Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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‘Decency’ towards ‘animals in human form’ was, therefore, for Himmler

not a moral imperative but purely a matter of expediency, because, as he

explained in a speech in May 1944, the ‘many little subhumans in our

service’ were ‘attached to their master with doglike devotion [ . . . ] because

he was decent to them’.

Himmler’s concept of decency can be read as a cipher for double

standards; it stands for norms that were in themselves contradictory. On

the one hand decency, even towards enemies, is declared to be virtuous, but

on the other it is labelled as ‘madness’. Decent treatment could be expedi-

ent, but there was always the danger of treating enemies too well and thus

doing damage to one’s own cause—and that was morally reprehensible.

Accordingly, it was decent not to treat one’s enemies decently.

This is the only way of explaining how the SS on the one hand laid claim

to being honourable and chivalrous, and yet on the other found every

possible way of degrading, torturing, and murdering human beings with

the greatest cruelty. The aura of dread surrounding the SS was a component

in their strategy of terror, and Himmler knew how to exploit this effect.

‘I have no intention, at least not during the war, of dispelling the bad

reputation we have, which is only advantageous for Germany, because it

keeps enemies at a distance’, we read, for example, in a speech Himmler

made to senior naval ofﬁcers in December 1943.

The demands of decency posed major problems even for Himmler

himself. However ﬁrmly and repeatedly he declared ‘decency’ to be his

life’s motto, it was impossible to disguise the fact that, just once in a while,

he wanted to be allowed to be ‘not decent’ and ‘not well-behaved’, as he

had confessed to his ﬁance

e at the beginning of their relationship.

The

context in which he confessed to this is important; he was referring to his

stomach problems, caused, he believed, by precisely those constant efforts to

be ‘decent’. He knew, therefore, that his rigid self-control, his torturous

system of rules and virtues, was causing psychosomatic disorders. His body

bridled at the imposition of decency—it wanted instead ‘not to be decent’.

Himmler’s constant appeals to ‘decency’ can be read as the expression of

his strenuous efforts to resist temptations ‘not to be decent’: to be cruel, to

torment or revile his enemies, to beneﬁt from their downfall or to take

malicious pleasure in it—‘understandable Schadenfreude’, as he called it in

1936. The imposition of ‘decency’ seems essentially to be a way of combat-

ing those feelings, which were only too familiar to him.

310 himmler’s leadership style

As far as the ‘decency’ of his leadership corps was concerned, the Reichs-

hrer-SS manifestly had similar doubts. Signiﬁcantly, he could not bring

himself to decide in the summer of 1942 to issue an order against anony-

mous letters in the SS. He told his administrative chief Pohl that he would

be able to ban such things only ‘when I am sure of again having peacetime

commanders and chiefs to whom any reasonably decent SS man can and

does conﬁdently come when he is deeply troubled. At this point I know

that this will not be true of the majority of the people in question.’

Below the level of ‘virtues’ there was a series of Himmler orders regulating

the conduct of SS members, most of which he produced on 9 November

each year and which he regarded as the ‘basic laws’ of the SS; over the years

they were collected numerous times in a constantly growing catalogue.

Alongside the engagement and marriage orders of 31 December 1931, the

‘honour law’ of the SS of 9 November 1935 was the most important of these

basic laws. It committed SS members to ‘defend’ their ‘honour by the use of

arms’. This could certainly be understood as promoting duelling (as a former

member of duelling fraternity, Himmler had obtained Hitler’s express

approval for this regulation).

In practice, however, Himmler tended if

possible to avoid such duels and instead to settle these conﬂicts by concilia-

tion. To this end, he set up special ‘arbitration courts’ that decided whether

in actual cases of someone’s honour being slighted a duel was appropriate or

not. This judgement had to be conﬁrmed by the Reichsfu

hrer,

for

‘duelling with swords should not be done as lightly as in the past, otherwise

duelling will be turned into a completely devalued formality’.

If a duel was

judged to be unavoidable it had also to be approved in advance by Hitler;

at the beginning of 1943 duels of this kind were forbidden on principle

‘during wartime’.

The regulation concerning the ‘sacredness of property’ of November

1936, according to which in future there were to be no more locks on

lockers in SS troops’ accommodation, was also a basic law, along with the

‘duty to save’ and the ‘sacred task [ . . . ] of giving help of every kind to the

wives and children of dead comrades’.

During the war the order ‘Last

Sons’ was added: it laid down that members of the Schutzpolizei and the SS

who were the ‘only or last surviving son’ in their family should be sent

home from the front and told: ‘It is your duty, through the procreation and

birth of children of good blood, to ensure as quickly as possible that you are

not the last son [ . . . ] so that you can be deployed again in the front line of

battle.’

himmler’s leadership style 311

There was little that escaped Himmler’s attention. His men were supplied

with a constant stream of rules of conduct and prohibitions. He felt obliged

to take steps to curb cheating and other discreditable practices in sports; at

SS sports events he demanded ‘incorruptible honesty’, ‘chivalrous bearing’,

and ‘strict adherence to the standards of good behaviour’.

He reminded

his men of the need to observe the speed limit,

and forbade high-ranking

SS leaders who held a pilot’s licence to ﬂy while on duty.

SS men were not

allowed to address each other as ‘Herr’ but had to use their rank, and on

Mother’s Day they had to ensure they were at home.

Men should

acknowledge each other ‘not with a limply bent arm, but in a soldierly

fashion, with arm and hand outstretched’.

And when shaking hands,

remove gloves! Or, to use Himmler’s words: ‘When SS men greet each

other with a handshake, even if this takes place between a man and his

superior ofﬁcer, they must shake hands and not gloves.’

Indoctrination

According to Himmler, ‘indoctrination’ was of the greatest importance in

ensuring the enforcement of SS virtues and for the loyalty and commitment

of SS members. At ﬁrst it was the responsibility of the Race and Settlement

Main Ofﬁce.

A suitable organization was built up in the course of 1934:

every SS unit down to the Sturm had an individual head of indoctrination

who was appointed by the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce and who was

to ensure that all SS men within his ﬁeld of responsibility took part once a

week in an indoctrination hour. This indoctrination organization was

directed by the thirteen full-time race ofﬁcers from the SS-Oberabschnitte,

who since April 1937 had been called ‘SS Race and Settlement leaders’

(RuS-Fu

hrer). It also came within their remit to implement the marriage

order and, from 1938, to carry out the racial examination of whole popula-

tion groups, initiate resettlement measures, and more besides.

To brief the

indoctrination leader, at ﬁrst indoctrination letters were issued sporadically

and then replaced in 1936 by the SS Guidance Booklet (SS-Leitheft), which

appeared regularly with guidelines and information.

In 1937 the indoctri-

nation organization of the SS took on the ideological training of the

police.

In August 1938 Himmler withdrew responsibility for indoctrina-

tion from the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce, with whose head he had

quarrelled, and transferred it to the SS Main Ofﬁce.

At this point the

312 himmler’s leadership style

indoctrination ofﬁce had thirty-one full-time staff members and 430 hon-

orary indoctrination leaders.

At the beginning of 1939 Himmler trans-

ferred responsibility also for the so-called team houses (Mannschaftsha

user)

from the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce to his Personal Staff. The total of

sixteen team houses accommodated SS members who were receiving

special ideological training and being toughened up in martial sports.

They were to form the core of an academic SS elite.

According to the principle of their ideological training, SS men were not

to ‘know about’ National Socialism; rather, they were to ‘live’ it. ‘The

indoctrination leader must ﬁre the emotions of his SS men. He can do that

only if he propounds our intentions on the basis of his own most profound

inner experience’, as one set of instructions put it. ‘The indoctrination leader

must be a man’s man himself and a living example of every word he says.’

It would seem more than doubtful whether this could be realized in

practice: indoctrination was schematized and formalized to the extent that

there was little scope for improvisation. ‘Flights of ideological imagination

are something I most decidedly will not tolerate’, as Himmler informed his

indoctrination leaders.

Das Schwarze Korps then also described the attitude

of many SS comrades to indoctrination as follows: ‘Of course, this or that

person thinks, “We ought to go along, especially because our superior

ofﬁcer is also going to be there (promotion!). In any case,” as these people

console themselves in a typically philistine manner, “the cosy get-together

afterwards is always really nice.” ’

In February 1936 the head of the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce

ordered that the ‘basic indoctrination’ of SS members had to take place in

a total of twenty-eight weeks, split into four blocks and spread over twenty-

one months in all. In every indoctrination week two teaching units of forty

minutes each were to be held and had to follow a particular pattern: reading

and discussion of an extract from Mein Kampf and of a short essay on a

particular topic, followed by the presentation of a practical example derived

from the procedure for approving marriages, so that the SS men were given

some direction when choosing the right wife.

The four blocks of basic

indoctrination covered the following topics: blood and soil (eight weeks),

Jewry, Freemasonry, Bolshevism (eight weeks), history of the German nation

(eight weeks), the SS year and customs, honouring the dead (four weeks).

The matching teaching materials can be found in the ﬁrst seven editions

of the SS Guidance Booklets, which even after the ‘basic indoctrination’ was

completed remained the most important training resource.

Booklet 9 was

himmler’s leadership style 313

concerned, among other things, with the history of the SS, while other

booklets concentrated on the SS’s spring games,

topics from prehistory

and early history, and German history.

In addition there are constant ‘tips’

on choosing the right partner

and—under the heading ‘For the family’—

hints on how to choose ‘good’ German ﬁrst names, in order to prevent

aberrations, which were clearly quite frequent.

Himmler himself took control of the design of the SS Guidance Booklets.

At the meeting to discuss Booklet 10 he imparted some general instructions

to Joachim Caesar, the head of the Indoctrination Ofﬁce: ‘It is my wish that

the material used in indoctrination is not always taken from one area of life.

Every area of life should be touched on and indeed in such a way that the

trainee looks forward to the next indoctrination session and to reading the

booklet. Above all, the way things are presented is what counts. The articles

are never to be longer than 5–6 pages.’ In particular he recommended The

Loyalty Book and The Passion Book, works by his favourite writer Werner

Jansen, as models.

In line with the example of Jansen’s books, Himmler advocated above all

heroic stories in the SS Guidance Booklets—sagas, as he put it.

‘We must

get rid of the idea’, he declared in a lecture some years later, ‘that a “saga” is

something untrue, something made up. Rather, Norway’s or Denmark’s

sagas are the history of these nations, and the saga of our nation is the history

of our nation from its earliest time. And the human heart, that of men and

women in Germany, can respond to this form of saga, of story, with its

sensitive voice, much, much more than scholarly, didactic writing can teach

men or women.’

In 1937 the SS Guidance Booklets did in fact move more

towards putting historical material across in the form of ‘heroic sagas’.

The SS’s ‘ideological training’ therefore moved further and further away

from its initial ambition of passing on to SS members a comprehensive

‘vision of the world’, and concentrated instead on the ‘most imaginative’

dissemination possible of heroic role-models. First and foremost, SS men

were to ‘believe’ in the order’s mission; above all, emotional attachment to

the organization was promoted. Through membership of the SS they had

taken their place in a phalanx of heroic ﬁgures who had fought an eternal

battle against ‘subhumanity’ to protect their families and their ‘blood’. In

this struggle private decisions regarding marriage and children played a

signiﬁcant role. As we shall see, the Reichsfu

hrer-SS therefore devoted

particular care and attention to these questions, beyond the scope of indoc-

trination in general.

314 himmler’s leadership style

Himmler as Educator

immler’s educational ambitions were not conﬁned to the behaviour of

his subordinates while on duty. Rather, they embraced all aspects of

his men’s lives: their appearance, their economic circumstances, their rela-

tionship to alcohol, their health, and, as we shall see in the next chapter,

marriage and family planning. The Reichsfu

hrer-SS reserved for himself the

right to demonstrate in an exemplary fashion to members of the SS, down to

those of the lowliest rank, his severity and omnipotence. This he did by

means of targeted interventions in the most diverse areas of their lives. The

most senior members of the SS leader corps in particular had to endure

painstakingly precise surveillance of their entire existence.

In the second half of the 1930s and during the Second World War the SS

leadership—in other words, those who had reached at least the rank of

Gruppenfu

hrer—was drawn overwhelmingly from two groups: young First

World War volunteers and the so-called ‘war youth generation’. The young

volunteers were those born in the 1890s (mostly after 1895) who had seen

service in the First World War, most of them from the outbreak, and had

predominantly served as young lieutenants and then been members of the

Free Corps. Members of this cohort had helped decisively to build up the SS

before 1933. The so-called ‘war youth’ generation (that is, those born after

1900 who, although they had been fully aware of the war, had been too

young for active service—Himmler’s cohort) began to ﬁll leading posts

from 1933 onwards. There were, of course, also older men among the

leaders, yet on closer inspection it appears that the majority of these played

no active role in the SS but rather had been rewarded by Himmler with a

relatively high rank in the General SS as part of his strategy of cultivating

contacts. The Gau leaders of the veterans’ organization, the R

eichskrieger-

bund, for example, had, when their organization was taken into the SS,

received the rank Gruppenfu

hrer, without as a result achieving any signiﬁ-

cant inﬂuence on the leadership of the SS. The situation with regard to

police ofﬁcers (some of them long-serving ofﬁcers, others Nazi activists

appointed after 1933) was different; Himmler conferred corresponding SS

ranks on them in order to incorporate them into the ‘state protection corps’

he was aiming to form. As the police became increasingly important after

Himmler’s appointment as Chief of the German Police, but in particular

after 1939, when the racial utopia he advocated was being implemented (for

example, in the ﬁght against asocials in the 1930s or the mass executions

carried out by the order police in eastern Europe during the war), these

latecomers joining the SS in a sideways move should be taken into account

in any analysis of Himmler’s tactic of attaining his goals with the help of a

subtle personnel strategy.

At this point, however, the two cohorts mentioned above (young war

volunteers and the war youth generation), who put their stamp on the SS in

the 1930s, are the focus of attention. I have already discussed the speciﬁc

biographical characteristics of the young war volunteers in the SS leader-

ship, whose period as First World War soldiers was frequently followed by a

frustrating and unsuccessful civilian career and who thus saw the SS as their

last chance. Those who attained leading positions in the SS before 1933

were presented in Chapter 6; after 1933 further war volunteers moved up

into the top positions.

Herbert Gille, born in 1897, was one example. He was to become the

commanding general of the 2nd SS Tank Corps. A former cadet and

professional soldier, Gille had taken work after the First World War as an

estate manager, until in 1929 he was ‘cut back’ without any prospect of

further work in agriculture. Until 1931 he got by as a travelling salesman and

then as an independent insurance salesman. In 1932 he gave up this work for

a full-time post as chief of staff of the SS-Abschnitt IV.

In March 1933,

immediately after the seizure of power, he was, however, relieved of his

position, taken into custody for three months, and expelled from the SS;

precise reasons for these measures were never given to him. Although

rehabilitated in March 1934, he was, as his brother wrote to Himmler,

‘ﬁnancially ruined and psychologically very low’. In a personal interview

with Himmler in April 1934 he regained his spirits a little,

and Himmler

gave him an interim position as a Standartenfu

hrer. He clashed with his

superiors, however, again lost his job, and was judged by his superior ofﬁcer

Jeckeln as ‘unsuitable for a leading role in the higher echelons’.

Gille was

316 himmler as educator

given a third chance: he was moved to the political action squad (Politische

Bereitschaft) in Ellwangen and this time he was successful in carving out a

career in the armed SS (Verfu

gungstruppe).

Georg Lo

rner, born in 1899 and later head of Amtsgruppe B in the SS

Main Ofﬁce for Economy and Administration, had taken part in the First

World War. After completing a course at a business school, in 1923 he went

into his brother’s ﬁrm: ‘Because of the adverse economic circumstances and

various failures the ﬁrm was forced in February 1930 to declare itself

bankrupt’, he wrote in his curriculum vitae.

Carl-Albrecht Oberg, born in 1897 and deployed in the war as a Higher

SS and Police Leader, had been a war volunteer and Free Corps ﬁghter who

in 1921 assumed the role of go-between linking the Reichswehr and the

Patriotic Associations in Schleswig-Holstein. ‘In January 1926 I was again

employed as a businessman, as my political post up to that time, being

ﬁnanced by private means, was not sustainable.’ In the end he found work

with a company importing bananas, but not for long. ‘This ﬁrm was

liquidated after about a year and a half, making me jobless. In November

1930 I bought my present cigar shop.’ The following year he became a

member of the NSDAP and in 1932 of the SS.

nther Pancke, in the Second World War a Higher SS and Police

Leader in Denmark, was born in 1899 and fought in the First World War as

an ofﬁcer cadet. After the Revolution he was active in the Free Corps in the

Baltic region, then spent the time between 1920 and 1926 in Argentina,

where he worked on cattle ranches. On a visit to Germany in 1926 he found

a job. ‘In June 1930 I joined the party and in 1931 the SS. After a tear-gas

attack in protest at a private showing of the ﬁlm All Quiet on the Western

Front put on by the Reichsbanner, I was dismissed without notice from my

ﬁrm and put in prison for six weeks. The sentence was suspended and on 1

January 1932 I went as a teacher to the SS School at Kreiensen.’ A full-time

post in the SS followed, and Pancke’s career rapidly took off.

For Otto Hofmann also the seizure of power meant a unique opportunity

to return to the military milieu. Born in 1896, he was a war volunteer and

member of a ﬂying unit. After his divorce in 1926 he had lost his post as

general manager in his parents-in-law’s wine wholesale business and then

worked as a salesman for a wine merchant. In April 1933 he decided to take

a full-time post in the SS, to which he had belonged for a number of years.

In 1940, after numerous promotions, he became head of the Race and

Settlement Main Ofﬁce.

himmler as educator 317

Georg Ebrecht, originally an artist, was born in 1895 and volunteered as a

soldier in 1914, ending the war as a lieutenant. Up to 1924 he was active

above all in various military organizations; long travels abroad followed and

eventually he settled in East Africa as a planter of sisal. In 1922 he had already

separated from his ﬁrst wife; his divorce in 1926 was followed four weeks

later by marriage to a woman who was already living on his plantation in

Africa. In 1931 he was economically ﬁnished: ‘When, after the huge

collapse of prices on the world market, the plantation I had painstakingly

built up became uneconomic, I went back to Germany.’ He joined the

NSDAP, in which he was active as a speaker, without support from any

occupational income. The seizure of power opened up to him a professional

career as a party functionary, ﬁrst as a district leader, then as a Gau Inspector.

In 1935 he moved to the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce, where in 1937

he became a section head.

In 1938 his second marriage ended in divorce,

on the grounds of ‘complete breakdown’, the court commenting that

because of his function in the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce he took

the fact that the marriage was childless particularly to heart.

Ebrecht

married a third time and had two daughters.

Hanns Albin Rauter, a Higher SS and Police Leader in the Netherlands in

the Second World War, was born in 1895 and fought in the Austrian Army

for the whole of the First World War. He was then head of the Styrian

paramilitary Heimatschutz, but in 1933 was expatriated from Austria as a

result of National Socialist activities. Without career or money, he joined

the NSDAP and the SS.

The SS leaders from the war youth generation had also frequently been

active in Free Corps and military groups, the young ones often in radical

right-wing paramilitary youth organizations. This cohort, Himmler’s con-

temporaries, was not only preoccupied with the trauma of defeat and the

failure of the putches, it also shared an attitude that veered between

disappointment at having arrived too late and a deﬁant posture of ‘We’ll

show the older generation’. We have already been introduced to a number

of members of this group, who joined the NSDAP before 1933—for

example, Heydrich, the discharged naval ofﬁcer, and Fritz Weitzel, the

junior ﬁtter with a conviction for aiding an abortion.

In general the members of the war youth generation had better prospects

of successful careers than the cohort of young soldiers, who had lost decisive

years through their military service. A number of later SS leaders from this

group went to university, in particular to study law. In the late 1920s and

318 himmler as educator

early 1930s they had mostly completed the second state examination in law.

But with the onset of the economic crisis, and in view of the surplus, widely

bemoaned, of candidates for graduate professions, they had only the slim-

mest chance of a post in the civil service, and even if they did get one they

had ﬁrst to accept years of unpaid work as trainees. The prospects for

establishing themselves as lawyers were also poor. Those who had studied

other subjects were confronted with similar problems; Himmler’s failed

career in agriculture illustrates the difﬁcult situation. A takeover of power

by the Nazis offered the prospect of a suitable career in the state or in one of

the party organizations, and this undoubtedly provided one of the powerful

motives propelling this group towards the NSDAP from the end of the

1920s. For many people, even for those who were not university educated,

there was no comparable alternative.

Born in 1903, Werner Best, who in 1939 became a departmental head in

the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce and organizer of the Einsatzgruppen in

Poland, had, after his law degree, become a junior judge. In 1930 he joined

the NSDAP in the Hesse-Darmstadt Gau and headed its legal section.

When in 1931 the so-called ‘Boxheim documents’, papers providing evi-

dence that Best had made concrete plans for a National Socialist coup, were

passed on to the authorities, he was dismissed from state service. The Nazi

takeover of power provided him with the means in March 1933 of gaining a

position as state commissar for police in Hesse; he became involved,

however, in internal power struggles in the party and in September 1933

was removed from his post. In this situation Himmler offered him the

opportunity of taking over the SD-Oberabschnitt South-West.

The following can also be cited as examples of university graduates who

saw in the SS comparatively good career prospects: Hermann Behrends,

doctor of law and trainee lawyer from 1930 to 1933, was in the SS from

February 1932 and in the SD from the end of 1933, where he took over the

central department for ideological evaluation. In 1936 he moved to the

Gestapo, became staff manager of the Coordination Centre for Ethnic

Germans (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle = VoMi), and in 1944 a Higher SS and

Police Leader in Serbia.

Otto Ohlendorf, born in 1907, studied law and

political science and worked at the Kiel Institute for World Economics.

From 1936 he made a career for himself in the SD, where he began by being

responsible for reporting on economic affairs and from 1939 headed the

‘German Home Affairs’ department. In 1941–2 he was in addition chief of

Einsatzgruppe D and responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of

himmler as educator 319