a decree which would give the ultimate authority to decide who was and who was not a Jew to Rosenberg’s Commissar-General and not to Himmler’s Security Police. Himmler wrote to Berger: ‘Do not publish the decree defining Jews. Such foolish precision ties our hands. The Eastern Territories will be freed of all Jews. I alone am responsible to the Führer and do not want any discussion.’

In the west Himmler’s powers were far weaker; the principal German authority in France remained the Wehrmacht, through which the deportation of Jews had to be ordered. Although Jewish refugees rounded up in France were sent east, according to Reitlinger little more than one-sixth of the Jews with French nationality were deported during the years of occupation, though their persecution by other means was as intensive as Himmler’s, Heydrich’s and Eichmann’s agents could make it, particularly during the period of the round-up of 1942, which was undertaken nominally as reprisals for attacks on German soldiers. When the Germans occupied the Free Zone in November 1942, negotiations for handling the Jewish question had to be undertaken with the Italians, into whose area in the South of France the Jews poured from the north, and Eichmann’s attempts to secure them ended in almost total failure.

In Holland, Himmler’s deportation orders worked more smoothly and almost three-quarters of the Jewish population were removed. On a report sent him by the S.S. Chief, Hans Rauter, about his deportation measures in September 1943, Himmler was able to scribble an approving Sehr gut. In Belgium, the impact of the S.S. was considerably lessened by the opposition to their extremism shown by General von Falkenhausen, the German Military Governor until his arrest in July 1944. In Denmark, Himmler’s anti-Jewish pressures were resisted with almost entire success; he attempted during 1943 to make Werner Best, formerly on Heydrich’s staff, then in Paris and now Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark, understand that the ‘final solution’ applied equally to Jews in the semi-neutral territory of Denmark as to those in the east. His persuasion, however, did not reach the point of action until the period in August 1943 when martial law had to be proclaimed following riots in the docks of Odense, action by the resistance movement in Copenhagen and the revolt of the small Danish fleet. Himmler, who had by this time become Minister of the Interior, used this unrest to insist throngh Ribbentrop that Best start at once to seize the Danish Jews and deport them to the east. There then followed the usual unseemly evasions of responsibility in which so many administrators became expert during the latter years of the war, when the possibilities of defeat and future reprisals began increasingly to influence their actions; the round-up of Jews became, in effect, a token affair that provided ample opportunities for saving Jewish life in a country which did everything it could to protect the Jews or evacuate them to Sweden. Himmler was finally persuaded that Denmark was ‘Jew-free’ only after Best had done everything he could to encourage the Jews to escape. In Norway, where conditions were far less favourable for diplomatic hedging than in Denmark, two-thirds of the small Jewish population managed to elude Himmler, many escaping over the border into Sweden.

The main resistance to Himmler’s obsessions occurred in the south, for the Italians were never won over to anti-Semitism; in any case there were barely 50,000 Jews living in Italy. The Italians had refused to co-operate in the South of France, and Eichmann was forced to complain once more of their ‘sabotage’ in Greece and Yugoslavia. Although Mussolini had created his own anti-Jewish laws in 1938 under the influence of Hitler, he did not want to become implicated in genocide. Himmler, as we have seen, was regarded by Hitler as a suitable envoy to negotiate with Mussolini, and he paid several state visits to the Duce, the last being in October 1942, of which no record survives that includes discussion of Jewish deportation. ¹⁴ Only when the Germans occupied Italy in September 1943 did Himmler gain direct access to those Jews who, having taken refuge in Rome, failed to escape the successive round-ups that followed in the capital and the north. In Yugoslavia and Greece, the proportion of Jewish losses by deportation were, in sharp contrast to Italy, extremely heavy.

‘In the spring of 1942 the first transports of Jews, all earmarked for extermination, arrived from Upper Silesia’, wrote Hoess.¹⁵ They were taken across the meadows to Hoess’s new gas-chambers, told to undress because they were to be disinfected, then sealed in and killed:

Hoess sat drinking deeply with Eichmann, trying to discover whether similar anxieties were to be found in him, but:

What is more revealing than these expressions of self-pity is the inability of Hoess to conceive the magnitude of the crime to which he was committed. His emotionalism, so evident throughout his writing, constantly falls ludicrously short of the nature of the tragedy which he is trying to describe, if not excuse. ‘I truly had no reason to complain that I was bored’, he says. ‘My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers… The prisoners never missed an opportunity to do some little act of kindness for my wife or children, thus attracting their attention. No former prisoner can ever say that he was in any way or at any time badly treated in our house.’ When offered the chance of moving to Sachsenhausen he says, ‘At first I felt unhappy at the prospect of uprooting myself,… but then I was glad to be free from it all.’ As his excuse for what he did he quotes the British saying, ‘My country, right or wrong’, but he lays the blame squarely on the desk of Heinrich Himmler, whom he calls ‘the crudest representative of the leadership principle’. ‘I was never cruel’, he declares, though he admits that his subordinates frequently were so; but he was, he claims, unable to stop them. The nature of these cruelties, practised by the sadists of the S.S. and the Kapos who enjoyed their absolute authority over the prisoners, has been described in detail by Kogon and many others who survived imprisonment in the camps.

It is perhaps not surprising that after his initial visit in March 1941, Himmler saw the camp at Auschwitz only once more. This was in the summer of 1942, when he came to inspect constructional developments. According to Hoess, his interest lay solely in the agricultural and industrial plant. Nevertheless, he was shown something of the fearful living conditions of the prisoners and their subjection to disease and overcrowding. He was furious: ‘I want to hear no more about difficulties’, he said to Hoess. ‘An S.S. officer does not recognize difficulties; when they arise, his task is to remove them at once by his own efforts! How this is to be done is your worry and not mine!’ He contrasted the progress made by I.G. Farben in their structures; from the point of view of Hoess, Farben had the use of all the skilled labour and had priority over him for building materials.

Then Himmler turned to other matters:

Hoess used every opportunity to voice his complaints, although he knew that ‘Himmler always found it more interesting and more pleasant to hear positives than negatives.’ At dinner, when Hoess told him many of his officers were utterly inadequate, Himmler merely replied that he must use more dogs. At a late-night party in the house of the local Gauleiter, with whom Himmler was staying, he became more amiable and talkative, ‘especially towards the ladies’. He even drank a few glasses of red wine. The following day he watched a female prisoner whipped in the women’s camp; he had in fact only the previous April personally ordered ‘intensified’ beatings of undisciplined prisoners. The beatings were administered on the naked buttocks of male and female alike, their bodies strapped down on wooden racks. Then, says Hoess, he ‘talked with some female Jehovah’s Witnesses and discussed with them their fanatical beliefs’.¹⁶ At a final conference with Hoess he told him he could do nothing to alleviate his difficulties; he would have to manage as best he could. Auschwitz must expand, work must be increased, prisoners who could not labour must be killed. Eichmann’s programme was to be intensified. He then promoted Hoess an S.S. Lieutenant-Colonel and flew back to Berlin. He would not see Auschwitz again.

Though Auschwitz was Himmler’s principal death camp, there were others in Poland and Russia at which the organized gassing and shooting of Jews, Slavs and gypsies took place during the years 1942—4.

In Auschwitz and its satellite, Auschwitz II at Birkenau, the massacres began in March 1942 and did not end until October 1944; the gas-chambers and crematoria, meticulously destroyed by Himmler in November 1944 in the face of the Russian advance, were buildings constructed in an area separated from the camp itself. The human destruction was held back by the limited capacity of these buildings and their equipment; the limit at Auschwitz, even after the construction of four new combined gas-chamber-crematoria in 1943 by Heinz Kammler, who was later to design the sites for the V-rockets, seems, according to Reitlinger, not to have exceeded some 6,000 prisoners a day. Another growing limitation was transport; the trains, their airless vans packed tight with prisoners, were shunted into sidings to avoid delay to rolling-stock with a higher war priority. Himmler and Eichmann might rage at the delays that impeded the purification of Europe, but Auschwitz before its closure consumed some two million people. Himmler’s mechanized massacres far exceeded those of his hero Genghis Khan.

Himmler’s off-hand treatment of Hoess is evidence that by 1942 his positive interests lay elsewhere. This was the first year of reverses for Germany, both in North Africa and on the Russian front, while at home the intensity of the Allied bombing grew even greater.

In July 1943 came the collapse of Italy and the arrest of Mussolini, and there were hasty conferences summoned by the Führer at Rastenburg, his East Prussian headquarters. Only a few days before, Hitler had met the Duce at Feltre in Northern Italy. News of Badoglio’s arrest of Mussolini on 25 July reached Rastenburg in time for an all-night session, during which Hitler planned to occupy Italy and reinstate Mussolini; at the same time on the following day, when all the Nazi leaders had arrived, according to Goebbels the Führer ‘ordered Himmler to see to it that most severe police measures be applied in case such a danger seemed imminent here’.

There followed a period of great confusion in Italy; the armistice with the Allies, who landed in Southern Italy early on 3 September, was not announced until 8 September, and the strategy adopted by the Allies in fact saved Kesselring’s modest forces in Southern Italy from what seemed certain destruction from the combined threat of the Allied and the Italian divisions. Himmler meanwhile had been told to find Mussolini and organize his rescue, while Badoglio prevented any immediate relief of his prisoner by moving him from island to island until it was finally decided what should be done with him. In the end, early in September, when Mussolini was due by the terms of the Armistice to be handed over to the Allies, he was suddenly rescued from his final place of imprisonment on the heights of a ski resort on the Abruzzi Apennines in a brilliant operation carried out by an S.S. officer, Otto Skorzeny, after Himmler had briefed him. Skorzeny’s commando party was landed by glider on the mountain top; after Mussolini had been taken from the hotel where he was held prisoner, he was flown to Vienna with Skorzeny in a small aircraft which only just managed to take off from the mountainside.

Himmler had had no illusions about Mussolini; he had been kept well informed of the situation by his agents in Rome, and Skorzeny records how much Himmler seemed to know of the position. However, once Mussolini was under arrest, the reports of his agents no longer sufficed. Himmler is said by both Schellenberg and Höttl to have consulted a group of astrologers in an effort to divine where Mussolini was hidden. They were confined, says Schellenberg, in a country house by the Wannsee and there, after the seers had consumed great quantities of food, drink and tobacco, one of their number, a Master of the Sidereal Pendulum, located Mussolini on an island west of Naples. Since Mussolini had actually been taken for a while to Ponza, this no doubt more than justified in Himmler’s eyes the expenditure of S.S. time and money on the occult.

With Heydrich dead, Himmler was left to carry the full burden of his policies alone. He exercised, like Hitler himself, the leadership principle in the control of a situation of such growing complexity that, even in a dictator-state, consultation between the ministries and the co-ordination of policy with the High Command responsible for the conduct of the war would seem essential if Germany were to resolve the problems which Hitler’s ambitions had brought about.

But in the place of consultation and co-ordination, Hitler chose to govern by personal decisions which were less and less affected by the advice he received. With Goring in decline and Goebbels still chafing to extend his growing influence outside the restricted field of propaganda, Hitler was surrounded by nonentities whose place in his favour still depended on their ability to support him in his fantasies of war. His strength was still great and he had not lost his cunning, but he was already in these mid-years of the war using at their limit his vast quantities of men and equipment. He weakened his fighting forces by extending them on a front that stretched two thousand miles in a curve from north to south, leaving the heart of Germany exposed to the Allied bombers from the west, which the Luftwaffe could no longer successfully oppose. For Hitler, his ultimate failure was always inconceivable, and his instinctive response to all reverses was to turn his attention from them and withdraw into the delusions of his mind. Himmler was present with both Goring and Goebbels when, at a conference held in December 1941, Hitler proclaimed himself his own Commander-in-Chief in order that he might more readily override the Army High Command. From 1942, he shut himself away from the German people and from the parading soldiers, whose saluting and massive cheers had once fed his pride and purpose. Now he saw himself as the solitary genius waging war from a succession of headquarters that lay remote from the battlefronts, first of all at Vinnitza in the Ukraine, then either at Rastenburg in East Prussia, at Zossen near Berlin itself, or in the retirement of Berchtesgaden, where the mountains reflected the peace and perfection that he craved.

Below him in the Nazi hierarchy lived Himmler, a lesser spirit but one created in the image of the man he worshipped. In place of Hitler’s perverted genius, he could only offer his insatiable obsessions and his pedantic attention to detail; in place of Hitler’s mesmeric leadership, his absolute devotion to his duty and his rigid insistence on a similar dedication in his subordinates. His power was based on fear; yet fear was the experience he endured himself, and it grew directly out of his dependence on others and his personal inadequacy. His nervous condition had become chronic, and only Kersten could relieve him from these disabling bouts of pain. His anxiety to destroy the Jews and Slavs and place himself at the head of a Nordic Europe brash with health was a compensation for the weakly body, the sloping shoulders, the poor sight and the knockknees to which he was tied. His mistress and her children had renewed his sexual confidence, but sexual prowess was not his strongest point. He wore the élite black uniform of the S.S. or the field-grey of his fighting forces, but his private army, even in 1942, was still kept in severe check by Hitler, and his schemes for independent arms production in the camps were equally frustrated.

Hitler’s reserve on recruitment for the S.S. was not to be removed till March 1943; the armoured train and the remote headquarters in Zhitomir, to which Himmler travelled so often during the years 1941—3, were a centre for directing persecution behind the lines and not for the exercise of military powers.¹⁷

Zhitomir, in the Ukraine, some 700 miles south-east from Berlin, was situated about sixty miles north of Hitler’s headquarters at Vinnitsa. An officers’ training college, set in beautiful surroundings, had been requisitioned for the Reichsführer and his staff. It was equipped, according to Schellenberg who was a frequent visitor and appreciated elaborate installations, with short-wave and telephone communications linking him to every part of German-occupied Europe. There was even a tennis court on which Himmler attempted now and then to keep himself fit. During the period Hitler was in Vinnitza, from July to October 1942, Himmler made a point of seeing him on every occasion possible, driving south in his armoured car along the Rollbahn connecting the two centres.

Meanwhile Himmler attempted to keep the S.S. in sound moral order. Reproving letters poured out from his headquarters: ‘I note your daughter is working in your office. You should have asked me first’; ‘you had better look at the Germanization files giving you evidence of intercourse between German women and incriminated Poles and other aliens’; ‘I do not want you to travel round as much as you do, showing off as a great commander’; ‘the Reichsführer S.S. considers it inexcusable for S.S. leaders in the fourth year of the war to get drunk’; ‘Dietrich told me today that the Leibstandarte during its stay in France had 200 cases of gonorrhea. The men really cannot be blamed. The unit came from the Eastern front and must have been completely starved sexually… All units of the Waffen S.S. are to be provided with brothels for whose flawless medical control the unit is responsible.’ At the same time unit leaders must see that the seventeen and eighteen-year-olds ‘do not waste their health and strength on harlots’, and arrange for ‘meetings between married S.S. men and their wives, since otherwise we cannot expect these marriages to produce the required and desirable number of children’. A list of suitable hotels and inns near training camps was to be drawn up, and the expenses of visiting wives met from S.S. funds. In addition lectures on the healthy procreation of children were to be given to the men.

Himmler’s thought and strategy during the middle years of the war must be understood in the light of the document he showed to Kersten at his field headquarters in December 1942, the twenty-sixpage report on Hitler’s state of health. He took the report, contained in a black portfolio, from a safe and gave it to Kersten under terms of the utmost secrecy. The report went into Hitler’s medical history, how he had suffered from the effects of poison gas in the First World War and had been for a while in danger of blindness, and how he had certain symptoms associated with the syphilis he had contracted in his youth and which had never been cured. After lying dormant, these symptoms had re-appeared in 1937 and again at the beginning of 1942; they included insomnia, dizziness and severe headaches, and revealed that Hitler was suffering from progressive paralysis which must sooner or later affect his mind. The only treatment he was receiving was that devised by his full-time physician, Professor Theodor Morell, a former ship’s doctor who had run a somewhat shady clinic for venereal diseases in Berlin until he had been discovered by Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, and introduced to the Führer. Hitler, as unorthodox in his attitude to medical treatment as Himmler, had taken Morell into his intimate circle in 1936, and given up his body to him for endless experiments in drugs and injections, many of which Morell patented and manufactured for his personal profit.

Orthodox treatment in a mental institution, of course, was out of the question for the Führer. ‘You realize now what anxieties I have’, said Himmler, ‘The world regards Adolf Hitler as a strong man — and that’s how his name must go down in history. The greater German Reich will stretch from the Urals to the North Sea after the war. That will be the Führer’s greatest achievement. He’s the greatest man who ever lived and without him it would never have been possible. So what does it matter that he should be ill now, when his work is almost accomplished.’

Only sheer anxiety had forced Himmler to reveal the report to Kersten, on whom he had come to rely, but the advice Kersten gave was unacceptable — that Hitler should retire at once and place himself in medical care, while his successor brought the war to a close. Himmler at once responded with a flood of arguments prepared for the answer he had obviously expected Kersten would give. There was no provision for a successor; the Party would be at loggerheads with the High Command; his own motives would be suspected, since it would appear he himself wanted to succeed; the symptoms observed in Hitler might well prove the result of mental and physical fatigue and not of paralysis.

‘What will you do, then?’ asked Kersten. ‘Will you simply let the matter alone and wait for Hitler’s condition to get worse and worse? Can you endure the idea that the German people have at their head a man who is very probably suffering from progressive paralysis?’

Himmler’s answer was in character. ‘It has still not gone far enough; I’ll watch carefully and it will be time enough to act once it’s established that the report is correct.’

According to Schellenberg, Heydrich had gathered together every detail about Hitler’s health and habits, including the diagnoses made by his doctors; these reports had been transferred to Himmler’s office after the death of Heydrich. What had no doubt led to scintillating speculation on the part of the head of the S.D. and Reich Protector in Prague, only filled Himmler with acute anxiety. Later Kersten gathered that the report about him had been specially compiled for Himmler from the files by an unnamed medical adviser of absolute integrity. Although there had always been rumours circulating about Hitler’s ill-health and psychological peculiarities, the detailed facts of his case were known only to a very few persons, among whom, Kersten gathered, were Bormann and, possibly, Göring.¹⁸

A week later, on 16 December, Himmler discussed the situation once more with Kersten. This conversation was most significant. Kersten argued that Hitler must, for Germany’s sake, retire for proper treatment; as long as he was in supreme power, it was possible at any time that his judgment would fail, and his mind become clouded by delusions and megalomania. He would suffer from loss of muscular control, and paralysis of the speech and limbs would follow. He might issue the most damaging orders while under the influence of his disease. He was a very sick man, and should be treated accordingly.

Himmler remained silent. Kersten continued his argument that Hitler should be induced to hand over his authority to a successor, and that peace negotiations should follow. To this Himmler replied that Hitler’s will only decreed a successor in the event of his death, and that ‘fierce quarrels over the succession’ would break out between the Army and the Party if Hitler during his lifetime did not remain in absolute power. As for himself, he could never be the first to make any move against the Führer; as he put it, ‘everybody would think that my motives were selfish, and that I was trying to seize power for myself.’ The medical evidence, in the face of Hitler’s still infallible personality, would be regarded as a fake. He must, said Himmler, be left where he was; untold harm would follow his departure. He believed that Hitler’s resources of health were such that he might well overcome the disease; the symptoms he was showing were very possibly those of sheer exhaustion. All he could do for the moment was watch the Führer’s condition more carefully. Kersten realized then the inherent weakness that lay behind Himmler’s apparent strength.

It was during 1943 that Hitler’s health suffered grave deterioration; all those who met him constantly acknowledged this. It is not clear how much Schellenberg knew of what was on the secret file; he may well have known more than he reveals. He merely remarks: ‘from the end of 1943, he showed progressive symptoms of Parkinson’s disease…; a chronic degeneration of the nervous system had set in’. As early as March, Goring expressed his concern to Goebbels about the Führer who, he remarked, had aged fifteen years during the three and a half years of war. Goebbels agreed, and comments on how Hitler never relaxed, but ‘sits in his bunker, worries and broods’. He suffered now from a trembling of the left arm and leg, and he was receiving from Morell a drug compounded of strychnine and belladonna for his chronic stomach pains which, according to a later medical report, could only have harmed him and caused the discoloration of his skin that was becoming more noticeable. When not on the Obersalzburg, where his mistress Eva Braun lived her isolated life, he spent most of his time at the various remote centres from which he conducted his war, and especially at the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg, hidden in the dark forests of East Prussia, where in the summer of 1941 he had a suite of rooms constructed in concrete and buried in the ground beneath the heavily guarded enclosure of chalets. The Wolf’s Lair became a strange mixture, as General Jodl said, ‘of cloister and concentration camp’.

In these concrete rooms Hitler held his incessant conferences. He ate and slept as his mood dictated, taking no exercise and seeking no entertainment except the endless repetition of his reminiscences. This helped to keep his ego in a state of ferment.

These were the conditions in which he normally received his Ministers, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Speer and Bormann, when they travelled east to meet him and weave their jealous webs round what was left of his attention. It was here, for instance, that on one occasion he gave an emotional discourse on Wagner to Himmler and the members of his staff. Himmler, like the others, was drawn to him as the ultimate source of the power he had gathered over the years; each of these men was torn with doubts and anxieties. How, they all wondered, were they to retain and enlarge these powers at each other’s expense? On the surface they were colleagues, bound together by their devotion to the Führer; underneath they were imperialists interested only in expanding their rival spheres of influence against the time when one or other would succeed to Hitler’s place. At no time did they form an integral cabinet of executive ministers; the dangers of such organized, co-ordinated power was always instinctively realized by Hitler, the preservation of whose authority lay to a large extent in the disorganization that existed immediately beneath him, the wasteful consequences of the policy of divide and rule. When some essential matter was broached, he preferred to see his Ministers singly; when they met collectively the time was passed in trivialities or in the undiscussed reception of Hitler’s long-winded commands.

Reitlinger has pointed out that Himmler’s senior officers were never encouraged by him to meet and discuss their collective responsibilities. They, too, were the rivals for his favour whom he dealt with singly and separately to prevent their making common cause against him. Like Hitler, he surrounded himself with junior officers, aides whom he could replace at will, but who, by virtue of their closeness to him, achieved a power far greater than their standing. Kersten was quick to recognize the influence of men like S.S. Colonel (later General) Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s principal aide, a former male typist through whom it was necessary to pass to reach the ear of the Reichsführer S.S. Schellenberg describes Brandt as a small man of plain appearance, who tried as far as possible to look and behave like Himmler. He had a phenomenal memory for facts and began work at seven in the morning, hurrying to his master with his files and papers so that work could start while Himmler shaved. If there was bad news, Brandt would begin with the word, ‘Pardon’, and Himmler would stop shaving. ‘He was Himmler’s living notebook… I believe he was the only person in whom Himmler had complete confidence… He was the eyes and ears of his master, and the manner in which he presented a matter to Himmler was often of decisive importance.’ Both Schellenberg and Kersten kept on good terms with him.¹⁹

Himmler’s senior officers remained in their separate orbits, planets to Himmler’s sun — S.S. General Ernst Kaltenbrunner, appointed head of the Reich Security Office in 1943, S.S. General Mueller, head of the Gestapo, S.S. General Pohl, head of the economic administration of the S.S. and inspector of the concentration camps, and S.S. Lieutenant-General Schellenberg, Chief of Foreign Intelligence, who was now to become Himmler’s closest political adviser. He also had his retinue of specialized advisers, such as Korherr, who combined the handling of statistics with the provision of secret reports on the other S.S. leaders. This led to his being beatenup in August 1943.

In appointing Kaltenbrunner head of the Reich Security Office on 30 January 1943, Himmler made a grave error. Apparently he brought him from Vienna, where he had been Higher S.S. Police Leader for several years, because he thought a stranger would be more tractable than one of his nearer subordinates. Kaltenbrunner, though a stupid man, was sensible enough to share the S.S. view that the war was lost and seek the quickest possible means to power, one of which was to form a working alliance with Bormann when he became Hitler’s personal secretary the following April. Himmler could scarcely have foreseen this danger any more than that offered by his other principal opponent on the staff; this was Mueller, head of the Gestapo who, according to Schellenberg, was also quick to establish good relations with Bormann. Both Mueller and Bormann looked rather to Russia than to the West as the place where peace negotiations should be developed. Schellenberg regarded both Kaltenbrunner and Mueller as his enemies, only too anxious to outwit and discredit both him and probably Himmler as well. He describes Kaltenbrunner as ‘a giant in stature, heavy in his movements, a real lumberjack… his small, penetrating brown eyes were unpleasant; they looked at one fixedly, like the eyes of a viper seeking to petrify its prey’. His hands were small, like ‘the hands of an old gorilla’; his fingers were stained with chain-smoking and he drank heavily. He spoke with a pronounced Austrian accent, just as Mueller spoke broad Bavarian.

Heinrich Mueller, who had been on Himmler’s staff since 1933, was a reserved, obscure man, a professional police official with piercing eyes but no marked personality. He had been described by Captain Payne Best as good-looking, though he attempted to overawe him by shouting in his face and staring at him with ‘funny eyes which he could flicker from side to side with the greatest rapidity’ in an attempt to mesmerize his victims. In spite of his position he would, like Hitler and Himmler, spend endless time on details, conducting individual interrogations himself because he enjoyed doing so. Schellenberg describes with disdain his squarish skull, jutting forehead, narrow lips, twitching eyelids and massive hands. At the end of the war he completely disappeared, taking refuge perhaps with the Russians, whose police methods he had always professed to admire.²⁰

The first stirrings of a rumour that Himmler might be in favour at least of a separate peace with Britain is mentioned in von Hassell’s diaries as early as May 1941, in the period immediately preceding the attack on Russia. Hassell had been German Ambassador to Italy from 1932—7; he was a career diplomat of right-wing views whose firm belief in friendship with Britain and the United States had brought him into conflict with Ribbentrop. He was retired from the foreign service in 1937 while he was still an active man well under sixty, and he became what Allen Dulles, America’s wartime agent in Switzerland, describes as ‘the diplomatic adviser of the secret opposition to Hitler’. He carried out his resistance activities under the cover of a post in economic research that he held for the German Government and which enabled him to travel in Europe with relative freedom. His acquaintance with members of the resistance, more particularly on the civilian side, was wide and the diary that he kept from September 1938 until July 1944, when he was arrested after the failure of the attempt on Hitler’s life, is one of the most valuable documents that has survived from Nazi Germany.

The rumours Hassell records about the possibilities of Himmler’s defection from Hitler afford the first tenuous links in a submerged chain that brought Himmler into direct contact with a section of the German resistance movement.

Carl Langbehn, a Berlin lawyer whose work took him to many countries and who at the time of the Reichstag Fire Trial in 1933 had offered to defend the Communist deputy Ernst Torgler, was a neighbour of Himmler’s both in Gmund and Dahlem; they had met socially before the war through their daughters, who went to school together. Langbehn was a friendly, genial man and an excellent linguist; he became a member of Canaris’s Abwehr; he also began at Himmler’s invitation to act as an independent observer for him when he was abroad on business. At the same time, he became a channel through which a certain amount of information about Himmler reached those connected in one way or another with certain sections of the growing resistance movement. Langbehn was a friend of that extraordinary man, Professor Albrecht Haushofer, son of the notorious geo-politician who had inspired Hitler’s dreams of expansion, and the man who planned Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941.

Haushofer acted as a contact-man for Hess with Karl Burckhardt, President of the International Red Cross in Switzerland, who was a friend of the Hassells. In May, just before the flight, Burckhardt told Frau von Hassell that in April he had had a visit from ‘an agent of Himmler’ who, during a visit to Zurich, had asked Burckhardt’s opinion as to whether the British would be willing to discuss possible terms for peace with Himmler instead of Hitler. This agent was undoubtedly Langbehn, who was to make the acquaintance of the Hassells later that year, in August, and become one of their valued friends.

This circuitous series of relationships may well seem to imply that Himmler, and possibly even Hitler, knew in advance of Hess’s mission to Britain. In any event Haushofer, whose part in Hess’s flight was known to the Gestapo, was released on Hitler’s order after only a brief detention, and he was to enjoy Himmler’s protection until the end of the war. However that may be, Langbehn became a source of rumour surrounding Himmler during the darker days of the Russian campaign; from 1941 to his arrest by the Gestapo in September 1943, he had at least the temporary protection of Himmler and a calculated measure of his confidence, while at the same time, through Popitz and von Hassell, he also enjoyed direct contact with one of the principal arteries of the resistance movement. Even as early as 1938, Langbehn’s influence on Himmler was sufficient to secure the release from a concentration camp of Fritz Pringsheim, the Jewish professor who had taught him law. Pringsheim was released and even allowed to leave the country.

After the initial reference to Langbehn’s activities on behalf of Himmler given by Hassell in May 1941, any occasional signs of disaffection in the S.S. are noted down with wishful determination during the long period of frustration that followed the invasion of Russia. After receiving certain evidence from a discontented junior officer in the S.S., Hassell wrote in September 1941: ‘it was apparent that in Himmler’s outfit they were seriously worried and looking for a way out’. In December, Langbehn told Hassell he ‘had been busy trying to get people out of Himmler’s concentration camps’, and that this often meant arranging the payment of large sums of money. He spoke also of ‘the fluid state of mind existing within the S.S.’, which he felt was a strange combination of the ‘barbaric Party soul’ and a ‘misunderstood, aristocratic soul’. S.S. leaders often made wild remarks critical of the Party, the outcome of the war, and of Hitler himself. In March 1942, Langbehn according to Hassell ‘still suspects all sorts of things are being planned around Himmler’, and these were no doubt the rumours that reached Ciano’s lengthy ears in Rome the following month, when he noted in his diary that Himmler ‘who was an extremist in the past but who now feels the real pulse of the country, wants a compromise peace’. In May Ciano added that the rumour was being spread from Prince Otto von Bismarck at the German Embassy in Rome that ‘Himmler is playing his own game by inciting people to grumble.’

Various glimpses we get of Langbehn’s contacts and relationships with Himmler reveal little more of Himmler’s intentions. The woman Gestapo agent responsible for investigating Haushofer’s connections with Britain became his friend and retailed some gossip to him just prior to Heydrich’s assassination in May 1942, to the effect that Heydrich hoped to supplant Himmler. Haushofer thought this information might be useful in gaining Himmler’s confidence, and Langbehn passed it on to the Reichsführer, who thanked him formally and then had the woman agent arrested for spreading false rumours. Also early in 1943, Himmler warned Langbehn to keep clear of taking any legal part in a spy trial in which he might find himself supporting the interests of Ribbentrop against those of the Reichsführer S.S.

By the middle of 1942, Schellenberg felt he had risen sufficiently in Himmler’s confidence to risk discussion of the possibilities of achieving some form of negotiated peace. With Goring ‘more or less in disgrace’, Himmler in Schellenberg’s estimation ‘was, and remained to the very end, the most powerful man in the regime’. He considered a total victory was now no longer possible, and in August 1942 he had a preliminary conversation at Zhitomir with Kersten (who, on Himmler’s recommendation, was treating him for nervous strain), about the best way to broach the matter with Himmler. He discovered that he had an ally in Kersten, and the following day he asked Himmler for a special appointment to discuss ‘a matter that involves a most important and difficult decision’. Sometime after lunch, at which Himmler ‘changed from being the cool executive to being an amusing and pleasant host’, Schellenberg secured his interview. He made an elliptical approach to the difficult subject in order to prepare the ground; he began by quoting precedents for the wisdom of considering alternative solutions to every kind of problem, and then asked Himmler directly if he had in mind any alternative solutions for bringing the war to an end. After a full minute’s silence, Himmler gave way to surprise and indignation, but after a while he began to listen to Schellenberg’s argument that the rulers of Germany would be better advised to strike a good bargain from the vantage-ground of their present strength than wait until Germany had become so weakened by war on all fronts that her present advantages were lost. Then he joined in the argument himself:

Schellenberg explained that very tentative negotiations should be conducted ‘through the political sector of the Secret Service’. Himmler, he said, must appoint an agent who had real authority behind him, and meanwhile himself work on Hitler to remove Ribbentrop and appoint a more tractable Foreign Minister. Then they looked at a map of Europe and agreed that, with certain exceptions, Germany might well have to relinquish the greater part of the territory she had occupied since September 1939 in order to retain full rights within all those areas that could be rightfully regarded as German. According to Schellenberg, when they parted in the small hours of the morning, ‘Himmler had given me full authority to act… and had given me his word of honour that by Christmas Ribbentrop would no longer be at his post.’

Schellenberg’s calculations, however, were made without sufficient regard for Himmler’s extraordinary caution. He played as little part as possible in the machinations of the other leaders, and quietly resisted the open intrigues of such men as Goebbels. He preferred, as always, the secret road to power, the back way up. He was, however, according to Schellenberg, ‘very discreetly striving to create a new leadership for the Reich, naturally with Hitler’s approval. This policy was to ensure that all those who held leading posts in the Reich ministries, in industry, commerce and trade, in science and culture… should be members of the S.S.’ Meanwhile he sank himself in work, absorbed himself in details, the clerk in high office hidden behind a pyramid of files. The result was that at the end of the year he refused to take advantage of the notorious memorandum on the mental instability of Ribbentrop compiled by Martin Luther, an under-secretary at the Foreign Office, who had formerly been Ribbentrop’s confidant, but partly through the intrigues of Schellenberg had turned violently against him.

The time chosen by Luther to produce his report was indeed an unfortunate one; Himmler fell back into one of his moods of indecision because at that particular moment he believed Hitler’s confidence in him had been shaken. In the struggle for power in Rumania, Hitler on Ribbentrop’s advice had chosen to support Antonescu, whereas Himmler and Heydrich had favoured Horia Sima, Leader of the Iron Guard who, encouraged by Heydrich, had been responsible for an unsuccessful putsch against Antonescu in January 1941 at a time when Hitler wanted to strengthen his relations with Rumania before the coming invasion of Russia. By agreement with Antonescu, Sima had been kept a prisoner by the S.D., who managed to let him escape. Mueller did not dare to inform Himmler of the escape for a fortnight, and it was some while before the fugitive was captured. Hitler was led by Ribbentrop to believe that Himmler had known of the escape all along and was attempting through him to stir up further trouble in Rumania. If there was one thing Himmler could not bear it was the criticism or ill-will of the Führer; in any case Himmler disliked Luther, who tended to be loud-mouthed and over-familiar. While Wolff stood on one side of him warning him against Luther, Schellenberg, with his plan to depose Ribbentrop firmly in mind, stood on the other urging him not to reach a hasty decision. Himmler as usual postponed making up his mind but, as he always did when he was in any doubt, he finally took the line that offered the least risk to himself. Luther was arrested and interrogated, and Ribbentrop’s face was saved.

Himmler had lacked the courage to act against Ribbentrop. He feared Hitler’s admiration for the man he regarded as second only to Bismarck, exceeded the Führer’s confidence in himself. Schellenberg’s carefully contrived advantage was therefore discarded, and Himmler fell temporarily out of favour. In a private letter to his wife dated 16 January 1943, Bormann comments at some length on Himmler, who, he says, is ‘deeply offended… He feels unjustly treated by the Chief’. Bormann claims that he tried to calm Himmler, whose criticism of the treatment he had received was ‘very bitter, and at times acid’. Himmler, he thought, was suffering from ‘nervous strain.’ Later Schellenberg, to his disgust, found that Himmler wanted to discuss the whole matter openly with Ribbentrop showing, as Schellenberg put it, ‘a cowardly lack of decision’. He agreed, however, that any future attempts to negotiate peace must be conducted through a neutral country. ‘I don’t wish to know all these details’, he added. ‘That’s your responsibility.’ Throughout this period Himmler impressed on Schellenberg that he should keep in contact with Langbehn, and it seems clear that at some stage Langbehn was being used as an agent by Schellenberg to make contact with Allied representatives in Switzerland. For instance, in December Hassell noted in his diary, ‘Langbehn has had some talks with an English official in Zurich (12 December) and an American official (Hopper) in Stockholm, with the approval of the S.D.’ The talks, as always, were inconclusive because the Allies required the unconditional surrender of Germany and the complete overthrow of the Nazi regime.

Meanwhile Kersten, who still had Finnish nationality, had moved with his family to Stockholm at the end of September 1943, where he was introduced to an American, Abram Stevens Hewitt, who was visiting Sweden as a special envoy from Roosevelt. Kersten soon found that Hewitt, who had become his patient, shared his view that the war should be brought to an end as soon as possible through peace negotiations, more especially as the threat from Russia was becoming so strong. Kersten offered to discuss the matter with Himmler, and on 24 October sent him a letter through the Finnish diplomatic bag.

Kersten began his letter by saying it concerned ‘proposals which might have the greatest significance for Germany, for Europe, even for the entire world. What I offer is the possibility of an honourable peace.’ He then went on to describe Hewitt’s influential position with the American Government and the proposals for peace talks that Hewitt considered possible, but depending on conditions which were very drastic and included the abolition of Hitler’s dictatorship and the Nazi Party and the appearance of the leading Nazis before a court to answer for their war crimes. ‘I beg you not to throw this letter into your wastepaper basket, Herr Reichsführer,’ he wrote, ‘but receive it with the humanity which resides in the heart of Heinrich Himmler.’ He suggested that Schellenberg be sent to Stockholm to meet Hewitt. In every paragraph he appealed to Himmler’s vanity, and concluded with the challenge: ‘Fate and history itself have placed it in your hands to bring an end to this terrible war.’

Kersten was also involved in encouraging the Finnish Government to retire from the war, in which they had become the unwilling allies of Nazi Germany because of their struggle with Russia. After a short period in Helsinki, Kersten returned to Stockholm, where he anxiously waited for some reply from Himmler. Schellenberg arrived in Stockholm on 9 November and met Hewitt with whom, according to Kersten, he got on well.²¹ But, as usual, nothing happened when Himmler was pressed to take action.

Kersten met Himmler on 4 December at Hochwaldt, his headquarters in East Prussia. He pressed him for a decision. ‘Don’t torment me’, he reports Himmler as saying, ‘give me time. I can’t get rid of the Führer, to whom I owe everything.’

Kersten played every trick he knew to inflate Himmler’s vanity as ‘a great Germanic leader’.

‘In Stockholm Mr Hewitt is waiting for your decision’, he said, ‘so that he can take it to Roosevelt.’

Himmler found the conditions for the peace talks ‘hair-raising’. He could not conceive of a Germany without the Nazi regime.

‘How can I take the responsibility,’ he said, ‘when faced with the leaders of the Party?’

‘You will have no responsibility towards them’, Kersten pointed out. ‘They will have ceased to exist.’

Himmler seemed most perturbed about the suggestion that there must be a court to try those responsible for war crimes, since he knew that the annihilation of the Jews was necessarily regarded by the Allies as the worst of the many crimes the Nazis had committed. This was not a crime at all, Himmler argued to Kersten, since it was decreed by law.

‘The Führer ordered the annihilation of the Jews in Breslau in 1941. The Führer’s orders are the supreme law in Germany. I’ve never acted on my own initiative; I’ve only carried out the Führer’s orders. So neither I nor the S.S. can accept any responsibility.’

The removal of Hitler he regarded as ‘cutting the ground from under my own feet’; the withdrawal of the German Army was an invitation to Russia or America to dominate Europe.

In the end he avoided making any decision by saying he was too tired to think. He agreed, however, that the war should be stopped, but that the conditions suggested by Hewitt were very hard.

‘Your proposals aren’t unacceptable to me,’ he said, according to Kersten, ‘except for the one about responsibility for alleged war crimes.’

In subsequent discussions on 9 and 13 December, Kersten claims that he went on pressing Himmler to make up his mind. He argued that Hitler was a sick man whose orders were bringing Europe nearer and nearer disaster. Eventually Himmler agreed to send Schellenberg to Stockholm to bring Hewitt secretly into Germany to discuss the negotiations with him.

But by the time Schellenberg eventually reached Stockholm, the time-limit for discussions set by Hewitt had elapsed; he had gone back to America. A remote chance to bring about peace had been thrown away; how far deliberately, how far through Himmler’s chronic procrastination it is now impossible to determine.

During 1943 Himmler began to extend his military ambitions. The fall of Stalingrad followed by reverses in North Africa led Hitler to revoke his ban on the expansion of the Waffen S.S. His total losses in Russia and Africa amounted to over half a million men. After Khahov was recaptured by the Germans in the spring, Himmler, as we have seen, spoke there in the University about the foreign recruits his S.S. men would soon find fighting beside them. Eight new divisions were formed during 1943, half of them recruited from East Europeans of whom by no means all were of German racial origin. All Rumanians of German origin were subject to conscription, to the resentment of the Rumanian Army; many of them were sent to replenish S.S. divisions elsewhere in Europe, where they were not popular. Even Bosnian Moslems were recruited, and in May Himmler made the Mufti Hajji Iman an honorary S.S. Lieutenant-General. Obviously all former S.S. standards had gone by the board, and in the same month recruitment began for an S.S. division made up of anti-Bolshevist Ukrainians, who formed part of the vast body of men numbering over half a million who had been former subjects of the Soviet Union and whom the Germans persuaded to serve in their own armies. Himmler still endeavoured to maintain his racial prejudice in the face of this rapid expansion of his forces, since he regarded all Slavs as inferior, but he welcomed into his ranks the Asiatic stock he associated with Genghis Khan. Other divisions were formed in Latvia and Estonia. By the end of the war, the number of S.S. divisions was to increase to thirty-five, representing some half a million fighting men. Allowing for losses, the numbers involved were some 900,000; of these less than half came from Germany itself, and some 150,000 were men whose racial origins were not Germanic.²²

Although the eight months from January to 25 August 1943, when Himmler became Reich Minister of the Interior following the downfall of Mussolini and the defection of Italy, represent a period during which he had to regain the confidence of Hitler after the misunderstanding over the escape of Horia Sima — ‘a considerable time’, says Schellenberg — they were months in which Himmler’s powers outside Hitler’s court considerably increased. Although, according to Reitlinger, Himmler had no direct access to Hitler, who was spending the greater part of his time at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters at Rastenburg, this does not mean he was out of touch with him. There was, however, a continuous struggle between him and Bormann for influence over Hitler, though each of them knew better than to bring the fight into the open. According to Schellenberg, who hated Bormann — ‘the contrast between him and Himmler is really grotesque; if I thought of Himmler as a stork in a lily-pond, Bormann seemed to me like a pig in a potato-field’ — Himmler made many tactical errors in his dealings with Bormann, which the latter merely exploited at Himmler’s expense; one of these errors was the secret loan through Bormann of 80,000 marks from Party funds to help provide for the needs of his mistress Hedwig and their children.

After April 1943, when he was appointed Hitler’s personal secretary, Bormann increasingly governed Hitler’s daily life; he became an indispensable companion, sharing his worries, soothing his nerves, using his ‘cast-iron memory’ to clarify the growing complexity of Hitler’s war situation and guide his decisions. As Himmler said to Schellenberg:

Schellenberg positively enjoyed embarrassing his master, and continued throughout 1943 to remind him of his promise to remove Ribbentrop:

Goebbels, who had personal discussions with Goring in March 1943 in the hope that some sort of group representation of the old leaders could be formed to counteract the bad influence of Bormann, Ribbentrop, Lammers and Keitel, regarded Himmler as at least a potential ally; the theory was that Goring, roused from his lassitude, should reconvene the pre-war Council of Ministers, of which he was President, and through this set up an opposing factor with Goebbels, Himmler, Speer and Ley. In May Goebbels preens himself in his diary about the praise Himmler had given to his department and agrees with his stringent criticisms of Frick, the Minister of the Interior, whose lack of leadership he deplored. On the other hand, Semmler, Goebbels’s aide who kept his own diary at this time, recorded in March that Goebbels was equally suspicious of Himmler and Bormann — ‘not one of those three trusts the others out of his sight’.

Not that Bormann was unfriendly to Himmler’s face; he merely placed himself firmly between the Führer and Himmler, whose field headquarters in Birkenwald, East Prussia, were some thirty miles distant from the Wolf’s Lair. To Bormann (whose father had once been a bandsman who, according to Ribbentrop, had often performed on the bandstands on English sea-fronts in the years before 1914), Himmler was always ‘Uncle Heinrich’. As Party Chancellor, controlling the whole national Party machine, Bormann could do much in a quiet way to frustrate the influence of men as uniquely powerful as Goebbels and Himmler were to become between 1943 and the end of the war.

Himmler meanwhile built up a vast bureaucracy of his own; in addition to the Waffen S.S. in the field, some 40,000 men were employed by the S.S. leadership office, while the Reich Main Security Office had a strength of over 60,000. When S.S. General Heinz Guderian, the expert on armoured warfare who had been reinstated by Hitler after temporary dismissal and made Chief Inspector for Panzer Troops, met Himmler on 11 April at Berchtesgaden, he found him completely opposed to any integration of the new S.S. armoured divisions with the Army. Neither Hitler nor Himmler wanted to see the S.S., the personal army of the leadership, merged with the armed forces of the Reich. Nor could he persuade Himmler to influence Hitler in the direction of delegating more power to the Army; he ‘received an impression of such impenetrable obliquity’ that he gave up any thought of ‘discussing a limitation of Hitler’s power with him’.

Parallel with his extension of the Waffen S.S., Himmler turned his eyes in another direction that might assist his future powers. In April 1943 he visited the rocket establishment at Peenemünde for the first time, and met the scientist and soldier in charge of the research and development of liquid-propellant rockets, Major-General Walter Dornberger. The first experimental rocket of the pattern later known as the V2 had been successfully launched as early as October 1942, and Himmler was anxious to know more of this carefully-guarded secret weapon, for the development of which Hitler had not yet given full priority.²⁴ Dornberger describes Himmler’s manner and appearance:

Dornberger soon discovered the nature of Himmler’s interest.

‘I am here to protect you against sabotage and treason’, he said. Peenemünde was too much in the limelight; its security had become of national importance, and not merely the concern of the Army, under which its activities were formally placed. As he left, Himmler promised Dornberger that he would come back for further private discussions.

‘I am extremely interested in your work’, he said. ‘I may be able to help you.’

The infiltration of the S.S. into the work at Peenemünde followed immediately on this meeting. Dornberger’s Station Commander, Colonel Zanssen, an experienced man who had been at Peenemünde for some years, was suddenly dismissed without any reference to the Army departments concerned. This was done by order of Himmler on the most trivial charges, which the S.S. refused to authenticate. Dornberger managed to have Zanssen reinstated with the support of General Fromm, the Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army under whose command Peenemünde was placed. After the war, Dornberger learned that Professor von Braun, who was then one of the senior research officers at the establishment, had under an oath of secrecy been offered by Himmler full scope to develop Peenemünde if the S.S. ever took over. Von Braun had rejected the offer.

Himmler’s second visit came on 29 June; he arrived driving his own small armoured car. As usual, he made a better impression in private than he did in public. Dornberger describes him at a meeting with the senior research workers:

He seemed happy to talk politics in this group of men whose interests were absorbed in science and engineering. He spoke of Europe as a social and economic unit controlled by a racially-sound Germany which had come to an understanding with Britain, whose main interests lay overseas and with America. The Slav block was the great danger to Europe, and that was why Hitler had gone to war with Russia before the Slav nations had been welded into one invincible group under Russian domination. He compared the Western European worker, with his demand for leisure and a high standard of living, with the Russian worker, dedicated entirely to his factory’s output and ready in time to flood world markets with cheap goods. The war was therefore just as much an economic struggle as it was military and political. They argued about the German occupation of Poland — ‘Himmler’s glasses glittered. Was I mistaken,’ wrote Dornberger, ‘or had his imperturbable, impenetrable mask of amiability fallen a little?’ Poland was needed for German colonization, he said. The birth-rate of the Poles would have to be reduced until the German settlers grew sufficient in numbers to take over the territory. ‘We shall arrange for the young German peasants to marry Ukrainian girls of good farming stock and found a healthy new generation adapted to conditions out there… We must practice a rigid state-planned economy both with men and material throughout conquered territory’, he added.

Dornberger and his colleagues sat both fascinated and revolted by Himmler’s manner of presenting his policy, which he expressed so ‘concisely, simply and naturally’. ‘I shuddered at the everyday manner in which the stuff was related. But even as I did so I admired Himmler’s gift for expounding difficult problems in a few words which could be understood by anyone and went straight to the heart of the matter.’

Himmler then went on to praise Stalin who, he said, Hitler considered to be his only really great adversary, and Genghis Khan, who had tried in his period to consolidate Mongol supremacy in Asia and whose blood survived in the modern ruler of Russia. They could only be conquered by the methods they understood — those practised by Genghis Khan.

They talked until four o’clock in the morning. Himmler knew the calibre of the men he was with, and that he could best appeal to them by intellectual discussion. This was conquest by the spoken word.

The following afternoon Himmler saw a successful launching of a ‘V2’ rocket, and he went away determined to win control of Peenemünde from the Army.

Meanwhile, in August 1943 Langbehn consented to bring a key member of one section of the German resistance movement to see Himmler. This was Dr Johannes Popitz, a scholar and an intellectual belonging to Hassell’s circle, and a man of whom Goebbels was to record his grave suspicion less than a month later. ‘Hitler’, wrote Goebbels in his diary, ‘is absolutely convinced that Popitz is our enemy. He is already having him watched so as to have incriminating material about him ready; the moment Popitz gives himself away, he will close in on him.’

In tracing the devious relations between Himmler, Langbehn and Popitz, it is impossible to know every aspect of Himmler’s motives, though it is, of course, easy to speculate about them. Schellenberg, whom, as we have seen, Himmler had instructed to put out peace feelers to the Allies through Langbehn, makes no mention of Popitz in his published memoirs. Although Hassell was always doubtful about the usefulness of Himmler in any conspiracy directed solely against Hitler, there was a period when Popitz, as a member of Hassell’s aristocratic circle of conspirators, managed to convince them that a risk should be taken to sound out Himmler’s loyalty. In this he was encouraged by his friend Langbehn.

It must be remembered that the conspirators were by 1943 in a state of considerable frustration; no progress seemed to have been made to bring in the Army and the generals. There had since 1941 been desultory discussion of the idea of stimulating a ‘palace revolution’, at first through Goring and then later through Himmler, either of whom could at a later stage be removed from power once he had fulfilled his initial task in assisting with the removal of Hitler.

Langbehn was the obvious man through whom Popitz could be introduced to Himmler. According to the evidence in the indictment used at their trial in 1944, they had first met during the winter of 1941-2, shortly after Langbehn had joined the circle round Hassell. Popitz is another curious figure whose actual position it is difficult to determine; he was not a member of the Nazi Party but remained from 1933 until his arrest in 1944 Prussian Minister of State and Finance under Goring. He had been a friend of Schleicher, and it was probably at the time of Schleicher’s murder by the Nazis in 1934 that he began to entertain the doubts that eventually made him one of the more ardent members of the resistance. The fact that he had once been a supporter of the Nazis and as late as 1937 accepted the golden badge of the Party from Hitler made him suspect in the eyes of many members of the resistance. Also he was politically very right-wing and favoured a return of the monarchy. But Hassell trusted him as a friend and fellow-conspirator, and it was decided by May 1943 that Langbehn should seek an appointment for Popitz with Himmler through the agency of Wolff. The arrangements were delayed owing to Wolff’s illness during the summer, but eventually the meeting took place in Himmler’s new office at the Ministry of the Interior on 26 August 1943.

Neither Wolff nor Langbehn was actually present at the interview, of which two accounts survive. The first is that given in the subsequent indictment of Langbehn and Popitz, and is therefore strictly slanted to conceal Himmler’s part in the matter; only Popitz’s very vague statements are given and no word is included of what Himmler may have said. Popitz, according to the terms of the indictment, expressed his anxiety at the corruption in high places, the inefficiency of the administration, and the impossibility of winning the war so long as Hitler, though admittedly a genius, remained in absolute power. The chances of promoting a negotiated peace should be explored, but this was not possible unless the Führer was ‘surrounded by men with whom negotiations could be undertaken’. Such conditions would definitely exclude Ribbentrop. Popitz then mentioned the kind of persons he had in mind for the leadership of the Army and the Foreign Office. It was left that another conversation should be arranged at a later date. Meanwhile, in the ante-room, Langbehn expressed his fears to Wolff that Popitz would not be sufficiently outspoken to Himmler, and said that on the next occasion he wanted to be present himself. The other account of this meeting was that given by Popitz himself to a friend called Zahler a few days later. Himmler had said little, he told Zahler, but had not opposed the suggestion of negotiations being conducted without Hitler’s knowledge.²⁵

Langbehn then left for Switzerland to pass on the good news to his contacts in neutral territory. It was then, at this moment of cautious optimism, that the sword of Damocles overhanging every conspirator against Hitler, fell on the neck of Langbehn. As Schellenberg put it: ‘A radio message about Dr Langbehn’s negotiations with Allied representatives in Switzerland was intercepted, and the fact that Dr Langbehn had my blessing in this completely unofficial undertaking was mentioned, as well as Kersten’s part in furthering these negotiations. Kaltenbrunner and Mueller immediately arranged for a secret investigation, but Kersten’s influence with Himmler saved me from disaster.’

The interception of this radio message (which, according to Dulles, was neither British nor American in origin) meant that Himmler and Schellenberg were forced to sacrifice Langbehn, though Popitz, strangely enough, remained free until after the attempt on Hitler’s life the following year. However, it seems that Langbehn was able to secure a meeting with Himmler before his arrest by the Gestapo following his return from Switzerland. Evidence for this meeting, which must have taken place before Schellenberg and Himmler had learned about the interception of the message, rests solely on Langbehn himself, who told his friend the sculptress Puppi Sarre ‘that he had touched on the elimination of Hitler only in passing, that Himmler had been quite serious, had asked factual questions, but had not tried to find out any names’. But Himmler could do nothing now but protect himself and Schellenberg, whom Kaltenbrunner and Mueller were now only too ready to denounce as a British agent. Langbehn was arrested, along with his wife and Puppi Sarre.

Himmler, however, won a victory elsewhere. This was the final collapse early in 1944 of Canaris’s department for military Intelligence in foreign countries, the Abwehr. It came as a direct result of the arrest of another anti-Nazi group centred round the widow of Dr Wilhelm Solf, a former German ambassador in Japan and a man of liberal, as distinct from right-wing, outlook. Solf, who hated the Nazis and did not fear to say so, had died in 1936 and his wife, Frau Hanna Solf, and her daughter, the Countess Ballestrem, maintained this independent outlook and were active helpers of those persecuted by the regime. They formed an intellectual circle of distinguished people, but on 10 September a Gestapo spy called Dr Reckse, who they believed to be a Swiss medical student prepared to take messages to Switzerland, was introduced at a tea-party given by Frau Solf for members of this group. Three months were allowed to elapse before the mass arrest of over seventy anti-Nazis belonging to the liberal wing of the resistance, including Otto Kiep, formerly of the German Foreign Office, and Helmuth von Moltke, who belonged to the legal section of the Abwehr. Attempts were also made to inveigle two other Abwehr agents, Erich and Elizabeth Vermehren, who were close friends of Kiep in Berlin, to return from their base in Istanbul for interrogation. Knowing of Otto Kiep’s arrest, they sought asylum with the British, and were flown to Cairo.²⁶

Hitler was now strongly advised by Himmler to dispense with the Abwehr, since it seemed so persistently to be staffed by intellectuals who were opposed to the regime. On 18 February 1944 Hitler broke up the organization and announced that the German Intelligence Service was to be unified. Later in the year the various sections of the Abwehr came finally under the authority of the Gestapo and the S.D., and in May Himmler gave one of his standardized speeches at Salzburg to the principals of Canaris’s former department. He derided the very term Abwehr as defensive, whereas a truly German Intelligence service, he said, should obviously be aggressive. The inspiration of the Führer made defeatism impossible; Himmler even went so far as to welcome the idea of invasion because it would enable Hitler’s armies to drown the invaders ‘in the seas of their own blood’. D-Day came two weeks later.

Canaris was not immediately disgraced by the collapse of the Abwehr. He was transferred and made chief of the Office for Commercial and Economic Warfare, a suitably remote position for a man who was too involved in well-meaning personal intrigue to be an efficient master either of spies for the Nazis or agents for the resistance. The Abwehr had been a failure, staffed by amateurs and used as a convenient cover by a number of members of the resistance, such as the Pastors Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Bethge, Hans Bernd Gisevius, Otto John and Josef Müller. ‘His subordinates were able to twist him round their little finger’, wrote Schellenberg of Canaris, whose company he always enjoyed in spite of their dubious official relationship. A vast dossier against Canaris had been built up over the years against the time when Himmler should decide on the destruction of this man he professed to admire. The long delay in taking action led Schellenberg, the expert in suspicion, to sense that Canaris had some secret hold over Himmler. He was allowed to continue unassailed until after the attempt on Hitler’s life in July, when Schellenberg was sent to arrest him.

Langbehn remained imprisoned without trial until after the attempt on Hitler’s life the following year; he was the subject of speculation alike by the Nazis and the members of the resistance. Popitz’s attempt to enquire after his fate from Himmler met with no success, and Popitz himself was regarded with suspicion by many members of the resistance who knew in any case that he was dangerous because he was being closely watched. Interrogation recurred month after month, duly noted by Hassell, but it was in Himmler’s interest to keep the enquiries as obscure as possible. At least at this stage Langbehn was not tortured, and this could only have been the result of orders from Himmler.

Early in November 1943, Himmler had a long conversation with Goebbels in which they agreed that Ribbentrop’s inflexible foreign policy was deplorable, and they joined in the usual diatribe against the High Command. Then Himmler began to whitewash his own position with regard to the resistance; he told Goebbels all about the existence of a group of enemies of the State, among whom were Halder and possibly also Popitz. This circle, he said, would like to contact England, by-passing the Führer. Himmler must have aquitted himself well: ‘Himmler will see to it that these gentlemen do no major damage with their cowardly defeatism’, wrote Goebbels. ‘I certainly have the impression that the domestic security of the country is in good hands with Himmler.’