Himmler

The Evil Genius of the Third Reich

Willi Frischauer

• Éditeur: Lucknow Books
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781787202412
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Military & Maritime History

Originally published in 1953, this masterly study of Heinrich Himmler is a forceful, dispassionate analysis of a man who rose from obscure beginnings as an agricultural student to a position of almost absolute power, until, in the Nazi twilight, he challenged Hitler himself.Outwardly insignificant, diffident—possessing neither the flamboyance of Goering nor the incisiveness of Goebbels—Himmler, head of the dreaded Secret Police, yet made himself the man most feared in the Nazi hierarchy—and as much by his 'friends' as his enemies. Only when the incredible facts about Himmler's extraordinary hold over his colleagues became known were the full depths of the infamy to which Nazism had brought Germany revealed.Based on journalist Willi Frischauer's unique knowledge of the background and sequence of events which gave rise to the Hitler regime, he manages to unearth the evidence, building up, stone by stone, the mosaic of Himmler's true portrait.A fully documented and unforgettable narrative.

 

CHAPTER ONE—THE MISSING LINK

As a little boy Heinrich Himmler sat on his father’s knee almost every evening, ear glued to the lips from which tales of wonderful adventure flowed in a rhythmic, studied language. Hero of the tales invariably was grandfather Johann Konrad Himmler, soldier of fortune who had hitched his star to any army that would have him, a rugged nineteenth-century warrior who had burst the narrow confines of his time and branched out into the wide world. Grandfather’s most glorious campaign had been fought in Greece. He had marched in the shadow of the Acropolis; he had seen Thebes and the Pass of Thermopylae and brought back to his own humble environment a breath of adventure and greatness. What did it matter that he had spent the last years of his life supplementing a meagre pension by work as commissionaire on a rural council not far from Munich. He had had a glimpse of greater vistas, had acquired a smattering of history, a respect for learning and a thirst for knowledge. If there was now no further chance to widen his own horizon, he was anxious to spend what little money he had saved on a sound and solid education for his son.

This son, Gebhard Himmler—Heinrich Himmler’s father—remained for ever grateful to the memory of the strange, simple, yet imaginative man of whom he had seen little and whom he had sometimes found it difficult to call father. “I owe everything to him,” he used to say. Gebhard was born in Lindau, on the German side of Lake Constance, in 1865. His diligence in school was not only a debt of honour which he paid to his father; it brought its own rewards when he successfully passed his entrance examination for Munich University, where he studied philology. To become a teacher of languages was his ambition after graduation. He made Munich his home and there was married a few years later to Anna Heyder, daughter of a wealthy merchant from Regensburg. Her dowry enabled Gebhard to set himself up in a comfortable flat. He was now anxious to continue his studies and research into the history of Germany which fascinated him. He wanted to add to his collection of old coins and improve his knowledge of numismatics. Now he had enough money to take part in the fashionable hobby of excavating from the soil of Germany the hidden tokens of her teutonic past and the vessels and weapons which linked her to the ancient civilization of Rome.

There seemed to be many jobs available for a man of his talents and inclinations, and he avidly accepted an offer to become the tutor of a Wittelsbach prince, Heinrich of Bavaria, whom he instructed in the glorious story of his own great family. The world of the Wittelsbachers, with its great traditions and proud associations, stimulated the young professor. He was a good and faithful servant of the Royal House and it was not for several years that he turned to his chosen profession as a high-school teacher in Munich. He lived in the Liebigstrasse, just above the famous Liebig apothecary’s from which the street took its name. There, on 7 October, 1900, at the beginning of a century on which he left a million scars. Heinrich Himmler was born as Professor Gebhard Himmler’s second son. He was not much more than a toddler when he was first attracted by the mysterious alchemy which was obviously practised in the chemist’s shop downstairs, by the concoctions which were brewed there, the powders and pills which people received over the counter.

Little Heinrich grew up in a calm and cultured atmosphere, reflecting the artistic inclinations of his father. He was baptized as a Roman Catholic and Prince Heinrich von Bayern, his father’s pupil, was his godfather. In the evening he would say his prayers in front of an ivory statue of Christ, cut from one big elephant’s tooth, which is still in the possession of his elder brother. He was taught to be careful of the mirrors and antique chests, of the paintings and other objets d’art which crowded the flat. No Sunday passed without Himmler senior taking his wife and three children (a third brother, Ernst, was born in 1906) to church. Regularly Heinrich Himmler would confess his sins and take Holy Communion with the rest of his family.

After dinner Mother would sew in a corner of the room while Father would read to the boys from the historical works which overflowed from his ever-growing library. Heinrich was not yet ten when he could reel off the dates of famous battles; the sagas of the Nibelungen were his bedtime stories, the wars of the Middle Ages fuel for his imagination which other boys of his generation fired with tales of Red Indian exploits across the Atlantic. By the time he was entered into German high-school he could match his teachers’ knowledge of Germany’s great but turbulent past. Those who knew young Heinrich at the time describe him as a good pupil, a diligent, bookish boy whose father had seen to it that he knew why he was learning. He had his limitations. However hard he tried to learn a foreign language, he never achieved a workable knowledge of any one. For many months the boy tortured himself with attempts to learn the piano, but his father soon realized that the awkward fingers would not follow the command of his over-eager mind. Most boys are relieved when their parents agree to liberate them from the attention of their music teachers. To Heinrich Himmler it was a sad day when he was told that his hopeless endeavours must come to an end. For years afterwards he would sit silently and listen to his elder brother—named Gebhard, like his father—extracting heavenly tunes from the self-same piano which had defied him. On Sundays he accompanied his brother to church, where, to his envy, he was playing the organ for the congregation.

One of the rooms in the parental flat had gradually been set aside and turned into a shrine devoted to the memory of the family’s ancestors. It soon came to include souvenirs and gifts from relatives and the more important friends. Heinrich spent many hours of his leisure in this room, which he later, not quite accurately, called the Ahnenzimmer (ancestors’ room). An inexplicable curiosity to know all about his ancestors, much more than his father could tell him, possessed Heinrich Himmler already at an early age.

Here, then, originated in young Heinrich Himmler’s consciousness the preoccupation with problems of ancestry which the stories about his grandfather first stimulated until they became an obsession. It was the first symptom of a morbid inclination to look into the past and draw from it a picture of the future, to base his philosophy on ideas which progress, greater knowledge, modern civilization had long and justly disproved and, seemingly, confined to oblivion. From them grew eventually Himmler’s conception of the S.S. organization and finally an S.S. state within the German state. Race and ancestry were to be the foundations of this state. “We ask,” Himmler said much later (of the prospective S.S. men), “the record of his ancestry as far back as 1750....” We shall soon see the fantastic result which this policy produced. But while Heinrich Himmler was laying down the stern principles of admission to the S.S., of which he was the supreme commander, he was not at all sure whether he himself could fulfil the genetic demands made on his officers and men.

Even before the Nazis came to power in 1933 there were already in existence elaborate family trees which traced the descent of almost every Nazi leader back to earlier generations. Hitler’s, it is true, was kept behind lock and key because it might have revealed his father’s illegitimate birth and the fact that the family name of Schicklgruber was only changed to Hitler to conform with the provisions of a relative’s will. Hermann Göring proudly boasted that the blood of the ancient Royal Houses of Hohenzollern and Wittelsbach flowed in his veins, that he was, however distantly, related to the family of Germany’s great poet and thinker, Goethe, to Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, and—through the Hohenzollerns—to Queen Victoria. But Heinrich Himmler’s tree defied investigation at the roots. The incensed and frustrated Reichsführer of the S.S. finally assigned a scientist with a high rank in the S.S. to devote his time exclusively to research into the antecedents of the Himmler clan. The man, Major Bergmann, took up his work in 1934. The war had gone on for several years and the cream of Himmler’s pure-blooded teutonic knights was already biting the dust in a dozen European countries when Bergmann, far removed from the tremendous events of the day, now assisted by a large clerical staff, still continued to dig into the soil from which Himmler was supposed to have sprung.

Early in 1951 I travelled to Gmünd, the little Bavarian village by the Tegernsee around which Nazi villas began to spring up in the early ‘twenties and which is still a favourite hideout of inconspicuous but prosperous survivors of the régime. Occupying a small, crammed ground-floor flat in one of these villas, I found Gebhard Himmler, who does not conform to the general formula. The late Heinrich’s brother is notorious but impecunious, writhing under the full blast of anti-Himmler sentiment which has been cultivated so carefully in post-war Germany. Once a Standartenführer, a full colonel in the S.S., employed on his brother’s head-quarter’s staff as a technical adviser on education, Gebhard Himmler, with wife and child, lives the life of a political pariah, although he pathetically asserts that he is “still proud to bear the name of Himmler.” He was willing, indeed anxious, to speak about his late brother, and much of the information about Heinrich Himmler’s private life which has found its way into these pages originates from Gebhard, although it has, of course, been stripped of the indulgence of a brotherly interpretation of hard and incontrovertible facts.

Here, in two crowded rooms, there was much to recreate the atmosphere of Heinrich Himmler’s early days: the piano on which he played as a boy, the ivory statue of Christ on the Cross before which he used to say his prayers. From among a mass of documents Gebhard Himmler produced the Himmler clan’s Sippenbuch (a family stud-book, obligatory documents for every good Aryan in Nazi Germany). That pass-book shows that Heinrich Himmler’s grandfather, Johann Konrad, was the illegitimate son of Johann Michael Hettinger and Johanna Dorothea Himmler. Old Hettinger is believed to have been born at Ansbach on 4 December, 1781. But however hard Major Bergmann tried to find earlier clues, however urgent messages he sent to local parishes, to harassed registrars, to confused churchwardens on the authority of the almighty Reichsführer himself, no suitable Hettinger senior could be found to fill the bill as Heinrich Himmler’s great-great-grandfather.

To Himmler it was a point of honour to discover this elusive ancestor. To Bergmann it was a matter of life and death. In his despair, instead of an older Hettinger, he produced one Friedrich Hoettinger and let it go at that. Hoettinger figures in Gebhard Himmler’s family pass-book as the last of the line: “There is no further information available,” he recalled sadly. But the problem becomes even more hopeless when it comes to Grandmother Agathe Kiene (mother of Himmler senior). A number of menacing question-marks loom on the branches of her family tree where there should be dates and places of birth of her own grandparents. Big blanks are shown on the table which would have failed to secure admission to the S.S. for Heinrich Himmler had he tried to join the ranks instead of making the ranks join him.

The Aryan descent of Heinrich Himmler’s mother is equally left in doubt. I talked to many people who knew the fine old lady, a woman with a sunny temperament over which only a few intimates seemed to discover the shadow cast by a realization that her son Heinrich was a freak. Frau Himmler senior was never sparing in her criticism of Heinrich, even when he had already become a power in the land. He had inherited the blurred and indistinct features of her face; but while her eyes rested kindly and calmly on the world around her, Himmler’s cold and diffident stare into space disguised the resemblance. Former high-ranking S.S. functionaries, experts in race research and physionomics which they regarded as an exact science, are still debating the bone structure of Himmler’s head and face. Some of them who used to discuss the problem with Bergmann in careful whispers have reason to believe that Himmler’s private race researcher had discovered a pointer to Frau Himmler’s descent from Mongolian stock. Gebhard Himmler admitted that he had often heard his parents mention the possibility that Grandma Anna Heyder’s ancestors came from Hungary. The name of that family, they said, was originally Red Hey, a transposition of the syllables which form the name of Heyder. But that, as far as Bergmann’s research elicited, was long before the S.S. key year of 1750. Ancestor number thirty-one, a certain Herr Fortunat Reindl, is known to have married in 1772. What and who went before him is lost in the midst of a family history of which every S.S. aspirant would have had reasons to be ashamed.

Himmler was as yet not aware of these details when the family moved from Munich to Landshut, where father became head of a high-school, which the boys joined as pupils. Today the surviving members of Himmler’s family strongly deny that the youngsters were ever in trouble with their little colleagues because they would tell Father too much of what went on behind their teacher’s back. But one of Himmler’s schoolmates still describes the boy Heinrich as a notorious informer. Groups of boys, exchanging their small secrets, would disperse, he said, when tile awkward, short-sighted, ugly little fellow approached. None of his schoolmates would ever accept an invitation to the Himmler home, and Heinrich kept aloof, often even from his brother. Yes, those who knew him then will say today he was “different,” not a good mixer, not good at anything except history, hampered at games or sport by the weakness of his eyes and the unfortunate build of his body.

The family lived in Landshut until 1919. The memory of his grandfather, the tales of the soldierly virtues which had brought him respect, if not fame, in his own circle of friends, aroused in young Heinrich a desire to emulate the old man, to become a soldier and an officer. In the third year of the war he joined the German Army as an ensign in the 11th Regiment, which was stationed at Regensburg. The end of the war and the defeat of Germany deprived him of all hopes of realizing his great ambition. A sullen, dissatisfied, disappointed, morose and certainly unhappy young man of eighteen entered the Technical High-school for Agriculture in Munich to study for a farmer’s diploma. Chemistry, the study of fertilizers, raising new types of crop, weeding and breeding novel varieties, were his chief concern. The first symptoms of the mania which later gripped him began to manifest themselves. To mould plants and animals in new patterns to his own design became a hobby; to raise pure and beautiful flowers and trees, the purpose of his study; to prepare the ground for such achievements, to treat and till the soil, the precondition for success. The more he turned the problem over in his mind, the more it came back to the fertilizers. Fate had singled out the youngster in whose imagination new trees were growing into high heaven to start his professional career by working with manure. Armed with a farmer’s diploma, he went out hunting for a job and regarded himself as lucky when he was engaged as a laboratory assistant by the Stickstoff GmbH (Nitrogen, Ltd.) of Schleissheim, a firm conducting field tests with calcium-nitrogen fertilizers.

The year was 1922 and Heinrich Himmler’s spare time was spent like that of most young men in Germany in the post-war years—with discussion about the loss of the war and the future of their country. Inevitably he joined his elder brother as a member of one of the innumerable paramilitary nationalistic organizations of the day, the Reichskriegsflagge, in which an as yet unknown ambitious and politically active army officer, Captain Ernst Röhm, took a special interest. The Reichskriegsflagge, with all other national organizations, was called out on 8 and 9 November, 1923, when one Adolf Hitler incited the Bavarian nationalists to rise against the “November Republic,” the democratic government of Berlin. Gebhard and Heinrich Himmler were among those who answered the call.

There is still in existence a picture which shows a group of rather ridiculous-looking youngsters standing guard behind a barbed-wire enclosure which the putschists had thrown around the building of the War Ministry in Munich. The boys were obviously trying to look fierce and martial. Among them is Gebhard Himmler, and in the centre of the picture one can discern the figure and face, already embellished by the hint of a moustache, of ex-ensign Heinrich Himmler. The putsch largely passed the Himmlers by. It collapsed before they could draw their revolvers, before Heinrich Himmler could wave the flag to which he seemed to cling desperately for support in a situation wrought with imaginary danger. Captain Röhm never noticed his humble follower. Adolf Hitler at the time did not know that the Himmlers supported him. When the leaders of the abortive putsch dispersed in flight or went to jail, nobody even noticed Heinrich Himmler, who just went home. And Heinrich Himmler, his first excursion into the violent street politics of the early ‘twenties having come to an inglorious end, did hardly realize that the ban on the Nazi Party which followed the putsch, the dissolution of the S.A., the Party’s storm-troops, also removed from the political scene of Bavaria the Stosstrupp-Hitler, a platoon of S.A. commandos who had acted as Hitler’s personal bodyguard and was the nucleus from which the all-powerful S.S. Black Guards’ organization was eventually developed.

CHAPTER TWO—S.S.—SPACE SELLERS

THE agricultural tests conducted with the help of young Himmler did not produce any grandiose results. Economic conditions in Germany deteriorated and the nitrogen firm in Schleissheim was forced to reduce its staff. One of the first to get his notice was Heinrich Himmler. He did not seem to care. The world of his imagination was none too secure either. There seemed no hope of recapturing the glories of Germany’s past. The Reichswehr, Germany’s tightly organized, super-efficient post-war army of one hundred thousand élite soldiers and officers, would not even look at the former ensign whose physical appearance and mental qualifications were far below the standard set by ambitious generals. In one of his rare confidential moods he later confessed to his friend, Joseph (Sepp) Dietrich, that he haunted recruiting offices and could never forget the piteously contemptuous looks from burly sergeants, that their: “Sorry, untauglich!” (unfit!) resounded in his ears when he tried to find sleep after another day of disappointment. For over a year Heinrich Himmler, now twenty-four years old, did exactly nothing. His parents tried to rouse their brooding son from his daydreams. But while his ageing father pursued his profession and his two brothers worked hard in their jobs, he only contemplated the world, past and present. The family had moved to the little town of Ingolstadt, but Heinrich Himmler’s heart—and his few friends—were in Landshut.

In Landshut in 1925 he heard that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party was being re-established even though the S.A. formations were still banned. Hitler and other Nazi leaders were debarred from holding public meetings or making speeches anywhere, except in Saxonia and Thuringia, where the movement was weak and overshadowed by the traditional parties of Left, Right and Centre—particularly those of the Left. To protect Nazi speakers who ventured on to platforms in these hostile parts, and to circumvent the ban on the S.A., Hitler organized a new formation and called it the Schutz Staffeln (Protective Guards). They had to provide their own uniforms and they chose black breeches, jackets and black shirts so as to distinguish themselves from the banned Brown Shirts of the S.A. There was only a handful of them and, though later S.S. officers missed few opportunities to recall the spirit of sacrifice which animated this small band, Hitler quickly thought of a way to exploit their enthusiasm for his cause and to cement their loyalty with the bait of a small income. The Nazi Führer had a financial interest in the party newspaper, Der Völkischer Beobachter, and though, in retrospect and full knowledge of the grim history of the S.S., it is not easy to credit, it is a fact that the advance guards of the dreaded terror units were employed by Hitler as space sellers for his newspaper. The first draft of the S.S. constitution included a paragraph which defined the duty of every S.S. man to advanc...