Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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infected the highest ranks of the Wehrmacht. Goebbels noted at the height

of the crisis, at the beginning of January, that the fact that the Gestapo could

not come up with the required results made Himmler ‘very depressed.

Fritsch has still not confessed.’

Himmler’s depression may well have increased when it became clear that

the accusations against Fritsch made by him were completely groundless.

Goebbels noted of a meeting with Hitler in March: ‘The trial of von Fritsch

is going very badly. The whole thing seems to be based on a case of

mistaken identity. Very bad news, particularly for Himmler. He is too

quick to act and also too prejudiced. The Fu

hrer is very annoyed.’

Hitler’s annoyance hit Himmler hard, and the blow was deserved. The

Reichsfu

hrer-SS and Chief of the German Police had completely failed in a

highly embarrassing affair of state. As late as August, at the time of von

Fritsch’s ﬁnal rehabilitation, Goebbels noted: ‘Terrible defeat for Himm-

ler.’

Himmler’s position in the Fritsch affair was made particularly awk-

ward because he was simultaneously facing the accusation that the

uncompromising pursuer of homosexuals was all the time tolerating one

in a key position within the SS. For, in February 1938, he was compelled to

suspend Gruppenfu

hrer Kurt Wittje, until 1935 head of the SS Main Ofﬁce,

because of rumours of his alleged homosexuality. Himmler instructed the

‘Reichsfu

hrer-SS’s Great Court of Arbitration’ to conduct an investigation,

which, however, produced no concrete evidence to support the allegations.

Himmler, though, was not satisﬁed. He produced a seven-page response to

the court’s report, subjecting it to a detailed and devastating critique, then

conducted his own meticulous examination of the Wittje case and ordered

his dismissal from the SS on the grounds that his homosexuality had been

‘deﬁnitely’ proved. He then sent the whole ﬁle back to the court with the

comment that they should consider the affair as a ‘classic example’ of how

such cases should be dealt with in the future. He could not resist teaching

the court a lesson, and did so in great detail.

It is clear from Himmler’s statement that the case was particularly awk-

ward because Hitler had already informed him in 1934 that he had been told

by the War Minister, Blomberg, that Wittje, a former ofﬁcer, had been

dismissed from the Reichswehr on the grounds of suspected homosexuality.

Himmler must have considered this information particularly alarming be-

cause the elimination of the SA leadership in 1934 had been justiﬁed

primarily on the grounds of Ro

hm’s and his followers’ homosexuality.

Had the rumour been conﬁrmed, the SS’s opponents would have been

400 war preparations and expansion

able to claim that the SS leadership was also involved in the homosexual

conspiracy allegedly led by Ro

hm.

Himmler’s detailed statement on the Wittje case from 1938 is thus also a

piece of self-justiﬁcation, comprehensive proof that, at that time, he himself

had carefully examined the accusations but had been forced to consider them

baseless. As far as Himmler was concerned, the case was particularly tricky

because, after the removal of Fritsch with the aid of a ﬁctitious scandal, now

he himself was in danger of being confronted with the accusation that he

had tolerated a homosexual and former ofﬁcer in the ranks of the SS. He was

thus concerned to prevent any suspicion of this arising.

Himmler told the court that the detailed examination of the affair that

was carried out at that time had not given rise to any suspicion on which one

could act. According to Wittje’s personal ﬁle, the only evidence was that on

two occasions during his Reichswehr service, when drunk, he had, as

Himmler indignantly noted, ‘put his arms round, hugged, and kissed a

subordinate’. As a result Wiitje had been requested by his superiors to

hand in his resignation. At the time, Himmler noted in 1938, he had

come to the conclusion that Wittje’s behaviour was the result of his

excessive alcohol consumption. He had thus warned him to avoid ‘getting

drunk’, a warning that unfortunately Wittje had not heeded. In May 1935

Himmler had relieved Wittje of his post as head of the Main Ofﬁce at his

own request, ‘on health grounds’, but had let him keep his rank of Grup-

penfu

hrer. In 1937 there had been a further complaint from Wittje’s former

driver, which in Himmler’s view was quite clear: ‘Hugging, kissing, touch-

ing.’ However, the driver had withdrawn his accusation.

In fact there was more evidence against Wittje. He had gone on holiday

with a young SS man. As far as Himmler was concerned, the case was clear.

‘In my eyes it is completely abnormal for a man of 43 to offer to use the

familiar “du” form with a young chap of 25 after only a few weeks and then

to go on holiday not with his wife and children, who were going to East

Prussia, but with this young man to Kreuth and Salzburg and then, despite

the fact that Wittje has recently been in ﬁnancial trouble, to pay for his trip.’

The trip with this young man, instead of with his family, was ‘outrageous

and could be attributable only to abnormality’. Wittje and his companion

were therefore to be dismissed from the SS, even if there is ‘a danger that

I’m being unjust to someone’, since ‘I would prefer to be too strict in this

area rather than allow the plague of homosexuality to enter the SS’.

wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 401

In November 1938 Himmler returned to the case at a meeting of Grup-

penfu

hrer, and justiﬁed Wittje’s dismissal, since ‘there must be a reasonable

question as to whether he has not seriously incriminated himself under }175

[of the Penal Code]’.

However, Himmler did not continue to hold this

affair against Wittje. In 1942 he helped him to ﬁnd another career.

The Blomberg–Fritsch affair, or rather the Blomberg–Fritsch–Wittje affair,

is reﬂected in Margarete Himmler’s diaries: ‘H has a lot of worries and even

more work’, she wrote on 26 January, not without compassion for the focus

of Himmler’s hard work: ‘I feel really sorry for poor old Blomberg.’ On 30

January she noted: ‘Day after day H hasn’t been getting back from work

before midnight. I don’t know how he can put up with it.’ And on 4

February she noted: ‘Big news. The Fu

hrer has taken over the Wehrmacht

himself. Ribbentrop has become Foreign Minister. Many changes. H is very

tense. Has had to work on it night and day and yet hasn’t been promoted

himself.’ Thus, presumably Himmler had thought he had a chance of being

promoted to minister, possibly to Minister of Police.

A month later, on 5 March, she reﬂected on her husband’s permanent

overwork and his position in the Third Reich: ‘We spent almost 8 days in

Gmund and two in Munich. Here on Tuesday we got back to lots of

excitement. I lie in bed till midnight waiting for Heini. H is so tired and

exhausted from all the annoyance and I always think he gets so little credit.

I sometimes rack my brains thinking why things are as they are. Are his

enemies really so powerful? But H is cheerful and brave and I try to be

cheerful too.’

The Anschluss with Austria

‘Austria is now part of the German Reich. H was the ﬁrst to arrive in

Vienna.’ Margarete Himmler noted this with satisfaction in her diary on 13

March 1938. For her this marked the end of a period in which the political

tension had had a direct impact on the atmosphere in Himmler’s family.

‘We could never escape the tension. Every day brought something new. H,

who naturally knew what was going on, was in a good mood, indeed really

cheerful. But for me, who could only watch the comings and goings and

had to pack his military uniform, it was all too stressful.’

402 war preparations and expansion

In January 1938 the German police had begun extensive preparations for

the mobilization of around 20,000 policemen, allegedly for a big parade. In

fact the police were preparing for the invasion of Austria, in which eventu-

ally, on 12 March, motorized police units from all over the Reich partici-

pated side by side with Wehrmacht units.

The excuse for Hitler to undertake the so-called Anschluss, which had

been planned for months and was carried out by force, was provided by the

sudden announcement by the Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg,

on 9 March, of his intention to carry out a plebiscite only a few days later on

the maintenance of Austrian independence. His aim was thereby to dem-

onstrate Austria’s determination to retain its independence in the face of

increasing German pressure. Hitler was not prepared to wait for this plebi-

scite, and indeed insisted that it should not take place. He succeeded in

forcing Schuschnigg’s resignation and his replacement as Chancellor by the

leader of the Austrian Nazis, Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Seyss-Inquart then

requested German troops to be sent in, as he had been instructed to do by

the German government.

In fact Himmler had ﬂown to Vienna in the early morning of 12 March,

before German units at the head of an armed commando occupied the city.

The journal Die Deutsche Polizei (The German Police) informed its readers that

the Reichsfu

hrer-SS ‘landed unexpectedly this morning around 5 o’clock at

Aspern airport near Vienna before any German units had crossed the

border. Accompanied by, amongst others, SS-Gruppenfu

hrer Heydrich,

he took the initial measures necessary to maintain law and order and thus

was the ﬁrst representative of the National Socialist Reich to step onto

Austrian soil.’

The paper spoke of a ‘bold coup by Reichsfu

hrer-SS

Heinrich Himmler’, by which ‘this revolution, one of the most epoch-

making in the history of the world [. . .] was carried out without a single shot

being ﬁred and without any blood being spilt’. However, the article did not

have the resonance it sought. Goebbels had the paper conﬁscated, since in

the article concerned ‘virtually all the secrets of 10–13 March were be-

trayed’.

This was something of a disgrace for the Chief of Police and

Secret Police.

But to return to Himmler’s appearance in Vienna on 12 March: here he

hoped that, by issuing tough-sounding orders, he would be able to wipe out

the memory of the defeat that his SS had suffered in 1934 after the attack on

the Viennese Federal Chancellery. One of his announcements, for example,

wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 403

read: ‘in Vienna 800 Austrian SS men are protecting the Seyss-Inquart

government in the Federal Chancellery from armed Reds.’

Himmler, accompanied by Seyss-Inquart, then moved on from Vienna

to Linz, where he arrived around midday in order to greet Hitler, who had

arrived in his homeland.

On 14 March Himmler had not been able to

resist marching into Vienna with Sepp Dietrich, ‘at the head of the Leib-

standarte’, as Die Deutsche Polizei reported. The next day he travelled west to

meet Hitler, who was on his way from Linz to Vienna. He met him halfway

there, at St Po

lten; from there he accompanied him to Vienna, where, on

the same day, the big demonstration took place in the Heldenplatz at which

Hitler announced the ‘entry of my homeland into the German Reich’, to

the applause of a huge crowd.

On 18 March Himmler ordered the establishment of a Gestapo head-

quarters in Vienna modelled on the organization he had created in the

‘Reich’, as well as the establishment of Gestapo district headquarters in the

provincial capitals of the Austrian provinces.

On 14 March he had already

appointed the Gestapo chief Hermann Mu

ller to be Inspector of the

Security Police in Austria. He remained in this post until the summer of

1938. His successor was Walter Stahlecker.

On 21 March Himmler appointed two new special staffs who had

responsibility for supervising the establishment of the order and security

police and liaising with the central agencies in Berlin.

At the beginning of

April 1938 he toured the Austrian provincial capitals in order to inspect their

police departments,

100

and between 23 and 25 May he once again visited

Vienna. In general Himmler succeeded in integrating the police of the

Austrian ‘corporate state’ into the German system without generating too

much friction. One of their most pressing tasks was to organize a wave of

arrests of political opponents, in particular communists and socialists.

101

As in the two previous years, and in the midst of this reorganization of the

Austrian police, between 2 and 10 May the Reichsfu

hrer undertook an

ofﬁcial visit to Italy.

102

As before, he was accompanied by his wife Margar-

ete, and again the visit was not without its hiccups. Margarete’s refusal to

follow court protocol and curtsey when being received by the Queen of

Italy—we should not have to do that!—caused offence. The ‘whole court’,

she wrote in her diary, was ‘peeved’. And, all in all: ‘there was a lack of order

and there were some funny situations. What a way to be treated. Such

courts have funny customs. They don’t regard anyone who isn’t a courtier

as a human being.’

103

404 war preparations and expansion

Operations in the Sudetenland

A substantial number of motorized police units participated in the occupa-

tion of the Sudetenland in October 1938, as well as two Einsatzgruppen of

the security police. The latter had originally been established with the aim of

operating throughout the country in the event of a German attack on

Czechoslovakia.

104

However, when this had to be postponed as a result of

the Munich Agreement of 30 September, which granted the Sudeten

German territory to Germany, the two Einsatzgruppen entered the Sude-

tenland. They conﬁscated Czech police documents and, by the end of the

year, had carried out a large number of arrests, possibly affecting as many as

10,000 Czechs and Germans.

105

Armed SS units—the whole of the SS

Verfu

gungstruppe as well as four Death’s Head battalions—also marched

into the Sudetenland, representing the SS’s ﬁrst military action.

106

By the

end of September other Death’s Head units had arrived to reinforce the

Ill 17. Himmler and his SS were to play a central role in the annexatio n of

foreign territories by the German Reich. The picture shows Himmler and the

chief of the order police, Kurt Daluege, at the ceremony where the Austria n

police swore an oath of loyalty to Hitler on 15 March 1938.

wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 405

Sudeten German Free Corps formed from refugees entering Czech territory

and occupying a small amount of border territory.

107

On 1 October this Free Corps, which had been trained by the SA and

supplied with arms by the Wehrmacht, was subordinated to the SS. How-

ever, the SS proved incapable of taking on the provisioning of food and

other necessities, which had hitherto been supplied by the SA and paid for

by the Wehrmacht. According to the Wehrmacht High Command’s liaison

ofﬁcer with the Free Corps, this provoked ‘discontent among the leaders of

the Free Corps, threatening to jeopardize the internal structure of the corps

which it had taken considerable effort to establish. The fear, which was

justiﬁed, was that the SA leaders who had proved themselves in action and

in establishing [the corps] would be replaced by ones from the SS.’ There

were signs that the force was liable to disintegrate. Moreover, the SS began

to try to recruit members of the Free Corps, which created ‘bitterness’

among SA leaders. ‘In order to win over the leadership of the Free Corps

the deputy leader of the Sudeten Germans and his chief of staff were offered

high-ranking positions in the SS. However, they rejected them.’

108

‘It was

shocking to experience how two components of the state (leaders of the SA

and SS) were involved in a more or less latent opposition to one another,

whose effects were having a negative impact on the leadership and the unity

of the force’, concluded the lieutenant-colonel concerned.

109

Clearly, ﬁve

years after the Ro

hm affair relations between the SS and the SA were

anything but harmonious.

The SS’s engagement in the Sudetenland had, however, increased

Himmler’s military ambitions. On 8 November, after the conclusion of

the occupation, Himmler reported to his Gruppenfu

hrer in Munich that

during the Sudeten crisis he had mobilized 5,000 SS men between the ages

of 45 and 50, of whom the SS had kept on 3,500 in the force. As a result of

this mobilization it had been possible to remove active Death’s Head units

from the concentration camps and establish six new battalions. In addition,

he had mobilized 11,000 men to act as police reinforcements.

110

Pogrom

The Nazi regime’s move to an overt policy of expansion went hand in hand

with increased persecution of the Jews. This became particularly apparent

after the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, when Nazi activists satisﬁed

406 war preparations and expansion

their pent-up desire to indulge in anti-Jewish acts, particularly in Vienna,

where there was a large number of attacks on Jews as well as arbitrary and

illegal expropriation of property.

111

The fact that, after the annexation of Austria, the SD, which was really a

party organization, succeeded in acquiring executive powers in the sphere

of Jewish policy proved decisive for the development of SS Jewish policy.

Adolf Eichmann, who had been sent to Vienna as the SD’s Jewish expert,

managed to persuade the Reich Commissar in Austria, Josef Bu

rckel, to

establish a ‘Central Agency for Jewish Emigration’ on 20 August 1938, and

to assign to the SD responsibility for running this organization. With the aid

of this agency Eichmann introduced a system by which Jews who were

compelled to emigrate were rapidly processed through all the various

bureaucratic procedures. The whole process was ﬁnanced by the property

which the Viennese Jews were forced to hand over as they passed through

it.

112

After the Anschluss the Nazis increased the persecution of the Jews.

A new wave of anti-Jewish laws was issued, which among other things

prepared for the ‘aryanization’ of what property the Jews still possessed. In

the course of the ‘asocial’ action of June 1938, as has already been indicated,

the Kripo also arrested a large number of Jews and placed them in preven-

tive detention.

113

What then, at this stage, did Himmler intend to do with the Jews who

were resident in Germany?

As has already been pointed out, prior to 1938 Himmler made relatively

few comments, either public or private, on the ‘Jewish question’. The

reason for this was not because he was not anti-Semitic, but presumably

simply because, unlike in the case of other issues such as the ﬁght against

‘asocials’ and homosexuals or the church question, in Himmler’s view

Jewish persecution required little engagement on his part. There was a

consensus among the most important actors in Jewish policy—Hitler, the

Four Year Plan organization under Go

ring, as well as the Reich Interior

Ministry under Frick—to radicalize the persecution in stages, in order

thereby to exclude German Jews completely from the economy and society

and try to persuade them to emigrate. Within the context of this policy

Heydrich’s security police and the SD performed their role so effectively

that Himmler was rarely obliged to intervene himself.

In the spring of 1938 Himmler took a decision in an individual case

concerning the request of a female German Jew living abroad to enter

wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 407

Germany, the justiﬁcation for which helps to reveal his long-term objective

for dealing with the Jews. The Reichsfu

hrer responded to the request by

saying that the person concerned could enter the country, so long as she

‘commits herself to staying in Germany because Germany [is not prepared]

to give up its most valuable pawn, the Jews’. This decision was in complete

contradiction to the forced-emigration policy which the SD in particular

was pursuing after the Anschluss, and thus caused considerable consterna-

tion in its Jewish department. In response, the department asked Himmler

whether his decision meant that ‘all rich Jews’, as well as ‘all well-known

Jews or those suitable to act as pawns’, should be excluded from the

emigration programme. Himmler initialled the document without com-

menting further, and in July announced that the matter was closed.

114

The

idea of keeping wealthy Jews as hostages reﬂected Himmler’s extreme

utilitarian mentality, and was to preoccupy him again and again in the

coming years.

Between May and July 1938 there were renewed attacks on Jews by party

activists in various parts of the Reich. In Berlin, in particular, Goebbels

attempted to create a real pogrom atmosphere. However, the Sudeten crisis

persuaded the Nazi leadership to stop anti-Jewish attacks for the time being

in order to demonstrate Nazi Germany’s peaceful intentions. At the begin-

ning of October, though, the moment the crisis was ended by the Munich

Agreement, the attacks began again with full force. Among other things, at

least a dozen synagogues were damaged during these weeks. There were

increasing signs that the party’s rank and ﬁle were moving in the direction of

a full-scale pogrom.

On 28 October, in the midst of this charged anti-Semitic atmosphere,

Himmler ordered the expulsion of Polish Jews resident in the R eich within

three days, in order to pre-empt the Polish government’s move to deprive

them of their nationality.

115

During the next few days, in the ﬁrst major

deportation, 18,000 people were arrested and driven over the German–

Polish border in inhuman conditions.

116

On 7 November 17-year-old Herschel Grynspan assassinated Ernst vom

Rath, the legation secretary in the German embassy in Paris, in revenge for

the deportation of his parents, who came from Poland. This provided the

Nazi regime with a welcome excuse to satisfy the militant anti-Semitic

sections of the party’s rank and ﬁle by launching the pogrom for which they

were pressing. Already on 7 November, the day of the assassination, the

Nazi press began issuing threats to the Jews living in Germany, and, in

408 war preparations and expansion

accordance with the instructions of the Propaganda Ministry, announced

that Grynspan’s deed, an attack by ‘world Jewry’, would have unforeseeable

consequences for the situation of the Jews in Germany.

117

On 7 and

8 November, in Hesse in particular, party activists attacked synagogues

and Jewish shops.

118

In this situation, on 8 November Himmler made his annual speech to the

SS-Gruppenfu

hrer, who had assembled in Munich to take part in the

ceremonies commemorating the putsch of 1923 on the following day. In

his speech Himmler referred to the ‘Jewish question’. ‘During the next ten

years,’ he announced, ‘we shall undoubtedly face extraordinary and critical

conﬂicts’, for it was a question of surviving the ‘ideological struggle’ with

‘all the Jews, Freemasons, Marxists, and churches in the world’. He did not

omit to add that ‘I consider the Jews as the driving [force], as the essence of

everything that is negative [ . . . ] the Jews cannot remain in Germany—it’s

only a matter of years—we shall increasingly drive them out with unparal-

leled and ruthless brutality’.

119

However, Himmler made no reference to

the actual situation, and the formulation that they would drive the Jews out

in the course ‘of years’ does not suggest that at this point he was working on

the assumption that there was about to be a dramatic new development in

the persecution of the Jews.

The following day, 9 November, vom Rath died of his wounds. The

news, which was not unexpected, arrived in Munich in the afternoon. His

death was ofﬁcially announced that evening during the usual commemora-

tion ceremony for the ‘old ﬁghters’ in the Munich town hall. Hitler left the

event, while Goebbels roused the party leaders who were present with a

ﬁery tirade and in this way initiated the pogrom. The chronology of these

events, however, indicates that before the meeting took place Goebbels had

already agreed with Hitler on how to proceed.

120

Himmler was also present in the town hall.

121

It is not clear what he did

after Goebbels’s speech or whether he issued any orders to the SS. In any

case, throughout the Reich members of the SS, who had come together that

evening for the commemoration, took part in the attacks. It is impossible to

establish whether special orders would have had to be issued centrally by the

Reichsfu

hrer-SS or whether the SS simply joined in the local attacks.

122

Later that evening Himmler went to Hitler’s Munich ﬂat and was present

when, shortly before half past eleven, reports came in about the extent of

the destruction.

123

Presumably he then gave instructions to the Gestapo

chief Mu

ller, based in Berlin, who then informed his ofﬁcials shortly before

wa r pr e pa rat i o n s a n d ex pans i o n 409