Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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make the situation easier, as Margarete’s complaints to him demonstrate:

‘That awful dog To

hle keeps on barking, and so the baby can’t sleep

either.’

119

Nor were the animals thriving: ‘The hens are laying very badly.’

120

Promotions to head the SS

During this period Himmler also experienced a number of changes in his

professional life. His appointment as ‘Deputy Reichsfu

hrer-SS’ in Septem-

ber 1927 was almost certainly largely due to the fact that he organized

meetings for prominent party speakers. Since 1925 the party had been

establishing a number of ‘protection squads’ (Schutzstaffeln) in its main

centres of support and using the title SS. These were small groups of party

activists who were primarily responsible for protecting big meetings and the

public appearances of prominent party ﬁgures. Himmler’s activity in the

Reich propaganda headquarters involved responsibility for deploying ‘indi-

vidual SS units when planning public meetings’. To perform this role he was

obliged to exercise certain command functions, that were now given

formal recognition with his appointment as deputy Reichsfu

hrer-SS

(under Erhart Heiden). In addition there was the fact that Himmler already

had SS experience: he had been in command of the Lower Bavarian SS

since 1926.

121

In 1927 the SS was a very small formation. It had been founded in spring

1925. At that time Hitler had given his old supporter Julius Schreck the task

of setting up a personal bodyguard, a ‘staff-guard’, which after a few weeks

was renamed ‘protection squad’. Similar formations had existed before the

1923 putsch. Hitler had already founded a staff-guard in March 1923, which

had been replaced in May by a ‘Stosstrupp [assault-group] Adolf Hitler’

under Joseph Berchtold; almost all the members of the protection squad,

including Schreck, had belonged to the Stosstrupp.

122

The uniforms of the

new protection squads were borrowed from those of the old staff-guard or

the Stosstrupp: in addition to the windcheaters worn by the SA, the

members of these former organizations had worn black ski caps with a silver

death’s-head badge and swastika armbands edged with black. The protec-

tion squads continued this tradition: while they too wore brown shirts,

which in the meantime had been adopted by the party, they also wore a

black tie, a black cap with a death’s head, a black, white, and red cockade,

riding breeches, and swastika armbands.

123

110 th e party functi onary

In September 1925 Schreck had sent a circular to all Gau headquarters and

independent local branches of the NSDAP requesting them to establish

protection squads.

124

The ‘function’ of the protection squads, which was

outlined in guidelines specially issued for the purpose, was to be ‘the

protection of the local meetings’ of the NSDAP as well as to ‘strengthen

the personal protection of our leader Adolf Hitler in the event of his

Ill. 6. Before the NSDAP achi eved its breakthrough in September 1930

Himmler’s role at Party Headquarters was more that of a faceless bureaucrat than

anything else. Here he can be seen in a group of leading Nazis who had met

together on 22 September in the Saxon spa town of Bad Elster. State elections

were taking place on the same day.

the party functionary 111

speaking there or in the neighbourhood of the local branch concerned’. The

protection squads were to be ‘neither a paramilitary organization nor a

bunch of hangers-on, but rather small groups of men on whom our

movement and our leader can rely. They must be people who are in a

position to protect our meetings from troublemakers and our movement

from “professional grousers”. For members of the protection squad there

must be no ifs and buts; they must observe our party discipline.’ In addition

they had the task of ‘canvassing for and winning over’ new members as well

as subscribers and advertisers for the party newspaper, the Vo

lkischer Beo-

bachter.

Moreover, Schreck decreed in the same circular that the only people

permitted to join the protection squads were party members between

23 and 25 years of age, who were ﬁt and ‘powerfully built’. ‘They must

be comrades who stand for the old motto, “all for one and one for all”.’

A protection squad should be composed of a leader and ten men or, in larger

places, there could be more than ten men. They were to be subordinated to

a high command to be established in party headquarters, and would ‘ﬁnance

themselves by collecting contributions’. Another version of the directives

composed in a still more martial tone included further organizational details

and emphasized the autonomy of the protection squads vis-a

-vis other party

organizations: ‘Neither the local branch nor the Gau headquarters has the

right to interfere in the internal organization of the local SS.’ The protection

squads were not ‘a subsection of the SA, but are of equal status’.

125

How-

ever, at this point an SA did not exist; banned following the putsch attempt,

Hitler delayed re-founding it until the end of 1926, since before doing so he

wanted to secure the party’s control over its strong-arm squad.

126

In April 1926 Berchtold, the old leader of the Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler,

who in the meantime had returned from Austria, took over leadership of the

protection squads from Schreck. The main reason for Schreck’s replacement

was the opinion, which appears to have been widely held in party head-

quarters, that, as one SS man put it, ‘Schreck does not have the requisite

leadership qualities and organizational talent and also does not have the

reputation that will ensure that the SS can become an elite troop within the

movement’.

127

Soon after his appointment Berchtold emphasized the SS’s claim to

elite status in a circular to the leaders of the protection squads. It allegedly

brought together ‘the best and most activist elements within our move-

ment’; they were not concerned with numbers but ‘solely with the inner

112 th e party functi onary

worth of each individual’.

128

Moreover, at the party rally in 1926 Hitler

handed over to Berchthold the ‘blood ﬂag’, the swastika ﬂag which had

been carried in the failed putsch and which allegedly had been ‘coloured by

the blood of a fallen National Socialist’.

129

It was only at the end of 1926 that

the SS was subordinated to the newly formed SA under von Pfeffer; as a

result, Berchtold lost his independence but was given the title Reichsfu

hrer-

SS.

130

In March 1927 Berchtold was replaced by his deputy, Erhard Heiden,

to whom Himmler was now assigned as his deputy.

131

Hardly anything is known about Himmler’s role as deputy Reichsfu

hrer-

SS. However, it is clear from the few remaining documents that, from the

beginning, he did not content himself with his immediate task of deploying

the protection squads to ﬁt in with party headquarters’ plans for meetings.

Instead, he concentrated on reforming the SS’s internal organization. In

September 1927, directly after taking over his new function, he issued an

‘Order No. I’ to all protection squads, and made it clear that from now on

the SS leadership would once again operate with a tough style of manage-

ment, which for various reasons had not been the case during the previous

weeks. This was followed by a series of instructions. Membership subscrip-

tions and insurance premiums were to be paid promptly. He ordered the

protection squads regularly to report on ‘all political or other events of

signiﬁcance’, and above all on the activities of their opponents, especially

‘Freemasons and prominent Jewish ﬁgures’. They were informed that there

were plans to set up a comprehensive intelligence service. Thus, with the

help of the protection squads Himmler was endeavouring to create a special

network of informants for the project which he had long been planning,

namely for the party to set up its own intelligence service.

In addition, he regulated the weekly ‘SS duties’ down to the very last

detail. Great emphasis was placed on ‘drill manoeuvres’, such as ‘standing at

attention, standing at ease, right and left turns’, and the like. ‘Appearances in

public should differ in no respect from those of an army unit.’ Members of

the protection squads, Himmler insisted, should keep out of all internal

disputes and should not participate in discussions during party meetings.

132

Also, their uniforms required further standardization; evidently the party

rally had shown up ﬂaws in this respect.

133

In January 1929 Hitler relieved Heiden of his post, ‘for family reasons’, as

the party’s ofﬁcial statement put it, and appointed his successor with the

following announcement: ‘I hereby appoint the previous deputy R eichs-

hrer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, to the post of Reichsfu

hrer-SS.’ We have

the party functionary 113

no further clues to explain either Heiden’s dismissal or Himmler’s appoint-

ment. Initially, Himmler retained his post in the Reich propaganda head-

quarters; the position of Reichsfu

hrer-SS could evidently still be carried out

on the side.

134

There is uncertainty about the numerical strength of the SS when Himmler

took up his appointment. His own later statements differed. He mentioned

variously 260, 280, 290,or300 members,

135

the SS Guidance Booklets (SS-

Leithefte) referred to ‘exactly 270 men’.

136

These numbers were probably

understated in order to emphasize Himmler’s achievement in building up

the force. A police report of 23 May 1929 refers to 1,402 members; an

internal SA order of 3 May 1929 mentions 748 SS members in the ‘ofﬁcial’

SS units, in other words in those that were organized in accordance with the

regulation requiring squads to consist of ten men.

137

However, such a rapid

increase following Himmler’s appointment is unlikely, as his initial organi-

zational measures were designed more to achieve a cautious consolidation of

the organization rather than a rapid expansion.

138

Himmler’s ﬁrst test in his new function came with the NSDAP’s Reich

Party rally that took place in Nuremberg in September 1929. He dealt with

the details in a special order of 6 July. Every SS man was obliged to take part

in the rally. They had to get ready for ‘the most strict duties’ and devote the

rest of the time before this high point in the party’s calendar to carrying out

drill manoeuvres: ‘Immaculate marching in double columns (8 pairs side by

side).’ Himmler wanted to leave nothing to chance, and carefully organized

his SS’s journey to Nuremberg: ‘Every SS leader will be responsible to me

for ensuring that his squad brings with it a sufﬁcient number of shoe and

clothes brushes.’ Considerately, he recommended that they should have had

‘plenty of sleep beforehand’, and reminded them ‘most emphatically’of the

‘ban on alcohol’.

139

Shortly before the party rally he issued another order in which he once

again demanded ‘the strictest discipline’, ‘total commitment to doing one’s

duty’, ‘the greatest possible sense of manly honour’, and for ‘every instruction

to be followed in the most exact and scrupulous manner’. To ensure strict

punctuality, he insisted that ‘on arrival in Nuremberg all watches are to be set

according to the station clock’. In addition, he ordered that ‘permission is

required to drink liquids offered by the population or from water bottles

during marches, since excessive drinking on an empty stomach or when

overheated can lead to serious accidents’.

140

The SS put in a satisfactory

114 th e party functi onary

performance in Nuremberg. The high point was the solemn ceremony in

which the SS received the ﬁrst ten ‘Storm Flags’. This was followed by a

propaganda march in which the SS marched as a single block behind a visibly

proud Himmler.

141

The new Reichsfu

hrer-SS soon found less and less time for his duties in

the Reich Propaganda Department. Hitler had already offered Goebbels the

post of Reich Propaganda Chief in place of Gregor Strasser.

142

Goebbels

had recommended himself for this post through his performance as Berlin

Gauleiter, where he had developed an effective style of propaganda. How-

ever, shortly after this offer had been made Goebbels came to suspect an

intrigue by Otto Strasser (like his brother a member of the ‘left’ wing of the

party), in which he might be being offered ‘the appearance of power’ in

Munich in order to get rid of him as Gauleiter of Berlin.

143

However, this suspicion did not last, and in November 1929 Goebbels

discussed in detail with Himmler, who was to become his ‘Famulus’, how

his takeover of the Reich Propaganda Department should be managed.

144

Goebbels’s assessment of Himmler remained positive, but not without some

doubts: ‘I am working out with him the basis for our future cooperation

over propaganda. He is a ﬁne little man. Amiable but also vacillating.

A Strasser product. But we’ll sort it out.’

145

During the following months Himmler kept Goebbels in touch with ‘all

sorts of goings on among the Munich camarilla’, in other words, Hitler’s

entourage. ‘Appalling’, commented Goebbels on the ‘terrible shambles and

cliquishness down there’.

146

In March Himmler urged him to take over the

Reich Propaganda Department, but Goebbels held back and continued to

wait for the ‘summons from Munich’. Hitler had to take the ‘ﬁrst step’,

otherwise: ‘Go

tz v. Berlichingen’.*

147

However, in April 1930 he ﬁnally agreed to go. The Propaganda Depart-

ment was split into two sections: Fritz Reinhardt’s speakers’ college, and a

Section II which Goebbels was in charge of.

148

He noted in his diary: ‘In the

evening a discussion with my secretary, Himmler. We very quickly came to

an agreement.’ In May he noted: ‘he’s not particularly clever, but hard-

working and well-meaning.’

149

‘Himmler is ﬁtting in very well’,

150

he is

‘getting to know the ropes’,

151

but is still getting ‘too bogged down in

details’.

152

* Translators’ note: An allusion to Goethe’s play of that name, containing the famous line: ‘He can

lick my arse!’

the party functionary 115

In fact the two of them had little time to get used to their new roles, for

the Reichstag election of September 1930 was approaching. On 29 July

Goebbels recorded the conclusion of the preparations: ‘Yesterday, RPD:

Finished dealing with propaganda. Final discussion with Himmler. From

now on he can deal with it on his own. The foundations are laid. Anything

that still has to be done is purely technical stuff.’ At this point it must have

been clear to him that after the election he would have to look for a new

deputy, for the more the NSDAP expanded, the more the post of Reichs-

hrer-SS was becoming a full-time job. Moreover, the party had responded

to Himmler’s growing importance by allocating him a promising place on

its electoral list for the Reichstag election.

153

And, in fact, after winning a

seat in the Reichstag, he stepped down from the post of deputy Reich

Propaganda Chief in mid-November.

154

As the organizer of the party’s propaganda, Himmler played a not-

insigniﬁcant part in its remarkable success in the Reichstag election of

14 September 1930, in which it increased its share of the vote from 2.6 to

18.3 per cent. The victory represented a political earthquake, and resulted in

what had hitherto been a splinter party becoming a signiﬁcant power factor

within German politics. However, as deputy to Goebbels, who patronized

him, Himmler was too much in the propaganda chief ’s shadow to draw

from this success signiﬁcant advantages for his future career in the Nazi

movement. He also failed to utilize his seat in the Reichstag. Although he

was a member of the Reichstag until 1945, he never made a speech. And he

carried out his functions within the party’s parliamentary group with little

enthusiasm.

155

When he falsely described the Liberal deputy, Theodor

Heuss, as a Jew in a pamphlet entitled The Reichstag, published in the series

NS-Bibliothek, he was forced to withdraw the accusation following strong

protests.

156

Nevertheless, gaining a Reichstag seat produced an important change in

Himmler’s circumstances: his R eichstag salary freed him at last from pressing

ﬁnancial worries. That he now possessed parliamentary immunity and was

entitled to free rail travel were additional practical beneﬁts. Above all,

however, by giving up his position as deputy Propaganda Chief, he was

able to concentrate on one thing. From now on Himmler had only one job,

that of Reichsfu

hrer-SS.

116 th e party functi onary

Reichsfu

hrer-SS

hortly after the Reichstag elections in September 1930, at which the

NSDAP achieved its great breakthrough, the SS became involved in a

serious crisis that had broken out in the Nazi movement as a result of the

simmering conﬂict between the SA and the party leadership. The conﬂict

had been provoked by the demand, put forward above all by the SA chief in

eastern Germany, Walter Stennes, for SA leaders to be given promising seats

on the party’s electoral lists in the forthcoming elections. Confronted with

the SA’s failure to persuade the party leadership to accede to its demand, the

SA’s supreme commander, von Pfeffer, resigned on 12 August 1930.

The conﬂict escalated when Stennes then announced that the SA in the

area for which he was responsible would cease cooperating with the party.

In fact, by 30 August he was prepared to give way, but when an SS man was

discovered eavesdropping on a meeting of SA leaders, all talk of compro-

mise came to an end. On the very same day, SA storm troopers forced their

way into the Berlin party headquarters, which was defended by an SS guard

unit. A ﬁght developed which had to be stopped by the police, who had

been summoned by the SS.

Hitler now intervened, hurrying to Berlin and holding talks with the two

adversaries. On 1 September he made a speech to the SA in which he

announced that he himself was going to take over the leadership of both the

SA and the SS. During the resultant jubilation he was able to secure a

‘declaration of loyalty’ from the assembled SA men.

Simultaneously, open

conﬂict had also broken out between the party and the SA in Augsburg.

Himmler and the leader of the Bavarian SS, Sepp Dietrich, travelled to

Augsburg and were only just able to prevent the SA from demolishing party

headquarters. There were similar conﬂicts in Dachau in October 1930 and

Hanau in February 1931. In both cases the local party leadership had to be

protected by the SS.

In the course of this crisis the SS had projected itself to the party

leadership as a totally loyal counterweight to the SA, or rather to the SA

leadership. During the following years the SS leadership cultivated the

notion that the SA storm troopers, who were at heart loyal and honourable

men, were being incited against the party leadership by a corrupt and

power-hungry clique, and that in the face of such a dangerous threat

there was only one effective antidote, the SS. Summing up the Berlin

incident eleven years later, Himmler claimed that ‘the SA men were not

in the least disappointed; the only people who were disappointed were Herr

Pfeffer and his camarilla, who had envisaged the SA as a Free Corps under

the protection of the NSDAP with which to play politics and, when

necessary, to blackmail the Fu

hrer’.

According to the ofﬁcial story, which the SS leadership put about a few

years later, after the Stennes putsch Hitler coined the motto, ‘Your honour

means loyalty’ (‘Deine Ehre heißt Treue’), which subsequently became ‘the

most important guiding principle of every SS man’. That may or may not be

true. But it is in any case signiﬁcant that the moral precept chosen by the SS

as its motto should refer to an internal party conﬂict which took place

during the ‘time of struggle’.

SA and SS

At the end of 1930, only a few months after the Stennes crisis, it did look

very much as if Himmler would succeed in removing the SS from their

position of subordination to the SA. In an SS order of December 1930 he

stated: ‘The complete separation of the SS from the SA in terms of both

organization and functions has been accomplished.’ In fact, this ‘complete

separation’ was to occur only after 30 June 1934; until then Himmler

remained subordinate to the SA leadership, which Hitler reorganized

towards the end of the year.

After Hitler had taken over personal command

of both the SA and the SS at the beginning of September 1930, the day-to-

day running of the SA was carried out by von Pfeffer’s chief of staff, Otto

Wagener.

At a meeting of SA leaders in Munich on 30 November 1930

Hitler announced the appointment of a new SA chief: Ernst Ro

hm, who

had returned from a lengthy stay in Bolivia.

This appointment came as a surprise. It is true that Ro

hm had become a

kind of patron o f the SA during the years 1920 to 19 23 when, as a captain

118 reichsfu¨hrer-ss

in the Reichswehr, he was endeavouring to coord inate the activities of the

various paramili tary leagues, and had been closely connecte d with the

history of this organization. However, from the very beginning his inter-

est had been focused on the SA’s military potential. He saw it as a

paramilitary league and not, as Hitler did , a unit whose main fu nction

was to se rve the party. By integrating the SA into a military alliance, the

Kampfbund, in the autumn of 1923, he had effectively put Hitler und er

pressure to launch the put sch of 9 Nove mber. Nevertheless, after his arrest

Hitler had assigned Ro

hm the task of reorgan izing the SA, and during

1924 the latter had once more tried to incorporate it into a large uniﬁed

paramilitary org anization, the Frontbann. When Hi tler left L andsberg

prison at the end of 1924 the irreconcilable differences betw een the two

men came to t he fore. Hitler had le arnt from the experience of November

1923 that a militariz ation of the SA, as Ro

hm had pu rsued and continued

to pursue it, was politically a cul-de- sac. Ro

hm had then left the SA and

taken employme nt as a military adviser in Bolivia. There was no evidence

that Ro

hm had revised his views on the role of SA in the meantime. Thus,

even after his appointment he continued to hold views diametrically

opposed t o those of Hitler.

It is therefore difﬁcult to understand why Hitler chose Ro

hm. Basically, it

was a concession to the rebelliously minded SA leaders, who, being mostly

former army ofﬁcers and Free Corps ﬁghters like the old warrior Ro

himself, did not believe that the SA should be ‘in the hands of a politician’.

Instead, it should be ‘in the hands of the leaders of its own units’, as a

participant in a meeting of SA leaders on 30 November 1930 put it in a

memorandum.

In Ro

hm’s favour was also the fact that, as a result of his

absence abroad, he had not been involved in the factional struggles and,

despite their differences of opinion, he maintained a good relationship with

Hitler. Ro

hm took up his post at the beginning of 1931 under the ‘Supreme

SA Leader, Adolf Hitler’.

Contr ary to the assumption that Himmler had expressed at the end of

1930, the SS remained subordinated to the SA. This was made unmistak-

ably clear in the Ord er No. 1 sign ed by Ro

hm on 16 January 1931:‘On14

January 1931, the Supreme SA Leader ordered that the Reichsfu

hrer of the

SS should be subordinate to the Chief of Staff [of the SA].’

As we have

seen, Himmler was an old acquaintance and comrade of Ro

hm’s. The

standard-bearer of the Reichskriegsﬂagge, Ro

hm’s own paramilitary

league, on 9 November 1923, had not let anything stop him from visiting

reichsfu¨hrer-ss 119