Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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Reich.

147

Within the SS he rose to the rank of Standartenfu

hrer, though

Ernst made it only as far as Sturmbannfu

hrer. In their careers it is clear that

both brothers succeeded in getting to the top of their respective professions.

Both took trouble to keep in close touch with Heinrich: in 1944 Ernst

and Gebhard, as his ‘technical brothers’, offered to give Himmler the

beneﬁt of a comprehensive account of their views on the future develop-

ment of military technology.

148

The fact that Himmler arranged for his schoolfriends Falk Zipperer and

Karl Gebhardt to work for him professionally, the one as a legal historian,

the other as director of a clinic, has already been mentioned. He maintained

his friendship also with Alois Rehrl, ten years his senior, on whose estate he

had done his agricultural work placement in 1921–2. It goes without saying

that Rehrl, like Zipperer and Gebhardt, joined the SS.

149

It was probably at the end of the 1920s that Himmler met a man with

whom he established a particularly close friendship: the vo

lkisch writer

Hanns Johst, already mentioned, who was a National Socialist and, as

chair of the Reich Writers Chamber, a powerful Nazi state functionary in

the ﬁeld of literature.

150

From 1934 onwards Johst addressed Himmler in

letters as ‘my friend Heini Himmler’,

151

and although he was ten years

older, called Himmler his ‘big brother’.

152

They paid each other frequent

visits (Johst lived on Lake Starnberg, not far from Himmler’s home on Lake

Tegern), played badminton, bathed, and ﬁshed in their leisure time,

travelled together, and went on tours of inspection.

153

In 1935 Himmler

accepted Johst into the SS, giving him the relatively high rank of Oberfu

hrer;

Johst was repeatedly promoted in the years following, ﬁnally becoming a

Gruppenfu

hrer on 30 January 1942.

154

The extensive correspondence between the two was marked on Johst’s

side by an exuberant and at times emotive and high-ﬂown style, in which he

expressed his unbounded admiration for Himmler’s life’s work and his

leadership style; indeed, he positively idolized him. After recovering from

an appendectomy in 1940, he wrote to his friend that he was ‘happy to be an

SS man and that on top of that life has given me our friendship, Heini

Himmler, which makes this dubious existence of ours worth living’.

155

1943 he praised Himmler’s rhetorical gifts in the most exalted terms: the

Reichsfu

hrer was a ‘typically masculine speaker’. ‘What you say lives and

works on the level of insight, [ . . . ] enriches us with your vision [ . . . ] even

more: it makes us resemble you and transforms us from being mere listeners

to being followers.’

156

Johst gave Himmler poems and books with a per-

380 the ss family

sonal dedication,

157

and published various contributions, for example to the

SS Guidance Booklets and to Das schwarze Korps, in which he praised the SS

and its leader in the most elevated poetic language.

158

Himmler responded to Johst’s effusions in his more reserved manner, but

he did repeatedly make efforts to show appropriate appreciation of the

outpourings of emotion that he inspired. Himmler also revered Johst, as

the writer possessed abilities he himself lacked. In March 1942 Himmler

assured Johst how important their correspondence was to him: ‘You may be

conﬁdent that your letters are always precious to me. They are like emis-

saries from a world I greatly love but which, because fate has chosen to put

me where I am, remains closed to me for most of my time and most of my

life. I am all the more delighted to receive regular salutations from the

intellectual world of our blood, which you embody as one of Germany’s

ﬁnest.’

159

Though each wrote in his own typical manner, the friends

exchanged what can almost be called love-letters.

Another, and very close, relationship of Himmler’s is noteworthy. From

1939 onwards the Reichsfu

hrer was a patient of the celebrity masseur Felix

Kersten, a Baltic German who after the First World War had acquired

Finnish nationality. Through intensive massages Kersten was capable of

relieving Himmler’s physical pains, at least for a time. Under the hands of

the masseur, who, two years older than Himmler and with a massive frame,

exuded an atmosphere of calm, Himmler relaxed generally, and Kersten

took advantage of the treatments to build up a relationship of trust with the

Reichsfu

hrer.

160

Whether Himmler really allowed him access to his more

intimate thoughts, as Kersten asserted in his memoirs, or whether Kersten

made up these conversations after the war must remain in doubt; at any rate,

Kersten was to take on an important role, particularly in the ﬁnal phase of

the war, in setting up foreign contacts for Himmler.

It is evident that the more Himmler established his position as Reichsfu

hrer-

SS and extended his power, the more the boundaries between his own family

and personal life and his ofﬁcial function became blurred. While on the one

hand he made his brothers, his closest friends, and even his favourite writer SS

leaders, on the other he treated SS members in many respects like members of

an extended family. Adopting the pose of a strict and solicitous father, he

educated, commended, punished, admonished, and pardoned his men. The

rigid notions he held, and prescribed for his men, about marriage partners,

sexual morality, and family planning reﬂected strongly his experiences as an

individual, including the shortcomings he saw in his own marriage. A certain

the ss family 381

voyeuristic tendency was also involved in his interventions in the private lives

of others.

His ideas on the virtues and values of the SS, which he was constantly

relaying formulaically to his men, reﬂected his efforts to replace the emo-

tional void he sensed in his relationships with others with a dense network

of rules of conduct. And if he constantly admonished his men to be ‘decent’,

it is not difﬁcult to see behind this his own exertions to keep under control

the emerging desire to be allowed for once not to be ‘decent’. His ambiva-

lent attitude to this matter expressed itself in particular through his repeated

and explicit bans on treating enemies ‘decently’.

Himmler had succeeded in establishing his personal predilections, foibles,

phobias, and hostilities securely within the SS. He tried as hard as he could

to develop an SS cult out of his passion for the Teutons, and in large

measure he drew on the Ahnenerbe to bolster his quasi-religious specula-

tions about God and the cosmos. Amalgamated with the police to form a

state protection corps, his SS persecuted a range of ‘subhumans’ that, in his

view, were setting about a ﬁnal conﬂict with the ‘Aryan race’. These were

made up of a collection of enemies, all of whom had some kind of close

connection with his own life history: communists, Freemasons, politically

engaged and morally censorious Christians, Jews, and homosexuals.

As a consequence, Himmler carried over his personal beliefs to an

astonishing extent into the organization he headed; leading the SS was not

for him simply a political ofﬁce, it was part of who he was. The task he had

set himself in life was to create a strong internal organization for the SS, to

extend it and to guarantee its future through his Germanic utopia. By

working tenaciously to fulﬁl the tasks Hitler had entrusted to him, and by

linking them adroitly, Himmler built up a unique position of power, which

he shaped in line with his own idiosyncratic ideas.

382 the ss family

PART

At War: Ambition and

Disappointment

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War Preparations and

Expansion

‘S

ometimes’, Himmler remarked at a meeting of SS-Gruppenfu

hrer in

February 1937,

National Socialists dream that one day we shall conq uer the world. I’m all in favour

of that, eve n if we’re not talking about it at the moment. But I’m convinced that we

must do it in stages. At the moment we wouldn’t have the numbers to populate

even another province, a zone, or a country half the size of Germany. It ought to be

obvious that we can’t simply take over a population, that if we have to take over a

province that is not ethnically German, then it will have to be cleared out down to

the last grand mother and the last child and without mercy—I hope there’s no doubt

about that. I hope there’s also no doubt about the fact th at we shall then need a

population and a population of high racial quality in order to be able to settle it

there and breed from it, so that we can begin to surround Germany with a hundred

million Germanic peasants. This will then enable us to set out once more on the

path to world domination, which was our position in the past, and really to

organize the earth according to basic Aryan principles so that it’s in better shape

than it is now.

Thus, the fantasy of this ﬁne Aryan world, which Himmler was outlining

here, was a long-term objective to be achieved ‘in stages’. The addition of

the 100 million settlers required—Himmler had already mentioned the

same number in a speech in 1931

—had to be largely secured by an

expansive population policy, an effort that would take several generations.

In 1938 Himmler prepared the SS leadership for a ‘conﬂict’, a ‘fateful hour’

that would ‘confront Germany in the next 30, 50, 100 years and with which

we ourselves might be faced’.

At the same time, Himmler assumed that a life-and-death struggle would

occur in the course of the next ten years, as he explained to the Gruppen-

hrer in November 1938:

We must be clear about the fact that during the next ten years we shall be faced with

extraordinary and critical conﬂicts. It won’t be simply a struggle among nations;

that’s merely a smokescreen put up by our opponents. It will be an ideological

struggle waged by all the Jews, Freemasons, Marxists and church people in the

world. These forces—and I am assuming that the Jews are in the driving seat as the

embodiment of everything that is negative—are aware that if Germany and Italy are

not destroyed, then they themselves will be destroyed. That is a simple conclusion.

The Jews cannot survive in Germany. It’s only a matter of years—we shall be

increasingly driving them out with unparalleled ruthlessness [ . . . ]

Be in no doubt that if we succumb in this decisive struggle they wouldn’t even

allow a few Germans to survive in a reservation; everyone would be starved and

slaughtered. Everybody will be affected, whether they are enthusiastic supporters of

the Third Reich or not; it will be enough that they speak German and have a

German mother.

Only a few months later, in February 1939, Himmler had changed the

timing he envisaged for the outbreak of a great war, a world war: now it

could be expected to occur not within the next decade but in the foresee-

able future, if not immediately, and as a direct result of the Jewish policy

initiated by the November 1938 pogrom. Himmler’s notes for a speech

given to Oberabschnitt Rhine in Wiesbaden read as follows: ‘Radical

solution of the Jewish problem is prompting Jewry to ﬁght us, if necessary

by unleashing a world war.’

There is a clear link here with Hitler’s well-

known ‘prophecy’ in his speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939,in

which he stated that a ‘world war’ unleashed by ‘international ﬁnance

Jewry’ would result in the ‘annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’.

Himmler probably used the term ‘greater Germanic empire’ for the ﬁrst

time in the presence of SS leaders when referring to his fantasy of a future

Germanic Reich in his 1938 speech to the Gruppenfu

hrer at the annual

commemoration of the 9 November 1923 putsch: ‘Germany’s aim for the

future is either the greater Germanic empire or it is nothing. I believe that if

we in the SS do our duty then the Fu

hrer will be able to achieve this greater

Germanic Reich, the greatest empire that has ever been achieved by human

beings and that the earth has ever seen. So, bearing this in mind, now go off

and do your duty and get to work.’

386 war preparations and expansion

Himmler does not appear, however, to have believed that this empire

could be created during the lifetime of Adolf Hitler; when referring to ‘the

hrer’ he must have meant a successor. That becomes clear if one draws on

another text from this period. In 1939, before the start of the war, Himmler

once again spoke of a ring of settlements surrounding Germany composed

of 80–100 million ‘Germanic peasants’. But this was intended merely as the

starting point for considerably more gigantic plans, ‘so that starting from that

basis Germany can create the great Germanic empire that we are dreaming

of and that the Fu

hrer is aiming for’.

The vision of the settlement of 100 million peasants with the subsequent

establishment of a great empire, mentioned here once again, evidently

referred to the distant future and was not envisaged as the outcome of the

world war, which Himmler was expecting to break out at any moment.

For, in 1938, the Third Reich did not possess the 80–100 million ‘Germanic

peasants’ and would not do so even in thirty or ﬁfty years’ time. At the end

of 1938 and beginning of 1939, world war and the creation of an empire

appear to have been distinct ideas in Himmler’s mind. At this point he

evidently regarded the military conﬂict that was expected as, in the ﬁrst

instance, a struggle for the existence of National Socialist Germany that

would then provide the basis for the later empire.

The takeover of ethnic policy

Although this empire was still a distant prospect, during 1936–7, Himmler

had begun to launch a number of initiatives to prepare for its creation.

Opportunities were provided by ethnic policy, that is to say, relations

between the Reich and ethnic German minorities mainly in eastern and

south-eastern Europe, by his contacts with Hitler’s foreign policy advisers,

as well as through international police links; furthermore, he tried to gain

inﬂuence within the diplomatic service.

Himmler had already gained experience in the ﬁeld of ethnic policy after

the SD had begun to take an interest in the Sudeten Germans in 1934.

Himmler’s intelligence agency ran the so-called Sudeten German Control

Centre, which Hitler’s deputy, Hess, had set up in December 1933 with the

help of a Gestapo functionary from Dresden in order to identify any Czech

spies among Sudeten German refugees.

During the following years the SD

also became involved in Czechoslovakia itself; above all it focused on the

wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 387

internal affairs of the Sudeten Germans with the aim of using the Sudeten-

land as its base for the surveillance and pursuit of German e

migre

sin

Czechoslovakia. For example, the murder of the engineer Rudolf Formis,

near Prague in January 1935—Formis was a former colleague of the Nazi

dissident Otto Strasser—was carried out by an SD commando. The SD also

supported the ‘Aufbruch’ circle, a group opposing Konrad Henlein’s Sude-

ten German Heimatfront.

The German consul in the Bohemian town of

Reichenberg, Walter von Lierau, had been a member of the SS since 1932

and was registered as a member of the SD Ofﬁce.

From the end of 1937 onwards Himmler intervened personally to direct

the regime’s ethnic policy. The situation was confused because in some

cases Nazi ethnic politicians found themselves in irreconcilable disagree-

ment with those with more traditional views on ethnic politics.

This

requires a brief explanation.

Since 1933 the Nazi regime had made considerable efforts to take over

so-called ethnic work; that is to say, to look after the affairs of and acquire

inﬂuence over the roughly 10 million members of German minorities in the

rest of Europe. At the time of the Nazis’ takeover of power there were a

number of organizations and institutions, the majority of which were

conservative and nationalist in outlook, that were actively involved in

developing relations with the ethnic German minorities, including in par-

ticular: the Verein—from 1933, Volksbund—fu

r das Deutschtum im Aus-

land (Association—since 1933, the National League—for Germans

Abroad); the Deutsche Schutzbund (German Protection League); the

Deutsche Ostmarkenverein (German Association for the Eastern Marches);

the Bund Deutscher Osten (BDO) (League of the German East); and the

Deutsche Auslands-Institut (German Foreign Institute) in Stuttgart. How-

ever, a number of Nazi politicians claimed a leading role in ethnic policy or

at least the right to have a say. That was true of the head of the Nazi Party’s

Auslandsorganisation (Foreign Organization), Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, who

tried to extend his responsibility for dealing with Germans abroad to include

ethnic Germans with a foreign nationality;

it was also true of Hitler’s

ambitious special representative for foreign affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop,

as well as of Alfred Rosenberg, who was head of the Nazi Party’s foreign

policy department.

A few months after the takeover of power Hitler assigned to his deputy,

Rudolf Hess, wide-ranging powers in the sphere of ethnic policy.

Hess’s

task was a difﬁcult one. A ruthless coordination of the existing, not genuinely

388 war preparations and expansion

Nazi, ethnic organizations appeared inopportune, since the Nazi leadership

had no interest in alienating the large numbers of conservative ethnic activists

and thereby possibly creating a movement opposed to the Nazi regime

among German minorities abroad. Moreover, in view of the extent of the

new regime’s diplomatic isolation, it wanted to avoid creating the impression

that it intended to use the Germans abroad as a means of causing disruption or

even as a ﬁfth column.

In the autumn of 1935, however, Hess decided to reorganize ethnic

policy and set up an ofﬁce under the direction of Otto von Kursell, a painter

and art teacher who had been an active supporter of the Nazis since the early

1920s and had been appointed to the Reich Ministry of Education in

October 1934. Its function was to coordinate ethnic policy. Formally the

‘Kursell Ofﬁce’, which was soon renamed the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle or

VoMi (Coordination Centre for Ethnic Germans), was subordinated to

Hess’s representative for foreign affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in order

to provide him with a vehicle for his ambitions in the sphere of ethnic

policy.

In 1936 Kursell, who had the rank of an SS-Obersturmbannfu

hrer, had a

disagreement with Himmler. When Kursell learned that the SS was favour-

ing a Sudeten German group, which was in opposition to Henlein’s Sude-

ten German Party, which Kursell supported, he persuaded Go

ring to issue

an edict which made the issuing of foreign currency in matters involving

ethnic politics subject to his, Kursell’s, approval. In this way he hoped to be

able to control Himmler’s activities in the Sudetenland. Irritated by Kursell’s

high-handedness, Himmler now evidently sought an excuse to get rid of

Kursell and to intervene in ethnic policy directly himself. He accused

Kursell, in his role as head of the Baltic Brotherhood, an association of

Baltic Germans living in the Reich, of engaging in activities hostile to the

state and involving Freemasonry.

And at the beginning of 1937 Kursell was

in fact replaced as head of VoMi by Himmler’s man, SS-Obergruppenfu

hrer

Werner Lorenz.

Lorenz, who had been a member of the SS since 1930, had been

substantially involved in establishing the SS in Danzig (Gdansk), had taken

over SS-Oberabschnitt North in Ko

nigsberg in 1931, and Oberabschnitt

Hamburg in 1934, in the latter case as the ‘permanent representative of

SS-Obergruppenfu

hrer Ambassador von Ribbentrop’.

Although inexpe-

rienced in ethnic politics, he was chosen because he had excellent social

contacts, a self-conﬁdent bearing, and a friendly manner. His close contacts

wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 389