Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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XIII.

224

Another wave of appointments followed in June 1938. However,

the HSSPFs’ responsibilities for the individual military districts, while at the

same time being assigned to the regional state administrations, produced

confusing chains of command.

Himmler’s strategy of favouring SS leaders when ﬁlling posts in the

police, and of admitting as many members of the police as possible to the

SS, represented a further important element in his policy of trying to merge

the two organizations. As part of this process the regulations for admission to

the police were continually simpliﬁed.

225

Above all, he wished to empha-

size the harmony that existed between the SS and police. Thus, during the

party rally of 1938 a delegation of order police paraded demonstratively

within the SS column.

226

Already in 1937 Himmler had granted the order

police the right to wear the SS runes on their uniform.

227

Members of the

security police who were simultaneously members of the SS were permitted

to wear SS uniform while performing their duties.

228

During the war this

privilege was extended to members of the security police who were not

even members of the SS.

229

Himmler also ensured that the procedure for the approval of SS mar-

riages, on which there will be more below, also applied to members of the

police.

230

Moreover, from 1937 onwards the police were integrated into the

system of SS indoctrination that had been created by then.

231

Furthermore,

the police were included in the ‘Teutonic’ rituals and celebrations typical of

the SS. For example, on Himmler’s orders the order police and security

police, like the SS, replaced the traditional Christmas celebrations with

‘Yule celebrations’ on the day of the winter solstice.

232

Much more serious

was the fact that, shortly after the start of the war, members of the SS and

police were subjected to a special SS judicial system modelled on that of the

Wehrmacht. In this way Himmler ensured that crimes or misdemeanours

committed by police and SS men were dealt with within the SS and were

not revealed to the outside world.

233

Himmler regarded the fusion of SS and police as a moral imperative. In his

radio broadcast on German Police Day in 1937 he expressed his conviction

that the fact that ‘they are rooted in the order of the SS, are bound by the

strict rules of the SS [will] give German police ofﬁcers the strength, with

integrity and decency, to treat every case fairly, to be tough and uncompro-

mising where necessary, to show understanding and magnanimity where

possible and, in the process, despite all the ﬁlth and mean-spiritedness the

250 the state protection corps

police inevitably experience, to afﬁrm the goodness and merits of the

German people’.

234

It is clear that Himmler’s attempt to turn the SS and police into a solidly

structured, uniform ‘state protection corps’ that could never be split up

again was a response to political imperatives. It is equally clear, however,

that political calculation was not the only motive for his designing his

organization in the way he did. The organization and aims of the state

protection corps were inﬂuenced by his phobias and prejudices, his fads and

fancies, and his passions to an almost astonishing extent. His homophobia,

for example, culminated in his making the pursuit of homosexuals one of

the main tasks of the security police. There was his deep hostility to

Christianity, his idealization of everything military, his control-freakery

which, among other things, led him to attempt to withdraw the SS and

police from the state’s judicial system. What the Reichsfu

hrer-SS and Chief

of the German Police deﬁned as ‘protection of the state’ can just as easily be

seen as Himmler protecting himself, and that in a dual sense: in terms of a

defence against his personal fears, and as a protective shield behind which he

could follow his own personal interests and aims. That applies particularly to

the SS, which, unlike the police, was removed from the grasp and interven-

tion of other state agencies. Here, as we shall now see, Himmler could

implement his own peculiar ideas unimpeded.

the state protection corps 251

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PART

III

The Order

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Ideology and Religious Cult

etween 1935 and 1937 there were about 200,000 members of the SS,

and by the end of 1938, after the annexation of Austria, exactly

238,159, 95 per cent of whom belonged to the General SS. They came

from all parts of society.

Compared with the population as a whole they

were decidedly over-represented in commerce, in the ﬁeld of health-care,

in the public services, and among semi-skilled and unskilled workers;

among skilled workers and members of the free professions they were

slightly under-represented; in agriculture above all, however, they were

distinctly under-represented. Only 10 per cent of SS members worked in

agriculture; in the Reich in general the proportion was around 22 per cent.

Thus the social proﬁle of the SS tended towards that of a modern service

industry, and it is difﬁcult to reconcile that with the vision Himmler was

continually conjuring up of an ‘order’ rooted in blood and soil.

The Reichsfu

hrer-SS therefore regarded it as his main task to strengthen

the unity of the SS, whose composition was in fact heterogeneous and

which was expanding in several directions, in such a way as to secure the

organization’s long-term viability. In 1936, on the occasion of the annual

meeting of Gruppenfu

hrer held at the commemorations of 9 November

1923, he made the following pronouncement on this problem:

I have often told you that I shall always strive to ensure that there are no false starts,

and that, if at some time in the future there is weak leaders hip, there will be no

gradual fragmentation, in the sense that ﬁrst of all there’ll be the General-SS, then

the protection division; the third function will be a kind of police; the SD will be a

kind of criminal or state police; the ﬁft h branch will be an institute for ideological

training and a research body—with the result that the order loses its unity and

somehow disintegrates into its component parts.

‘The entire SS’, as Himmler put it two years later on the same occasion,

‘consists today of numerous branches, various kinds of troop formations and

other kinds of institutions. All these things are splendid, but we must make an

extraordinarily concerted and conscious effort to ensure that all these sections

we have built up always retain a sense of being parts of a whole. [ . . . ] Everyone

is ﬁrst and foremost an SS man; after that he belongs to the General SS, the

Verfu

gungstruppe [armed units], the Death’s Head units, or the SD.’ He

therefore asked the Gruppenfu

hrer ‘continually to impress on the men and

their ofﬁcer corps that they are only part of a whole and that they count only

insofar as the whole counts’.

As Himmler once again made clear in an address

delivered in September 1940, the Waffen-SS could ‘endure only if the SS as a

whole endures. If the whole corps really is an order which lives according to its

own laws and understands that one part is unthinkable without all the others.’

In the concept of the ‘order’ or, as he insisted, the ‘clan order’ (Sippen-

orden) based on racial selection Himmler believed he had found the

appropriate formula to capture the nature of the SS. In the SS-Leithefte

(SS Guidance Booklets)of1943 there is an attempt to reﬁne the notion of the

SS as an order. There we read: ‘Within the context of a particular world-

view an order is that close-knit community whose members surrender

complete power over their lives to that world-view and all commit them-

selves willingly to following its precepts.’ The similarity to Christian orders

is no coincidence, the article says, and it is important to recognize that, in

spite of the ‘alien and wrong-headed philosophy of life’ that Christian

orders cultivate, they brought together ‘people who wished to dedicate

their lives to an idealistic and elevated goal’.

Himmler’s annual November speech of 1936 to the Gruppenfu

hrer

contains the ﬁrst mention of his idea of needing another ten years to secure

the inner cohesiveness he was aiming for in the SS and police, an idea to

which he returned several times the following year.

Indeed, in the eight-

and-a-half years that remained to him as Reichsfu

hrer-SS his main focus was

to be the internal integration of the SS. He went about this in a variety of

ways: organizational measures; the development of a philosophy particular

to the SS, created by his establishing a speciﬁc SS cult with attendant rituals,

symbols, and ‘sacred’ sites; the propagation of a doctrine of virtue speciﬁc to

the SS; and last but not least, a leadership style that was highly idiosyncratic

and yet geared to the conduct of his subordinates.

256 ideology and religious cult

The constant expansion of the SS forced Himmler repeatedly to adapt its

command structures. In 1935 he had, as mentioned above, already promot-

ed the three SS Section Ofﬁces (A

mter) to Main Ofﬁces (Haupta

mter). Now

he made further decisions.

In November 1936 he expanded the chief

adjutant’s ofﬁce, headed by Karl Wolff, into the ‘Personal Staff of the

Reichsfu

hrer-SS’. Wolff was given the rank of ‘Chief of Staff ’.

The actual

adjutancy, headed by Werner Grothmann, was now part of the Personal

Staff, as were a Personal Department of the Reichsfu

hrer-SS (under Rudolf

Brandt), a Chancellery of the Reichsfu

hrer-SS, and a gradually increasing

number of departments and divisions that in part had a connecting function

to the other Main Ofﬁces. When in 1939 the Personal Staff was declared a

Main Ofﬁce, Himmler named Wolff retroactively as Head of the Main

Ofﬁce, and in so doing underlined the particular position Wolff’s post had

acquired during the previous years.

In addition, a series of departmental

heads in the SS Main Ofﬁce were given posts in Himmler’s Personal Staff

and thus were visibly upgraded. For example, Pohl, head of the administra-

tive department in the SS Main Ofﬁce, was simultaneously ‘administrative

director’ of the SS and the head of the medical department, and was given

the title ‘Reich Medical Ofﬁcer SS’.

On 9 November 1936 Himmler also redeﬁned the role of the Ober-

abschnittsfu

hrer: now they were assigned to the three Main Ofﬁces (and no

longer only to the ofﬁce of the R eichsfu

hrer-SS and the SS Main Ofﬁce),

and thus had the task at regional level ‘of safeguarding the unity of the SS

order as a whole in accordance with the guidelines laid down by me’, as

Himmler put it. ‘I expect of my Oberabschnittsfu

hrer that they will not

regard this ﬁrst and foremost as a boost to their power but rather that, as

National Socialists and SS men, they will devote themselves to their new

and wide-ranging task with a high degree of responsibility and with respect

for the great and sometimes neglected achievements of the organizations—

the Security Service and the Race and Settlement ofﬁce—that are put under

their direction.’

The Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce under Walter Darre

had since

1935 consisted of ﬁve departments: the Central Ofﬁce, the R acial Ofﬁce

(where racial research was conducted), the Indoctrination Ofﬁce, the Clan

Ofﬁce (responsible for the selection of applicants and permissions to marry),

and the Settlement Ofﬁce.

The actual headquarters for the SS leadership

was the SS Main Ofﬁce, originally responsible for leadership, administra-

tion, personnel administration, and the SS court. After 1933 it accumulated

ideology and religious cult 257

numerous new tasks, in particular responsibility for the armed SS units,

concentration camps, border controls, and ofﬁcer-training colleges ( Jun-

kerschulen). In August 1938 it acquired responsibility for indoctrination from

the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce.

At the beginning of 1939 the SS

Main Ofﬁce, after the relocation of the Court Ofﬁce, already consisted of

twelve departments.

The SD headquarters under Heydrich, which in 1935 had been elevated

to the status of a Main Ofﬁce, retained its basic structure, and in ensuing

years was also organized into three ofﬁces: Administration and Organiza-

tion, Home, and Foreign.

In 1936 new additions were the two Main

Ofﬁces of the security police (also under Heydrich) and the order police

(under Daluege), a conﬁguration that revealed the planned amalgamation of

the SS and the police.

In April 1939 two further Main Ofﬁces were set up: Himmler named the

administrative director of the SS, Oswald Pohl, as head of a new Main

Ofﬁce for Administration and Business, and in addition made him head of a

Main Ofﬁce for Budgeting and Buildings that he placed under the Reich

Interior Ministry.

In reality both Main Ofﬁces under Pohl functioned as

one unit that could act in its capacity as a state or as an SS institution. From 1

June 1939 the two corresponding units in the Personal Staff were made into

two independent Main Ofﬁces, the Personnel Ofﬁce and the Court Of-

ﬁce.

While in the mid-1930s the General SS was still almost 50 per cent

ﬁnanced from membership dues (an additional special contribution was

levied on non-party members) and the payments of patrons, in 1939

Himmler succeeded in having the entire SS budget paid by the Reich

Treasurer of the NSDAP, in effect, therefore, from state funds. According

to the ﬁnancial planning documents for 1935, the total SS budget amounted

to c.15 million Reich marks. In 1936 it was a good 18 million and in 1937

and 1938 around 19 million.

In the mid-1930s, however, Himmler

acquired a further source of ﬁnance, namely regular donations from an

exclusive circle of entrepreneurs and managers from the German business

world.

The prehistory of this ‘Friends of the Reichsfu

hrer-SS’ organization

stretches back to the end of 1927, when the industrialist Wilhelm Keppler

was asked by Hitler to assemble a consultative group on economic matters.

Up to the takeover of power this relatively informal group had met three or

four times. Their discussions did not, however, make any impact to speak of

258 ideology and religious cult

on the NSDAP programme. Keppler, Kurt Freiherr von Schro

der, and

other members of the circle had, on the other hand, played an important

role in creating the contacts that led in late 1932 and early 1933 to soundings

concerning a Hitler–von Papen government. Himmler knew Keppler at the

latest from this period.

After the takeover of power Hitler had made Keppler his economic

adviser, though without creating for him a central role in the development

of economic policy. The ‘Keppler Circle’ instead looked to the leadership

of the SS. In March 1933 Himmler admitted the industrialist into the SS as a

Standartenfu

hrer,

and soon the circle was called ‘Friends of the R eichs-

hrer-SS’.

Meetings became more frequent, until from 1939 onwards

they occurred almost once a month.

At the meetings there were lectures

on political, economic, and cultural topics. Himmler, who determined the

membership himself,

took part frequently in the meetings in the ﬁrst

years, giving lectures about police matters and ancestral research or taking

the members on a tour of a concentration camp; in 1936, for example, they

went to Dachau. In 1937 they were the guests of the Berlin police depart-

ment.

After the outbreak of war Himmler’s appearances at the meetings of

his ‘friends’ grew less and less frequent, and from 1940 they evidently ceased

altogether. Nevertheless, in December 1943 the Friends went on a three-

day excursion from Berlin to Himmler’s East Prussian military headquarters,

where the Reichsfu

hrer informed his guests about the range of his respon-

sibilities.

In 1939 the Friends were thirty-six members strong. Among them, in

addition to Keppler and Schro

der, were leading representatives of German

business such as Rudolf Bingel, the chief executive and chair of the board of

Siemens–Schuckert, Heinrich Bu

teﬁsch, board member of IG Farben,

Friedrich Flick, chief executive of Mitteldeutsche Stahlwerke, Karl Ritter

von Halt, member of the board of the Deutsche Bank, and Hans Walz,

managing director of Robert Bosch. In addition there were high-ranking

representatives from the steel and machine-manufacturing industries,

banking and insurance, and the shipping industry. Hermann Behrends

and Oswald Pohl, as representatives of the SS, were also members, as was

Carl Vincent Krogmann, the incumbent mayor of the city of Hamburg, as

well as representatives of various ministries, the Reich Bank, and party

administration.

In 1936 Him mler appears to have as ked the Friends to make donations to

the SS for cultural a nd social purposes. The sum rais ed in 1936 is estimate d

ideology and religious cult 259