Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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elites, that even the Governor-General Hans Frank spoke of the ‘band of

murderers of the SS and Police Leader for Lublin’.

148

In April 1941—the Viennese audit had just been completed—Globocnik

approached Himmler about a personal matter: he had a new girlfriend, he

joyfully told his Reichsfu

hrer (his engagement from the Vienna period had

in the meantime ﬁnally been broken off ), and in July he asked Himmler for

permission to get engaged. Himmler reminded him gently of the prescribed

marriage application procedure and said he ‘conﬁdently’ hoped he would

soon be able to give permission.

149

In August 1941 Himmler helped

Globocnik by forwarding him the sum of 8 ,000 Reich marks so that the

latter could settle the ‘Michner matter’—clearly he had incurred debts with

his former prospective father-in-law. Globocnik thanked Himmler for the

non-repayable ‘assistance’, and assured him: ‘I shall do all I can to deserve

your support, Reichsfu

hrer.’

150

And Globocnik was to keep his word. In the following months he

became the driving force in the ‘Final Solution’ in the General Govern-

ment. Since the end of 1939 he had already set up camps on a large scale for

Jewish forced labour in Lublin. The major raids he organized to seize Jewish

workers led, however, to considerable economic problems and brought

him into conﬂict with the civil administration.

151

In October 1941 he appears on his own initiative to have obtained

Himmler’s permission to build an extermination camp in the Lublin district

to murder the Jewish civilian population that could not be deployed as

forced labour. As a result of these preparations he was charged by Himmler

with implementing Aktion Reinhardt, the systematic murder of the Jews in

the General Government. In July 1941 Himmler also appointed Globocnik

to set up the SS and police bases in the new eastern territories. We shall

return to look in detail at all these measures taken by Globocnik; our focus

here is the personality of this mass murderer and his personal relationship

with Himmler.

152

In August 1942, at the height of Aktion R einhardt, Globocnik once more

turned to Himmler concerning a private matter: an anonymous denuncia-

tion had been made about his ﬁance

e. In view of the concerns that Himmler

had already expressed about his engagement, Globocnik now asked him

whether he should break it off. Himmler, who had received a negative

report about the behaviour of Globocnik’s ﬁance

e in a pub, said he should,

and Globocnik duly obeyed.

153

350 himmler as educator

It is clear from an appraisal of Globocnik from May 1943 that his superiors

recognized that his hyperactivism was problematic, but tolerated it in the

interests of ‘the cause’:

A full-blooded character with a typical mixture of positive and negative sides.

Careless about externals, fanatically committed to the task in hand, engaged in it up

to the hilt without concern for his health or public acknowledgment. One of the

best and most vigorous pioneers in the General Government, responsible, coura-

geous, a man of action. His daredevilry often causes him to overstep the boundaries,

but not from personal ambition but for the sake of the cause. His achievements

deﬁnitely speak in his favour.

However, there was a note of warning: ‘It is important for SS-Gruf.

Globocnik to get married soon in order to counteract the restless, pioneer-

ing life he is leading, and which is getting him down, with the calming

inﬂuence of a wife and a home. This would undoubtedly help SS-Gruf.

Globocnik to conserve his energies in order to prepare him for the major

tasks which he is undoubtedly capable of carrying out.’

154

In the summer of 1943 Himmler decided to recall Globocnik from Lublin

because of his repeated clashes with the civilian administration.

155

In August

1944 Globocnik, who in the meantime had become Higher SS and Police

Leader in the Adriatic coastal region, where he was not only ruthlessly

pursuing partisans but also energetically organizing Jewish deportations,

once again approached the Reichsfu

hrer-SS concerning an affair of the

heart. He believed, so he informed Himmler, he had ‘found the girl

whom you, Reichsfu

hrer, would give me permission to marry’. Himmler

agreed in principle to become Globocnik’s best man. When the marriage,

which was arranged by Globocnik’s crony Friedrich R ainer, took place in

August 1944, Himmler was unable to attend because of a prior engagement

but sent the Globocniks a gift of a twelve-piece ‘dinner and tea service’.

156

It will have become apparent that Globocnik was entirely dependent

on Himmler and showed him a positively doglike devotion. This total

subordination manifested itself not only in the fact that he permitted the

Reichsfu

hrer-SS to make decisions concerning his private life, but above all

in his attempt to prove to Himmler that he was more or less permanently

ready for action. Yet his exceptional commitment, impulsive and ruthless

style of leadership, as well as his consequent inability to carry on a private life

that conformed to SS requirements inevitably kept getting him into difﬁ-

culties, and only one person was able to get him out of them: Reichsfu

hrer

Himmler.

himmler as educator 351

The SS Family

The SS is a National Socialist order of soldiers of Nordic race and a community of

their clans bound together by oath. [ . . . ] Fiance

es and wives, as well as their

husbands, also belong, according to our laws, to this community, this order.

[...] Let us be very clear about this: it would make no sense to collect together

good blood from the whole of Germany and establish it here with a serious

purpose, while at the same time allowing it through marriage to ﬂow into families

at will. Rather, what we want for Germany is a ruling class destined to last for

centuries and the product of repeated selection, a new aristocracy continuously

renewed from the best of the sons and daughters of our nation, a nobility that never

ages, stretching back into distant epochs in its traditions, where these are valuable,

and representing eternal youth for our nation.

his exposition by Himmler, dating from 1937 , makes it plain that,

from the point of view of its Reichsfu

hrer, the SS had moved a long

way from the idea of a purely male league. Instead, it was the ‘clan’ and its

‘nurture’ that were becoming ever more prominent.

Himmler had presented these ideas to Hitler as early as 1 November 1935

and noted his ‘complete agreement and approval’. Himmler had gone into

the details of his plans: ‘half or

of all new admissions should be sons of SS

families, in order to sift out imperfect material, and at least

must come from

non-SS families, so that good blood of those outside the SS and destined to

lead others should not be left untapped in the nation.’ He had made sure he

got precise conﬁrmation from Hitler of every word of the progammatic

formulation that the SS was ‘an order of soldiers of Nordic race and a

community of their clans bound together by oath’—a typical procedure

of Himmler’s to back up his decisions that makes clear how much he had

built his own position and that of the SS on absolute loyalty to the ‘Fu

hrer’.

The SS, as Himmler stated on another occasion, was ‘nation, tribe, clan,

community’, an ‘order of knights that no one who, by virtue of his blood,

has been accepted into can ever leave; he belongs to it body and soul as long

as his earthly life shall last’.

Wives of SS men, Himmler explained in 1943 at

a conference of naval commanders, ‘also belong to this SS order, both

during their husbands’ lifetime and after their husbands’ death. Wives and

widows of SS men will never be excluded. After one year they become

members of the SS and after ten years their children also become members,

and they enjoy all the protection and care that we offer our clan.’

It goes without saying that the SS remained ﬁrst and foremost a male

organization.

Nevertheless, the distinction Himmler drew between the SS

and the typical purely male league (his warning of 1937 against a too

pronounced ‘masculinization of the Nazi movement’, which would un-

doubtedly lead to homosexuality, should be borne in mind) resulted in the

wives of SS members participating, at least peripherally, in the SS world:

they were not only congratulated and sent a gift on the birth of their third

child by the Reichsfu

hrer himself, but were also exposed to his solicitude

and surveillance in a wide variety of ways.

Approval of marriages

As leader of the ‘clan order’ of the Schutzstaffel, Himmler set great store by

the ‘correct’ choice of a wife, by which was meant someone who satisﬁed

his ‘racial’ criteria. This notion can be traced back to a very early stage in his

plans. He had already established the basis for turning it into reality by

issuing the Engagement and Marriage Order of 31 December 1931.

In 1934–5 the process for gaining approval for marriages was formalized.

SS members who wished to marry had to produce family trees for them-

selves and their ﬁance

es stretching back to 1800 and complete a question-

naire and a handwritten curriculum vitae, which they submitted at ﬁrst to

the Race Ofﬁce and from 1935 onwards to the Clan Ofﬁce of the Race and

Settlement Main Ofﬁce. In addition, they had to provide statements from

two sponsors, full-length photographs showing ‘the applicant and his future

bride standing side by side’, as well as pictures of the families of both

partners. Both had to be examined by an SS doctor, who then completed

a questionnaire on their hereditary health and on the results of the medical.

The process was protracted and expensive. The very time the procedure

took made it almost impossible for engagements to be dependent on

obtaining approval. Even though Himmler took exception to it, in many

the ss family 353

cases applications were received from SS men who had already got en-

gaged.

If in the course of the approval process the bride-to-be turned out

not to conform to SS requirements—if, in other words, she was racially

‘unsuitable’, had a hereditary illness, or was infertile—and if the applicant

refused to terminate the relationship, he was obliged to leave the SS. In

doubtful cases ‘leave to marry’ was granted on the couple’s ‘own responsi-

bility’, which meant that the family was excluded from the ‘SS clan com-

munity’, which was to be catalogued in a special ‘SS clan book’. This

differential treatment of SS members with a view to creating a ‘new

aristocracy’ had, however, a fundamental shortcoming: Himmler could

never bring himself to set down in detail how the clan book was to be

established.

In the end the remodelling of the male order into a ‘clan

community’ remained purely rhetorical, for no systematic biological ‘selec-

tion’ took place.

Signiﬁcantly, the Marriage Order came to be repeatedly disregarded, so

that Himmler was continually obliged, on threat of punishment, to remind

his men that it was still in force.

In March 1936 he complained of many

instances of SS members ‘applying to get engaged and married only when

the bride-to-be was eight or nine months pregnant’.

Approvals were in

general granted in a relatively relaxed way. In April 1935 the Reichsfu

hrer

had already told his ofﬁce heads that the ‘criteria for approving brides-to-be

of SS men cannot yet be very strict, as we have as yet hardly made any

progress towards instructing people about what we want and what we don’t

want’. At any rate, long-standing relationships, where there might already

be children, were to be respected.

In July 1935 Himmler extended the existing racial criteria by adding the

provision that all full-time SS leaders, sub-leaders, and team members under

25 could marry only if they were able to show evidence of being in a

position to support their future family (SS pay on its own did not enable

them to do so).

If a young SS man had already fathered a child, Himmler

allowed the marriage if his relatives undertook to allow the bride-to-be ‘to

stay in their home and to provide for her’.

In August 1935 he demanded

that prospective wives should have taken a course in motherhood.

In the

autumn he instructed that all SS members submitting applications for

marriages to be approved must as a ﬁrst step have obtained the permission

of their superior ofﬁcer.

In 1937 he required that ﬁance

es of SS men

should obtain the Reich Sport Badge.

354 the ss family

On principle Himmler had the ﬁnal word on particular requests: all

marriage applications from SS leaders, all refusals, and all requests to marry

women who were not German nationals had to be referred to him.

During the war he ruled that he wanted to see all applications involving

marriage to ethnic Germans who had formerly had Polish nationality,

those belonging to ‘Germanic’ nations,

and to women of ‘alien ethnic

background’.

This was the theory. In practice the Clan Ofﬁce was simply incapable of

meeting the heavy demands of this procedure. The Race and Settlement

Main Ofﬁce complained repeatedly about considerable ‘backlogs’ in pro-

cessing requests. As early as 1936 Himmler was forced by lack of staff in the

Clan Ofﬁce to suspend until further notice the requirement for SS appli-

cants to produce their family tree and to disregard marriage requests.

May 1937 20,000 marriage applications were already awaiting processing.

Himmler had no alternative but to relax the strict rules in the case of

long-standing SS members, who if necessary had to obtain permission to

marry after the event.

In June 1937 he gave the instruction that future

infringements of the Marriage Order were not to be punished.

At that

point at least 308 SS members had been excluded in the ﬁrst six months of

1937 alone for this very reason.

At the end of 1940 he deferred the

decision on how to punish infringements of the Marriage Order until the

end of the war. In line with this instruction, during the following years no

steps were taken against SS men for ignoring the order.

Himmler even

went as far as to allow former SS members who had been excluded for this

reason to be received back into the SS in certain circumstances.

Regardless of the fact that the approval process could not be implemented

in the rigorous manner desired, Himmler repeatedly intervened in an

attempt to perfect it. On 18 May 1937 he issued the following directive:

‘My wish is that SS members will found racially superior and healthy

German families. For that reason the highest standards must be demanded

of prospective wives with regard to appearance, health, and hereditary

soundness.’ The required gynaecological examination was to take the

following form:

Be thorough but treat women sensitively! The ability to bear children should be

assessed with reference to general appearance, the external measurement of the pelvis,

and above all a tactfully conducted but nevertheless searching medical history (previous

gynaecological illnesses or haemorrhages, discharges, menstruation, inﬂammations,

abortions, etc.). There is reason to conduct an internal examination—which in some

the ss family 355

circumstances need only be carried out rectally—only if the medical history or ﬁnd-

ings are equivocal. If the external pelvic measurements give rise to doubts, the internal

measurement can, if necessary, be carried out gently and precisely by means of

an X-ray.

In August 1937, in a perplexing instruction, he encouraged full-time SS

leaders to marry young: ‘I require full-time SS leaders to marry early.’ He

went on, however, in the next sentence to say that on principle people in

this group would not be allowed to marry before the age of 25. Aspiration

and reality—in this case the relatively modest ﬁnancial circumstances of SS

members—diverged dramatically.

In April 1938 Himmler came up with a

further suggestion: he asked the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce to

consider ‘if the medical questionnaire for prospective wives of SS men

could not have the questions added: Does the person in question have

prominent cheekbones? Has she a Mongolian eyelid crease?’

Ill 16. As the supreme guardian of the ‘clan order’ of the SS Himmler made

efforts to incorporate wives into the ‘SS family’. There was no strict separation

of private and professional life for Himmler or for his men. On this SS wedding

photo Himmler is seen on the right next to the bride. On the left is the head of

the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce, Walther Darre

, and behind him the Chief

of Himmler’s Personal Staff, Karl Wolff.

356 the ss family

During the war the procedure for approving marriages was further

simpliﬁed. On 1 September 1939 Himmler ordered that, in the event of

mobilization, it should be shortened in such a way that approval could be

sent out from the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce ‘within a few hours’.

In January 1940 he directed that the documents normally required on

submission of the request could also be sent in after the war and the

‘marriage provisionally approved’.

‘At the start of the war,’ he conﬁded later to the Higher SS and Police

Chief for the Elbe, Obergruppenfu

hrer Udo von Woyrsch, in March 1943,

I had to confront the huge question: should I give very strong backing to the men’s

willingness to marry and make it possible, without being in a position in wartime,

where training for battle claims most of one’s attention, to give the men adequate

instruction about racial laws, life experience, and all the things necessary to make a

successful union of two biologically well-matched people? Or should I stick to very

strict selection by refusing a certain number of requests to marry? If I had done the

latter I would have put an enormous brake on the willingness to marry precisely of

young soldiers at the front. I therefore decided to limit the formalities, give a

powerful boost to marriage, and to accept the mistakes that are made by individual

SS men in wartime to a much greater extent than in peacetime.

The most important thing, Himmler continued, ‘that I can and will

achieve is to ensure as far as possible that every SS man who dies in the

war has a child’. If the number of children became ‘larger in total, I will

accept what from a breeding point of view might be called poor results,

which always do occur in the wider population’. Precisely because it was

wartime, he said, he worked on the principle: ‘Better to have a child of any

kind than no child at all.’

A few months later he reiterated this position when the head of the

Marriage Ofﬁce, SS-Brigadefu

hrer Otto Heider, suggested that, in view of

the large number of marriage applications that did not meet the strict racial

demands of the SS, an attempt should be made ‘to inﬂuence SS men’s

choice of partner and by this means to achieve an element of “breeding” ’.

Himmler replied that Heider should be in no doubt that he ‘was fully aware

of these matters’. It would be ‘one of our most important peacetime tasks to

instruct and direct all young SS men so that they choose a biologically

appropriate future wife and mother of their children. [ . . . ] But during the

war this was impossible.’ The Reichsfu

hrer considered it more important,

the reply said, ‘for SS men simply to reproduce than for the Reichsfu

hrer to

the ss family 357

forbid them to marry hastily and thereby prevent children from being

born’.

In 1941 the Clan Ofﬁce stated that since 1931, when the Marriage Order

was issued, a total of more than 40,000 ‘provisional decisions’ had been

made, of which the ofﬁce had been able subsequently to ﬁnalize only about

1 per cent because of the volume of work.

This situation never funda-

mentally changed: in fact, in the ﬁrst six months of 1942 there were an

additional 5,590 ‘provisionally’ processed applications. In January 1942 the

Clan Ofﬁce made 522 decisions: eighteen approvals, nine rejections, forty-

three cases of ‘leave given on the applicant’s own responsibility’; 452

decisions were merely ‘provisional’.

Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1941

Himmler’s assiduity was shown by his requirement that the medical ques-

tionnaire include the ‘shape of the legs’ under the three headings of ‘straight,

bow legs, knock knees’, and subheadings ‘slim, medium, and fat’.

Himmler examines and decides

Whenever Himmler dealt personally with requests to marry he did not

conﬁne himself simply to rejecting or approving the application. Rather, he

used the opportunity to intervene in a sustained and detailed way in the

personal affairs of his men and their partners. His reactions and comments

are revealing about his attitude to the opposite sex, his position regarding

sexuality—and, last but not least, about the state of his own marriage.

In August 1940 Himmler was sent the marriage request of an SS man who

wished to marry a Czech woman, who had been designated ‘of good race’

by the race inspectors. Himmler viewed the matter as a question of princi-

ple, in other words, from a racist perspective. As he wrote to the Higher SS

and Police Leader von dem Bach-Zelewski, from a ‘purely national point of

view such a marriage should of course be rejected’, but on the other hand,

‘from a racial perspective the SS man’ had made ‘absolutely the right choice,

for it would be good to remove this woman of good race from the Czech

nation and incorporate her as a mother of Nordic blood into the German

nation’. To achieve this, the couple should move to Reich territory and not

return for the foreseeable future to the bride’s home town.

He would

make a ﬁnal decision on the case at the end of the war.

When approving requests to marry women from ‘alien’ or slightly

dubious ‘ethnic German’ backgrounds, Himmler frequently stipulated that

358 the ss family

the couple should move away from territories that were occupied, annexed,

or had a politically problematic ethnic mix to the so-called Old Reich

territory.

His conditions could be much more stringent, however. Rot-

tenfu

hrer G., a member of the guard unit at Dachau KZ, asked for permis-

sion in 1942 to marry Lucie B., the mother of his three children. Both were

natives of the Warthegau. Himmler withheld permission for the foreseeable

future, as the woman ‘is not in a position to bring up G.’s children as

Germans. G. has only himself to blame for this refusal, as he failed to teach

B., whose father is German and mother is Polish, to master the German

language and use it all the time.’

Himmler, however, held out hope for the marriage, if Frau B. and her

children submitted to a programme of Germanization, which Himmler set

down in detail: the children were to be transferred immediately by the Race

and Settlement Main Ofﬁce to a ‘good German children’s home’, where the

‘purely German and other aspects of their upbringing’ were to be moni-

tored. ‘An SS leader from the Race and Settlement Main Ofﬁce near the

children’s home is to be given personal responsibility for checking on and

visiting the children. He should take a kind interest in them, as would an

uncle with his nephews and nieces. The mother, Frau B., if she really wants

to marry the father of her children, is to be sent for a year to a mothers’

school run by the NS Women’s Organization (Frauenschaft).’ She would not

be allowed to marry G., Himmler continued, until she had been given a

positive assessment there: ‘My decision should be communicated to G. by

his commanding ofﬁcer personally in a long, very positive, and kind

conversation.’

By contrast, Obersturmfu

hrer Adalbert K., a member of the Death’s Head

division, was transferred ‘to the east immediately’ in 1943 on Himmler’s

orders for having submitted a request to marry ‘a girl who was admittedly

good-looking’ but who came from a strongly nationalist Czech family.

this case Himmler decided clearly in favour of the ‘national point of view’.

Even in the case of Hauptsturmfu

hrer Dieter Wisliceny, who had played

a decisive role in organizing the deportations of the Slovakian, Greek,

and Hungarian Jews, the Reichsfu

hrer took the view that, given that the

prospective bride regarded herself as an ‘ethnic Hungarian’, though ‘of

good race’, the most important factor was whether she had the right ‘attitude

to Germany’.

Himmler was indignant when couples wishing to marry did not submit

their applications until the bride was about to give birth. Such behaviour,

the ss family 359