Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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ously to the SS Gruppenfu

hrer in November 1936—as always, when

awkward subjects were being dealt with, ‘quite openly’, but ‘without this

being something that should immediately be released for publication for the

masses or, as I should perhaps better say, the rank and ﬁle of our SS leaders

and men’.

‘You see,’ Himmler began his train of thought, ‘our men often complain

and say, “Where for heaven’s sake are we supposed to meet decent women,

decent girls we can marry!”’ In order to respond to this emergency he

intended to make the summer solstice again a festival ‘of Maytime, a festival

of life, a festival of marriage’. For in ancient times ‘the time between

the spring festival and the summer solstice was the time for young

people to compete with each other. It was then customary that the

young people danced and leapt around the summer-solstice ﬁre. Marriages

were made.’

On this pattern, the ‘SS men’s sporting competitions, which we shall put

on every year,’ were ‘always to take place between Easter and the summer

solstice’. Himmler’s ideas went far beyond the sporting aspect, however:

‘I can imagine my initiative being adopted by the BDM (Bund Deutscher

del) and the Women’s League, with competitions arranged for girls at

the same time as the SS establishes competitions for men [ . . . ] If this process

of selection were supported by a racially based selection of the participants in

the female competitions it is my view that in the course of the years the

summer solstice will be brought back to its true, ancient, and necessary

signiﬁcance.’

184

As he let the Ahnenerbe know in a circular in September 1938, Himmler

was assuming that in certain Germanic tribes it was usually only at the

summer solstice that ‘children were procreated and thus sexual intercourse

took place’.

185

The summer solstice as a festival of copulation was symbo-

lized, as Himmler said in 1936 at the Leadership School for German Doctors

at Alt-Rehse in Mecklenburg, by ‘the ancient custom that the ﬁnest boy

leaps through the ﬁre with the ﬁnest girl (both having been chosen through

physical contests)’.

186

Himmler naturally insisted on taking part every year in the summer

solstice ceremonies.

187

In 1935 they were in the Sachsenhain at Verden,

in 1936 on the Brocken mountain. In 1937 he was at Ludendorff’s funeral

on that day, but in 1938 he again celebrated the summer solstice, this time at

Wolfsberg in Austria, and in 1939 on the Baltic near Kolberg (Kołobrzeg).

290 ideology and religious cult

Himmler constantly intervened in what was to happen at the ceremonies.

In 1936 he called on the Standarten to rehearse a ‘torch dance for ﬁfty-one

dancers’ created specially for this occasion, and to perform it at as many

ceremonies as possible.

188

In 1938 he once again issued an order for the

summer and winter solstice celebrations to be carried out in a uniform

manner for the next three years,

189

and after the summer solstice he asked

for reports on the celebrations from the whole of the Reich. He may well

have been extremely enthusiastic about the results, for the various SS units

had proved to be particularly imaginative in this year: while one Standarte

could report the ‘demonstration of a gymnastic dance by the BDM in

dresses with colourful bodices, which led into a general folk-dance around

the ﬁre’, in SS Abschnitt XVII ‘ribbon dances’ and ‘bridal waltzes’ had been

practised. The Oberabschnitt Danube reported graphically that, ‘after the

anthem of loyalty and the national anthems members of the Hitler Youth

hurled hoops of ﬁre into the valley and young couples formed to jump

together through the slowly subsiding ﬁre’.

190

If the summer solstice celebrations as conceived by Himmler formed the

ﬁnale to the annual trials of physical strength within the SS,

191

at every

winter solstice ‘intellectual contests in the SS’ were to take place, as Himm-

ler informed the Gruppenfu

hrer in 1937. To this end, in 1937, he exp-

lained, genealogical tables as well as family histories and pieces on the

signiﬁcance of reverence for ancestors were to be produced.

192

Apropos

of how to conduct the winter solstice, Himmler explained in 1936 to the

Gruppenfu

hrer:

The winter solstice is not only the end of the year, Yuletide, after which come the

twelve holy days, when the new year begins, but rather it was above all the festival

when ancestors and the past were remembered, and when the individual realized

that without his ancestors and his worship of them he is nothing, a smal l atom that

can be swept aside at any time. Yet integrated into the inﬁnite chain of their family

in true modesty, ancestors and grandsons are everything.

193

Accordingly, at the Yule celebrations gradually twelve candles were to be

lit, and at each one a saying connected with the light was to be recited,

which was followed by a general response: ‘May their light shine.’ The

sayings revolved around the thought that the life of an individual was

absorbed into the ancestral line.

194

In November 1937 Himmler issued

the order that, following the winter solstice, SS men and their wives or

ﬁance

es in SS units had to celebrate Yuletide together. On this occasion the

ideology and religious cult 291

newly married SS members were to be given the Yule lights donated by the

Reichsfu

hrer-SS.

195

In November of the following year Himmler asked the

young SS scholars who belonged to ‘team houses’ to ‘encourage young

writers to compose German songs for Yuletide that could be sung at the

celebrations of the party and its organizations in place of Christian hymns’.

196

Himmler even turned his mind to the subject of funerals. In 1936,ashe

explained to his Gruppenfu

hrer, he had assigned the task of ‘producing

designs for tasteful cofﬁns’. Wreaths of artiﬁcial ﬂowers were not to be used

under any circumstances. ‘I suggest that throughout the winter the depart-

ments of the SS should give wreaths only of conifers—spruce, pine, or

Scotch ﬁr. That is simple and, if the wreaths are properly made, the nicest

and best thing. In summer use oak and beech leaves and twigs for wreaths

and add some nice ﬂowers.’

Once again, what was important to him was ‘that gradually a style should

emerge. For everything we do must gradually conform to our innermost

being. How we live, what sort of furniture, morals, and customs we have, all

of this must be an expression of our inner selves. We must achieve this, and

indeed in these ﬁrst years of the SS we must lay the foundation stone.’

Himmler emphasized, nevertheless, that he had no objection to Christian

burials, if the relatives wanted them, referring to the death of his father

which had occurred only a few days previously. The religious ceremony

had, however, to be kept strictly separate from the SS ceremony.

197

In 1942 the SS Main Ofﬁce issued a publication, Suggestions on How to

Conduct a Funeral. Himmler wrote the preface: ‘For us death has no terrors.

[ . . . ] The individual dies, but even during his lifetime in his children his

nation develops beyond him.’ An SS funeral was to consist of the funeral

service, the funeral procession, and the solemn burial. To supplement the

ceremony, quotations from the Fu

hrer, aphorisms, and literary sources were

recommended. The funeral of Heydrich on 9 June 1942 was considered the

paradigm for a truly successful occasion of this kind (see Ill. 13).

The responsibility for conducting these diverse ceremonies could not,

however, in the Reichsfu

hrer’s view be placed in the hands of those in

charge of SS indoctrination; that would lead to the creation of a new

‘priesthood’ within the SS. ‘We do not want that in the SS.’ It was, he

said, the task of commanding ofﬁcers to ofﬁciate at the ceremonies.

198

When, in April 1940, he caught an SS leader planning to conduct an SS

marriage ceremony that was outside his sphere of responsibility as a com-

mander, Himmler threatened him thus: ‘If I should catch you or another

292 ideology and religious cult

SS leader again acting as a speaker or organizer of a clan ceremony [ . . . ]

I shall strip you or the person concerned of his rank and lock you up for

several years for attempting to re-found the priesthood.’

199

In November 1936 Himmler requested the SS-Gruppenfu

hrer not to

conduct birth or marriage ceremonies on SS premises or in public, but

rather within the family.

200

Any report in the press was to be avoided.

201

The private nature of these ceremonies, as Himmler explained to the

Gruppenfu

hrer, should prevent any ‘priest’ from turning up and objecting

that a ‘heathen marriage’ or ‘something like a church ritual’ was being

carried out. He wished to avoid, he said, ‘taking a step out of time, one

for which people are not ready and that would not yet be understood and so

would make a ridiculous impression’.

202

There were good reasons for

Himmler to be nervous about making the SS cult, which he had expressly

designed, all too public, as will become clear through other examples. He

feared not only ridicule from the public, but in particular Hitler’s negative

attitude with regard to any too pronounced revival of the Germanic

heritage: ‘Rosenberg, Himmler, and Darre

have to stop this nonsense with

cults’, he had said in 1935, according to Goebbels’s diary.

203

As far as the normal SS social gatherings were concerned, Himmler was

tireless in trying to prevent them from degenerating into all-too-vulgar

events, ‘bleak evenings of drinking’, as he himself called them; instead, it

was his wish to incorporate them into his plan of education. In 1941 he

produced an eight-point sheet of guidelines for a—to his mind—successful

‘comradeship evening’.

204

First of all, we read, one thing is crucial: ‘In all circumstances such social

evenings must be properly planned.’ And: a ‘responsible leader’ must super-

vise the ‘organization of the programme’ and ‘have a ﬁrm hold on the

evening’s events’. He must, for example, ensure that before the evening starts

the men have eaten properly so that they are not ‘obliged to drink on an

empty stomach’. Furthermore, on attending such an evening Himmler had

noticed that ‘people had forgotten the self-evident custom that no one may

smoke until the highest-ranking ofﬁcer gives permission’. He had, he wrote,

gained the impression that ‘a number of men and ofﬁcers had succumbed so

heavily to a smoking addiction that they could not last a quarter of an hour

without smoking’. In addition, ofﬁcers on these occasions had not ‘to huddle

together in a group and create their own clique, but had rather to sit among

their men, which is why they are called “comradeship evenings”’. Himmler

warned his readers: ‘To have any value, the ﬁrst part of any such evening has

ideology and religious cult 293

to serve to celebrate the education of ofﬁcers and men. Regimental music or

music played by a few of the men, “hearty songs” [ . . . ] a very few (one or

two) well-delivered poems, a speech by the commander or someone of high

rank—these are the things that have to make up the programme of a

comradeship evening.’ Even a good atmosphere came down, in Himmler’s

view, to organization.

Locations

In Himmler’s opinion the rituals and festivals he had designed required a

suitably digniﬁed space, and he took pains to create locations that symbo-

lized the continuity of ‘Germanic’ culture to a high degree. The Reichs-

hrer-SS made it his aim that ‘as far as possible each Standarte [regiment]

shall have a cultural focus for German greatness and the German past, and

that it should be put in order again and restored to a state worthy of a nation

of culture’.

205

The most important of these ‘cultural foci’ were to be situated in north-

west Germany, the place of origin of the house of Saxony so esteemed by

Himmler. The burial-place of Henry I in Quedlinburg on the eastern

border of the Harz mountains was one of these SS ‘holy places’, but it was

by no means the ﬁrst.

As early as 1933 Himmler had set out to ﬁnd a suitable building for the

planned SS ‘Reich leadership school’. In November he had viewed the

Wewelsburg near Paderborn, a three-cornered castle built in the seventeenth

century, the owner of which, the district of Bu

ren, no longer wished to

maintain it. Himmler took the view that the Wewelsburg was exactly right

for his purpose.

206

After alterations, the castle was transferred to Himmler in a

solemn ceremony on 22 September 1934 by the district administrator of

ren. Manfred von Knobelsdorff became the ﬁrst captain of the castle

(this designation was introduced in 1935). Up to that point he had been the

SS chief indoctrination ofﬁcer and he was Darre

’s brother-in-law.

207

In 1935 Himmler moved responsibility for the project from the Race and

Settlement Main Ofﬁce to his Personal Staff;

208

its ofﬁcial designation was

now Wewelsburg SS School.

209

In the meantime, however, the institu-

tion’s emphasis had shifted: now its function was research on National

Socialist ideology.

210

In fact, the impression created is of ‘uncoordinated

pseudo-scientiﬁc research undertaken for a speciﬁc purpose and determined

294 ideology and religious cult

by the individual ideas of whoever was working there at the time’, the main

emphasis lying on the task of creating a genealogical chart of the Himmler

family.

211

When, from 1936 onwards, the Ahnenerbe took over by degrees

the SS research projects that were ideologically relevant, vague plans were

made that increasingly envisaged the castle as a site for ceremonial and

prestigious occasions.

212

Between May 1935 and November 1937 Himmler visited the Wewels-

burg many times, and on some occasions for several days. In May 1938 a

meeting of all the most senior ofﬁcers of the SS took place there. Alongside

Sepp Dietrich, Eicke, and Wolff were Daluege, the head of the Main

Ofﬁce, Werner Lorenz, August Heissmeyer, Heydrich, Walter Schmitt,

and Pohl.

213

In November 1938 Himmler announced that he intended in

future to hold a conference of Gruppenfu

hrer every spring at the Wewels-

burg,

214

and to use the occasion to swear in the new Gruppenfu

hrer.

215

The

ﬁrst such gathering was planned for March 1939, but the occupation of

Czechoslovakia meant that it did not take place.

216

While staying there in January 1939 Himmler made various decisions. He

was not prepared to open this ‘treasure’ to the ‘hyenas of the press’, and

therefore publications about the Wewelsburg were as far as possible to be

suppressed. He planned a planetarium for the castle, and in addition—

clearly under the inﬂuence of the romanticism surrounding castles—he

intended to establish a hoard of gold and silver ‘for a rainy day’.

217

For his

own room he wanted a ‘long, narrow Gobelin tapestry [ . . . ] depicting a

maidenly young woman, a future mother’.

218

The death’s-head rings that reverted to the Reichsfu

hrer-SS after the

death of their wearers were to be stored in a special cabinet.

219

The family

coats of arms of deceased Gruppenfu

hrer were to be hung in the castle so

that, as he explained to the Gruppenfu

hrer in 1939, ‘those who come after

us must always take counsel together before our plaques, and must always

stand upright in our presence so that they will do things as we did them’.

220

Those Gruppenfu

hrer with no coat of arms—in other words, the majori-

ty—were called upon by the Personal Staff to have one designed, a move

that occasioned extensive correspondence.

221

Comprehensive structural changes were made to the Wewelsburg, and

the Reichsfu

hrer-SS had it equipped with numerous objects from the

applied arts. The Gruppenfu

hrers hall, which was to be decorated with,

amongst other things, coats of arms, was largely completed, and also a crypt

in the castle tower, although neither was ever used. Nor did ceremonies,

ideology and religious cult 295

celebrations, or cult rituals take place at the castle, and only once, in June

1941, did the Gruppenfu

hrer actually hold their conference at the Wewels-

burg.

Up to the end of the war a special Wewelsburg construction management

team was drawing up plans for a grandiose extension of the site, which

Himmler approved at each stage. Yet neither these nor any other remaining

documents throw light on what function the Wewelsburg was supposed to

assume in the life of the SS. The numerous contradictory and erratic

instructions that Himmler gave out over the course of time for the exten-

sion of the castle indicate that he himself was not clear what this project was

actually about.

222

About 20 kilometres north-east of the Wewelsburg, near Detmold, were

the Externsteine, a further ‘cultural focus’ of the SS. The Externsteine were

a striking group of rocks that, according to a view prevalent in vo

lkisch

circles, represented a Germanic sanctuary. There was particular speculation

that it was in fact Irminsul, the legendary chief sanctuary of the Saxons

destroyed by Charlemagne.

Himmler was ﬁrmly convinced that the Externsteine played a signiﬁcant

role as a site of Germanic worship, and with the help of the Ahnenerbe

he wished to provide scientiﬁc proof of this theory. What is more, he set

about, by means of a foundation specially created for this purpose, develop-

ing the Externsteine into a neo-Germanic sanctuary. In 1934 and 1935

he ordered excavations of the Externsteine, which like all archaeological

efforts before it produced no evidence of a ‘Germanic’ past history to the

stones.

223

Himmler did not, however, loosen his grip. In April 1937 he issued a

detailed assignment: a medieval relief on one of the stones showing the

descent from the Cross was to be investigated to see if what was there was

not a ‘Christian reworking of a Germanic depiction’.

224

A few months later,

in November 1937, he voiced concrete speculations about why the rocks

were blackened by ﬁre. One explanation, he said, was, ‘as SS-Brigadefu

hrer

Weisthor and I have long supposed, ﬁre, which in some degree served

astronomical purposes and whose function it was to indicate phases of the

sun, months, and perhaps also days’.

225

Himmler did not, however, want to

subject such speculations to expert scientiﬁc debate. Similarly, in November

1937 he instructed the Ahnenerbe to check any publication about the

Externsteine in advance; the aim was to obstruct any ‘that might in any

way provoke a debate about the Externsteine’.

226

296 ideology and religious cult

After a further visit to the stones he wrote, on 20 April 1940, to Pohl that

‘a lot of things’ had to ‘happen’ on the site. Once again Himmler had very

precise ideas about the development of the publicly accessible site: ‘At both

entry gates, halls or houses must be erected in the style of the farmhouses of

Lippe [ . . . ] At the Externsteine themselves the ascents to rocks 1, 2, and 3

must be altered.’ Various demolitions and changes had to be undertaken,

and after that

the foundation’s entire site must be put in our care. We shall also take on

responsibility for the forest and protect the bird life as far as possible. I am declaring

the site a reserve in perpetuity, where the only game that may be shot are boar, as I

believe these could at best be a nuisance to visitors. Feral cats and dogs may still be

shot. All other animals shall be able to run free here. We intend [ . . . ] to ensure that

the forest again becomes as it once was and that animals can survive in it [ . . . ], not

by artiﬁcial feeding but rather through the planting of trees and shrubs, including

wild fruit bushes. [ ...] At the same time we must arrange for one of the South

Tyrol hoteliers to come to Horn and build a decent hotel there. [ . . . ] We must

keep a constant eye on all details such as noticeboards, signs, and waste-bins to

make sure they are tasteful and placed so that they are easily spotted. [ . . . ] All in all,

the public must be educated to behave as if in a truly sacred place.

227

It was not only the adversities of war that made the development of the

site difﬁcult and caused Himmler to postpone his plans until peacetime.

228

In February 1942 Hitler told him, explicitly and unambiguously at an

evening party, that the Externsteine had ‘certainly never been a ritual

site’.

229

The so-called ‘Saxons’ grove’ (Sachsenhain) near Verden was created by

Himmler to commemorate the execution of allegedly 4,500 Saxons by

Charlemagne in 782. The building-work began in the winter of 1934– 5.

In memory of the Saxons 4,500 boulders were set up; a village of Lower

Saxon half-timbered houses that had been pulled down elsewhere com-

pleted the site.

230

At the summer solstice of 1935 Himmler and Rosenberg conducted the

ofﬁcial inauguration of the site. In his speech the Reichsfu

hrer-SS recalled

‘the ancient law of German religion [ . . . ] that ascendancy is followed by

downfall and downfall then followed by new life, as long as the will and the

strength of blood live on in an earthly being’.

231

The invocation of ‘German

religion’ referred to the fact that the Sachsenhain was intended as a monu-

mental accusation in stone of the cruelty of Christian methods of conver-

sion—a reproach that was, as it happens, untenable, for Himmler’s repeated

ideology and religious cult 297

assertion that the Saxons had been killed as a result of the emperor’s policy

of conversion was completely without foundation.

232

There is evidence that Himmler revisited the site in the summer of 1938

and gave various instructions for its design.

233

After Hitler, however, had

‘rehabilitated’ Charlemagne in his speech to the party conference in 1935,

there was no more question of making the Sachsenhain a central ritual site

for the SS. Up to the end of the war, however, it served the SS as a location

for indoctrination and meetings.

As the history of all three sites graphically illustrates, Himmler’s attempt

to celebrate SS ideology by means of holy places, special rituals, and gifts

with symbolic signiﬁcance did not get beyond the preliminary stages: the

manifestations of the ‘cult’ remained in the end as undeﬁned as their

content. From Himmler’s perspective the reason was, no doubt, clear: it

was not that he was on the wrong track, but rather that National Socialist

Germany was simply not yet ready for his substitute religion.

298 ideology and religious cult

Himmler’s Leadership Style

immler added to the ideology and rituals peculiar to the SS an

unmistakable leadership style, aimed at aligning the SS with him as

an individual and with his goals. He saw himself primarily as the educator

of his men: he not only personally established the principles on which

members of the SS were selected, trained, disciplined, and made to conform

to a model of family life governed by the SS ethos, but also monitored

pedantically whether they were being observed.

As part of this process, his whole apparatus of control was designed

exclusively around himself, and the management structure was decidedly

unclear. By distributing the executive authority for his various areas of

responsibility (police, SD, concentration camps, General SS, Waffen-SS,

and others) over several SS Main Ofﬁces, Himmler ensured that the SS did

not fragment into diverse, autonomous power-blocs. He had no deputy,

nor was there a body composed of the top SS leaders that met regularly.

Gruppenfu

hrer meetings were effectively no more than roll-calls. Himmler

therefore could—and was obliged to—intervene repeatedly and make

decisions over matters large and small. The creation of the Higher SS and

Police Leaders (Ho

here SS und Polizeifu

hrer = HSSPF) allowed him at the

same time to direct control over regional ofﬁces. Despite his pedantry,

Himmler was not ﬁrst and foremost a bureaucrat. He did not wish to create

an administrative apparatus that controlled his sphere of power according to

ﬁxed rules. Bureaucratic institutions, as he was aware, tend to compel even

their own leadership to act within the rules, to limit their room for

manoeuvre and to make their actions predictable. By contrast, Himmler’s

style of leadership was highly unpredictable.

This type of leadership reﬂected his mistrust of others and his need to be

in control. Himmler attempted to guide the extensive apparatus over which