Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life
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a pointedly friendly letter to Bocchini in which he nevertheless complained
strongly about the propaganda campaign, the arrests, and about the fact that
the Italians had not kept to certain parts of the agreement concerning the right
to opt for German or Italian nationality
111
On 15 November Wolff and the
under-state secretary in the Italian Interior Ministry, Buffarini Guidi, came to
an agreement in Rome which, in particular, ensured the release of those who
had been arrested.
112
The option process, which had been completed by
the end of 1939, resulted in a large majority opting to emigrate.
113
Of the 200,000 people who had opted for Germany or were German
citizens, 56,000 had left their homeland by the end of 1940. However,
during the last months of 1940 the numbers of resettlers were declining
significantly. By the middle of 1942 only a further 20,000 people had left
South Tyrol, and then the whole project came to a halt. The vast majority
had emigrated to Austria, around 21,000 to other parts of the Reich.
114
While the majority of South Tyroleans were housed in makeshift reset-
tlement camps, Greifelt’s RKF office stuck to the plan for a settlement of the
South Tyroleans en bloc. Himmler’s original idea of resettling the South
Tyroleans in the Beskyda was dropped fairly quickly, in view of the negative
response of those affected.
115
After the victory over France in June 1940,
Greifelt put forward a new plan. On 10 July he produced a memorandum
which envisaged the resettlement of the South Tyroleans in Burgundy.
A week later Himmler made a surprise revelation of this idea, which had
allegedly already been approved in principle by Hitler, to a delegation of
those who had opted for Germany. The delegation went on a tour of
inspection to the proposed settlement area, and on 23 July was received
by Himmler for a final meeting. Although work continued on the project
during the following years, the annexation of French territory and the
expulsion of the indigenous population in order to ‘free up’ the settlement
area would have damaged German–French relations to an extent that made
it inconceivable during the war.
116
After the occupation of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941 a new settlement
area was discussed and then rejected, namely Lower Styria, which had been
annexed by Germany. Finally, in mid-1942 the most outlandish plan of all
was mooted: to settle the South Tyroleans in the Crimea, a scheme pro-
posed to Himmler in May 1942 by the former Gauleiter of Vienna, Alfred
Frauenfeld, who had been designated as the future Commissar-General of
the Crimea. Himmler discussed this project with Hitler and both men liked
the idea. It was agreed, however, that its implementation would have to be
460 anewracialorder
postponed until after the war. Himmler told Frauenfeld that ‘we shall simply
find another national group or another population’ for Burgundy.
117
The strategy developed by Himmler in October 1939 had involved
committing himself to carrying out a rapid resettlement of a whole popula-
tion to a particular area without an area actually being available. Conceived
in the euphoria of Germany’s victory and inspired by the expansion of his
resettlement task in his new role as Settlement Commissar, it proved to be a
disaster with catastrophic consequences. However, the abortive resettle-
ment of the South Tyroleans was not the only fiasco produced by Settle-
ment Commissar Himmler.
The Reichsfu
¨
hrer on the defensive
At the beginning of 1940 Himmler was faced with massive criticism from
the leadership of the Wehrmacht. At its heart were orders relating in various
ways to Himmler’s radical policy of ethnic reordering but also affecting the
status of the Wehrmacht, namely the mass murders committed by the SS in
Poland, which in the view of the officer corps threatened to damage the
honour of the Wehrmacht, and also Himmler’s so-called ‘Procreation
Order’ of October 1939.
As has been shown above,
118
from 1939 onwards there was an increasing
number of complaints from Wehrmacht commanders about atrocities car-
ried out by the SS in Poland. In particular, in November 1939 and January
1940 the Military Commander East, Colonel-General Johannes von
Blaskowitz, complained to the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Walther
von Brauchitsch, in two memoranda.
119
After a meeting between Blaskowitz and von Brauchitsch in January the
latter had two meetings with Himmler, on 24 January and 2 February, at
which, among other things, he raised these complaints, though without
trying to press Himmler too hard. During the second meeting Himmler was
conciliatory, admitted ‘mistakes’, and emphasized that he was concerned to
maintain good relations with the army.
120
Brauchitsch was satisfied with
this. Indeed, on 13 March he invited Himmler to give a speech to the senior
commanders in Koblenz. Himmler used the opportunity to play down the
reports of atrocities by the SS and, in addition, to indicate that he was doing
nothing without Hitler’s knowledge. Thus, his radical population policy
was covered by the authority of ‘the Fu
¨
hrer’.
121
In the end, the outrage
anewracialorder 461
within the officer corps at the crimes of the Waffen-SS in Poland fizzled out
without having made any impact, apart from the fact that in future the
military was much more reserved in its response to proposals from the SS
leadership to integrate SS command structures or agencies into the military
command structures.
At von Brauchitsch’s meeting with Himmler on 2 February, Himmler’s
‘Children’s Decree’, as the Commander-in-Chief politely described it, was
also the subject of discussion. This was the order of 28 October, which
within the Wehrmacht was known as the ‘Procreation Order’ (Zeugungsbe-
fehl), and which may well have caused more agitation than the crimes
committed by the SS in Poland.
122
On issuing this order Himmler had provided the following justification:
‘Every war is a bloodletting of the best blood. Many a military victory won
by a nation has been at the same time a crushing defeat for its vitality and its
blood.’ However, the ‘inevitable death of its best men, however sad, is not
the worst thing’ about it; it is rather ‘the non-existence of the children who
have not been produced by the living during the war and by the dead after
the war [ . . . ] He who knows that his clan, that all that he and his ancestors
have wanted and sought to achieve, will be continued through his children
can die in peace. The best gift to the widow of a fallen soldier is always the
child of the man she loved.’ And then Himmler came to the point: ‘Beyond
the limits of bourgeois laws and conventions, which are perhaps necessary in
other circumstances, it can, even outside marriage, be a noble task, under-
taken not frivolously but from deep moral seriousness, for German women
and girls of good blood to become mothers of the children of soldiers going
to war of whom fate alone knows whether they will return or die for
Germany.’
Thus Himmler had decided publicly to propagate the views on illegiti-
mate births that he had pursued above all during 1936–7. Although he had
addressed his order to procreate children ‘outside marriage’ to ‘the whole of
the police and SS’, in fact he spoke generally about ‘soldiers going to the
front’, and so it was also intended to be a general appeal to go beyond ‘the
bounds of bourgeois laws and habits’.
Apart from that, Himmler recalled in his order—referring once again not
only to the police and SS—the
sacred duty to become mothers and fathers. Let us never forget that the victory
gained by our swords and the blood shed by our soldiers would be pointless unless it
462 anewracialorder
were followed by the victory involved in the birth of children and the settlement of
our new land. During the last war many a soldier decided out of a sense of
responsibility to have no more children during the war so that his wife would
not be left in need and distress after his death. You SS men need not have such
concerns and anxieties.
123
In January 1940, however, Himmler felt it necessary to elucidate the
Procreation Order through a further order. His October order, which—
how could it be otherwise!—‘was conceived with decency and construed in
a decent sense and deals candidly with problems that can be anticipated in
the future’, had ‘led to misconceptions and misunderstandings on the part of
some people’. As far as this involved the question of illegitimate children,
Himmler commented briefly and succinctly: ‘this is not a matter for discus-
sion.’ However, the order had also been interpreted to mean that SS men
were being encouraged ‘to approach the wives of soldiers serving at the
front’, and Himmler emphatically denied this.
124
On 30 January he issued a
specific ban on members of the police and SS having sexual intercourse with
the wives of front-line soldiers. Himmler made it clear in the order that
breaches would be treated as disobeying a military order and punished
accordingly.
125
After the two meetings with von Brauchitsch in January and February
1940 Himmler also dealt with the murders in Poland and the controversial
Procreation Order in a speech to the Gauleiters and other high-ranking
party functionaries. Unlike the appearance before the senior commanders of
the Wehrmacht arranged with von Brauchitsch, here Himmler was basically
performing in front of his home crowd, and so did not have to adopt a
remorseful pose.
As far as the Procreation Order was concerned, Himmler noted that,
‘with a very few exceptions’, he ‘had been clearly and correctly understood’
by the party, but outside the party he had ‘largely’ met with ‘criticism and
opposition’. Himmler explained that he had issued the order because the
father of an SS man who had been killed had asked him whether his son had
left behind an illegitimate child. This enquiry had made him realize that, ‘in
our hypocritical age, for we are still socially hypocritical, it is necessary for a
chap to be dead and buried before his parents can be happy and suddenly
understand the age-old truth that it is important for a family to go on and for
its blood not to be lost’. In response he had ‘drafted this order and given it to
the Fu
¨
hrer, not—and I would ask you to appreciate this—because I wanted
to tell the world that the Fu
¨
hrer had approved it, but only in order to find
anewracialorder 463
out: does the Fu
¨
hrer agree with it or does he not? If he agrees with it then
the order will be issued. If there’s a negative response we shall have to deal
with it ourselves and not refer to the Fu
¨
hrer.’
After having covered his back by citing the highest authority, he then
gave them a lecture that was simultaneously grammatically confused and
condescending:
Gentlemen theoreticians, you fail to see that this increase in the number of males
born in the war years will bring nature back into balance by itself, but that this
equilibrium will not be produced in the cohorts of women now aged between 35
and 40, but in fact will be produced by war widows, though not all of them in the
legal sense of the word, but rather by women whose husbands or future husbands
have fallen and are not there, women who are still of child-bearing age. I reckon
that these amount to 100,000, it may be 2, 3, 4 or 500,000, indeed it may well be
half-a-million who have a problem in that their husband is dead.
In addition, ‘there is a huge silent burden which unfortunately continues to
weigh on our nation’ in the shape of homosexuality, a ‘lethal illness for a
nation’. While Himmler naturally assumed that the fight he had been waging
for years—he had previously estimated there were 2 million homosexuals—
had made a significant impact, ‘I think we must still reckon there are
half-a-million’ of them.
This problem, ‘that there are women here and no men for these women’,
cannot ‘simply be solved with moralizing words’. ‘I am opposed and I think
we are all opposed to this continuing social hypocrisy, to the fact that flirting
or, if you like, friendship, or a relationship are socially acceptable but an
illegitimate child is not socially acceptable and so the mother isn’t either.’
The attitude he was putting forward did not, he claimed, undermine
marriage; on the contrary, ‘marriages which produce many children form
the core of the nation’. Himmler devoted seventeen pages of his speech to
the controversial order, before moving on to his second topic. The point
was to ensure that ‘in the provinces which now belong to Germany [ . . . ]
the problem of the existence of a Polish minority is dealt with and elimi-
nated during our time’. And, in order to clarify matters, he emphasized:
‘I don’t want to be misunderstood: the Polish nationality and the Polish
people must both be dissolved.’
After commenting on the supposed percentage of Germanic blood in the
Slavs, he came to the point with a combination of half-hearted assertions of
his innocence and relatively subtle counter-attacks:
464 anewracialorder
Then there’s the question of alleged atrocities. It is of course quite possible that
in the east a train gets frozen in and not only during evacuations and that
the people freeze to death. That’s possible. Unfortunately that’s happened to
Germans as w ell. You simply can’t do anything about it if you’re travelling from
Ło
´
dz
´
to Warsaw and the train gets stuck for hours on end. Then you can’t
blame the railways or anybody. That’s the fault of the climate there. It’s
regrettable for the Germans, it’s regrettable for the Poles, and, if you like, it’s
regrettable for the Jews as well, if anyone feels like being sorr y for them. But
it’s not intended and it can’t be helped. I think it’s wrong to make a big song
and dance about it.
Himmler continued:
Also, the fact that a lot had to be done on foot. Well, good God, I can’t help it.
I couldn’t help the fact that the Germans had to go on route marches either. So
my first concern is going to be for the Germans. If I can change things for them I
will certainly do so. And then, if I have the time and opportunity, I will happily
change things for the Poles and Jews as well. But that has the lowest priority. And
I think it’s wrong for people to get excited here in Berlin and to tell a lot of
stories about atrocities. I don’t deny at all—in fact, I’m well aware of it—that
here and there in the east excesses have occurred, shootings when people were
drunk, cases where people may well have deserved to be shot but shouldn’t have
been shot by someone who was drunk, where looting has occurred throughout
the east sometimes in a manner that I must say I didn’t believe possible. Done by
every conceivable agency and by every conceivable person in every conceivable
uniform. [ . . . ] When a case like that occurs, then one must calmly note it:—for
example, if I’ve been informed by a few Gauleiters that police sergeant so-and- so
has sent some parcels home, I’m very grateful for that. We shall note it and then
deal with the man.
126
In September 1940 Himmler referred once again to the murders in
Poland, this time in a speech to the commanders of the ‘Leibstandarte’ and
this time without attempting to describe the crimes as an accident. On the
contrary: internally, he openly admitted the murders when he reminded
people that in Poland, in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, ‘we had to
cart off tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. We had to be
tough enough—you’re going to listen to this and then immediately forget
it again—to shoot thousands of leading Poles. We had to be tough
enough to cope with bringing in tens of thousands of Germans this winter
in –40˚ because otherwise we would later come to regret not having
done it.’
127
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A change in Himmler’s private life
If Himmler had simultaneously to defend his public support for illegitimate
births and the mass murders in Poland, this was not by chance. In both cases,
albeit in very different spheres, his ethnic policy had come up against what
were still widely accepted ethical boundaries and he had determined to
ignore them.
This was also true, as has already been indicated, of his private life. The
Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS took his own ‘Procreation Order’ to heart and planned to
have children outside his marriage. While he was not among those who
risked their lives at the front, his self-image as a soldier made it appear to him
as his duty to procreate during the war, even if in doing so he was forced to
break with convention.
At the beginning of 1936 Hedwig Potthast had become Himmler’s
private secretary,
128
responsible, among other things, for the distribution
of the Reichsfu
¨
hrer’s gifts as well as for his role as godfather.
129
She was 23
years old at the time and the daughter of a Cologne businessman. After
training as a secretary qualified in foreign languages she had got a job in
Koblenz, but in 1934 transferred to the Gestapa in Berlin. At some point
Himmler and Hedwig Potthast became intimate. At Christmas 1938, as she
told her sister three years later, they had confessed to each other that they
were hopelessly in love. During the next two years they had thought
carefully about whether there was any ‘decent’ way by which they could
be together—Himmler did not want a divorce, out of consideration for his
wife—until in the end they decided to have children within a sort of second
marriage.
130
Thus, Himmler probably decided to have children with Hedwig Potthast
in 1940, the year in which he publicly supported illegitimate births. The
letter also reveals that Himmler wanted to inform his wife of his extramarital
relationship only after children had been born. On 15 February 1942
Hedwig’s and Himmler’s son, Helge, was born in Hohenlychen, the sana-
torium headed by Himmler’s schoolfriend Gebhardt.
131
According to Hedwig Potthast’s own statement, she gave up her job as
Himmler’s secretary at the beginning of 1941. To begin with, Himmler sent
her to live in Bru
¨
ckenthin in Mecklenburg, very near to a manor house, the
home of Oswald Pohl and his second wife, Eleonore, who was a friend of
466 anewracialorder
hers.
132
In 1942 she moved to Berchtesgaden, where she gave birth to a
second child by Himmler on 20 July 1944, who was given the name
Nanette-Dorothea.
133
Unfortunately, we know hardly anything about the relationship between
Hedwig Potthast and Heinrich Himmler. In view of Himmler’s full diary
the couple cannot have seen much of each other, and they cannot possibly
have lived together. Presumably he did not reveal the secrets of his work, his
plans, and projects to her any more than he did to his wife, Margarete. One
cannot assume that because she had been his private secretary he let her in
on official secrets.
On the outbreak of war Margarete had looked for a task in which she
could engage. As a trained nurse she began work in a Red Cross hospital,
134
but soon experienced friction and problems with the doctors.
135
At the
beginning of December 1939 the Red Cross appointed her supervisor of its
Ill. 20. After his relationship with his wife deteriorated Himmler tried to develop a
close and loving relationsh ip with his daughter Gudrun. He kept in clos e touch
with Gudrun and during the war kept her regularly informed about his daily life.
From time to time she was allowed to acc ompany him on official trips (here
together with the chief of Himmler’s personal staff, Karl Wolff).
anewracialorder 467
hospitals in Military District III, Berlin–Brandenburg, which were mainly
involved in treating transports of wounded soldiers;
136
‘my train stations’, as
she proudly called them.
137
This responsible task also involved trips to the occupied territories,
where, as usual, she commented on the land and its people. For example,
in March 1940 she noted on a journey to Poland: ‘Then I was in Posen,
Ło
´
dz
´
, and Warsaw. This Jewish rabble, Polacks, most of them don’t look
like human beings and the dirt is indescribable. It’s an incredible job trying
to create order there.’
138
‘These Polish types’, she wrote in the same month,
‘don’t die so easily from infectious diseases, are emune [sic]. Almost incom-
prehensible.’
139
In April 1941, on a visit to inspect Red Cross establishments
in Alsace, she proved how sharp her racial antennae were: ‘Very poor
population. Sloping foreheads.’
140
Margarete found out about Heinrich’s new liaison at the latest by
February 1941. She felt humiliated and bitter.
141
When an acquaintance
divorced her husband because he had made another woman pregnant, she
commented in her diary: ‘Men think of doing that only when they’re rich
and successful. If not, their not-so-young wives have to feed them, help
them, or stick it out with them. What times we live in!’
142
However,
Heinrich Himmler regularly visited Gmund, where Margarete was now
living with their daughter Gudrun, in order to make sure everything was all
right. His meetings with Margarate must have been tense. Margarete, at any
rate, did not look forward to them: ‘Now Heini’s coming, there’ll be a lot of
trouble. One can’t look forward to anything. I will and must put up with it
all for the sake of my child.’
143
He too was more concerned about his
daughter during these visits. He telephoned Gudrun, whom he still called
Pu
¨
ppi, every second or third day;
144
both of them sent letters to each other
more or less every week,
145
and he sent her photos which documented his
life in his headquarters or on trips and which he provided with appropriate
captions.
146
They had a close and loving relationship, and after 1945
Gudrun Himmler tried as hard as possible to keep these memories alive,
refusing to distance herself from her father.
147
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17
Repression in the R eich
T
he Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt = RSHA),
established shortly after the outbreak of war, provided Himmler with a
central organization with which to subject Germany and the occupied
territories to a regime of repression and terror during the coming years.
The initial impetus for the creation of the Reich Security Main Office came
from Heydrich. From the beginning of 1939 Heydrich had been aiming to
complete the unification of the security police and SD within a new
organizational structure, and in particular to establish a distinct career path
for its members and to transfer the whole organization onto the books of the
Reich budget.
1
In February 1939 Heydrich instructed his colleague Walter Schellenberg
to produce a plan for a reorganization of the security police and the SD.
Schellenberg followed the principle that the security police should become
the state protection corps by ‘being absorbed into the SS’, ‘and not the other
way round’.
2
This was a pointed reference to the views of Werner Best, the
administrative chief of the Gestapo, whose aim was nothing less than to turn
the leadership of the SD into civil servants.
3
At the core of this dispute was the question of who would have control
over this organization designed for political repression and created through
a merger between the security police and the SD—lawyers or ‘political
fighters’—and during the following months this produced a major clash.
In view of Himmler’s well-known hostility to lawyers Best’s position had
little prospect of succeeding, and in 1940, partly as a consequence of this
conflict, Best left Heydrich’s sphere of operations. However, Heydrich and
Schellenberg failed in their attempt to create a structure that would preserve
the autonomy of the SD and secure the leadership of the SD/SS vis-a
`
-vis the
security police, at least in the form in which they envisaged it.
4