Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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at 600,000 R eich marks, and by 1939–40 rose to a good 1 mi llion Reich

marks per year.

The funds were clearly used for special tasks, for example,

to ﬁt out the Wewel sburg (of which more later), or to support projects of

the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) organization or the Lebensborn

(Spring of Life) association. The Friends boosted the Reichsfu

hrer-SS’s

reputation in business circles and conversely opened up to its members the

possibility of approaching one of the leading representatives of the regime

with projects—or of making money through the extensive programme of

Aryanization.

Finally, Himmler’s efforts to build up a comprehensive organization were

completed by the founding of businesses owned by the SS. In addition to

various workshops in concentration camps and the manufacture, developed

since 1938, of construction materials (these have already been discussed

in the 1930s Himmler supported a series of smaller businesses that served a

wide variety of purposes. All these businesses were managed from the

Personal Staff ofﬁce.

One example was the Magdeburg publishing house Nordland, which

specialized in bringing out ideologically relevant writings. Another was

Anton Loibl, a private limited company founded in 1936, with the help of

which Hitler’s chauffeur, an acquaintance of Himmler’s, developed the

application of a patent for pedal-operated reﬂectors, which since 1937 had

been mandatory for bicycles. A considerable part of the proﬁt was diverted

to the SS’s ‘academic research’ organization, the Ahnenerbe, and to the

Lebensborn association. In 1937 the private limited company Friedrich

Franz Bauer was created as a way of enabling the man in question, a personal

friend of Himmler, to disseminate his photographs.

The Allach porcelain factory set up by Himmler in January 1936 had a

peculiar position among the SS businesses. In addition to Karl Diebitsch, a

kind of personal adviser to Himmler on matters of taste, who was brought

into the Personal Staff as a specialist in art and design, three further SS

members were involved as founders of the ﬁrm.

These four straw men

were, however, forced to surrender their share of the business in October

1939 to Pohl, who incorporated it in German Economic Enterprises

(Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe = DWB).

Situated in the north of Munich, Allach saw itself not as an economic

enterprise but as a ‘state manufactory’.

Two-thirds of its production went

to the SS, the police, and the Wehrmacht.

The SS beneﬁted from large

discounts, as a result of which the manufactory ran in the early years at a

260 ideology and religious cult

loss.

Himmler planned to make good the losses after the war with the help

of proﬁts from a large agricultural estate, and intended by this means to grant

the Reichsfu

hrer-SS in perpetuity an ‘unlimited right to make gifts’ of the

Allach products.

During the war he had the workforce replaced to a great

extent by prisoners from Dachau concentration camp, which was nearby.

The porcelain manufactory’s range stretched in total to 240 models, all

bearing the double Sig rune, the emblem of the SS—a grandiose collection

of SS kitsch. ‘Emblematic ﬁgures of the movement’ such as the ‘SS ﬂag-

bearer’, as well as ﬁgurines of historical soldiers and of animals (‘alsatian’,

‘rutting stag’, ‘young hare’), were available in porcelain, while the compul-

sory bust of the Fu

hrer, the Yule light (candle-holder) indispensable to the

SS family, and ‘Germanic’ utensils such as vases and dishes could be obtained

in pottery. In addition, and increasingly during the war, Allach produced

everyday items for the Waffen-SS.

The emerging conﬂict with ‘Asia’

Although an ideology speciﬁc to the SS was to become the means of

binding the organization together, before the outbreak of the Second

World War statements from Himmler concerning the future goals of the

SS were relatively rare. Apart from his programmatic speech at the NS

Leaders Conference of 1931 there are in fact only three speeches in which

he discussed the role of the SS in a future ‘Third Reich’ and fundamental

ideological questions: his speech at the Reich Peasants’ Rally of November

1935, which was also published under the title The SS as an Anti-Bolshevik

Fighting Force; his lecture to a Wehrmacht course on national politics in

January 1937; and ﬁnally, his speech of November 1938 to the SS-Grup-

penfu

hrer.

There are also indications to be found in the indoctrination

material over which Himmler exercised control, such as the SS Guidance

Booklets.

If these speeches and materials are analysed more closely, it appears that an

idea fundamental to Himmler’s ideological outlook was that there existed a

superior Nordic or Germanic race, which, as the leader of the ‘white races’

and thus also representative of humanity as a whole, was engaged in a

millennia-long struggle with racially inferior opponents. The endpoint of

this conﬂict would be a ﬁnal clash between the racially superior—in other

words the ‘Germanic’—peoples, and their opponents, the inferior races, or

ideology and religious cult 261

to put it in drastic terms, a ‘struggle between humans and subhumans’.

The rise of National Socialism under the leadership of the genius Hitler, the

idea runs, opened up the historically unique opportunity to win this battle.

If they should lose, the inexorable consequence would be the destruction of

the Germanic—in other words, the white—race.

In public presentations of this idea Himmler identiﬁed Freemasons,

communists, and Jews as dangerous enemies; within the SS he made it

clear that he considered Christianity to be at least as dangerous. The Jews,

who in Himmler’s programmatic speech of 1931 had not even been men-

tioned, appeared in the changing guise of both string-pullers and the

intellectual gurus of the enemy camp. Jews were both Freemasons and

communists, and somehow or other they were also behind the intrigues

of Christianity.

Because, however, the Jews were to blame for everything,

they remained, even in Himmler’s tirades, curiously insipid. By contrast, his

rhetoric took ﬂight when he was speaking against communists, homosex-

uals, and above all against Christianity.

At the beginning of the 1940s Himmler’s concept of the enemy was

decisively extended. He now favoured the view that the Teutons were

engaged in a perpetual struggle with forces repeatedly thrusting forth from

Asia to conquer Europe and destroy the Teutons: ‘inevitably, like the swing

of the pendulum.’

Himmler traced a line beginning with the Huns and

stretching via the Magyars, the Mongols, Turks, and Tartars to the Soviet

communists. In the ﬁnal analysis it was the ‘conﬂict between a Germanic

Reich and subhumans’.

In the process he was to stress again and again the alleged close symbiosis

of communists and Jews, and develop the idea that ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ was

attempting to mobilize the masses of the Asian continent against the ‘Teu-

tons’.

The fact that he repeatedly placed this Jewish-Bolshevik threat in a

‘historical’ context and presented it as the most recent manifestation of

‘Asiatic’ imperialism indicates an important shift in his vision of the

world: the original arch-enemy ‘the Jews’ (whom he had always named in

the 1930s in the same breath as the communists, Freemasons, and Jesuits),

was now replaced by a much more encompassing enemy, the ‘Asians’. It

goes without saying that this vision of the enemy included ‘the Jew’; as

Himmler emphasized, the war was a racial war against ‘Jewry and Asians’.

The change in Himmler’s conception of the enemy is shown also by the fact

that he no longer designated another important ideological enemy, Chris-

tianity, as the product of ‘Jewish’ inﬂuence, as he had done in the 1930s,

262 ideology and religious cult

but rather as a religion infected by ‘Asian’ elements. In 1944 these came

together in the formulation ‘purely Near Eastern Christianity, relayed by

Jews’.

Himmler’s anti-Semitism was therefore always an integral part of a

colourful collage of hostile images.

First in 1938, but above all in the 1940s, a further change in his terminol-

ogy can be observed: the future Reich that was to be established was no

longer simply ‘Germanic’ but ‘Greater Germanic’ ( grossgermanisch), in other

words, it was to include ‘related blood’ from various European states and

ethnic German minorities, take possession of extensive territories in eastern

Europe, and, by expelling or exterminating the indigenous population,

‘Germanize’ them. Himmler conceived of this Greater Germanic Reich

not as a Greater Germany extended by a few provinces but as an entirely

new kind of supranational state organization created on a racial basis.

The

historical analogy in his mind was that of the foundation of the Reich or

Empire of 1871: just as Prussia had become a part of the German Empire, so

the Greater German Reich would be absorbed into the Greater Germanic

Reich.

His vision of a ﬁnal conﬂict with the Asian powers is probably to be

found most distinctly in a speech he made on 16 September 1942 to the

leaders of the SS at his Ukrainian headquarters at Hegewald. He warned his

audience that, just as ‘an Attila was born in this seething mass of millions of

subhumans, in the same way suddenly in some coupling of two people the spark

can be ignited’ by means of which ‘an Attila, a Genghis Khan, a Tamberlaine,

a Stalin can emerge from lost traces of Nordic-Germanic-Aryan blood that is

ﬂoating in this mass and which alone can give rise to powers of leadership and

organization’. If, however, ‘such a genius, such a dictator, such a Genghis

Khan is born and simultaneously on the other side no Adolf Hitler is born’,

then ‘things may turn out very badly for the white race’. There was only one

way of successfully meeting this challenge: ‘If you encounter any example of

good blood somewhere in the east—and this is the ﬁrst principle you must

take note of—you can either win it over to your side or you must kill it.

To leave it, on the other hand, so that tomorrow another leader emerges,

whether of small, great, or indifferent stature, would be a crime against us all,

for in the end only our own blood can defeat us.’

Here a new idea comes into play: The greatest threat, in Himmler’s view,

no longer comes from an Asian–Bolshevik bloc under Jewish leadership but

from Asian masses subordinated to strong leader ﬁgures, whose sudden

emergence he could explain to himself only by positing the accidental

ideology and religious cult 263

breeding back of ‘lost’ ‘Germanic’ genes. On another occasion he claimed

fancifully: ‘Originally what probably happened was that we had a German-

ic–Nordic ruling class who—and this is reported even by academic histor-

ians—had assumed the position of lords or princes over some peoples in the

east, in part at their request. They probably said, “Send us somebody for we

cannot control ourselves and we want somebody to keep us in order”.’

The more the Soviet Union proved itself to be at least a match for National

Socialist Germany in the Second World War, the more clearly this idea

crystallized in Himmler’s utterances: Genghis Khan, Lenin, and Stalin

became leaders with ‘Aryan’ roots.

Simultaneously—in 1942 Himmler

had embarked on the ‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish question on a European

scale—the Jews receded more and more as the principal enemy; in 1943 he

was already referring to the Jewish question in the past tense.

It has no doubt already become obvious that Himmler’s politico-histori-

cal ideology was a construct of the imagination that is almost impossible to

analyse in detail on the basis of intellectual history. Not only was it

inconsistent within itself and terminologically extremely vague, but in the

course of time it also underwent signiﬁcant changes that called into ques-

tion its own foundations. The deﬁnition of the Germanic collective was

dependent on a capriciously applied concept of race, and the hated ene-

mies, the opponent, were described so imprecisely and were so closely

linked that they were practically interchangeable and could be blamed for

anything. At the end the Teutons were ﬁghting a hostile leader class that

was their own mirror-image. Himmler asked the Reich Peasants’ Rally of

1935 to focus more on the ‘line of argument as a totality’, and that is the

procedure that must be followed here if these ideas are to acquire any

coherent meaning.

That does not, however, mean that there were no constants in his

outlook. The restoration of some kind of ‘Germanic’ Reich that would

colonize the east was without doubt one of them, as was his deep hostility

towards the peoples settled in this east, towards Christianity, and towards

the Jews. Yet these constants could be translated in very diverse ways into

programmes of imperialist conquest and campaigns of annihilation.

It would therefore be wrong to assume that it was Himmler’s priority to

translate an ideological ﬁxed programme into reality. Rather, he was ﬁrst

and foremost a highly ﬂexible and adaptable politician who knew how to

legitimize whatever policy he adopted by dressing it up with appropriate

264 ideology and religious cult

ideology. Or to put it another way, Himmler the politician wished to avoid

being too hemmed in by Himmler the ideologue.

Overcoming Christianity

In order to arm them for the forthcoming epochal conﬂict between ‘hu-

mans and subhumans’ Himmler wanted to direct the SS to one task above

all: it was to act as the vanguard in overcoming Christianity and restoring a

‘Germanic’ way of living. As he understood it, this was the actual mission of

his Schutzstaffel; it was to this task that it owed its identity and the justiﬁca-

tion for its existence.

Christianity seemed to him so dangerous because its sexual morality stood

in opposition to the biological revolution he planned, and because the

principle of Christian mercy contradicted his demand for unwavering

severity in dealing with ‘subhumans’.

Replacing Christian principles

with ‘Germanic’ virtues was the precondition if they were to prevail against

the ‘subhumans’ and secure the future.

In Himmler’s concept the dual process of ‘de-Christianization’ and

‘Germanization’ was to impact on all aspects of life: custom and moral

behaviour, in particular sexual morality; the legal system; the entire realm

of culture; and the social order. This general revision of outdated values that

Himmler aimed for corresponded strikingly to his own personal develop-

ment. Not only did he blame the ‘homosexual male order’ of the Catholic

Church and the prudery rooted in his Catholic upbringing for his own

delayed sexual development and for what he subsequently was to call with

shock the ‘threat’ of homosexual temptations. In the face of his gradually

waning enthusiasm for his wife after ten years of marriage, towards the end

of the 1930s, he also felt limited in his private needs by the dominant

morality of Christian marriage. ‘Germanic generosity’ could be of use

here. His reorientation towards ‘Germanic’ values also enabled him to

create a moral system by which he could reject the humanitarian values

he had grown up with, and which had obstructed the development of a

ruthless policy of expanding living-space.

There is no doubt about Himmler’s anti-communism and anti-Semitism,

and he sought to destroy both groups without mercy. Yet he was basically

much more interested in Christianity: the conﬂict with the Christian world

in which he had grown up had truly existential signiﬁcance for him, and by

ideology and religious cult 265

linking opposition to Christians with the idea of restoring the lost Germanic

world he had set himself the overriding challenge of his life. A political

consideration was also important: anti-Semitism and anti-communism were

fundamental to National Socialism, both ideologically and in its political

practice. The SS would be hard put to establish a distinctive proﬁle in these

areas. By linking de-Christianization with re-Germanization, Himmler had

provided the SS with a goal and purpose all its own.

We have already seen that, in spite of his rejection of Christianity,

Himmler set immense store by the fact that his men and he himself ‘believed

in God’.

What he said about his own ‘belief in God’ was, however, vague.

In his speeches he occasionally referred to ‘Waralda, the ancient (das Uralte)’,

but without deriving from that a concept of divinity to which he or the SS

were committed. For example, in a speech to senior naval ofﬁcers in 1943

he propounded the view that those who observed and understood the

process of natural selection were ‘believers in their innermost being’.

‘They are believers because they recognize that above us is an inﬁnite

wisdom. The Teutons had a beautiful expression for it: Waralda, the

ancient. We may dispute how it can be revered and how in earthly terms

it can be broken down into cults and varieties.’

Himmler was not willing to profess belief in public in Wotan or other

Germanic deities. In secret, however, he thought about the question of

whether it might not be possible to decipher such ‘Germanic’ ideas of

divinity. In May 1940 he turned to Walter Wu

st, the head of the Ahnen-

erbe, and asked him ‘to research where in all of North-Germanic Aryan

culture the concept of the lightning ﬂash, the thunderbolt, Thor’s hammer,

or the hammer thrown or ﬂying through the air appears. Also, where there

are sculptures of a god holding an axe and appearing in a ﬂash of lightning.’

He requested him to collect ‘all such evidence, whether in pictures, sculp-

ture, writing, or legend’, because he was convinced that in this case it was

‘not natural thunder and lightning but rather a case of an earlier, highly

developed weapon our forefathers had, possessed of course by only a few,

namely by the Aesir, the gods, and presuming an extraordinary knowledge

of electricity’.

The ﬁnal remark about electricity indicates that Himmler

believed this weapon had actually existed and had really been in the hands of

god or godlike beings; had he been interested only in the depiction of the

phenomenon of the thunderbolt he would not have needed to bother about

the construction of the alleged weapon, and could have left it entirely to the

imagination of the artist. Or had his enthusiasm made his thoughts run away

266 ideology and religious cult

with him? The fact that Wiligut (of whom we will hear more later), his

adviser in all Germanic and occult questions, presented him with a plan to

introduce a primitive Germanic religion in place of Christianity does indeed

lend strength to the supposition that among his intimate associates Himmler

pursued these ideas seriously.

In general, however, Himmler’s attitude to religious questions was char-

acterized by his radically utilitarian outlook, indeed by unvarnished cyni-

cism: if Christianity was harmful that was above all because it stood in the

way of Himmler’s intended demographic revolution. When, for example,

during the war a volunteer division of Muslims was created for the Waffen-

SS (see Ill. 31), he praised Islam as ‘a religion that is both practical and

appealing to soldiers’, for it trained ‘men for me in this division and promises

them heaven if they have fought and fallen in battle’.

He came to respect the Jehovah’s Witnesses, tens of thousands of whom

were imprisoned in his concentration camps as a result of their paciﬁst and

anti-Nazi attitudes, because of their stubborn will to resist: ‘If their fanati-

cism could be harnessed for Germany or a similar fanaticism be created in

the nation as a whole in wartime, we would be stronger than we are

today!’

They also lived frugal lives and were hard-working and honest.

For that reason he not only employed them in his own household and in

those of friends and SS families,

but expressed the view that precisely these

qualities should be propagated among the suppressed nations in the east,

where in addition the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ paciﬁsm was extremely wel-

come to the Germans! In July 1944 , in a long letter, Himmler therefore

ordered the then-head of the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce, Dr Ernst Kalten-

brunner, to export the religion to the occupied eastern territories (which by

this time were no longer occupied): ‘In the case of all Turkish peoples the

Buddhist faith is suitable but for other nations the teachings of the Bible

Students [ Jehovah’s Witnesses] are the appropriate ones.’

For his own men too Himmler had a ready store of pragmatic solutions to

existential questions. Answers to the question of human transience were not

to be sought in the realm of religion but in the cult of ancestors he

propagated. This practice of revering ancestors, in his view, strengthened

each individual’s consciousness of being linked to the continuum of suc-

ceeding generations; the transience of the individual was abolished in the

immortality of the nation. At the meeting of Gruppenfu

hrer on the eve of

the November 1938 commemoration of the Munich putsch he claimed that

‘we shall be unconquerable and immortal as a nation, truly immortal as an

ideology and religious cult 267

Aryan–Nordic race, if we hold ﬁrm by selection to the law of blood and,

maintaining the cult of our ancestors, recognize the eternal cycle of all being

and action and of every other kind of life in this world. A nation that

preserves its ancestors will always have children; only nations without

ancestors are childless.’

The subsequent text of the speech shows, however, that Himmler not

only equated immortality with the perpetuation of the Volk as a collec-

tive—a typically vo

lkisch attitude—but that in his view immortality was

also something an individual could experience: ‘And however bitter death is

for the moment—for it means taking leave—we know equally on the basis

of the most ancient conviction of our blood that it is merely a move to

another plane; for we have all seen each other somewhere before and by the

same token will see one another in the next world.’

Ill. 13. ‘For us death has no terrors [ ...]The individual dies but even while

he lives in his children his nation goes on after him’, wrote Himmler in 1942

in a preface to a document from the SS Hauptamt giving instructions on the

conduct of digniﬁed ‘SS obsequies’. The ceremony for Reinhard Heydrich—at

which Himmler gave the eulogy—was conducted in the Reich Chancellery

and was seen as exemplary. Heydrich had died after an assassination attempt.

268 ideology and religious cult

Himmler also concerned himself intensively with the question of rein-

carnation. He declared to the Gruppenfu

hrer in February 1937 that this ‘was

a question that could be discussed for hours’. He claimed to be personally

neutral: ‘I must say that this belief has as much in its favour as many other

beliefs. This belief can no more be proved by the methods of exact science

than Christianity, the teaching of Zarathustra, Confucius, and so on. But it

has a big plus: a nation that has this belief in reincarnation, and reveres its

ancestors and thus itself, always has children, and such a nation has eternal

life.’

On a personal level Himmler did in fact have very clear views on this

matter, as is demonstrated by a letter he sent the same month to SS-

Hauptsturmfu

hrer Eckhardt. Karl August Eckhardt, whose main occupation

was that of Professor of Legal History, had shown Himmler a manuscript

with the title ‘Earthly Immortality’, on which the Reichsfu

hrer-SS had

commented very favourably. Himmler let Eckhardt know that his work

was ‘an immensely valuable contribution and a complete conﬁrmation of

what has been passed down orally over millennia, though, as in the case of all

such things, it has not been recognized in academic studies’. He did want to

see changes, however; he objected to Eckhardt’s term ‘transmigration of

souls’ and wished it to be replaced by ‘rebirth in the clan and in the same

blood’.

The revised manuscript was published as a book in 1937, and was

distributed by Himmler to the SS in 1939 in a special edition.

Naturally Eckhardt had responded to Himmler’s comments when revis-

ing the work. There was no more mention of transmigration of souls but of

‘a belief in reincarnation’ that was ‘of Aryan origin’. In the foreword

Eckhardt quoted one of Himmler’s favourite writers, Werner Jansen; in

his ‘most profound book’, the ‘heroic song of Robert the Devil, Duke of

Normandy’, he named this heroic ﬁgure as the chief witness for his main

thesis that the Teutons had believed in ‘reincarnation’.

The cult of the Teutons

Himmler pursued vigorously the aim of making the SS the focus o f a c ult

of the Teutons. In doing so he was not sa tisﬁed with laying bare the

allegedly ‘German ic roots’ of contemporary Germans and exhorting

them to develop a cult of their ancest ors. Rather, his purpose was to

bring to light in a comprehensive new interpretation the supposedly

ideology and religious cult 269