Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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Himmler informed an applicant in February 1943, was ‘reckless and un-

chivalrous (unritterlich)’, and he requested him, he said, ‘to make up for his

past recklessness by conducting his marriage in a decent and chivalrous

manner’.

An Oberscharfu

hrer who had made a girl pregnant while

aware that her hereditary health was compromised and had then submitted

a request to marry was dismissed by Himmler from the SS.

Where the bride lacked ‘reproductive capability’, Himmler invariably

intervened in both word and deed. Thus, Frau F. received the following

communication in July 1941 from the Personal Staff of the Reichsfu

hrer-SS:

‘As the results of examinations so far indicate that in your case we must

anticipate a lack of reproductive capability, before making a ﬁnal decision

the Reichsfu

hrer-SS has ordered that you be sent to Prof. Dr. Clauberg for

hormone treatment.’ The SS was to bear the costs.

When the treatment

proved successful, Himmler approved the marriage.

On numerous occasions Himmler’s guiding principle was: ﬁrst children,

then marriage. ‘Fate itself’ should decide, as he put it.

He seems to have

enjoyed insisting on this principle when the potential father came from the

so-called more exclusive social circles. One example is the case of SS-man

Adrian Count A., a member of the propaganda squad—in Himmler’s view,

‘rather an odd character and his ﬁance

e seems even odder’. Himmler came

to the decision: ‘At his age, for the SS to approve a marriage makes sense

only if the wife has a reasonable prospect of having children. In the case of

this woman that seems extremely doubtful.’ Accordingly there was ‘only

one possibility, namely that the Count should take steps before the mar-

riage. If they are successful, I shall be more than willing to approve the

marriage. This method, tried and tested in countless German peasant

villages, might bring success even in such an elevated family as the

Count’s.’

Himmler made a similar judgement in 1942 in the case of Franz Alfred

Six, head of an ofﬁce in the R eich Security Main Ofﬁce. He requested that

Six should be informed in Himmler’s name ‘that he could give him leave to

marry only when it is clear that his ﬁance

e is expecting a child. The

Reichsfu

hrer-SS wishes this personal discussion to be conducted in a very

kind manner and for it to be made clear to SS-Hauptsturmfu

hrer Six that his

ﬁance

e, as he is aware, had syphilis in 1928 and a marriage without children

would be pointless for him.’

If Himmler considered that an applicant had chosen a very inappropriate

bride, that man was liable to face serious repercussions. On 27 September

360 the ss family

1942 he asked the chief of the SS Leadership Main Ofﬁce, Hans Ju

ttner, to

summon SS-Hauptscharfu

hrer Konrad H. and tell him ‘that as far as his

choice of bride, Fra

ulein Emma B.—this painted Czech girl—is concerned,

I think he has taken leave of his senses. By making this choice H. has shown

that he was clearly responsible for his two divorces, one as the guilty party

and the other as jointly guilty. But he has also shown that he has not the

remotest understanding of the principles of the SS.’ In addition, Himmler

called on Ju

ttner to see to it ‘that in order to cool his passion Herr H. is

moved to the healthy air of the front’.

On 17 June 1943 Himmler wrote to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, asking him to

inform SS-Sturmbannfu

hrer Wilhelm B., an ofﬁcial of the Alsace Gestapo,

that Himmler was refusing his request to marry (the 38-year-old wished to

marry Frau Z., who was considerably older). The applicant was, in addition,

to be informed of the following:

I am abiding by my refusal, as I consider your marriage as a 38-year-old German

man to a 50-year-old woman to be as irresponsible as your saying you refuse to

marry again because you have suffered a disappointment. [ ...] You have not yet

served at the front and therefore, like everyone who is given that opportunity, you

must see to it that the sacriﬁce of many hundreds of thousands of lives at the front

was not in vain and that the gaps they left in the nation are ﬁlled in future by

children.

Immediately after this communication B. was to be ‘transferred to the

territory where the most difﬁcult anti-partisan ﬁghting was going on and

to stay there for two years until he grows up or until his injuries land him in

hospital’.

Himmler could also show kindness. In individual cases, for example if

petitioned by the bride-to-be, he could actually be persuaded to review his

previous marriage prohibition.

In another case Himmler discovered that

the ﬁance

e of an SS-Sturmfu

hrer had been unfaithful. He imposed a year’s

‘self-examination’ on her, during which a child was to be conceived; after

that, he said, he would be prepared to approve the marriage.

Himmler’s counsels or requirements, as has been indicated, often affected

the most private areas of a marriage. He sent a message to one bride-to-be

that, although leave to marry would be granted, she was to be subjected to an

examination by the SS doctor, Brustmann, because of her ‘excess weight’, as

this might be ‘attributable to a malfunctioning of the ductless glands’.

Untersturmfu

hrer whose marriage he approved was nevertheless informed:

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‘In the view of the Reichsfu

hrer-SS, B.’s bride, who seems to be a painted

doll, is not suitable for an SS man.’

Obersturmfu

hrer Werner K. was in turn

told that ‘his ﬁance

e should not paint herself in that way. It is not the done

thing in the SS.’

Gunner Richard A., on the other hand, was to ‘suggest to

his ﬁance

e that she would [ . . . ] look more beautiful if she lowered her

eyebrows’.

On this evidence, women’s use of cosmetics was a difﬁcult subject.

Himmler was not prepared to approve the marriage of SS man B. until

the bride was pregnant, as in spite of a four-year engagement B. had not

managed to wean her off ‘make-up and dressing up’.

Rottenfu

hrer Z.,

however, was advised ‘to father no more children after the child his ﬁance

is expecting at the moment. I believe this solution to be the best as

otherwise both run the risk of marrying healthy partners and then, despite

this, not having healthy children because of their own impairment.’

Himmler gave two people who wished to marry, but who were both

conﬁrmed as having a serious hereditary ‘impairment’, the advice to marry

but to ‘have themselves sterilized at the same time’.

Even in the case of racial examinations Himmler reserved the right to

adjust the results. In the case of a girl who, when examined, was designated

as an ‘uneven cross-breed’, with western and eastern Baltic racial elements,

mixed with some Dinaric ones, Himmler noted on reading through the

documents: ‘This girl is 1.68 metres tall, which in a woman absolutely

indicates Nordic blood. The skin is pinkish-white, which is not strong

evidence of western Baltic, eastern Baltic, or Dinaric racial origin. The

head is of medium width and oval and there are no prominent cheekbones.

The occiput is moderate and the colour of the eyes greenish.’

On another occasion he reached the verdict that ‘Frl. X.’s facial features

are typically Slav’, and recommended the examiner, one Oberfu

hrer

Berndt,

to take a course in racial theory. I assume that his medical appraisal of 16. 2. 43 stems

from ignorance and not from exaggerated solicitude based on a misunderstanding

of the nature of comradeship. To identify in Frl. X. the predominance of Dinaric

racial characteristics with an element of Baltic is more than strange. The main

comment to be made here is that Herr SS-Oberfu

hrer Berndt will perhaps learn in

his ﬁrst remedial lesson in racial theory that only an eastern Baltic race is known in

the terminology of that science.

In February 1940 he made the following criticism:

362 the ss family

Frl. L.’s medical questionnaire seems to me very peculiar and determined by an

absolutely provincial point of view. She was examined on 18. 12. 1939 by an SS

doctor, Dr M.. I ﬁnd it incomprehensible how a woman aged 30, 1.74 metres tall,

weighing 64 kilos, with pinkish-white skin, grey eyes, light blond straight hair, and

categorized as Nordic on the basis of the predominant racial component, should

make a very mediocre impression on the doctor. This so-called SS doctor in my

view examined Fra

ulein L. not as a doctor but as a philistine from Inster burg.

Himmler in fact suspected that the woman, who wished to marry an SS

doctor who was still married, was the victim of small-town tittle-tattle.

Casting the net of suspicion more widely, he continued: ‘If the same young

woman had come to him anonymously he would probably have had a

better impression. As it was, no doubt every gossip-monger in East Prussia

knew what was going on.’ He reserved the right to dismiss the doctor for

incompetence.

Himmler exploited this incident to expound the principles underlying

marriage and the admissibility of ‘decent’ separations: ‘I know precisely how

the Fu

hrer regards this matter. [ . . . ] When a couple separates it makes no

sense to prevent another couple from forming and having children. In these

matters too I would ask you when making judgements to attempt to reach a

more profound understanding of the laws made by the Fu

hrer and under his

leadership, such as the new divorce law, and not to stick rigidly to ways of

thought that are in the ﬁnal analysis profoundly Christian.’ And he added:

‘People should behave in a manner that is decent and chivalrous, and if they

no longer get along together my view is that they should separate in a decent

and chivalrous manner. I don’t need to labour that point.’

Himmler therefore turned down requests from SS men to marry consid-

erably older women, if there was no prospect of children. In such cases he

typically asked the applicant’s superior ofﬁcer ‘to inform him in a kind and

comradely manner that he considers his marriage to Fra

ulein X. to be

unsound from an ethnic point of view’.

The refusal could, however, be

delivered in a less ‘friendly’ form: ‘After R. [ . . . ] was dissuaded from

marrying a woman of 43, he is now attempting to marry a woman of

42½. Although I can see he has improved by six months, I consider this

tendency to be positively aberrant. Saying he is too old to have more

children shows that R. is as yet unaware of the attitude and views an SS

man must have with regard to these matters in life.’

If a child had already been born or the woman was pregnant he took a

softer line:

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It is of course correct that marriages in which the man is so much younger than the

wife are biologically undesirable, as they can lead to the wife quickly ceasing to

have children—at an age when the husband can still father children—and as a result

there is a considerable risk of divorce. During the war, where soldiers on short

leaves have less time than they have in peacetime to choose a partner, my view is

that marriage to a woman who is carrying his child mus t be permitted and all doubts

put aside.

He was not prepared to give Oberscharfu

hrer Willy M. leave to marry a

woman eleven years older until she conﬁrmed ‘conclusively’ that she was

pregnant. In this instance Himmler also ordered the applicant to come to

Berchtesgaden so that he could communicate the decision to him in person

and reprimand him ‘most severely’ for the ‘immature and arrogant beha-

viour’ he had displayed during the application process.

To be in a better

position to gauge the likelihood of a pregnancy in such cases, he turned in

August 1942 to the director of Lebensborn (Spring of Life) with the request

that he should ‘establish in an appropriate manner when the women giving

birth at Lebensborn started menstruating and up to what age they might

have children’.

In 1942, ‘in spite of serious misgivings’, Himmler gave a 17-year-old

Unterscharfu

hrer leave to marry a woman fourteen years older than him

(she was expecting his child), though not without adding a piece of personal

advice for the applicant:

You and your ﬁance

e must nevertheless be in no doubt that in ten years at most this

marriage will undergo a severe test, as, purely biologically and in accordance with

nature’s laws, the trajectories of men’s and women’s lives diverge at this point.

Embark on this marriage if you are convinced that your future wife has the human

qualities that in some form or other fate will demand of her. If difﬁculties arise, you

and your wife have my permission to approach me for a solution, should I be spared

till then.

In another case on which he also reached a decision in 1942, Himmler

had already refused the request of a Hauptscharfu

hrer to marry on the

grounds that the woman was too old. Then, however, he changed his

mind after receiving a personal letter from the woman. Himmler replied

that he was gratiﬁed by the ‘very decent attitude’ that emerged from the

letter, and particularly by the woman’s willingness to ‘release [the Haupt-

sturmfu

hrer] immediately and without hesitation if he should ever be

obliged to demand this in order to preserve the nation’. Then his tone

became more personal:

364 the ss family

I can put myself in your position very easily. I simply ask you, in view of the great

love that binds you to this man, to be clear in your own mind even today that for

you a time may come when fate, in accordance with the laws of nature, tears apart

the threads it has woven round the two of you, or when you, showing kindness and

understanding, will be forced to be very generous. Delightful as the idea is of

including children not your own in your family, in the majority of cases, and in

spite of all the love and care your husband may show towards them, they will not be

able to replace the child of his own blood he might have fathered.

The timing of this letter was probably no accident. Himmler, who of course

was himself married to a woman considerably older than himself, knew the

problems he describes from personal experience. At any rate, in 1942 he

became the father of a child born out of wedlock.

Yet what purpose was served by this minute examination of individual

cases, the imposition of these conditions with their far-reaching conse-

quences, if the process was, as we have seen, for the most part a farce and

Himmler was unwilling to treat the whole matter so rigorously that it

turned into a massive impediment to marriage for his men? On the one

hand, the examples set out here indicate that Himmler quite clearly took a

strongly voyeuristic interest in these procedures, as is evidenced in particular

by his obsessive demand for details, and not least by his obvious curiosity

with regard to female anatomy. Evidently he derived pleasure from inter-

vening in other people’s most intimate concerns and controlling and orga-

nizing them in a conﬁdent manner—as he had done in his youth. One is

reminded in this connection of the love-letters he wrote for a friend, or of

the ‘Paula affair’ of 1923, when he tried to engineer the breaking-off of his

brother’s engagement. Yet again, the manner in which he fulﬁlled his duties

as Reichsfu

hrer-SS was closely linked to his personal inclinations: for on the

other hand, the process for approving marriages gave Himmler a further

opportunity to discipline and educate his men. In the clan order of the SS

getting married was not a private matter—and, as we shall see, nor was being

married.

Himmler intervenes

When examining requests to marry, Himmler, for example, directed par-

ticular attention to any available divorce judgements. If his men had be-

haved in an ‘unchivalrous’ manner when the previous marriage was

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dissolved, he was implacable. He disapproved of the fact that Obersturm-

hrer C., who wished to remarry, had petitioned for divorce from his ﬁrst

wife, naming her as the sole guilty party, even though the marriage had

clearly broken down. But that was not all: ‘I consider it unchivalrous and

outrageous for an SS man to demand marital relations of his wife shortly

before she is due to give birth.’ In addition, C.’s ‘appearance is peculiar from

a racial point of view (I merely draw attention to the shape of the mouth)’.

Himmler ruled that C. should be ‘dismissed from the Waffen-SS and the

General SS after the war’, but for the time being—and that meant ‘imme-

diately’—he was to be ‘transferred to a Waffen-SS anti-aircraft division at

the front’.

In the case of Oberscharfu

hrer H., a member of the Waffen-SS, Himmler

immersed himself in two divorce judgements issued against H., from which

it was clear ‘that he mistreated and abused his wife’. H. should ‘be in no

doubt’, Himmler threatened, ‘that I shall intervene if he mistreats and abuses

his third wife’. Such behaviour would not lead to divorce but rather to

‘years of disciplining and instruction’ by the Reichsfu

hrer, ‘to rid him of his

violent temper and inculcate the self-control and kindness towards others

required if people are to live in communities’.

In autumn 1939 Himmler

dismissed Gu

nther Tamaschke, the commandant of the female concentra-

tion camp of Lichtenburg, for neglecting his wife.

In November 1937 he declared to the Gruppenfu

hrer that ‘another thing’

he would ‘not tolerate’ was ‘when any leader—I noticed a Standartenfu

hrer

or Oberfu

hrer recently who fell into that category—is henpecked. I have

often made myself clear on this matter: leaders who are incapable of leading

a unit of two, in this case himself and his wife, are incapable of greater

things.’ Himmler called on the Gruppenfu

hrer to take such people in

hand.

Occasionally he did this personally. Brigadefu

hrer Hermann Behrends

was urged to ‘take the lead’ in his marriage,

and Gu

nther Pancke, his

Higher SS and Police Leader in Denmark, had also to submit to a lecture on

how his wife, who lived in Brunswick, was leading an overly extravagant

life. ‘In addition, I would ask you to instruct your wife to the effect that she

should not go round proclaiming her opinion loud and clear in all kinds

of places about this or that political event in the Gau or about the Gauleiter.

I also consider it unnecessary for you as a dutiful husband to come charging

down from Denmark by car after every air raid on Brunswick, in order to

report to her. You have no idea how much people are talking about this!’

366 the ss family

Pancke was deeply distressed by what, in his view, were unjust re-

proaches and responded with a self-assured and angry letter: ‘From her

youth my wife has been a National Socialist and at the age of 35 and as

the mother of 4 children she has the maturity and experience of life not to

need today to be instructed and directed by me.’

Pancke’s anger was not surprising, for Himmler had on occasions ex-

pressed criticism of the behaviour of wives that in essence was aimed at the

SS leaders themselves, who were, it was implied, incapable of instructing

and directing their wives as he saw ﬁt: ‘I disagree with several things about

the way the wives of SS leaders appear in public,’ Himmler declared to the

Gruppenfu

hrer in 1936, for example, ‘I am opposed to SS wives wearing

make-up and going about with painted faces.’ Make-up, he claimed, was

merely the inferior tendency of those of lesser races [ . . . ]. And our foolish German

women, precisely those of superior race, think they have to copy this stupid

fashion. In my opinion, anyone who piles on make-up—and I’m never petty

about this—anyone who gets herself up like a half-caste is completely forgetting

that she is denying her own good blood. [ . . . ] I at any rate intend, if I encounter

extreme examples in company, to speak to the women about it.

He was also ‘opposed to SS women smoking in public’. In Berlin, ‘this

swamp and mass grave of our nation,’ he had in addition noticed that ‘the

16- and 17-year old daughters of party comrades, even sometimes of SS

members, were already appearing prominently by invitation at large state

festivities [ . . . ] If we do not wish to bring up a generation of good-for-

nothings, I would like urgently to request that SS leaders, those in high

positions in particular, bring up their children in a simple and austere fashion

[ . . . ] The same goes for the sons.’

Himmler’s intervention in the married life of his men could take on

drastic proportions. This was true in the case of Erwin Ro

sener, the Higher

SS and Police Leader for the Alps: he approached Wolff in April 1942 with

the request that he inform Himmler cautiously that Ro

sener’s second

marriage had also broken down as the result of his being the prospective

father of an illegitimate child. He was, he said, ashamed of appearing before

the Reichsfu

hrer and saying to him, ‘Reichsfu

hrer, here I am for the second

time, causing you this unhappiness’.

After the divorce, and when Ro

sener had

remarried, Himmler consistently exploited Ro

sener’s weakness and started to

keep his marriage under regular surveillance. He admonished him to go

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to Berlin at least every four weeks, ‘in order to maintain married life’, and made

it abundantly plain that he would ‘not tolerate a third shipwreck’.

Herbert Becker, a 56-year-old SS-Gruppenfu

hrer and police lieutenant-

general, was called upon by Himmler in 1943 to respond to the question of

whether his wife was involved in a lesbian relationship; private correspon-

dence to which Himmler had access aroused this suspicion. In a three-page

letter Becker challenged this accusation vigorously and assured Himmler

that, as a result of a full and frank discussion with his wife, they had both

decided not to abandon the marriage, as previously planned, but ‘to ﬁnd a

way back to a married life based on National Socialist principles’. Himmler

was relieved. He wrote to Becker that he regretted having done his wife an

injustice, and expressed the hope ‘that your marriage [ . . . ] may yet acquire

true and lasting meaning and content through the birth of children’. He also

immediately suggested a gynaecologist who might be helpful if there were

complications.

Illegitimate births

In 1936 and 1937 Himmler, with striking frequency, concerned himself

with different aspects of sexuality, on which he made a variety of comments

and statements. We have already seen that at the Gruppenfu

hrer meeting of

February 1937 he had warned very insistently about the dangers of homo-

sexuality that could result from any too pronounced ‘masculinization’ of the

National Socialist movement. At that time, as a means of protecting the

particular ‘at-risk’ group (16- and 17-year-old boys), he had recommended

relaxed and innocent social contact with girls (dance lessons!), at the same

time rejecting the notion that this would promote premature sexual rela-

tions among adolescents.

In the months that followed he appears to have given further intensive

thought to these problems. What was to happen with these young people

when they were a few years older? In June 1937 Himmler had the opportu-

nity to present the fruits of his deliberations and researches to a particularly

well-qualiﬁed panel, the Expert Advisory Panel on Population and Racial

Policy. ‘We have attempted to use police resources,’ Himmler explained,

bringing in our own departments as well, in order to discover what is really

happening. At what age do young German men and girls begin to be sexually

368 the ss family

active? [ . . . ] We are almost all from middle-class backgrounds and w ant to look out

into the world beyond our pro tected bourgeois upbringing. I am forced to say: it is

completely different from what all of us have been told and from how we perhaps

would like it to be. By the age of 22 —I am using ﬁgures that are absolut ely

indisputable—the majority of men have been with a woman. Any ofﬁcer, any

soldier, can conﬁrm this.

At this point Himmler permitted himself a small digression that makes clear

how much he had abandoned his earlier self-stylization as a celibate—or

rather, how concerned he still was to distance himself from this ideal he had

held in his youth: ‘The fact still remains, however, that soldiers who have

had, and are still having, a lot of experience with girls are often precisely the

ones who are good soldiers. In the movement, during the time of struggle,

we too found that the very prim and proper ones were not always the best

ﬁghters.’

This was not his main topic, however: ‘I merely want to state that sexual

activity begins in the case of men—and the social context is of course an

important factor here—between the ages of 18 and 21 and in the case of girls

at 25.’ What was to be done? The ideal solution in Himmler’s view was

certainly to marry early. He was, he admitted, in no doubt that most young

men and women were not yet ﬁnancially in a position to found a family,

which was the reason why he had forbidden his own full-time SS men to

marry early. Another, realistic solution had to be found: pre-marital sexual

relations and illegitimate births had to become acceptable. (It goes without

saying that the word ‘contraception’ does not occur anywhere in Himmler’s

statements on this subject.)

He expounded the problem to the Expert Advisory Panel as follows: ‘I

have come to the following conclusion: all the moral views we’ve had up till

now that say, “All right, but not before marriage”, are not going to get us

anywhere.’ As the SS’s highest authority for approving marriages, Himmler

after all had relevant experience to draw on: ‘My SS men’s requests to marry

land on my desk and every day I look at twenty because I want to keep in

touch with what is being done in practice. [ . . . ] I have reserved the right to

deal with any refusal of a marriage in the whole of the SS so that during the

ﬁrst decades, while a certain way of doing things is still getting established,

the criteria set are not too stringent.’ Among the family trees in the

applications there were few without some illegitimate children, he said,

and so this matter should be ‘treated to some extent with Germanic

generosity’. He summed up the conclusion he had drawn from all this as

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