Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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of February 1944: the Germanic corps was intended to form the cadre

for recruitment and training in the event of ‘having to introduce legal

conscription in the Germanic countries later, which will undoubtedly

be necessary’.

190

In September 1943 Himmler asserted that Hitler had

approved this view in principle, and was of the opinion that the formation

of the Wehrmacht in Germanic countries should take place under the

control of the SS’.

191

If one takes into account Himmler’s successful compulsory recruitment

of ethnic Germans living outside Germany and bears in mind the fact that,

from 1943 onwards, he concentrated on recruiting ‘ethnic alien’ units to

serve within the framework of the SS, it becomes clear how he envisaged

the armed forces of a future Germanic empire. Alongside the Wehrmacht

there would be a Waffen-SS whose elite troops would comprise Reich

Germans, ethnic Germans, Dutch, Flemings, Danes, Norwegians, and, if

necessary, troops from other countries classiﬁed as ‘Germanic’. Around this

core would be grouped units whose ‘ethnic alien’ members would not be

seen as being SS-worthy, but (and this is clear from the recruitment attempts

during the last phase of the regime) could come from almost every Europe-

an nation (with the exception of Poland), a kind of gigantic foreign legion,

whose members would serve in separate ‘national’ units.

In his speech to the Gau and Reich leaders in Posen on 3 August 1944

Himmler mentioned his aim of forming thirty SS ‘European divisions’ in

the post-war period. Effectively this represented the future peacetime

strength of a European SS, which could then be expanded in the event of

war. Together with its purely German troops, the Waffen-SS would have

reached a sufﬁcient size to make it a second autonomous land-based military

force alongside the Army.

192

(Himmler’s ambitions seem to have gone

beyond the creation of a land-based army. In 1944 he reached agreement

with the Navy to establish a ‘Germanic Naval Reserve Section’, which was

based in Sennheim in Alsace—in other words, a safe distance from the sea—

and was being prepared for deployment with the Navy.)

193

Viewing Himmler’s efforts at recruitment during the last years of the war

from this perspective, it is clear that what at ﬁrst sight appears to be a hectic

and desperate cobbling together of the last and least militarily effective

reserves represented from Himmler’s point of view a logical and integral

part of his Greater Germanic vision.

680 a new opportunity?

Himmler as Reich Minister of the Interior

On 10 August 1943 Hitler appointed Himmler Reich Minister of the

Interior.

194

At this point he was of the opinion, as he informed Goebbels,

that the Reichsfu

hrer was ‘a quite exceptional ﬁgure in our regime’.

195

The

previous incumbent, Dr Wilhelm Frick, who had held the post since 1933,

was fobbed off with the purely representative ofﬁce of Reich Protector in

Bohemia and Moravia.

196

Hitler did not expect that in his new role Himmler would carry out

structural changes to the state machine or fundamentally alter the relation-

ship between party and state. Rather, his appointment was intended to

strengthen further his reputation as the man primarily responsible for the

‘security’ of the Third Reich and to round off his area of responsibilities.

‘Himmler is undoubtedly the right man to control domestic policy’, Goeb-

bels noted in his diary. ‘At any rate, he will guarantee our internal security

under all circumstances.’

197

Nevertheless, Himmler’s assumption of his ofﬁce on 26 August was

followed by a number of changes within the ministry. Himmler reorganized

it into two areas of activity: he placed the departments for the constitution

and administration, civil defence, personnel, and local government in the

section ‘Internal Administration’ under state secretary Wilhelm Stuckart,

and assigned the other section, health administration, to state secretary Dr

Leonardo Conti.

198

He transferred the tasks of the ministry’s department IV, to which were

subordinated the existing institutes for Ethnic Research, and Research into

Foreign Countries and Peoples, to the SD’s foreign department in the

RSHA. In this way Himmler had not only taken a step towards ensuring

that these institutions could be utilized for foreign espionage; in addition he

had brought such important institutions as the Ethnic German Working

Groups, the German Foreign Institute, and the Wannsee Institute, which

was responsible for research on Russia, under his control, thereby acquiring

Nazi research capabilities in the ﬁelds of ethnicity and foreign countries that

he could utilize for his long-range plan for ‘living-space’.

199

Himmler, who visited the Interior Ministry only two or three times

during the period of his incumbency, controlled it from his ﬁeld headquar-

ters, where his long-term assistant Rudolf Brandt acted as head of the

a new opp ortunity ? 681

ministerial ofﬁce. In fact, the Interior Ministry under Himmler as minister

operated to a large extent independently under state secretary Stuckart.

200

Himmler kept his distance from the Ministry, not only on account of his

numerous other tasks but also because of his distrust of the state bureaucracy

and his general dislike of lawyers and ofﬁcials. As Interior Minister he

continually inveighed against bureaucratic formalism and schematic ap-

proaches. For example, in order to break through the anonymity of admin-

istrative documents he often demanded that the ofﬁcial dealing with the

issue should sign the correspondence personally.

201

He supported the idea

that county administrators (Landra

te) should hold their posts for a maximum

of ten years only, which resulted in a lengthy dispute with Bormann.

202

considered it necessary to make frequent ostentatious statements that in

future he would be relentless in rooting out corruption in the administra-

tion,

203

and he signed an edict restricting the employment of close relatives

in the same government body, which, given the actual situation in small

local authorities, was singularly naive.

204

Himmler admonished his ofﬁcials to treat citizens in a way ‘that is worthy of

a German Teuton person’. In the event of such admonitions having no effect,

in a speech to the mayors of large cities he advised them: ‘you should try

treating these gentlemen ofﬁcials in the same offensive way as they treat the

nation.’ Himmler had found a new task: ‘We shall jolly well teach these people,

and anyone who doesn’t get the message will one day get the boot.’

205

The new minister placed a particular emphasis on ‘strengthening self-

administration’

as he put it.

206

The reason why he was particularly

concerned with rearranging the responsibilities of mayors and county ad-

ministrators was that, as part of the wartime rationalization of the adminis-

tration, from 1943 onwards attempts had been made to delegate

administrative tasks to the lowest level. The Party Chancellery had been a

particular advocate of this because, by transferring responsibilities to a new

middle-tier authority between the Reich and county levels (an enhanced

Gau) as well as by strengthening the municipalities vis-a

-vis the directly

state-controlled counties, it was aiming to increase the authority of the party

at the expense of the state bureaucracy. Gauleiters were to be given more

independence from ministerial bureaucracy and Nazi mayors from county

administrators.

* Translators’ note: Self-administration (Selbstverwaltung ) is the technical term referring to the rights

and partial autonomy of local government vis-a

-vis the state supervisory authorities.

682 a new opportunity?

While Frick had always opposed this policy of Bormann’s, Himmler was

more sympathetic to such ideas. When in the coming months he advocated

‘strengthening self-administration’ his main ulterior motive was, in close

alliance with Bormann, to weaken the state administration in favour of the

party. They had both discussed the future policy of the Interior Ministry a

few days before Himmler’s appointment.

207

Himmler’s inimitable personal contribution to this attempt at a structural

shift in power was the way in which he tried—with references to the

‘Germanic tradition of cooperation’, to Henry I as a founder of cities, or

to the historic role of ‘German mayors as supporters of the tradition of the

Reich’—to provide these administrative changes with an ideological

gloss.

208

But in the ﬁnal analysis little came of it.

209

It is true that Himmler was able to achieve limited successes at regional

level with his attempts at meeting the wishes of the party through adminis-

trative restructuring. For example, he secured Fu

hrer edicts to divide up the

Prussian provinces of Saxony and Hesse-Nassau into a total of four new

provinces, as well as for the reorganization of the Lower Weser area, thereby

serving the needs of the Gauleiters affected by these changes.

210

However,

he rejected Bormann’s attempt to close district governors’ ofﬁces (Regie-

rungspra

sidien), thereby strengthening Lammers’s and Stuckart’s position,

which was vital for maintaining the authority of the state vis-a

-vis the

ambitions of the Gauleiters.

211

These examples show the extent to which

Himmler became involved in the details of the power struggle between

party and state without being in a position to develop a uniform political

line and get it implemented.

This inability became evident to all those involved at a series of big

meetings at which Himmler tried to give the ofﬁce heads the impression

that, with his appointment as Reich Minister of the Interior, a fresh wind

was blowing though its dusty ofﬁces. Whether at the ‘Assembly’ of the

government of the General Government in Cracow on 18 November

1943,

212

or at the conference of all the district governors on 10–11 January

1944 in Breslau,

213

or at the meeting of mayors of large cities (Oberbu

germeister) and Landeshauptma

nner* on 12 and 13 February in Posen

214

—

at all of them the pressing problems with which the administration saw itself

* Translators’ note: The Landeshauptma

nner were the highest-ranking Prussian ofﬁcials, who had

traditionally been elected by the provincial assemblies and were responsible for matters that

were ‘self-administered’ by the provinces.

a new opp ortunity ? 683

confronted during the war (shortage of personnel, the consequences of the

air war, and so on) came under discussion. But Himmler invariably limited

himself to generalities; he had no solutions to offer.

215

Despite his limited success, however, through his promotion to Reich

Interior Minister Himmler joined the leadership group of Goebbels, Bor-

mann, and Speer, which was pressing for German society to be forced to

adjust to the requirements of ‘total war’. Goebbels, in particular, repeatedly

noted the ‘absolute agreement of our views’

216

and praised Himmler’s

policy.

217

However, he did not want Himmler to take over any more

responsibilities: ‘Himmler has already got too much to do and cannot do

most of it by himself ’, as he observed in his diary.

218

Goebbels also carefully noted that Bormann, who since his appointment

as head of the Party Chancellery had been considered one of Himmler’s

closest allies, now began increasingly to distance himself from him: ‘Bor-

mann has become a bit sceptical about Himmler because he is taking on too

many things. It’s not good if someone in the NS leadership gets too big; the

others must then make sure that he is brought back into line.’

219

Power-

political rivalry and common interests balanced one another among this

group. There also seem to have been tensions between Speer and Himmler.

In May 1944, at any rate, Goebbels advised Speer to resolve his differences

with Himmler and Bormann, for both ‘belong to our most active circle’.

220

In his role as Reich Minister of the Interior Himmler found himself faced

with a fundamental conﬂict of interest: For political-ideological reasons he

supported the policy, developed above all by Bormann, of replacing state

administration by Nazi ‘leadership’ (Menschenfu

hrung). As Interior Minister

in time of war, however, he had to be concerned to maintain traditional

administrative structures. And if he actually tried to introduce changes to

the administrative structure of the state he would be accused of being

hungry for power. Himmler ‘solved’ this complicated situation by leaving

things unsettled.

The SS and armaments

As we have already seen, Himmler’s attempt to establish his own armaments

concern failed in September 1942 as a result of the SS’s lack of the relevant

skills, and of opposition from industry and from Speer. The majority of

the armaments projects that Himmler had wanted to carry out in the

684 a new opportunity?

concentration camps never materialized, or not nearly to the extent that had

been envisaged;

221

most SS plants, whether based inside or outside concen-

tration camps, did not transfer their production to armaments.

222

The only

plants to engage in full-scale armaments production were the German Earth

and Stone Works Company and the furniture factories based in the Protec-

torate.

223

When Himmler claimed, in a speech to the Gruppenfu

hrer in

October 1943: ‘We have armaments plants in the concentration camps’, this

was, to put it mildly, somewhat exaggerated.

224

Himmler, however, did not give up. But he now concentrated above all

on exotic projects. In autumn 1943 he promised Hitler ‘to meet the

Waffen-SS and police oil requirements by processing oil shale ourselves’,

and for this purpose in May 1944 founded the German Oil Shale Co. Ltd.

(Deutsche Schliefero

l GmbH). Ten oil-shale plants employing only con-

centration camp inmates were established in Wu

rttemberg. This was fol-

lowed in September 1944 by the establishment of the German Peat

Processing Co. Ltd. (Deutsche Torfverwertung GmbH) to collect peat to

produce motor-vehicle fuel.

225

Moreover, the Reichsfu

hrer could not stop thinking about the cultivation

of Kok-Sagys. From the beginning of 1942 onwards he had been hoping

that this rubber-containing plant, which was cultivated in eastern Europe,

could make a major contribution to the provision of rubber for the German

war economy.

226

When, during an interview with Hitler in February 1943,

Himmler pointed out the beneﬁts that wide-scale cultivation of this plant

would bring, the Fu

hrer immediately made him responsible for achieving

these production goals. In response to Himmler’s objection that he was only

marginally concerned with this question, Hitler replied, as the bafﬂed

Reichsfu

hrer noted at the time, that ‘he was not interested in organizational

matters and he was giving me responsibility for it!’

227

Himmler immediately

formed the organizations involved into a Kok-Sagys working group,

228

organized a Kok-Sagys conference,

229

and after Go

ring had appointed him

on 9 July ‘my special representative for all matters involving rubber

plants’,

230

created an ‘administrative ofﬁce’ to run the show.

231

An experi-

mental farm was also established in Auschwitz.

232

Although it quickly became clear that the plant could cover only a tiny

amount of Germany’s overall requirements for rubber (a maximum of 1.7

per cent),

233

Himmler made great efforts to secure an extensive area for its

cultivation. We have already referred in this chapter to the attempts made to

utilize areas in northern Ukraine and Russia-Centre ‘plagued by bandits’ for

a new opp ortunity ? 685

this purpose.

234

Himmler reckoned initially on using a total of 30,000

hectares in the annexed eastern territories for its cultivation, in the General

Government,

235

in the Ukraine, in Reich Commissariat Ostland, as well as

in France. In September 1943 Romania also became a target for the Kok-

Sagys planners as a potential area of cultivation.

236

After the occupation of

Hungary the SS sought another 10,000 hectares there to compensate for the

recent loss of territory in the east.

237

Himmler advised that they should focus

in particular on former Jewish landed property.

238

The more the occupied

territories had to be given up, the more the cultivation of Kok-Sagys had to

be concentrated in Reich territory, where in 1944 a total of 16,700 hectares

were provided, with 18,500 envisaged for 1945—land that was urgently

needed for planting with foodstuffs.

239

The practical results of the cultivation were catastrophically bad. At the

end of 1943 the person responsible for reporting from the west of Ukraine

noted ‘a complete failure’, since ‘95% of the acreage’ had ‘not produced

anything’.

240

In the Reich as well, in 1944 almost everywhere it was

reported that the harvest had failed.

241

In March 1944 the head of the

raw-materials and planning ofﬁce in the Armaments Ministry, Hans

Kehrl, advised Himmler in future to give up cultivating Kok-Sagys

completely.

242

Himmler replied sharply, and reminded Kehrl of his duty

of obedience: ‘I myself am not prepared to break with this tradition of

obedience, which I have regarded as sacred ever since I joined the move-

ment, in the interests of some sort of capitalist speculations.’ He considered

Kehrl’s objections to be a ‘typically narrow-minded big-capitalist attitude,

which obviously regards plant-sourced rubber as undesirable competition

for the IG Farben invention of Buna’.

243

But who was it, Himmler

continued, who had enabled IG Farben to construct a big Buna works in

Auschwitz? He, the Reichsfu

hrer! Himmler did not mention the total lack

of success of the Kok-Sagys enterprise; the whole thing had become purely

a matter of prestige. The plantations of the ‘Special Representative for all

Matters concerning Plant-sourced Rubber’ had not produced any signiﬁ-

cant yields by the end of the war.

As the SS failed to establish its own armaments concern, from autumn 1942

onwards the Business and Administration Main Ofﬁce shifted its focus

towards hiring out prisoners to armaments factories. The employment of

prisoners by the Oranienburg Heinkel works became a trial project in

which, in the end, almost 7,000 prisoners, who were accommodated in a

686 a new opportunity?

camp located directly next to the works, were employed. Numerous

industrial concerns followed this example.

244

By September 1942, through his agreement with Thierack concerning

the ‘handing over of asocial elements from the penal system to the Reichs-

hrer-SS for liquidation through work’, Himmler had attempted to ﬁll his

camps in order to satisfy the growing demand for prisoners as workers. His

order of 31 December to consign 35,000 additional prisoners to the con-

centration camps must be seen in the same context.

245

As a result of this

policy the number of prisoners in the camps doubled between September

1942 and April 1943, from 110,000 to 203,000.

246

It was, however, only

from autumn 1943 onwards that the really massive deployment of prisoners

occurred, as the number of forced workers recruited by Sauckel began

gradually to fall. Now the system of satellite camps, situated directly next

to industrial plants, began rapidly to expand.

Moreover, in summer 1943 it looked as if the SS would succeed after all

in moving beyond the hiring-out of prisoners and a modest amount of

production to becoming involved in a promising major armaments project,

namely, in the development and production of the so-called A4, the ﬁrst

ballistic missile.

Militarily, the A4 with its conventional warhead of 1,000 kilograms of

explosives, was of relatively little value; the much cheaper and technically

less advanced Luftwaffe competitor, the ﬂying bomb, Fi 103, could carry

almost the same amount of explosives. However, from a technical point of

view neither the Fi 103 nor the A4 represented a reply to the Allied bomber

ﬂeets, which in a single attack could drop thousands of tons of explosives

with increasing accuracy on their planned targets. It was presumably

Himmler’s penchant for exotic, utopian-type projects that made him so

enthusiastic about the Army’s idea for a rocket. Moreover, he was probably

also tempted by the thought that, with the help of prisoner labour, he would

at last be able to get hold of a major armaments project.

Himmler’s interest was aroused after Hitler had given his basic approval

to the A4 rocket programme in November 1942.On11 December he

attended a rocket trial launch at the Peenemu

nde testing ground; he was not

put off by the fact that the trial ended with the rocket exploding four

seconds after take-off. On the contrary, he supported the head of the

project’s attempt to gain an audience with Hitler, though without suc-

cess.

247

In March 1943 he had the military commander at Peenemu

nde

dismissed. There were doubts about his reliability because of his alleged

a new opp ortunity ? 687

links to the Catholic Church, and vague accusations were made, which later

turned out to be without foundation. Himmler installed a successor who

could be relied upon to toe the line.

248

This example shows how he was

prepared to use his police powers ruthlessly when bent on gaining an

advantage. On 28 June Himmler was received at Peenemu

nde by Wernher

von Braun wearing the uniform of an SS-Hauptsturmfu

hrer. The visit went

off satisfactorily: Himmler appointed von Braun Sturmbannfu

hrer and

backdated the promotion to the day of his visit.

249

In the meantime the A4 special committee of the Peenemu

nde test

facilities responsible for rocket production had decided to request KZ

inmates from the SS for the envisaged manufacture of the rockets, and

this was approved in June.

250

However, when a British air raid on Peene-

nde in August 1943 caused some damage, Himmler suggested to Hitler

that rocket production should be placed entirely in his hands. The A4

rocket was to be produced underground with the aid of KZ prisoners—

the SS had already agreed to a request from the A4 Armaments special

committee—and the development programme could be carried out at a

testing ground of the Waffen-SS in Poland. Hitler approved this proposal

and Himmler assigned the responsibility to Hans Kammler, the head of

Department C (Buildings) in the Business and Administration Main Ofﬁce.

A cave system near Nordhausen in Thuringia was selected as the production

site, the so-called Mittelwerk, where in autumn 1943 an autonomous

concentration camp was established named Mittelbau.

251

On 20 August

Speer and his deputy Karl-Otto Saur met the recently appointed Interior

Minister, Himmler, to discuss the details. The following day Himmler

summed up the main result of the meeting in a note to Speer: ‘I, as

Reichsfu

hrer-SS, [..] am taking over responsibility for the production of

the A4 equipment.’

252

This statement was, however, a little premature, for while Hitler had

ordered that Himmler should support Speer with this work, he by no means

wished to give him responsibility for the production process.

253

Himmler,

however, did not allow himself to be put off: in March 1944 von Braun and

two of his leading colleagues were arrested and imprisoned for several

weeks. They were accused of making comments in which, among other

things, they had criticized the conduct of the war and emphasized the

importance of civil space exploration.

254

Braun’s army superior managed,

however, to get the technical director freed, albeit only on a temporary

basis. According to von Braun, Himmler’s aim in doing this was to gain

688 a new opportunity?

control of the development work on the rocket, though he was to prove

unsuccessful.

255

In spring 1944, however, Himmler’s man Kammler became

heavily involved in the transfer of German aircraft production under-

ground; Mittelwerk became the model for this. On 4 March 1944 Go

ring

appointed Kammler his ‘Representative for Special Building Work’, where-

upon, supported by the SS and with the aid of KZ prisoners, he set about

transferring aircraft production underground in mines, tunnels, and so forth.

This meant that the SS had in fact at last managed to get a foothold in

Luftwaffe armaments production, but at a time when German planes could

no longer compete with those of the Allies.

256

The collapse of Italy and its consequences

On 4 October 1943 the SS-Gruppenfu

hrer gathered in Posen for one of

their regular meetings. Himmler gave a speech lasting several hours cover-

ing the political and military situation. In the process he came to talk about a

subject that he usually refrained from discussing in his speeches:

Today I am going to refer quite frankly to a very grave chapter. We can mention it

now among ourselves quite openly and yet we shall never talk about it in public.

I’m referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people.

Most of you will know what it is like to see 100 corpses lying side by side or 500 or

1,000 of them. To have coped with this and—except for cases of human weak-

ness—to have remained decent, that has made us tough. This is an unwritten—

never to be written—and yet glorious page in our history. For we know how

difﬁcult we would have made it for ourselves if, on top of the bombing raids, the

burdens and the deprivations of the war, we still had Jews today in every town as

secret saboteurs, as agitators and troublemakers.

257

Two days later the Gau and Reich leaders, the party elite, came to Posen.

Once again Himmler referred to the issue, ‘which for me has become the

most difﬁcult question I’ve had to face in my life, the Jewish question’.

Once again, to justify the genocide he emphasized ‘that we would not have

been able to withstand the burdens of the fourth and would not withstand

the ﬁfth and sixth years of war that are perhaps still to come, if we had still

had this corrupting plague in our national body’. Later on in his speech he

dealt speciﬁcally with the murder of women and children:

a new opp ortunity ? 689