Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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1925, I took over command of the SA [. . .] When my father-in-law heard

about my political activities he cut off my monthly allowance.’

Heissmeyer then had to cut down on his political involvement and

concentrate on maintaining his family:

To begin with, I became a fruit-tree salesman. My family had been living apart

from me for three years in Hamelin and I now brought them to live with me in

ttingen. When nobody wanted to buy any more trees, after about 1½ years I

became a salesman for Siemens–Schuckert. But business collapsed because of the

increasing shortage of money and the economic crisis. I then became a driving

instructor in a driving school [. . .] in Go

ttingen where I worked from February to

December 1931. In December 1930 I joined the Go

ttingen SS. By Novem ber 1931

I had succeeded in increasing its numbers from 18 to 600.

In December 1931 he was put in charge of Standarte 12 and ‘moved to

Brunswick, while my family had to stay behind in Go

ttingen for ﬁnancial

reasons’.

In October 1932 he took over Abschnitt XVII (Mu

nster).

Kurt Wege, who was born in 1891, had been a soldier from 1911 onwards

and was discharged in 1920 as a lieutenant. His subsequent career was

chequered. To begin with he worked in farming and began a degree in

agriculture, which he had to interrupt in 1923 because of the inﬂation. He

then tried to get by as an unskilled worker, then as a cashier, and then as a

clerk, but was repeatedly made redundant. In 1926 he once again became a

student—‘since I couldn’t ﬁnd suitable employment’—but then gave it up

and instead did a correspondence course in bookkeeping. He earned his

keep as a ‘security ofﬁcial’ with the Berlin Guard and Security Service, a

private ﬁrm. ‘But I had to give up this strenuous night work for health

reasons.’ He was appointed secretary of the National Transport League on a

trial basis, but his ‘appointment failed to be conﬁrmed as a result of

disagreements between the two chairmen. I also became ill as a result of

my previous work as a security ofﬁcial.’ Between 1927 and 1929 he worked

as a salesman. In addition to his career problems, he suffered personal

tragedy: his wife died in 1923 and Wege, who had two school-age children,

went to live with his mother. In December 1929 he ﬁnally found permanent

employment with the NSDAP Gau Berlin. From there he switched to the

salaried position of an SS-Oberfu

hrer and leader of SS Abschnitt XIII

(Stettin).

Richard Hildebrandt, who was born in 1897, passed his Abitur in 1915,

volunteered for military service, and was discharged from the army as a

130 reichsfu¨hrer-ss

lieutenant in 1918. After the war he studied economics, languages, history,

and art history, without ﬁnishing his degree in any of them. He then

worked in banking and as a clerk in commerce and industry in various

places. In spring 1928 he went to the United States, where he worked

‘mainly in manual occupations (farming, horticulture, artisanal)’. In 1930 he

returned to Germany. He had already joined the party in 1922, and on his

return from the United States he again became actively involved and joined

the SS in 1931, where he was appointed adjutant to Sepp Dietrich, the head

of the Munich SS Abschnitt.

Friedrich Wilhelm Kru

ger was born in 1894 as the son of an ofﬁcer. He

left grammar school without taking his Abitur, took part in the World War

as an infantry ofﬁcer and in various post-war military actions, and was

discharged from the army in 1920 as a lieutenant. At ﬁrst he tried his hand

at bookselling, but lost his job in 1924 and switched to a management post in

the Berlin waste-disposal department, from which he was also dismissed in

1928. He described his profession from now onwards as ‘independent

businessman’. Kru

ger also began a family in these economically difﬁcult

years. He married in 1923 and his ﬁrst son was born in 1929. He joined the

NSDAP at the end of 1929.In1933 he was in temporary charge of SS

Abschnitt III (Berlin), but then switched to the SA, where he was appointed

to senior positions. In 1935, however, he was to return to the SS.

Friedrich Jeckeln was born in 1895. He was unable to ﬁnish his mechani-

cal-engineering degree because of the outbreak of the World War. He

volunteered for the army and achieved the rank of lieutenant, and from

1917 onwards was a pilot in the Flying Corps. He married in 1918 and

administered an estate that belonged to his father-in-law. However, they

soon fell out with one another. Jeckeln concluded from the behaviour of his

father-in-law that, as he told Himmler some years later, he must have

married into a family of Jewish extraction. This notion (for which there

was no evidence) resulted in his becoming increasingly alienated from his

wife. From then onwards he spent a considerable amount of time with a

group of former ofﬁcers, among whom, as he admitted, he ‘sometimes

consumed a signiﬁcant amount of alcohol’. Finally, he left the farm and he

and his wife separated. During the following years he tried in vain to

establish himself in another profession. He married for a second time, but

got into considerable ﬁnancial difﬁculties as a result of old debts owed to his

father-in-law and the maintenance payments due to his ﬁrst wife, and had to

declare himself bankrupt. ‘I felt a broken man and was ﬁnancially ruined.

reichsfu¨hrer-ss 131

I couldn’t ﬁnd a job and get settled’, as he subsequently put it when

describing this period in his life to Himmler. It was while in this depressing

personal situation that he joined the NSDAP in 1929, at the beginning of

the economic crisis, and in the following year the SS. When his divorced

wife once again complained to Himmler that her former husband was

behind with maintenance payments, Jeckeln responded: ‘Only when Ger-

many is free will I be able to put right everything that has been brought

about by the decline of our nation and fatherland.’ Thus, for him the Nazi

‘seizure of power’ came as his salvation.

Werner Lorenz was born in 1891 and went to a military cadet school. He

joined the army in 1912 and became an ofﬁcer in 1914. He described his

career during the post-war period in his curriculum vitae as follows: ‘After

the war ended, his regiment was deployed on frontier guard duties; until

June 1919 he commanded a squadron of his regiment. He was then dis-

charged. Since 1929 actively involved in the NSDAP. Joined the Danzig SS

in January 1930’, which he subsequently built up. Signiﬁcantly, his curricu-

lum vitae does not mention his civilian life at all. In his SS personal ﬁle his

occupation is given as ‘soldier’.

Kurt Wittje was born in January 1894 and, from June 1932 onwards, was

leader of SS Abschnitt IX (Wu

rzburg). He was one of the few high-ranking

SS leaders who managed to get taken on by the Reichswehr as an ofﬁcer

during the 1920s. However, in 1928 he had to leave the army because of

suspicions of homosexual activities, and joined the board of a limited

company. He joined the SS in 1931; he wisely kept the reason for his

discharge from the army to himself.

The leaders of Abschnitt V (Essen), Karl Zech, Abschnitt X (Kiel), Paul

Moder, and Abschnitt XVI (Zwickau), Heinrich Schmauser, all of them

former army ofﬁcers, had had to follow similar careers that they did not

consider appropriate to their social standing, such as ‘commercial employee,

miner and mining ofﬁcial’,

‘mail order manager, clerk’,

or ‘in bank-

ing’.

Among the high-ranking SS leaders there are three who, in terms of their

birth and personal circumstances, can deﬁnitely be described as upper class.

Thus, on the basis of his birth Josias, Hereditary Prince of Waldeck and

Pyrmont, was certainly an exception among the high-ranking SS leaders.

Born in 1896, the prince had fought in the World War, was discharged from

the army as a lieutenant, and had subsequently studied agriculture and

economics at Munich University. It was there that he had got to know

132 reichsfu¨hrer-ss

Himmler.

In 1923 he broke off his studies without having graduated. To

begin with, he was involved in the Jungdeutscher Orden, which he left in

1926. He joined the SS in November 1929, where, in September 1930,he

became Himmler’s adjutant and then his ‘chief of staff ’.

The leader of

Abschnitt VI (Breslau), Udo von Woyrsch, who was born in 1895, had a

full-time job managing his father’s estate.

The later Munich police chief,

Friedrich Karl Freiherr von Eberstein, who was born in 1894, became a

factory owner in the 1920s after a standard military career as a cadet, war

volunteer, army ofﬁcer, and member of a Free Corps. He joined the SS in

1929, but was provisionally transferred to the SA, where he ﬁlled a number

of high-ranking posts.

Only three of the early high-ranking SS ofﬁcers had not achieved the

rank of ofﬁcer in the military. Sepp Dietrich, who was born in 1892 , came

from a humble background and began his career in the hotel business. He

was called up into the army in 1914, discharged as a sergeant in 1919, and

then joined the Free Corps. Between 1920 and 1923 he worked for the

Bavarian state police, and then, thanks to the head of the Munich NSDAP,

Christian Weber, in the latter’s petrol station. From 1925 onwards he was

involved with the NSDAP; he joined the party and the SS in 1928. Two

months later he had already become leader of the Munich SS Standarte and,

in July 1929, SS-Oberfu

hrer for the whole of Bavaria. In July 1930,as

Oberfu

hrer South, he took over responsibility for the SS throughout

southern Germany. He was promoted to Gruppenfu

hrer in December

1931 and from February 1932 was in charge of Hitler’s bodyguard, which

was to operate from 1933 onwards as the staff guards at the Reich Chancel-

lery and was to form the basis of the ‘Leibstandarte’.

Kurt Daluege, who was born in 1897 the son of a middle-ranking civil

servant, served in the army from 1916 onwards, where, like Dietrich, he

achieved the rank of sergeant. After the defeat he was involved in various

paramilitary organizations and took part in confrontations with Polish

militia. From 1921 onwards he studied at the Technical University in Berlin

and graduated with a diploma in civil engineering. At the same time he was

involved with radical right-wing organizations, and joined the NSDAP in

1923. To begin with he was active in the SA; indeed, he was the leader of

the SA in Berlin–Brandenburg from 1926 to 1929. However, the fact that

Walter Stennes was appointed SA-Oberfu

hrer for northern Germany in-

stead of himself may have persuaded Daluege to accept Hitler’s advice and

transfer to the SS in the summer of 1930, where he took over the leadership

reichsfu¨hrer-ss 133

of the Berlin SS. In this role Daluege was to play a decisive part in the party’s

internal surveillance of the unruly Berlin SA. In civilian life Daluege had

succeeded in establishing a conventional middle-class existence for himself

that was markedly different from the personal biographies of the other high-

ranking SS leaders. He earned his living as a senior manager in the Berlin

city department for refuse disposal, was married in 1926, and had three

children.

Among the former NCOs was Alfred Rodenbu

cher, who was leader of

the SS Abschnitt XIV (Bremen) from October 1932 onwards. Born in 1900,

he had joined the Navy in 1916 as a cabin boy and ultimately been

promoted to the rank of chief petty ofﬁcer. In 1930 he transferred from

the Navy to the career of a low-ranking civil servant. His appointment to a

leading position in the rapidly expanding SS offered him the prospect of a

much more prestigious career.

Rodenbu

cher, like Himmler, belonged to the so-called war youth gen-

eration, who, while being fully aware of and experiencing the effects of the

war, had not actually been able to ﬁght in it. Among this age cohort, which

formed a deﬁnite minority within the SS leadership, was Fritz Weitzel, who

was born in Frankfurt in 1904. An apprentice locksmith, Weitzel had at ﬁrst

been a member of the Socialist Workers’ Youth organization, but then

transferred his allegiance to the NSDAP in 1923. Soon after the founding of

the SS in 1925 he took over its organization in Frankfurt. After being

appointed to various different posts, at the end of 1930 he was made leader

of the SS in the whole of western Germany. In 1930 he was also a successful

candidate in the Reichstag election, which gave him ﬁnancial security.

1927 Weitzel had been sentenced to a month’s imprisonment for his

involvement in an abortion case.

When a party member reported this to

Himmler, he replied that he was fully aware of the circumstances and that he

was of the ‘opinion that Party comrade Weitzel’s honour had not been

affected or damaged in any way by the whole affair’. He would ignore any

further ‘letters of denunciation’ in this matter.

In fact the sentence did not

have any negative effect on Weitzel’s career.

Wilhelm Rediess, who was born in 1900 in Heinsberg in the lower Rhine

area, served a few months in the army from June 1918 but was not sent to

the front. A qualiﬁed electrician, after his discharge from the army Rediess

could not ﬁnd employment in his trade. To begin with he worked as a

trainee in agriculture, and then, between 1924 and 1928, after having

undergone the appropriate training, was employed as a skilled mechanic

134 reichsfu¨hrer-ss

in various ﬁrms. ‘I became unemployed after the collapse of my ﬁrm as a

result of the economic crisis’, he noted in his curriculum vitae. After the

occupation of the Rhineland by French troops in 1923 he joined the

lkisch-Social-Bloc, which later went over to the NSDAP en masse. In

1925 he became the leader of an SA Sturm in Du

sseldorf. He joined the SS

in 1930 and took over Abschnitt XI (Koblenz) on 1 January 1931.

With a remarkable instinct Himmler had gathered round himself a group

of men who, although they no more matched the high ideals of the SS than

he did himself, were nevertheless men on whose loyalty he could rely.

Many of them were dependent on him for their very material existence, a

situation which, when necessary, he knew well how to exploit. This, then,

was the team with which he set about building up his organization.

A mass organization in the making

At the end of 1931 Himmler gave orders that the regional structure of the SS

should be changed to conform to that of the SA. He subordinated the SS

Abschnitte to two Gruppenkommandos (one for south, the other for north

Germany) and appointed Weitzel and Dietrich as their chiefs.

In the

course of 1932 they were joined by further Gruppenkommandos—East,

South-East, and West—out of which the Oberabschnitte later emerged.

Below this level there was a continuing increase in the number of Ab-

schnitte. In January 1932 Himmler ordered the creation of SS Flying Units

separate from the NS Flying Corps, in order to attract those interested in

ﬂying and gliding to the SS.

In April 1932, when the paramilitary units

(SA and SS) were temporarily banned, the SS contained more than 25,000

members; after the ban had been lifted in June there were already more than

41,000.

This meant that the SS had succeeded in reaching the 10 per-cent

quota ﬁxed by Ro

hm, indeed in slightly exceeding it. The whole organiza-

tion was ﬁnanced half by membership contributions and half by contribu-

tions from so-called sponsor members.

In order to cope with these changes Himmler concentrated on consoli-

dating the Munich headquarters. On 15 July 1932 he created an SS Admin-

istration Ofﬁce (SS Verwaltungsamt) under a businessman, Gerhard

Schneider. However, the ‘Reich Finance Administration’ under Paul Mag-

nus Weickert was dissolved in October 1932. Weickert himself was dis-

missed from the SS, possibly on the grounds of embezzlement. This gave

reichsfu¨hrer-ss 135

Schneider the opportunity to expand the Administration Ofﬁce, which was

to ﬁll a key position within the SS headquarters. However, in 1934 he too

had to go because of embezzlement. The Weickert and Schneider cases

were not the only errors of judgment that Himmler was to make in his

appointment of key personnel.

In addition to such organizational measures, Himmler tried to unify the

SS’s rapidly growing leadership corps in various other ways. For example,

he arranged a special leadership course at the party’s so-called Reich Lead-

ership School in Munich, to run from 31 January to 20 February 1932.

For

the ﬁrst time dressed in his black uniform, which after the course was

introduced into the SS generally in order to distinguish it from the brown

shirts of the SA,

he used this opportunity to give several lectures which,

according to his later adjutant, Karl Wolff, covered ‘world revolution, the

Jews, Freemasons, Christianity, and racial problems’.

In 1939, on the

occasion of the tenth anniversary of Himmler’s appointment, Wolff de-

scribed the impression his ﬁrst meeting with Himmler made on him: ‘What

impressed all those who had not yet met the Reichsfu

hrer-SS face to face

was how, when marching slowly along the ranks, his clear eyes looked into

our very souls. From this moment onwards he had succeeded in establishing

the personal link that bound each one of us to his strong personality.’

During a post-war interrogation by the Munich prosecutor’s ofﬁce,

Wolff’s memory of Himmler’s appearance was rather different: ‘By contrast,

Himmler’s appearance, pale and wearing a pince-nez, was rather disap-

pointing. He lacked a strict military bearing and the self-conﬁdence vis-a

vis an audience that one needs [. . .] If you talked to him one to one after his

lectures his gleaming pince-nez no longer gave his eyes a distracting cold-

ness and they could suddenly seem warm and even humorous.’

It may not appear surprising that the description of Himmler’s appearance

that Wolff gave to the prosecutor differed from that in the piece celebrating

his anniversary. Many of his contemporaries, however, noticed the different

sides to Himmler’s personality revealed in Wolff ’s descriptions—the cold-

ness, the attempt to project authority, the insecurity which he endeavoured

to disguise with informality and joviality. The contradiction between

Himmler’s claim to be a member of an elite and his attempt to project a

soldierly presence and the reality of his average appearance was only under-

lined by the smart black uniform which he had now adopted. Even the fact

that Himmler had tried to give himself a suitable image, with a very short

military haircut and a moustache, could not disguise the ‘pale, whey face,

136 reichsfu¨hrer-ss

Ill. 7. Himmler gained in self-conﬁdence with his success in building up the

SS. But he tried to conceal his continuing awkwardness in relations with other

people by adopting an ostentatiously ‘soldierly’ bearing.

reichsfu¨hrer-ss 137

the receding chin and the blank expression’ that ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengel,

Hitler’s foreign-press chief, who for a time shared an ofﬁce with Himmler,

could remember so well.

During a six-hour train journey that he shared with Himmler, Albert

Krebs, a Nazi functionary from Hamburg, gained the impression of a man

who was strenuously trying, through his self-presentation, to compensate

for what he felt he lacked. According to Krebs: ‘Himmler behaved coarsely

and he showed off by adopting the manners of a freebooter and expressing

anti-bourgeois views, although in doing so he was clearly only trying to

disguise his innate insecurity and awkwardness.’ However, what Krebs

found really intolerable was the ‘stupid and endless prattle that I had to

listen to’. Never in his life had he heard ‘such political rubbish served up in

such a concentrated form and that from a man who had been to university

and who was professionally engaged in politics’. Himmler’s conversation

had been ‘a peculiar mixture of warlike bombast, the saloon-bar views of a

petty bourgeois, and the enthusiastic prophecies of a sectarian preacher’.

Evidently Himmler’s constant urge to express his views, for which he had

continually criticized himself in his diaries, had not waned in the meantime.

In fact the opposite was true, and, when combined with the self-conﬁdence

which he ostentatiously displayed, it clearly got on the nerves of those

around him.

During the years 1929–32 a centrally directed and highly structured mass

organization had been created from what had begun as a few dozen

‘protection squads’ (Schutzstaffeln), which were scattered across the whole

of the Reich, consisting of no more than a few hundred men and function-

ing mainly as bodyguards for Nazi leaders. This success was not primarily

due to Himmler himself, but above all to the fact that, as a newly appointed

Reichsfu

hrer-SS, in 1929–30 he found himself in the middle of an histori-

cally unique process of political radicalization and mobilization, which

worked in favour of the NSDAP. To begin with, his contribution lay

essentially in creating organizational structures which made it possible to

divert from the ﬂood of hundreds of thousands of predominantly young

men who wanted to join the SA a certain proportion into the SS, and at the

same time to keep pace with this tremendous growth.

During these years Himmler demonstrated for the ﬁrst time in his life real

organizational talent. The strictly hierarchical structure into which he was

integrated as Reichsfu

hrer-SS was evidently much more congenial to him

138 reichsfu¨hrer-ss

than the more opaque situation that had confronted him as secretary of the

Lower Bavarian Gau or as deputy Propaganda Chief. In those positions he

continually had to mediate between the different views held by party

headquarters and the rank and ﬁle, a role which he clearly found difﬁcult.

Moreover, he had also developed an—albeit vague—idea of how the SS

should develop, which went far beyond the protection of NSDAP leaders

and the provision of an internal party intelligence service. He envisaged an

elite guard, associated with the idea of racial selection, whic h would have

the utopian future task of reviving the ‘Nordic race’. And he had recog-

nized that, in order to strengthen it s position within the Nazi movement,

one thing was essential: absolute ‘loya lty’ to the party lea dershi p, through

which the SS could differentiate itself from the SA.

Himmler and the end of the Republic

Despite repeated electoral successes, the NSDAP did not succeed in form-

ing a government. According to the Weimar Constitution, the Reich

President was by no means obliged to appoint the leader of the largest

party as Chancellor. On the contrary, the Constitution permitted him to

rule without parliament, thanks to his power to issue emergency decrees. If

a parliamentary majority opposed government policy, he could dissolve the

legislature.

In the spring of 1932 it became clear that the Bru

ning government, which

had hitherto been supported by Reich President Hindeburg’s emergency

decrees and by the SPD in parliament, was coming to an end. Of all things it

turned out to be the ban on the SA and the SS, which Bru

ning had issued in

April, that initiated the demise of his government. General Kurt von

Schleicher, who had opposed the ban on ‘military-political’ grounds, spun

a wide-ranging intrigue against the Chancellor, which eventually led to his

fall.

Von Schleicher made an agreement with Hitler behind the scenes: Hitler

offered to support a new presidential government if the NSDAP’s paramili-

tary organizations were once more allowed to operate freely and if new

elections were held. In return, Schleicher did his best to undermine Bru

ing’s position with Hindenburg. Hindenburg ﬁnally dismissed Bru

ning on

30 May 1932, and appointed Franz von Papen, an old friend of Schleicher’s,

as the new Reich Chancellor. Von Schleicher took on the post of Reich

reichsfu¨hrer-ss 139