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

VI. The Miraculous Hands

The curious relationship between Kersten and Himmler lasted for six years and became the single most powerful influence in Himmler’s life after the death of Heydrich. Even the strongest man placed in a position of unique responsibility normally needs the support of advisers, though he may turn these men into shadows of his own personality, expecting from them confirmation of every opinion he happens to hold. Some men in positions of supreme authority need someone whom they respect to stay close to them and fulfil their need for a confessor who can help them purge their consciences when their ruthlessness has led them to take actions of which they are uncertain, if not ashamed.

Kersten, as we have seen, was forced against his will to become Himmler’s confessor as well as his masseur. The relationship which grew up between them was one which neither could have forecast. Kersten has been described by his biographer, Joseph Kessel, as ‘mild-mannered with kind eyes and the sensual mouth of one who loves the good things of life’. In his gentleness lay his great strength: to patients seized by pain, much of which was neurotic in its origin, he seemed like an angel sent to bring them swift relief. Their gratitude was profound, and was increased by the speed with which his treatments had their effect. His patients all idolized Kersten, making of him a kind of saint on whom they showered their gifts and bestowed their praises.

A patient suddenly relieved of pain often turns to the man who has cured him with an urge to ease his mind. The mood of relaxation that follows treatment acts as a solvent to confession. Kersten, mild-mannered though he was, appeared to Himmler as a saviour, an indispensable, reassuring worker of miracles on whom he relied and whom eventually, in his own peculiar way, he loved. It was Kersten, in fact, who enabled Himmler to carry the unnatural burden which eventually proved to be far beyond his limited strength of character.

Kersten has described the situation very clearly himself:

Although Kersten used his growing influence over Himmler to save thousands of lives, his attendance on the head of the S.S. and the Gestapo during the worst years of his criminal career made him a controversial figure both during and after the war. Kersten began his treatments of Himmler unwillingly; he was, like everyone else, alarmed even at the thought of meeting him. But the needs of Himmler as a patient soon overcame Kersten’s initial antipathy, and almost immediately he sensed Himmler’s need for a confidant. The moment he was relieved of pain, Himmler began to unburden his mind. He wanted someone to whom he could talk. Who better than this Finn from Holland who looked at him with a calm and confident smile and seemed like some wise man — a ‘magic Buddha’, as Himmler once called him. The Reichsführer was deeply shamed of his illness, and the fact that only a few of his intimate staff knew of his suffering placed Kersten at once in a privileged position.

Kersten kept notes of everything that passed between Himmler and himself, as well as of the conversations he had had with other leaders of the S.S. His principal allies were Brandt, Hitler’s secretary, and later Walter Schellenberg. In Kersten’s memoirs we come nearest to understanding Himmler as a man and evaluating the peculiar views he acquired as a result of his scholarship. He talked to Kersten on every subject that occupied his thoughts. As far as his time permitted, Himmler was an assiduous reader, though, like Hitler, he used books only to confirm and develop his particular prejudices. Reading was for him a narrowing, not a widening experience. He saw himself as a teacher and reformer born to change the world.

The study of medicine along the lines he favoured was a constant subject for discussion with Kersten. He was against the conventional remedies put on the market by industry for private profit. He believed in herbal remedies that came straight from natural sources, and he had for long been a serious student of medieval herbalism. Kersten could not help being impressed by his knowledge, but scarcely by his conclusions. Himmler fancied himself as a medical adviser and he was always prepared to prescribe such natural remedies as applying a wet, cold stocking to the forehead to cure a headache. Kersten acknowledged that Himmler knew a certain amount about the subject, but the reforms he planned to introduce after the war would have staggered the medical profession had they known them. He intended to enroll in the S.S. the doctors who believed in homoeopathic remedies so that they might form effective shock troops to coerce the rest of the profession into seeing sense, while the German public were to be encouraged to grow their own health remedies in their back gardens. Meanwhile he experimented as far as he could with dietary and health practice in the S.S. and the Lebensborn movement.

It was natural for Himmler to see the future of society in terms of people of chosen blood. He believed that the healthiest and most intelligent and industrious stock originated from the land, and he wanted to found a vast European system of state farming to provide the right environment for the universal aristocracy of the future. Politicians, civil servants, scholars and industrialists alike would all be expected to keep in active contact with the land in addition to their urban professions. ‘Their children’, he said, ‘will go to the country as a horse to pasture.’ Kersten raised all the obvious objections to this, saying that the nation’s agriculture would be jeopardized by the ignorant activities of these amateur, weekend farmers. Himmler hoped to overcome this weakness by means of professional bailiffs, who would in the end be responsible for the maintenance of the farms. As for the industrial workers, they would have state allotments on which to dig and flourish, and all soldiers would automatically have the status of peasants. The S.S. would arrange everything, he said. ‘Villages inhabited by an armed peasantry will form the basis for the settlement in the East, the kernel of Europe’s defensive wall.’

The focus of Himmler’s political vision was centred in the past as he understood it. The vision had a deadly simplicity about it, taking no account of the organic growth of the many different peoples who had evolved the present divisions of Europe during centuries of war and political barter. Europe, he held, must be dominated either by the Germanic races or the Slavs; this was Himmler’s set belief. It always seemed to him utterly unreasonable for the Germanic English to side with the alien Slav against their racial brothers. As he put it to Kersten:

Had Nazi Germany won the war, this would have been the pattern of Europe which Himmler intended to impose by force had he succeeded Hitler as Führer; his aim was for Germany to set up a large economic confederation of European and North African states led by Germany and representing a total population and power three times greater than that of the United States. Kersten carefully recorded Himmler’s statements:

The great expanse of Russia was to be partitioned and placed under the administrative control of Germany, Britain and the United States, after these nations had come to terms with Hitler. Germany would control the area up to the River Ob, while the English were to have the areas between the rivers Ob and Lena. The Americans would be allocated the region east of the Lena and including Kamschatka and the sea of Okhotsh. As Himmler told Kersten early in the war, Germany had no intention of weakening England’s position as a great power. On the contrary, England was to be one of the cornerstones in the new Germanic Europe. The British fleet would protect Europe at sea while the Germanic armies would protect the land. Himmler’s theories, geared only to the past, found difficulty in defining a creative future for America. As Kersten puts it, ‘The whole American way of thinking was so alien to him that he could not even begin to understand it.’

Once Europe had been stabilized as the political, economic and cultural centre of the world, governed by a landed aristocracy and policed by a soldier-peasantry, the spread of the pure Germanic stock by intensive breeding would begin. The germs for this brave Germanic world had already been established in the original S.S. marriage and breeding codes and in the conception of the Lebensborn movement. ‘I regard the S.S. as a tree that I have planted’, said Himmler to Kersten, ‘which has roots deep enough to defy all weathers.’ This élite must be established in every nation capable of producing a pureblooded Nordic stock; where this did not exist, it must be provided by settlements of Nordic immigrants.

Alongside the men, Nordic womanhood was to be developed, the ‘Chosen’, as Himmler called them, ‘the strong, purposeful type of women’, the best of them trained in Women’s Academies for Wisdom and Culture and acting as representatives of Germanic womanhood throughout the world. The true Nordic woman would be willing to be directed into a suitable marriage designed to promote the ideal growth of the human race. Himmler maintained ‘that men could be bred just as successfully as animals and that a race of men could be created possessing the highest spiritual, intellectual and physical qualities.’ When he saw blond children, says Kersten, ‘he became pale with emotion’.

As the best of Germany’s manhood was dying at the front, both Hitler and Himmler agreed that a stand must be made after the war to change the marriage laws and introduce legalized bigamy. The good stock so cruelly lost in war must at all costs be replaced.

‘My personal opinion’, said Himmler to Kersten in May 1943, ‘is that it would be a natural development for us to break with monogamy. Marriage in its existing form is the Catholic Church’s satanic achievement; marriage laws are in themselves immoral… . With bigamy each wife would act as a stimulus to the other so that both would try to be their husband’s dream-woman — no more untidy hair, no more slovenliness. Their models, which will intensify these reflections, will be the ideals of beauty projected by art and the cinema.’

Himmler’s open and happy relationship with Hedwig, who at the time he was talking to Kersten on this subject had already borne him one child and was soon to become pregnant with her second, no doubt encouraged him to regard bigamy in a favourable light, both personally and politically. He loved to enlarge on this dream of multiple family life:

He attacked fiercely the fact that illegitimate children were denied the full rights due to them as their father’s offspring, and the social disgrace the unmarried mother had to endure seemed to him intolerable:

His rooted objection to homosexuality among S.S. men invariably led to habitual offenders being confined in concentration camps. The homosexual was only useful in a degenerate society where breeding was to be discouraged. A Nordic homosexual was ‘a traitor to his own people’, and he refused to listen to Kersten’s advocacy of psychiatric treatment for men with homosexual tendencies who were capable of redirection to normal sexual relations. Particular trouble arose over one dedicated officer who was discovered in 1940 to be advocating the formation of a homosexual élite within the S.S.; Himmler was horrified and prevailed on Kersten to interview the man and report on his case.

Himmler’s hostility to the Christian religion, and especially to the Catholic Church, led him to make his own particular form of study of other religions. This again drew him back into the past. He liked occasionally to entertain German scholars and challenge them with his ideas. He enjoyed discussion and friendly controversy, and he was not bigoted enough to refuse Gudrun, his daughter, her right to say Christian Grace before meals. He searched the sacred books of other faiths for ideas which would support his own acquired beliefs. He studied the Bhagavad-gita (which he particularly admired, observed Kersten, for its ‘great Aryan qualities’) and the books of the Hindu and Buddhist creeds, while his interest in astrology was well-known.

When Kersten, who was himself interested in comparative religion, asked him in the summer of 1942 whether he had any religious belief at all, Himmler was indignant that Kersten should even doubt that he had. It was only common sense, he said, to believe:

He longed, he said, to be Minister for Religious Matters and ‘dedicate myself to positive achievements only… Of course it’s pleasanter to concern yourself with flower-beds rather than political dust-heaps and refuse-dumps, but flowers themselves won’t thrive unless these things are seen to’. He spoke of the Gestapo as ‘the national charwoman’, cleaning up the state. Meanwhile, he took the Bhagavad-gita to bed with him; it gave him comfort to read this: ‘It is decreed that whenever men lose their respect for law and truth, and the world is given over to injustice, I will be born anew.’ That, he said, ‘was absolutely made for the Führer… It has been ordained by the Karma of the Germanic world that he should wage war against the East and save the Germanic peoples.’ In his more colourful and sentimental moments he saw Hitler, like the notorious picture postcard of the Führer, as a saint in armour whose head was haloed with light, a throw-back to the legendary Knights of the Holy Grail and the story of Parsifal. As for Himmler, he was proud to associate himself with the reincarnation of Henry the Fowler, on whom he tried to model himself. Yet in spite of his hostility to the Catholic Church, he foresaw the elevation of the Führers of the future through a system of election similar to that used in electing the Pope.⁶

Kersten studied Himmler’s character closely with the intention of controlling him in so far as he could, and began to introduce the question of the Jews into their discussions. Himmler was quite prepared to discuss this subject in the same way as he discussed any other, with an apparent rationality which soon became irrational. Just as the growth of freemasonry was obnoxious in a healthy nation because it represented a powerful, self-seeking secret society intent on spreading its own power and influence inside the State, so the development of powerful Jewish interests in Germany seemed to Himmler like a cancerous growth that had spread its parasitic network through the natural economy of the land. This conception of the alien Jew sapping the vitality of the German nation had become an obsession with Himmler, as with all the more bigoted Nazis. None of Kersten’s arguments, which Himmler was quite prepared to hear, moved him in the slightest from this predetermined and irrational obsession. He could not tolerate what he regarded as Jewish infiltration into the German economy and culture entirely for racial and political ends. The two races, the two worlds, he said, could never mingle; they must be separated by force before further irreparable harm was done.

It was this obsession, combined with his academic passion for ‘neatness’, that converted Himmler from the idea of the expulsion of the Jews from the Germanic territories and made him favour their absolute destruction through genocide.

Himmler was a man of violence, not by nature, but by conviction. Although, like Kersten, he took part in hunting as a manly sport, he was a poor shot, and he could never understand Kersten’s passion for deer-stalking. ‘How can you find any pleasure, Herr Kersten,’ said Himmler, ‘in shooting from behind cover at poor creatures browsing on the edge of a wood… Properly considered, it’s pure murder.’

He practised hunting, however, because it was a traditional Germanic sport, and because the game must be ‘kept within bounds’. But he despised the theatrical sportsman, like Goring, who turned hunting into an egotistical cult. Children, he believed, should be brought up to love animals, not to kill them merely for sport.

The destruction of human beings, who were themselves so much more destructive than the animals, was in fact forced on Himmler, and he accepted this fearful task because he believed it to be the only, as well as the ‘final’, solution to the problem of securing the racial purification of Germany which remained his deep-rooted ideal. Belief in the maintenance of racial purity in the modern world, if it is to be carried to its logical conclusion, must lead either to complete segregation or to genocide. Himmler, in the circumstances of total war, came to accept genocide as the only solution. The primitive hatred and fear from which such absolute ideas originate forced Himmler, who was neither primitive nor passionate by nature, to take the supreme crime of mass murder upon his uneasy conscience.

Kersten discovered what was affecting his patient as early as November 1941: ‘After much pressure… he told me that the destruction of the Jews is being planned.’

The admission put Kersten himself in a position of responsibility for which he was utterly unprepared. So far he had managed to persuade Himmler to release a few men from imprisonment as a personal favour to himself. The problem which he faced now was crime on a scale he did not know how to approach; he could only react at once against the raw fact that Himmler had unwillingly revealed to him:

Himmler spoke of the Jewish concept of ‘atonement’ and the Jewish saying of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. Had not the Jews been responsible, he argued, for millions of dead in building up their empire?

Himmler took his own time to adjust the necessity for genocide to his code of morality. He did so deliberately and painfully. As he said to Kersten, ‘It’s the old tragic conflict between will and obligation. At this moment I am learning how terrible it can be… The extermination of people is unGermanic. You can demand everything from me, even pity. But you cannot demand protection for organized nihilism. That would be suicide.’

As he watched Himmler absorb the necessity to commit this crime into the niceties of his conscience, Kersten got ready to use his increasing influence over the Reichsführer S.S. to keep his mind uneasy. This, he knew, was the only weapon he possessed with which to fight this man, whose soft but obstinate nature was only too familiar to him. He used every device he could to keep his patient pliable. But for the next two years the momentum of the war overcame him; he was able to ease a few individuals out of Himmler’s prison-camps, but not a whole race. Only in 1944, when the prospect of Germany’s defeat became evident to Himmler’s unwilling eyes, did Kersten’s struggle to turn the liberation of single individuals into that of large numbers begin to succeed.

The accuracy of his understanding of Himmler was therefore of the highest importance to his ultimate success. The superficial judgment passed on by Himmler to so many people, that he was like a teacher misplaced in a position of political power, was right only if the conception of a teacher is limited to an instructor and not an educator. Himmler was a born instructor, lucid and, within the limits he imposed on himself, well-informed. But in spite of his abundant and wide-ranging interests he was an informed not an educated man. He was always, as Kersten observed, using his knowledge to produce a set doctrine about which he loved to lecture any audience he could reach. Yet Kersten found him ‘not at all overbearing in these lectures of his, but quite amiable and not without a touch of humour’. In fact he encouraged his subordinates to express their opinions and argue respectfully with him, much as a headmaster whose opinions were hidebound might encourage his sixth-formers to debate with him so that he might have a good excuse to express his own opinions.

Fundamentally, however, Himmler’s character was deadly serious, in the direst meaning of these words. Like many men, he learned how to strengthen the weakness of his nature by fostering obsessions on which he could constantly lean for protection against his conscience and his reason. He used prejudice to lighten his burdens; if he needed an excuse for the exercise of kindness to a prisoner he would ask for a photograph and let clemency rule if the prisoner proved to be blond and Nordic. He could not tolerate his own physical weakness and ill-health, and yet he increasingly gave way to it in the refuge of Hohenlychen, to which in the end he would retire to recuperate from a cold. Kersten learnt exactly how to insert his subtly devised wedges with the grain of Himmler’s conscience, and he often gained concessions from him which might seem impossible. For Himmler lacked by nature the ruthless barbarity that his reason admired and that he extolled in the notorious speeches he made when the public image of the Reichsführer S.S. had to be maintained. His family background and training taught him only the meticulous honesty, industry and sense of public service expected of the German teacher, the subordinate soldier and the civil servant. As a man of action Himmler was quite useless; as a soldier disastrous; as an administrator industrious, pedantic and obsessed by the desire to surround himself with the protective cover of administration.

Like all Nazis, he was an authoritarian who derived his inflexibility from obedience to his chosen leader. On the belts of the S.S. he had the phrase inscribed: ‘My honour is my loyalty.’ Hitler’s influence over him was paramount, and he anxiously fulfilled every task the Führer gave him until the utter impossibility of doing so shattered the narrow energies of his spirit. In this, as Kersten observed, he confused statesmanship with the obedience of a bodyguard. In no essential matter did he ever dare to contradict Hitler to his face, and the difficulties both Kersten and Schellenberg encountered in their pursuit of Himmler’s weakness were due to the deep doubts he entertained of how best to reconcile loyalty to Hitler with loyalty to the fulfilment of the future of the German race. This conflict built up in him to fearful proportions when he realized that the Führer was a sick man who might have to be dispossessed for his own ultimate good and that of Germany. The increasing rage of the Führer as his sickness took possession of him only induced in Himmler the nervous condition which brought on the agonies of cramp. His subservience was complete, and as his tasks became more impossible to fulfil he dreaded the very thought of entering Hitler’s presence, where as like as not he would be reduced to a tongue-tied inability to speak at all.

In his private life he was simple and as kind as he knew how. He was considerate to his wife, in love with his mistress, and devoted to his children. He despised money and did his best, as far as wholly private expenditure was concerned, to eke out his living on his small official salary of some £3,000 a year in the values of the time. It is significant that when, during 1943, Kersten obtained an inexpensive watch for Himmler in Sweden, the Reichsführer S.S. thanked him, gave him M. 50 on account and promised to settle the rest of his debt when he received his next salary cheque. Although Himmler liked food, he ate and drank and smoked with extreme moderation, and expected all those in his service to do the same. He loved a life of hard labour and devotion to a narrow ideal which seemed to him moral and which was partly inherited from others and partly of his own creation.

He no more understood the evil he was generating through the S.S. and the Gestapo than a rigid Victorian moralist understood the repressive cruelty he must be imposing on the innocent members of his family. To the last he failed to understand why his name became so hated. He believed he was a good man who, if he had made mistakes, had made them in a noble cause. He dictated his memoranda from his various headquarters without any human consideration for the moral degeneration of his agents or the suffering of his victims. His efficiency was in his mind, and the chaos he caused was the result of enforcing what was at once both utterly cruel and administratively impossible.

As a man he was at the same time mediocre and extraordinary. Had he stayed in his rightful place in society he could have been an over-efficient and priggish executive, a small-time official or minor educationalist. But Himmler was not altogether mediocre. He possessed a fanatical vision and energy and an image of himself as a figure in power politics which made him in ten years one of the masters of Europe. A nonentity could not have become one of the most feared men in the history of modern times. Yet he failed utterly to develop a personality to match the scale of his office. He remained to the end a small, middle-class man, a petty bourgeois figure whose appearance made men laugh, a minister so utterly servile to his leader that he could not bear the thought of an ill-word or a reprimand.

If he did not consciously recognize this deep division in his nature, the nervous condition of his body did. This Kersten knew, and it gave him access to a certain degree of power over his patient which he tried to explain after the war:

Himmler, therefore, behind the mask of secrecy and power, was a man dominated as much by fear as by ambition. He tried hard to live in accordance with an image for which he was utterly unfitted. Few men in human history have shown to the extent that Himmler did what terrible crimes can be committed through a blind conviction that such deeds were both moral and inevitable.