Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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with Ribbentrop, who was regarded as ‘the coming man’ in the regime’s

foreign policy, were also in his favour, for VoMi was still answerable to Hess

via Ribbentrop.

Hermann Behrends, who had been involved in the SD,

became Lorenz’s deputy, and in his new capacity continued to act as

Heydrich’s agent.

Behrends, who became the real strong-man in VoMi,

recruited a number of SS leaders into it, among them Walter Ellermeier,

who was to become Lorenz’s adjutant.

Under its new leadership VoMi, which according to Lorenz was ‘the

supreme agency dealing with all matters concerning ethnic Germans’,

soon succeeded in subjecting the various organizations involved in this

sphere to stricter control.

Thus, in 1937 Behrends took over control of

the Bund Deutscher Osten from Theodor Oberla

nder and thereby became

largely responsible for ‘borderland activities’.

Evidently Himmler had

already been planning, in connection with the dismissal of Kursell, to get

rid of Hans Steinacher, the conservative chairman of the most important

ethnic German organization, the Volksbund fu

r das Deutschtum im Aus-

land (VDA), as well and to replace him with a ‘very senior SS leader’.

fact, on 19 October 1937 Hess suspended Steinacher from his post as head of

the VDA after Lorenz had informed him that Steinacher was not sticking to

various agreements made with VoMi.

As far as cooperation with the ethnic German organizations abroad was

concerned, although the new VoMi leadership favoured Nazi organiza-

tions,

it refrained from subordinating them formally to itself. The orga-

nizations remained de facto independent, which, among other things,

reﬂected foreign policy considerations.

On 2 July 1938 Hitler made VoMi responsible for ‘overseeing the work of

all state and party agencies involved in ethnic and borderland issues (German

minorities abroad and alien minorities at home) and for the efﬁcient deploy-

ment of all the resources at their disposal’. VoMi, which was not a state

organization, was thereby given the right to issue directives to Reich min-

istries. This represented an important invasion of the Reich’s responsibility

for foreign affairs.

On 3 February 1938 the VDA was ‘coordinated’ and

turned into a ‘cover organization’ of VoMi, as the Fu

hrer’s Deputy put

it in his directive. All the other ethnic organizations, with the exception of

the Bund Deutscher Osten, which was responsible for borderland issues,

were to be incorporated into the VDA, whereas in future all party organiza-

tions were to be banned from getting involved in any ‘ethnic activity’.

390 war preparations and expansion

Lorenz and Behrends also managed to put an end to, or at least mitigate,

conﬂicts among the leaderships of the German organizations abroad.

general they restricted themselves to working with those ethnic German

organizations that supported the Third Reich, and in most cases they

ensured that these groups dominated the political work of the ethnic

German minorities. In Romania VoMi succeeded in getting the Deutsche

Volkspartei (German People’s Party), which was opposed to the Deutsche

Volksgemeinschaft (German National Community), to join its competi-

tor.

In Yugoslavia VoMi recognized the Schwa

bisch-Deutscher Kultur-

bund (Swabian-German Cultural League) as the ofﬁcial representative of

the ethnic Germans after imposing a change of leadership.

In Hungary it

favoured the Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn (National League of

Germans in Hungary), which was founded in November 1938.

In the Sudetenland from 1937 onwards VoMi regarded Konrad Henlein’s

Sudeten German Party as the ofﬁcial representative of the Sudeten Ger-

mans,

particularly after Henlein had radically altered his position in

November 1937. Instead of demanding more autonomy for the Sudeten

Germans within Czechoslovakia, Henlein now demanded their absorption

into the Reich.

In doing so he was adopting the line of his deputy, Karl

Hermann Frank, who had close links to Himmler.

In 1938 VoMi, in

partnership with Henlein, introduced a ‘strict system of command’ into the

organization of the Sudeten Germans.

In May 1938 VoMi tried to establish an organization to include all the

ethnic Germans in Poland but failed as a result of the diversity of the various

associations.

After the Munich Agreement of November 1938 the Ger-

mans managed to gain ofﬁcial recognition for the ethnic Germans in

Slovakia, established a German Party sympathetic to Nazism, and secured

the appointment of the leader of the German ethnic group as a state

secretary.

Thus, up until the outbreak of war Himmler’s inﬂuence on ethnic

activities remained indirect and informal. It sprang from the authority he

exercised over the leading VoMi functionaries and their effective control

over the ethnic German organizations. VoMi was not yet an integral part of

the SS empire but only an extended arm of it.

The fact that Himmler was anxious to enlarge the activities of the SS to

include ethnic matters was clearly linked to the leadership role which he

envisaged the SS playing in the revival of the ‘Germanic race’ and the

impending expansion of the Reich. If the German Reich was to be determined

wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 391

in future by ethnicity and race, then it was necessary to secure the adhesion of

ethnic German minorities to Nazi Germany. Himmler’s plan to surround the

Reich with a ring of 100 million Germanic peasants is clearly relevant here.

Furthermore, by involving the SS in ethnic policy it would be possible to

extend the range of the concept of a comprehensive ‘state protection corps’,

with the SS acting in diplomatic crises as the defender of ethnic Germans, for

example through encouraging the formation of ethnic German ‘self-defence

leagues’. Indeed, this actually occurred during the Sudeten crisis and in the

Free City of Danzig during the preparations for war.

Himmler’s good personal relations with Ribbentrop, to whom Hitler had

given various special diplomatic assignments, and who since 1935 had had a

‘Bureau’ at his disposal for this purpose, provided the Reichsfu

hrer-SS with

further opportunities for acquiring diplomatic inﬂuence.

Himmler con-

sidered that it was his achievement to have drawn Ribbentrop into politics

during the negotiations preceding the formation of the Hitler government

at the turn of the year 1932–3.

As early as May 1933 he had appointed

Ribbentrop SS-Standartenfu

hrer, and he kept promoting him, for the last

time on 20 April 1940 to Obergruppenfu

hrer.

From 1937 onwards the

Ribbentrop Ofﬁce and the SD Main Ofﬁce cooperated closely,

and the

Himmler and Ribbentrop families were good friends. For example, on

2 February 1938, two days before Ribbentrop’s appointment as Foreign

Minister, the Ribbentrops stayed the night with the Himmlers,

and,

during a stay in a clinic in February 1939, Margarete Himmler noted with

gratitude that her friend had telephoned.

When, in June 1933, his former adjutant, Josias, Hereditary Prince of

Waldeck and Pyrmont, was appointed to the Foreign Ministry’s personnel

department, for Himmler this represented the ﬁrst step towards the SS’s

inﬁltration of the diplomatic service. In June 1934 the Hereditary Prince left

the service, but in the meantime he had ensured that of the ten attache

s who

had been appointed to the personnel department since he had joined ﬁve

were members of the SS.

After the Hereditary Prince’s dismissal the

ofﬁcial in the NSDAP’s liaison staff responsible for foreign affairs,

SS-Standartenfuhrer Herbert Scholz, was appointed to the Foreign Minis-

try. Scholz, who was soon transferred to the German embassy in Washing-

ton as an attache

, saw his role during his future career as being to act as a

representative of the SS. In February 1939, after meeting him, Himmler

asked Scholz to propose ‘suitable people in the diplomatic service based in

392 war preparations and expansion

the United States’ for membership of the SS. In January 1940 he recom-

mended two people in the embassy.

Up until February 1938 there is evidence of 50 out of a total of 500 senior

ofﬁcials in the diplomatic service being members of the SS. Around half of

these diplomats, who were very often attache

s at German embassies, joined

the SS between September 1936 and February 1938 , evidently following

increased efforts at recruitment by the SS.

Foreign Minister Konstantin

von Neurath was appointed an SS-Gruppenfu

hrer in September 1937.

13 September the head of the Foreign Organization of the NSDAP and state

secretary in the Foreign Ministry, Wilhelm Bohle, was admitted to the SS

by Himmler at the party rally. Bohle recruited numerous functionaries of

the Foreign Organization (i.e. Nazi sympathizers among ethnic Germans

abroad) into the foreign service, most of whom were in the SS. After he left

the Ministry in 1941 Bohle ensured that the Foreign Organization would

continue to provide intelligence for the SD, and gave Himmler information

concerning foreign service personnel.

Thus, with the appointment of Himmler’s friend Ribbentrop to the post

of Foreign Minister on 4 February 1938, initially it looked as if Himmler had

secured a signiﬁcant increase in inﬂuence over German foreign policy.

Ribbentrop not only brought with him twenty members of his ofﬁce,

who were simultaneously members of the SS,

but suggested that the

new state secretary, Ernst von Weizsa

cker, and Ernst Woermann, who

had been appointed head of the political department, should also be admit-

ted to the SS. On 30 April 1938 Himmler acceded to this request.

March 1938 he placed another intimate in the Foreign Ministry in the shape

of Wilhelm Keppler, who was appointed a state secretary and the Foreign

Ministry’s special representative for Austria. The two men had got to know

each other at the beginning of 1933 when they were arranging the meeting

between Hitler and Papen in Ribbentrop’s house, and since then Keppler

and Himmler had used the intimate ‘du’ form of address with each other.

Keppler, who had initiated the donor organization ‘The Friends of the

Reichsfu

hrer-SS’, had also been a member of the SS since March 1933.

November 1939 Himmler strengthened the bonds between the two still

further when, in his capacity as Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of

the Ethnic German Nation, he gave Keppler the job of dealing with all

matters concerning the property of the refugee Baltic Germans.

Emil Schumburg, the head of the Foreign Ministry’s department dealing

with Germany (Referat Deutschland) and a member of the SS since October

wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 393

1936,

increasingly took on the role of a ‘liaison ofﬁcer’

for Himmler.

However, soon this close cooperation with the SS appears to have aroused

Ribbentrop’s suspicion. According to a report by the Gestapo chief Hein-

rich Mu

ller, Schumberg’s ‘frank, invariably helpful and positive cooperation

with us’ had led ‘the new leadership of the FM’ ‘to marginalize Dr Schum-

burg’.

It did not, in fact, come to that;

however, as Mu

ller’s reference to

‘the new leadership of the FM’ suggests, Ribbentrop’s appointment as

Foreign Minister did not actually increase Himmler’s opportunity to inﬂu-

ence foreign policy in any way. On the contrary, Ribbentrop, who always

reacted very sensitively to anyone encroaching on his responsibilities, re-

sisted Himmler’s attempts at inﬁltration and their personal relationship

began to cool quite markedly.

Himmler, however, still retained the right to appoint police attache

sto

German embassies, who could then act as the extended arm of the Gestapo

and SS abroad. Thus, he installed one of these special representatives in

Spain. In May 1936, in other words, shortly before the outbreak of the

Spanish Civil War, criminal commissar Paul Winzer, a member of the SS

since 1933, was assigned to the German embassy in Madrid at the express

wish of the Chief of the German Police in order to investigate Spanish

communism and anarchism. In November 1936, again at Himmler’s express

wish, he became an ofﬁcial liaison ofﬁcer to the Spanish political police and

ﬁnally acted as a police attache

at the embassy.

During the following years

he expanded his ofﬁce quite considerably; by the end he had twenty staff, of

whom some were deployed in the Spanish protectorate of Morocco to act as

the ears of the SD in North Africa.

By the outbreak of war Himmler had appointed police attache

s to the

German embassies in Rome, Tokyo, and Belgrade.

When, after the

outbreak of war, Hitler ordered that all personnel employed at German

diplomatic missions should be subordinate to the Reich Foreign Minister,

Himmler worked out a deal with Ribbentrop to the effect that his repre-

sentatives at the various missions were permitted to have their own separate

line of communication to the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce (RSHA).

In August 1940 the head of the SD Foreign Department, Heinz Johst,

made an agreement with the desk ofﬁcer in the Foreign Ministry responsible

for liaising with the SS, Rudolf Likus, that the SD was permitted to run its

own intelligence service, so long as reports with any diplomatic signiﬁcance

were sent to the Foreign Ministry’s department dealing with Germany.

Moreover, the SD was entitled to act abroad on its own responsibility.

394 war preparations and expansion

Himmler also attempted to acquire inﬂuence over German foreign policy by

utilizing links to foreign police forces. Fascist Italy was the most obvious

partner. On 30 March 1936 a German–Italian police conference was held in

Berlin. Led by Himmler, the German delegation consisted of Heydrich,

Werner Best, Gestapo chief Heinrich Mu

ller, as well as other representatives

of the police and the Foreign Ministry. The Italian delegation included the

police chief Arturo Bocchini and other high-ranking police ofﬁcers. The

main topic of the conference was cooperation in the ﬁght against commu-

nism. In October a German delegation led by Himmler reciprocated with a

visit to Rome, where Himmler was received by Mussolini.

Further bilat-

eral police conferences with communism as their target took place during the

following months with Finland, Bulgaria, and probably with Hungary, and

contacts along the same lines were established with Poland and Yugoslavia.

Between 30 August and 3 September 1937 Himmler hosted an interna-

tional police congress attended by representatives from Belgium, Brazil,

Bulgaria, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland,

Portugal, Switzerland, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia. According to a Foreign

Ministry statement, he discussed with them how ‘the ﬁght against Com-

munism could be boosted’, and above all how ‘Germany could take the lead

[. . .] in this vital campaign in which they were all involved’.

Himmler

considered the topic of the conference to be so sensitive that he ordered that

no information about the conference should be released.

The Italian

delegation was once again led by Police Minister Bocchini, and he invited

Himmler to make an ofﬁcial visit to Italy in October 1937.

Himmler and Bocchini got on so well that after the end of his ofﬁcial visit

the Italian police chief invited his German colleague to stay on for a private

holiday in Italy lasting several weeks. Beforehand Himmler had to take part

in the obligatory ceremonies in Munich to commemorate the 9 November

putsch, but a few days later he and his wife departed on the only big foreign

holiday the couple ever had. This was reason enough for Margarete to begin

a diary, which she enthusiastically kept during the journey, though unfor-

tunately only occasionally adding further entries.

‘We arrived in Rome at midday on 14.11.37’, she noted. We learn that

the couple had travelled in a saloon carriage and were received by Bocchini

personally. During the days that followed they visited the sights: the Colos-

seum, Castel Gandolfo, the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Capitol and the Vati-

can, the Roman forum, where Himmler impressed his wife with his

wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 395

‘knowledge of history’. And then Margarete noted a small victory: ‘Thanks

to the kindness of the police we were able to go for a drive in the Vatican

park in our car with the SS pennant.’

On 17 November they went on to Naples. Unfortunately, Himmler had

‘a stomach upset’. Neverthless, the following day they visited Herculaneum

and Pompeii, where—and that was naturally particularly interesting—‘mo-

saic ﬂoors with a swastika’ had been excavated. Margarete Himmler noted

her impressions of the country and its people without any inhibitions.

‘In Italy they take cooking very seriously. Apparently there are no drunkards

here; they are used to drinking wine.’ ‘One comes across children every-

where; what a blessed country it is.’

On 19 November she continued her tour of Naples in the company of

Eugen Dollmann. Dollmann, a historian who had been living in Italy since

1928, had come into contact with leading Nazis, including Himmler,

through his acquaintanceship with the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von

Schirach. He acted as Himmler’s interpreter during his trips to Italy. In

fact Dollmann had a special place among Himmler’s representatives abroad.

Attached to the German embassy, he was not answerable to the police

liaison ofﬁcer, Herbert Kappler. In future his reports would keep Himmler

up to date with developments in Italy.

In the meantime, Himmler had spent a very disagreeable day—according

to Margarete, he had ‘driven up Vesuvius, where it rained and was very

windy’. In the afternoon they went on to Cosenza in Calabria, a trip of 350

kilometres involving several breakdowns, arriving after midnight. On the

following day the Himmlers visited the fortress that dated back to the

Hohenstaufens and then went on to Taormina in Sicily. And here they

began a fortnight’s holiday, reading, playing bridge, and bathing. Himmler

played a lot of tennis. They also made trips, for example to Syracuse, where

they visited the ‘catacombs with a Franciscan guide. He was a sly one who

didn’t answer any of H’s questions.’ At the beginning of December they

went on to Palermo, where Himmler, always on the lookout for ‘Germanic’

remains, bought some antiquities.

On 4 December the Himmlers ﬂew to Libya and, on the following day,

visited the archaeological sites in Leptis Magna, a city which, Margarete

noted, ‘the Romans had built with inﬁnite greatness, richness, and nobility’.

‘I keep thinking,’ she asked herself, ‘why are these people now so poor?

Perhaps because there are no longer any slaves.’ In view of the pomp with

which his host, the governor Italo Balbo, celebrated their visit, Himmler’s

396 war preparations and expansion

tourist garb was somewhat inappropriate. For he was wearing a ‘ridiculous

young person’s hiking-type knickerbocker suit’, as Dollmann disapproving-

ly noted.

On 6 December the Himmlers visited a Tuareg camp and on the

following evening they were invited to dine with the Balbos. Beforehand

the Himmlers had visited a mosque and the Jewish quarter. Margarete

described her impressions: ‘Awfully dirty and the smell! The Arabs are

much cleaner.’

On 9 December the Himmlers ﬂew to Naples, on the following day

visited Paestum and the National Museum, and on the eleventh were taken

to Rome by car. That evening, after dining with the German ambassador to

the Vatican, von Bergen, Himmler once again felt ‘very bad. Immediately

said it was the lobster.’ But the following day he had recovered enough to

be able to accept an invitation from Bocchini, and on the thirteenth they

returned to Berlin by train.

On 10 December, while still in Naples, Himmler had summarized some

of his impressions of the trip in a letter to Walther Wu

st, the head of the

Ahnenerbe, and had drafted a substantial research project. He wrote that,

while visiting Italian museums and archaeological sites, he had kept coming

across ‘evidence of Germanic remains’: references to runes in a Latin

inscription in the Roman forum, the swastikas in Pompeii and Hercula-

neum, and other things. Wu

st was therefore instructed ‘to create a depart-

ment in the Ahnenerbe with the task of studying Italy and Greece in the

light of their Indo-Germanic-Aryan associations’. Himmler fully recog-

nized that this was naturally a ‘very big’ task. But he expressed himself

conﬁdent that ‘we shall thereby achieve our main goal of coming closer to

proving that the Aryan and Nordic people have spread outwards from the

centre of Germany and the Baltic basin to almost all parts of the earth, and

that now at least we are coming closer to providing evidence for the

intellectual dominance of the world by the Aryan Teutons’.

Their trip, with its little difﬁculties, had shown that the Himmlers had

not yet quite achieved this high aspiration in their private lives.

The Blomberg–Fritsch crisis

At the end of 1937 Hitler made an important change in the policy of the

Third Reich: he embarked on a policy that was openly expansionist. On 5

wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 397

November 1937, in an address to the Reich Minister of War, Werner von

Blomberg, the Reich Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath, and the

commanders-in-chief of the army, navy, and Luftwaffe, he justiﬁed the

need for military expansion in order to acquire for Germany the ‘living-

space’ that was necessary to secure its future as a great power.

Hitler then went into the details of when and how, and suggested two

possible scenarios. In the ﬁrst place, he told his audience that he was

determined to conduct a major war at the latest by 1943 to 1945 in order

to solve ‘Germany’s space problem’. Their opponents would be France and

Great Britain. Secondly, he elucidated possible situations in which Germany

might be able to act before these dates. If, for domestic or diplomatic

reasons, France should prove incapable of intervening then he wanted to

use the opportunity to attack and annex Austria and Czechoslovakia.

The concerns and the criticism expressed by the military chiefs and

Neurath about his military plans following his talk helped to convince

Hitler that the transition to a more aggressive foreign policy would be

possible only if he replaced the conservatives, who were ﬁlling leading

positions within the state apparatus, with more biddable followers.

By chance, a few months later the Reich War Minister’s involvement in a

marriage scandal provided the opportunity for a major reshufﬂe along the

lines Hitler was seeking. In January 1938 Blomberg married a much youn-

ger woman, who, it was revealed shortly after the wedding, had several

convictions for ‘immoral behaviour’ and was registered with the police as a

prostitute. The affair—an affair of state, since Hitler and Go

ring had acted as

witnesses at the wedding—led to Blomberg’s retirement.

At the end of

January 1938 Go

ring, who regarded himself as the obvious successor to

Blomberg and had personally informed Hitler of the marriage scandal,

unexpectedly presented Hitler with material that compromised his most

important rival for the post, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Werner

von Fritsch. Himmler’s Gestapo had provided him with the material and

ring gave Hitler a ﬁle which appeared to show that Fritsch was homo-

sexual.

Hitler immediately seized on the accusation, arranging a confrontation in

the Reich Chancellery between von Fritsch and the sole witness, a man who

had previous convictions for blackmailing his sexual partners. The witness

claimed to recognize Fritsch as a previous customer, an accusation that

Fritsch strenuously denied. The Gestapo was assigned to investigate the

matter further. It was a scandal that, during the following days, threatened to

398 war preparations and expansion

plunge the regime into a crisis. On 4 February, however, Hitler took

control of the situation by dismissing both von Blomberg and von Fritsch,

by taking over the supreme command of the Wehrmacht himself without

replacing the War Minister, and by appointing Walther von Brauchitsch as

the new Commander-in-Chief of the army. At a stroke the whole structure

of the military leadership had been transformed.

The reconstruction of the leadership of the Wehrmacht was followed by

extensive changes in personnel. During the ﬁrst days of February twelve

generals were removed and ﬁfty-one other posts in the military hierarchy

had new incumbents. The Foreign Ministry was also affected: Foreign

Minister von Neurath was promoted ‘upstairs’ to chair the Secret Cabinet

Council (which never met), and was replaced as Foreign Minister by

Hitler’s slippery ‘special ambassador’, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who ap-

pointed Ernst von Weizsa

cker, the head of the Political Department (in the

Foreign Ministry), to be his state secretary. The ambassadors in Rome,

Tokyo, London, and Vienna were replaced. Finally, Hjalmar Schacht was

replaced as Reich Economics Minister by Walter Funk, a former business

journalist and hitherto a state secretary in the Propaganda Ministry.

In the meantime the Gestapo was investigating Fritsch, who had to

appear before the Reich Military Court in March. In fact the court had

begun its own investigation into the affair and—by contrast with the

Gestapo investigation—evidence had also been sought that might exonerate

Fritsch; and indeed, such evidence had been found. The main hearing,

which was conducted by Go

ring personally, ended with a sensation: the

prosecution witness was forced to confess that he had confused General von

Fritsch with a retired cavalry ofﬁcer named Frisch. Fritsch was pronounced

innocent and ofﬁcially rehabilitated.

Fritsch considered Himmler primarily responsible for his fall. He made

serious accusations against the ‘main villain’: ‘Your whole attitude in this

affair shows [. . .] that you were determined in a biased manner to portray

me as the guilty one.’ Fritsch even contemplated challenging Himmler to a

duel.

In fact Himmler had been convinced of Fritsch’s guilt from the start,

and he ensured that the investigation would be carried out one-sidedly. It is

possible—and we shall come back to this—that he thought that he would

boost his career by exposing the scandal. However, he certainly did not, as

Fritsch assumed, intentionally fabricate and initiate the affair. In the light of

the homophobic horror scenarios that Himmler painted in 1936–7, he may

well have actually believed that the plague of homosexuality had already

wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 399