Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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hm in Stadelheim prison after the abortive putsch. Also, Himmler had

corresponded w ith Ro

hm during his Bolivian exile and had encouraged

him in his decision to return to Ger many.

Full of pride, he had kept his old mentor in touch with the development

of the SS and had not omitted to emphasize his earlier role in the Reich-

skriegsﬂagge: ‘Many an SS leader has felt the beneﬁt of the training I got

from you’, he wrote in November 1929. ‘The boss has set us quite a target of

recruiting several thousand men by the spring and so we’ve got to meet it.’

hm replied in March 1930 : ‘I would like to congratulate you above all for

increasing the size of the SS. Knowing you as I do, I had no doubt that it was

being led in the old spirit and along the lines of our old RKF.’

It is unclear whether Himmler was yet aware of Ro

hm’s homosexuality.

He must have heard rumours about it, but may have rejected them as

opposition propaganda. It was not until the summer of 1931 that the

opposition press supplied clear evidence of his homosexual orientation.

The publication of private letters of Ro

hm in March 1932 ﬁnally provided

irrefutable proof.

At this point, however, Himmler probably calculated

that he could exploit his superior’s sexual orientation and the loose living of

many SA men by contrasting it with the virtue and discipline characteristic

of the SS. This is a point to which we shall return.

After his appointment Ro

hm immediately set about deﬁning the rela-

tionship between the SA and SS. The Order No. 1 of 16 January, already

referred to, stated: ‘The tasks of the SA and the SS are distinct. Thus there

should be no differences of opinion or friction between the two.’ In future,

the SS should be no larger than 10 per cent of the complement of the SA;

the SA should not recruit from the SS and vice versa. Ro

hm’s detailed

instructions give an indication of where in practice the friction was likely to

occur: ‘In the event that both the SA and the SS are engaged on party duties,

overall command shall be exercised by the highest-ranking and longest-

serving SA or SS leader in uniform, so long as there is a unit present of

which he is in command and the number of SA and SS units involved

corresponds to the ratio of 1:10.’ In the event that ‘both the SA and the SS

are engaged on party duties’, the SA should be responsible for ‘protecting

the meeting’; ‘the protection of the speaker, the political leaders, and the

leaders present as guests shall be the responsibility of the SS’. In the case of

marches the following regulation applied: ‘The main task of the SA is to

carry out propaganda marches; the SS has the task of manning the barriers

and maintaining security (street patrols). In the case of marches where

120 reichsfu¨hrer-ss

leaders take the salute, with the exception of those manning the barriers, the

SS will march as a unit at the back of the SA column.’ And, ﬁnally: ‘All SA

and SS leaders, political leaders, and party comrades are obliged to follow

the orders of the SS when it is carrying out its duties.’

The rapid growth of the SS required continual adjustments to the

organization. Already in 1930 three SS Higher Command districts had

been created, a kind of regional inspectorate from which the SS Abschnitte

(sections or districts) would emerge.

Order No. 25 of 12 May 1931

introduced new titles for the units. From now on the SS no longer

organized itself in brigades but in ‘Standarten’; the Standarten were then

divided into several ‘Sturmbanns’.

In order to increase its ﬂexibility,

emphasis was placed on establishing ‘motorized units’.

Moreover, Himm-

ler professionalized the work of his staff, which by 1931 was already

composed of ﬁve departments, by introducing rules of procedure.

Whereas the SA recruited its members above all from the lower-middle

and working classes, the SS mainly recruited from the ‘better class of

person’. There were, however, continual complaints that the SS was trying

to recruit SA members. Thus, the General Inspector of the SA, for example,

complained to Ro

hm about its ‘uncomradely manner of recruitment’.

The rivalry between the two Nazi mass paramilitary organizations was also

exacerbated by the fact that the SS projected itself as the much more

disciplined of the two, and claimed to enjoy the particular trust of the

party leadership.

According to an order issued by SS-Oberfu

hrer Sepp

Dietrich in a self-conﬁdent tone, the SS had been ‘bonded together from

the most active elements in the party as a particularly reliable instrument of

power in the hands of the supreme leader’. It was intended ‘for those duties

that go beyond the normal responsibilities and operations carried out by the

SA’, in particular, ‘for the maintenance of order and security’.

Above all, however, the SS was to be used again and again against the

undisciplined SA. In particular, during the so-called second Stennes revolt of

April 1931 the SS was employed as an internal party disciplinary force with

which to tame the SA. Although it had apparently been settled, the conﬂict

between the party’s political leadership and the SA leadership, which had

broken out for the ﬁrst time in east Germany—Stennes’s area of responsibili-

ty—in the late summer of 1930, had never really been resolved. In the winter

of 1930–1, therefore, Stennes increasingly adopted an anti-parliamentary

stance, which was inevitably liable to clash with Hitler’s ‘policy of legality’.

Stennes’s increasingly radical rhetoric ran the risk of provoking a ban on the

reichsfu¨hrer-ss 121

party; this had been greatly facilitated by an emergency decree issued by the

Reich President. In the light of this situation, Hitler dismissed Stennes at the

beginning of April, which prompted the latter to declare that he was ‘taking

over’ the party in Berlin and in the eastern provinces of Prussia. Stennes

instructed the SA to occupy the party’s ofﬁces in Berlin (they met with

physical resistance from the SS). He was able to win over a section of the SA

in his area of responsibility, but there was no general SA uprising. The Berlin

party leadership quickly regained control of its ofﬁces. During the following

weeks the SA leadership corps in north and east Germany was systematically

purged of Stennes supporters; around 500 SA men had to leave.

The structure and future responsibilities of the SS

Around two months later, in June 1931, Himmler gave a talk at a meeting of

SS leaders on the subject of ‘The Purposes and Aims of the SS, the Relation-

ship between the SS, the SA, and the Political Formations’. It is the only

surviving document from the ‘time of struggle’ which reveals Himmler’s

ideas for the future tasks and aims of the SS in a coherent manner.

After some introductory remarks on the ‘traditions of the SS’, Himmler

concluded that while the SA were the ‘regiments of the line’, the SS were ‘the

guards’, ‘the Fu

hrer’s last reserve [. . .] Whenever it comes to the last roll of the

dice, in every nation it is the guards who prove decisive.’ Since this was the

role that Hitler had assigned to the SS, ‘it has been set up for this purpose and

everybody must go along with this [. . .] because it is an order from our leader

and every order must be obeyed’. Himmler continued: ‘The SS must become

a force that includes the best human material that we still possess in Germany.

The SS must be held together by the shared community of blood. It must be

impossible for it to fall apart.’ It was true that there were still ‘blemishes’, but

nevertheless ‘we are on the way to becoming a force that is better than a

military unit, that is more disciplined than they are. Only when we can claim

to compete with the best military unit shall we have earned the right to wear

the death’s-head badge, only then will we be the guards.’ Only then, as

Himmler put it later, would ‘the old front-line soldiers want to support us,

only then will they come over to us and at that moment the “Stahlhelm”* will

be ﬁnished. There will be only one “League of Front-line Soldiers”: the SS.’

* Translators’ note: Himmler is referring here to the right-wing veterans’ organization, the

Stahlhelm (‘Steel-Helmet’) League of Front-line Soldiers.

122 reichsfu¨hrer-ss

In a central passage of the speech Himmler developed the idea of a ﬁnal

impending conﬂict between the ‘Nordic nation’ on the one side and

‘Bolshevism’ on the other:

Shall we, by ﬁltering out the valuable blood through a process of selection, once

again succeed in training and breeding a nation on a grand scale, a Nordic nation?

Shall we once again succeed in settling this Nordic people in surrounding territory,

turning them into peasants again and from this seedbed create a nation of 200

million? Then the earth will belong to us! But if Bolshevism is victorious then this

will mean the extermination of the Nordic race, of the last valuable Nordic blood,

and this devastation would mean the end of the earth.

According to Himmler, the SS would have a pioneering role to play in this

ﬁnal struggle:

We have been given the greatest and most magniﬁcent task that a nation can be

faced with. As far as the value of our blood and the numbers of our population are

concerned we are dying out. We are called upon to establish foundations so that the

next generation can make history, and if we create the right foundations it will be a

great one. The best soldiers, the best Germans will come to us of their own accor d,

we will not need to seek them, if they see that the SS has been set up correctly, that

the SS is really good.

What is remarkable about this major speech is the fact that Himmler

assumed that his fantasy of the ﬁnal struggle between ‘the Nordic nation’

and ‘Bolshevism’ would take place only in the ‘next generation’, and that he

saw his own task as being above all to create the basis for this struggle for

existence. Himmler saw the key to creating such an elite organization as

being the selection of the ‘racially best people’:

An SSF [SS leader] will never keep someone with a typical Slav face in his unit for

very long because so long as that person is in the troop or storm (Sturm), he will

never get the troop or storm into a proper order. He will soon notice that there is

no community of blood with the other comrades, who are of more Nordic descent.

The passport photos that have to be submitted together with the application forms

ensure that Reich headquarters can inspect the heads of the SS candidates. One only

needs to try the experiment of admitting a Mongol to the SS; it’s certain that he

would be thrown out during the trial period. But so long as this Mongol is in the SS

it will be impossible to create the spirit which is essential for the SS. The breaking-

point will come when the racially pure person will stay the course whereas the

racially impure will fall by the wayside.

reichsfu¨hrer-ss 123

Thus the selection must involve not only the careful inspection of the future

SS leader but also include his family:

The Oberfu

hrer must take particu lar care with the selection of leaders. He must

scrutinize the milieu and the family of the person whom he has envisaged appoint-

ing to a leadership position. A good and completely impeccable leader can never

come from an inferior milieu; he will always have scruples and he will never have

the decisiveness that an SSF must possess.

Finally, Himmler dealt with the role of the SS within the Nazi move-

ment: ‘We must be the best possible comrades of the SA and at the same

time always provide models for them. We must always work the hardest

and yet never talk about what we have achieved, for there is an old

proverb that says: “He who talks a lot never achieves anything.”’ What

was decisive was the recognition that the SS received from the political

leadership for its reliability and loyalty: ‘Not everybody likes us; we may be

shoved into a corner after we have done our work; we must not expect

any gratitude. But our leader knows that he can rely on his SS. We are

his favourite and most valuable organization because we have never disap-

pointed him.’

In the same month, July 1931, Himmler issued ‘Provisional Service

Regulations for the Work of the SS’, which spelled out the duties of SS

members in detail. According to these, SS members had to assemble four

times a month. They were expected to take part in monthly meetings of the

local branches and once a month undertake a propaganda trip, while two

further days in the month were to be devoted to actual ‘SS duties’. These

were to involve drill as well as ju-jitsu, which Himmler had practised in his

student days with more or less enthusiasm.

Again, Himmler underlined the claim of the SS to elite status; it should

not let itself descend to the level of petty local disputes: ‘The SS never takes

part in the discussion at membership meetings. Participation in membership

meetings is for the purpose of indoctrinating SS members, who are not

permitted to smoke or to leave the hall during the lecture.’ Also, Himmler

instructed that SS members were not allowed to get involved in the internal

affairs of the SA.

The Service Regulations also laid down what songs all SS members were

required to know by heart,

as well as the details of their uniform. The SS

uniform was to consist of a brown shirt, SS armbands, a black tie, a party

badge, a black cap with a death’s-head badge, black trousers, black leather

124 reichsfu¨hrer-ss

gaiters, black shoes with shoelaces or riding boots, as well as a black belt.

The carrying or use of ﬁrearms was strictly forbidden and would result in

dismissal from the SS and the party. Admission to the SS was to be governed

by the ‘strictest criteria’. The applicants had to be at least 1.70 metres tall and

at least 23 years of age. In view of the fact that the SA consisted mainly of

young men aged between 18 and 25, the higher age-threshold imposed for

the SS underlined its claim to a special status.

During the coming months the Service Regulations were augmented by

numerous additional orders, for example to do with the organization of the

staffs,

the establishment of marching bands,

and the medical examina-

tion of SS members.

In the end the SS leadership’s obsession with detail

went so far as to differentiate between six different types of order, each with

its own distribution list, which were cascaded down over the SS organiza-

tion throughout the country.

In the summer of 1931 Himmler took another decision that was to have

far-reaching consequences; he decided to set up a separate SS intelligence

service. The person he chose for this task was Reinhard Heydrich. Hey-

drich had been dismissed from the Navy in April 1931 after he ha d broken

off an engagement and been found guilty of dishonourable conduct by a

naval court of honour.

He had got to know Himmler through SS-

Gruppenfu

hrer Fri edrich Karl Freiherr von Eberstein. After he had joined

the Hamburg S S in July 1931 he was received b y the Reichsfu

hrer-SS,

who was impressed by He ydrich ’s former position as ‘Nachrichtenofﬁzie r’

(‘information ofﬁcer’—not realizing at the time that He ydrich had been a

signals, not an intelligence, ofﬁcer). On 1 August 1931 Heydrich began his

job as head of the new ‘Ic Service’, as the agency, usi ng milita ry jargon,

was called.

In a secret order of September 1931 Himmler deﬁned the structure of an

intelligence network that was to reach down to Standarte level.

To begin

with, however, Heydrich was the only member of the organization. This

changed only after the ban on the SA and SS in April 1932, when the

intelligence service was provisionally camouﬂaged as the ‘Press Information

Service’. During the following months Heydrich succeeded not only in

establishing a headquarters but also in recruiting colleagues throughout the

Reich, who reported their observations to it independently of the Standarte

reports. On 19 July 1932—the ban had been lifted in June—Himmler

appointed Heydrich head of the Party’s Security Service (SD) and ten

days later promoted him to the rank of Standartenfu

hrer.

reichsfu¨hrer-ss 125

The Nazi mass movement had been continually expanding since its great

success in the Reichstag election of September 1930. It was now also

continually making gains in state and local elections. It beneﬁted above all

from the fact that the Bru

ning government, which was backed by the Reich

President’s right to issue emergency decrees, failed to come up with ade-

quate solutions to the political and economic crisis and thus kept providing

the NSDAP with opportunities for attacking the ‘system’.

Although dwarfed by its competitor, the SA, whose membership had

risen from 88,000 to 260,000 between January and December 1931,

the SS

had also grown signiﬁcantly, although it still remained far behind the quota

of 10 per cent of the SA which Ro

hm had ﬁxed in January 1931 as the

ofﬁcial ratio of SS to SA. On 1 January 1931 the SS contained 2,272 members,

three months later 4,490, and in October Himmler noted that the member-

ship of the SS now stood at 10,000 with another 3,000 candidate members.

At this point it was organized into thirty-nine Standarten, which were

combined into eight Abschnitte.

In his June 1931 speech to SS leaders, however, Himmler had emphasized

that it was not so much a question of numbers, but rather the SS’s elite

character that was to be decisive for the task it had set itself as a racial avant-

garde. Thus ‘racial criteria’ also had to play a part in admissions to the SS.

During its initial years the Reichsfu

hrer-SS did in fact scrutinize every

application himself, and in the process, as he told Wehrmacht ofﬁcers in a

speech in 1937 , focused in particular on the applicant’s photo, asking himself

the question: ‘Does the man’s face reveal clear traces of foreign blood such

as excessively protruding cheekbones, in other words, a case where ordinary

people would say: he looks like a Mongol or a Slav?’

However, during the

ﬁrst months after the so-called seizure of power in 1933 the pressure to join

the SS was so great that admission was more or less indiscriminate. It was

only then that a systematic form of racial examination was introduced for

admission to the organization in order to control the stream of applicants.

But it was not only the SS applicants themselves who were examined. At

the end of 1931, with his ‘Engagement and Marriage Order’, Himmler

insisted on the examination of the race and ‘hereditary health’ of the future

wives of SS members.

The order began with the programmatic sentence:

‘The SS is a band of German men of strictly Nordic origin, selected

according to certain principles’, and determined that, for the purpose of

‘selecting and maintaining blood that is racially and genetically of high

quality’, from 1 January 1932 all SS members had to secure ‘permission to

126 reichsfu¨hrer-ss

marry’. Applications would be assessed by a new Racial Ofﬁce, which

would also start a ‘clan book’ (Sippenbuch) for every SS member.

Himmler was fully aware of the fact that his marriage order would meet

with incomprehension, indeed ridicule, outside his organization. He even

anticipated this reaction. Point no. 10 of the order stated: ‘The SS is

convinced that with this order it has taken a step of great signiﬁcance.

Derision, scorn, and incomprehension will not sway us; the future is

ours!’ Himmler referred to it twelve years later, and in a speech to the

Wehrmacht admitted that the marriage order had been regarded ‘at the time

as ridiculous, as nonsense, as exaggerated, and had not been understood and

had been rejected even by some in the ranks of the SS’.

However, the marriage order was not simply a fad of Himmler’s but an

integral part of the SS’s attempts to distinguish itself from the plebeian SA.

The marriage order was meant to express the fact that within the SS there

was a fundamentally different attitude to masculinity and the relationship

between the sexes to that prevalent in the SA. The image of itself projected

by the SA was of a bunch of tough-guys, who liked on occasion to get

drunk, were not averse to a punch-up, had a relaxed attitude to sex (which

included tolerating homosexuality in their own ranks), and in general lived

without ties.

The SS man, on the other hand, was expected to be

disciplined, to be reserved in manner, to be ‘Aryan’, and through his

marriage to contribute to the improvement of the ‘racial quality’ of the

German people.

As head of the new Racial Ofﬁce

Himmler appointed SS-Standarten-

hrer Walther Darre

, who was already responsible for propaganda within

the SS.

As leader of the Nazi agricultural movement, Darre

had contrib-

uted far more to the expansion of the NSDAP as a mass movement through

his mobilization of the ‘rural nation’ than Himmler had done in his role as

the desk ofﬁcer within party headquarters responsible for agricultural ques-

tions. Indeed, he was seen as one of the coming men in the NSDAP.

This

was attributable not only to his success in mobilizing support among the rural

population, but also to the fact that he was one of the movement’s keenest

ideologists. In his works The Peasantry as the Life Spring of the Nordic Race and

A New Aristocracy from Blood and Soil he had put forward the view that the

German people needed to be ‘nordiﬁed’ through a systematic racial policy.

Darre

wanted to create a new aristocracy from the peasantry, or rather to re-

create the ‘Germanic aristocracy’ that was rooted in the German people by

establishing hereditary landholdings (Hegeho

fe) and by the selection of the

reichsfu¨hrer-ss 127

women who would marry into them on the basis of racial principles. The

selection was to be carried out by so-called ‘Breeding Wardens’ (Zucht-

warte).

There was much in common between the intellectual worlds of Himmler

and Darre

: Teutonic fantasies, hostility to Christianity (which Darre

blamed

for the decline of the Germanic aristocracy), and common membership of

the Artamanen movement, and the two men were on friendly terms. With

Darre

’s appointment to the Racial Ofﬁce Himmler exposed the SS to the

blood-and-soil ideology and mythologizing of ‘the Teutons’. Himmler,

who owed his career in the party not to original ideas but to his role as a

functionary, would have had difﬁculty imposing these ideas on the SS as

required beliefs. Darre

, however, through his published works and his

political success, was regarded as an authority, which is why Himmler

tried to win him for the SS.

At ﬁrst, however, all this remained purely symbolic. The SS began the

actual ‘selection’ of the SS candidates and their future wives on a large scale

only after 1933.

At the start of his career as Reichsfu

hrer-SS, and particu-

larly in his immediate sphere of operation, Himmler evidently had other

priorities.

Himmler’s leadership corps

Like all of us Gruppenfu

hrer I owe to the conﬁd ence and generosity shown me by

the Reichsfu

hrer-SS all that I now am. I not only owe him my high rank, but above

all it is thanks to his great work and the training that he has put me through that

I have developed into what I am now. To be able to serve him loyally and selﬂessly

is not only an obvious duty but doing so gives me the greatest pleasure and the sense

of being honoured.

These sentences were written by Himmler’s adjutant Karl Wolff in January

1939, for the tenth anniversary of Himmler’s appointment as Reichsfu

hrer-

SS. And, if one takes a look at the SS leadership corps of the early years, it is

clear that Wolff was by no means the only one who owed the Reichsfu

hrer

‘all that I now am’.

The SS leadership team before 1933 was recruited above all from the age

cohort born between 1890 and 1900. Almost all of them had served as

young soldiers in the World War, the majority since 1914 and most of them

as ofﬁcers, and then often served a few more years in a Free Corps, before

128 reichsfu¨hrer-ss

being released into a civilian life in which the majority failed to ﬁnd their

feet and experienced that failure as a decline in their social status.

Wolff himself, born in 1900, had served in the exclusive guards regiment

of the Grand Duke of Hesse and then joined the Free Corps, until he was

discharged as a highly decorated lieutenant. At the beginning of the 1920s

he initially trained as a banker and then, after various failed attempts,

managed to get a position in advertising, eventually opening his own

advertising agency in Munich. During the world depression this ﬁrm,

which typically used his wife’s noble family name in its title, got into serious

difﬁculties. With his entry into the party and the SS in October 1931 this

extremely status-conscious 31-year-old hoped he had found a career that

would be appropriate for someone of his social standing.

August Heissmeyer was born in 1897 and fought in the war from 1915

onwards, ending up as a lieutenant. His detailed curriculum vitae, which is

preserved in his SS personal ﬁle, describes the chequered path of a typical

post-war career. However, he presents this as if it were the result of his

involvement with the ‘movement’: ‘I began as a worker in the Marienthal

woollen goods factory in Hamelin and then went to Go

ttingen in the

summer of 1919 and attended a course in order to gain my Abitur. I was

forced [sic] to interrupt my studies on account of the Kapp putsch.’ Heiss-

meyer took part in the crushing of the left-wing uprising that had broken

out in the aftermath of the putsch. But, ‘when there was no further

opportunity of participating in the struggle, I returned to Go

ttingen and

passed my Abitur in October 1930 [. . .] I then began to study law and

economics in Go

ttingen, Kiel, and then again in Go

ttingen [ . . .] Compelled

to leave the University as a result of the inﬂation, I went to work as a miner

in Westphalia.’ Here he was tempted to become a communist, but then

changed his political views: ‘I soon heard about Nazism and was swept away

[. . .] In the autumn of 1922 I got a job in the Ho

chst chemical works as a

blue-collar worker. In February 1923 I was put in charge of the safety

section of the pesticides department.’

However, in April 1925 Heissmeyer was dismissed on the grounds of his

political activity for the NSDAP. In the meantime he had married and had a

son: ‘I returned with the family to live with my parents-in-law in Hamelin.

My attempts to get back to ﬂying proved unsuccessful [. . .] I then returned

to Go

ttingen to ﬁnish my studies with the help of my parents-in-law.

However, things turned out differently because very soon, in October

reichsfu¨hrer-ss 129