Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life
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For I did not consider myself justified in exterminating the men—in other words,
killing them or having them killed—and then allowing their children to grow up to
wreak vengeance on our children and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to
be taken to make these people disappear from the face of the earth. For the
organization that had to carry out this duty it was the most difficult that we have
ever had to undertake.
258
Himmler’s aim in making these two speeches was clearly, by being
‘frank’, to confirm officially the widespread rumours and bits of information
that were going around about the true scope of the Jewish policy; in this
way his audience were to be turned into accomplices, complicit in the
unparalleled crime. To make quite sure, he had a list prepared specially of
those Gruppenfu
¨
hrer who were not present at his speech on 4 October
1943.
259
The fact that Himmler made this confession in October 1943 was not a
matter of chance. For at this point, in the aftermath of Italy’s breaking her
alliance with Germany and the consequent German occupation of Italy and
of Italian-occupied territory, Himmler initiated a further escalation of his
Europe-wide extermination policy. On 1 October, only a few days before
his speech, he had tried to get hold of the Danish Jews; but the majority of
his potential victims had already fled to Sweden.
Himmler became involved in the aftermath of Italy’s breaking of the Axis
alliance in various ways. On 19 July he had prophesied to Bormann and
Ribbentrop that Mussolini was about to fall, which then actually happened
on 25 July.
260
He had acquired his information from a German archaeolo-
gist working in Italy, and not, as he claimed, from ‘intelligence sources’—in
other words, the SD’s foreign department. His Waffen-SS took part in the
occupation of Italy in September in the shape of the ‘Leibstandarte’ division.
Originally, Hitler had ordered the deployment of the whole SS Panzer corps
with three divisions, but the situation on the eastern front made that
inadvisable.
261
The SD not only organized the kidnapping of Mussolini
from his imprisonment in the mountain hotel on the Gran Sasso, but a small
commando under the leadership of Otto Skorzeny, who was in charge of
Group S (Sabotage) in the SD’s foreign department, actually took part in the
action to free the Duce, which was carried out by German paratroopers.
262
German troops had hardly arrived in the country before Himmler had
organized an SS and police apparatus along the lines of those in the other
occupied territories. In the ‘Fu
¨
hrer’s Instruction Concerning the Appoint-
ment of a Plenipotentiary of the Greater German Reich in Italy and the
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Organization of Occupied Italian Territory’, provision was made for the
appointment of a ‘special police adviser to the Italian national govern-
ment’.
263
The post was filled by Karl Wolff, previous head of Himmler’s
personal staff, who simultaneously acted as HSSPF for Italy, later even as the
‘Highest SS and Police Leader’.
264
Wolff established a network of SSPF in
his area of responsibility. Mussolini, who was now head of a Fascist govern-
ment based in northern Italy, became merely a puppet of the Nazi regime.
As his ‘special police adviser’ Wolff supervised the contacts between the
Italian authorities and the German SS and police and controlled the estab-
lishment, armament, and deployment of Fascist combat units. From July
1944 onwards, as General Plenipotentiary, he was also responsible for
combating partisans behind the front line.
265
After the occupation of Italy Himmler also pursued the idea of getting his
SS to ‘collect’ members of the Fascist militia and party for later ‘forma-
tions’.
266
In October 1943 he wanted to begin by integrating two divisions
into the Waffen-SS.
267
But the project made little progress: at the end of
1944 only 5,000 men were ready for action in an Italian Waffen-SS division
instead of the 20,000 originally planned.
268
It was not only in Italy itself and the area hitherto occupied by Italy that Jews
became caught up in the extermination programme; the same thing hap-
pened in other countries where Jews had managed to survive up until then.
In the first place the RSHA was determined ruthlessly to deport the
around 33,000 Jews from those parts of Italy that were now controlled by
Germany.
269
In October Dannecker arrived in Rome at the head of a small
Einsatzkommando.
270
After a raid on 16 October he had more than a
thousand Jews deported from the Italian capital to Auschwitz; by the end
of the year, after further raids in other cities, the SS had managed to deport
nearly 1,400 people to Auschwitz. The RSHA, however, considered that
this way of proceeding had produced ‘no significant results’, for in the
meantime the vast majority of Jews living in Italy had managed to hide.
271
Therefore, at the beginning of December representatives of the Foreign
Ministry and the RSHA agreed to involve the Italian authorities in the
persecution and thereby make them complicit.
272
Since the Fascists could
in any case hold their own against a widespread resistance movement only
with the help of a terror regime, domestic political considerations no longer
played a part in German plans. At the beginning of 1944 Dannecker’s
mobile commando was replaced by a special Jewish department attached
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to the commander of the security police in Italy, which dealt with the
deportation of the Jews who had already been interned by the Italians.
During 1943–4 a total of 6,400 Jews were deported from Italy; the total of
those killed was 5,596, which meant that every sixth Jew who had been
living in Italy in 1943 was murdered.
273
Operating with a section of the ‘Einsatzkommando Reinhard’, Odilo
Globocnik, who came from Trieste and was one of those mainly responsible
for the extermination of the Polish Jews, wreaked havoc from September
1943 onwards among the Jews in the ‘Adriatic Coast zone of operations’,
the area round Trieste that had been incorporated into the territory of the
Greater German Reich. Himmler had appointed him HSSPF, and Globoc-
nik ensured that between December 1943 and February 1945 twenty-two
transports with more than 1,100 Jews left Trieste in the direction of
Auschwitz. Over 90 per cent of those deported were murdered.
274
In the former Italian occupation zones in Greece, Albania, and in the
Dodecanese (the group of islands in the eastern Aegean which had belonged
to Italy since 1912) around 16,000 Jews fell into the hands of the
Germans.
275
Between March and April 1944 the new occupiers deported
a total of 5,000 people from the Greek mainland alone.
276
Between May
and August 1944 around 3,800 members of the Jewish communities in the
Greek islands, mainly from Crete, Rhodes, and Corfu, were deported.
277
In Croatia, which up until September had also been under Italian occu-
pation, the majority of Jews, who in the meantime had been interned on the
island of Rab, managed to escape into the area controlled by the people’s
liberation army. The Gestapo caught a few hundred people and deported
them in the second half of March to Auschwitz.
278
On 8 September 1943 the Germans also moved into the zone previously
occupied by the Italians in southern France. Eichmann’s colleague Alois
Brunner, who had already organized the deportation of Jews from Vienna,
Berlin, and Saloniki, arrived hot-foot with his Sonderkommando.
279
With-
out French support, however, he was unable to deport more than a fraction
of the Jewish refugees, 1,800 people in all, to Drancy.
280
In the eyes of the
Germans the existence of the Italian occupation zone had hindered Jewish
persecution in the whole of France.
281
Now that it was gone, measures
could be drastically radicalized throughout French territory. From now on
all Jews living in France were to be deported to the east, irrespective of their
citizenship.
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In August 1943 the Gestapo had already begun to arrest more and more
Jews in France.
282
From December 1943 on it was being supported by the
French police in the provinces, since in the meantime the head of the Vichy
militia, Joseph Darnand, had replaced Rene
´
Bousquet as general secretary of
police, not least owing to pressure from Himmler.
283
However, it was only
after the reshuffle in the Vichy government had been concluded in March
1944
284
that the Germans could at last ignore French concerns about the
deportations. The new government was, in any case, so disliked by the
population that the country could now be controlled only by a terror regime.
On 14 April 1944 Brunner and Knochen, the commander of the security
police in France, ordered that all Jews should be arrested, irrespective of
their citizenship. In the four months until the fall of Vichy in August 1944
more than 6,000 people were deported.
285
In all, the occupying authorities
had deported a total of almost 76,000 Jews from France to the extermination
camps and killed a further 4,000 in other ways. Himmler’s SS men had
murdered every fourth Jew living in the country, including around 24,000
French citizens.
286
In October 1943, as previously mentioned, the RSHA also wanted to
deport the small Jewish minority in Denmark. The Reich plenipotentiary
appointed in November 1942, Werner Best, former administrative chief of
the Gestapo, had prompted the ‘action’ in order to bring about a funda-
mental change in German occupation policy, which had hitherto been
relatively restrained. However, fearing failure as he lacked sufficient police,
he allowed the date of the planned deportation to leak out, and so the great
majority of the around 7,000 Jews living in Denmark were able to escape.
287
The Hungarian Jews were less fortunate. During 1943 the Nazi regime
put more and more pressure on the Hungarian government to persuade
them to deport the Jews living in Hungary.
288
As it became increasingly
clear that the Kallay government was not prepared to hand over the Jews to
the Germans,
289
the Nazi authorities decided to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish question’
without Kallay.
At the beginning of 1944 German–Hungarian relations increasingly
deteriorated. It was clear that Hungary too wanted to leave the alliance
with Germany. In March 1944, therefore, German troops occupied the
country. Prime Minister Kallay was replaced by the man who had hitherto
been head of the Hungarian mission in Berlin, Do
¨
me Szto
´
jay. Hitler
appointed SS-Brigadefu
¨
hrer Edmund Veesenmayer to be the new envoy
and plenipotentiary of the Greater German Reich in Hungary, and Himmler
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established an SS organization there. This created the political and technical
preconditions for the deportations.
290
Under the pretext of labour deployment from now on the SS organized
the comprehensive deportation and extermination of the Hungarian Jews.
Prompted by Veesenmayer, as early as April the Szto
´
jay government was
offering the Reich 50,000 Jews for armaments projects, with the promise of
another 50,000 to follow.
291
The system of concentration and deportation developed over the years by
Himmler’s persecution machine was instituted and operated to perfection
with the active support of the Hungarian authorities. During March and
April the Germans had the Hungarian government introduce a compre-
hensive set of anti-Jewish legislation.
292
A Jewish council was established,
initially for the capital and then for the whole country, in accordance with
instructions from the RSHA Sonderkommando which had been sent to
Budapest and was led by Eichmann in person.
293
The country was divided
into zones, and later it took only a matter of days to clear the Jews from each
zone; they were then sent to Auschwitz zone by zone.
294
The first trains began rolling at the end of April. At the beginning of May
the tempo of the deportations was speeded up considerably. From 14 May
onwards as a rule four transports left the country every day, each carrying
3,000 Jews. By the beginning of July a total of 437,000 people had been
deported from the five zones. When, at the beginning of July, the deporta-
tions from the last zone, Budapest, were scheduled to begin
295
Szto
´
jaj
informed Veesenmayer that, in response to world-wide protests,
296
the
Reich Governor, Horthy, had ordered a halt to the deportations.
297
To
begin with, Himmler was powerless in the face of this decision: if he had
demanded the immediate resumption of the deportations he would have
risked Germany losing another ally. The opportunity to continue the
deportations was only to occur under changed domestic political circum-
stances.
Against the background of the continuing deportations from Hungary,
and in the course of a programme of ‘ideological-political indoctrination’
lasting several months, Himmler now frequently referred openly to the
murder of the European Jews in front of Wehrmacht generals and declared
his belief in the need for the genocide. By means of a whole series of
speeches the Reichsfu
¨
hrer wanted to make it clear to senior officers,
among whom rumours and bits of information about the Holocaust had
been circulating for years, that, in the event of a military defeat, they would
694 a new opportunity?
not be able to pretend they were unaware of the fact that the murder of the
European Jews was one of the regime’s war aims.
‘The Jewish question has in general been solved in Germany and in the
countries occupied by Germany’, Himmler declared to Army officers on 5
May. ‘It was solved uncompromisingly, as was appropriate in view of the
struggle in which we are engaged for the life of our nation, for the survival
of our blood [ . . . ] You may appreciate how difficult it was for me to carry
out this military order that I was given, that I have followed and carried out
for the sake of obedience and with complete conviction.’ Once again
Himmler referred to the murder of women and children:
In this conflict with Asia we must get used to condemning to the past the rules and
customs of past European wars which we have grown fond of and which are more
natural for us. In my view, despite all our heartfelt sympathy, as Germans we must
not permit hate-filled avengers to grow up, with the result that our children and
grandchildren will then be obliged to confront them because we, the fathers and
grandfathers, were too weak and too cowardly and left it to them to deal with.
298
A few weeks later, on 24 May 1944 he informed the generals:
The Jewish question was [ ...] solved ruthlessly in accordanc e with orders and a
rational assessment of the situation. I believe, gentlemen, that you know me well
enough to know that I am not a bloodthirsty person or a man who enjoys or takes
pleasure in having to do something harsh. On the other hand, I have sufficiently
strong nerves and a sufficiently strong sense of duty—I think I can claim that for
myself—that if I consi der something to be necessary then I will carry it out
uncompromisingly. I did not consider myself justified—I’m referring here to the
Jewish women and children—in allowing avengers to grow up in the shape of the
children who will then murder our fathers and grandchildren. I would have
considered that a cowardly thing to do. As a result the question was solved
uncompromisingly.
299
‘It was the most fearful task and the most fearful commission that could be
assigned to any organization: the commission to solve the Jewish question’,
he emphasized on 21 June in another speech. ‘I would like once again to say
a few frank words about it in this company: It’s good that we were tough
enough to exterminate the Jews in our area.’
300
He could not have
expressed it more bluntly. He had now made sure that the Army knew
about it.
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26
Collapse
T
he failed attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944 made it possible for
Himmler to accumulate an unprecedented range of powers. He was to
succeed for a final time in redefining his and the SS’s role within the Nazi
state, namely, as the guarantor of internal security and embodiment of
executive power in its entirety.
1
Again Hitler enabled him to do this by authorizing individual actions in
the weeks and months following 20 July. Himmler’s reputation had clearly
not been damaged by his failure either to expose the extensive preparations
for the coup or to prevent the attempt on his Fu
¨
hrer’s life. Obviously
the (overwhelmingly conservative) opponents of the regime and resistance
groups had not managed to keep the Gestapo completely in the dark about
their various deliberations and activities, and some members of these circles
had already been arrested in the months running up to the assassination
attempt.
2
But in July 1944 Himmler’s henchmen were not remotely close to
uncovering the actual coup.
3
On 21 July he therefore spoke to his officers in terms that were as
grandiose as they were vague about what was known before the assassina-
tion attempt: ‘As an old Nazi [ . . . ]—and let’s be open and German about
this with each other—I have always been expecting something to come
from these circles. And as Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS, with all the information sources
at my disposal and with my instinct for political developments, I was in a
position to anticipate for a very long time some initiative from reactionary
elements on the political spectrum. I knew it would come some time or
other.’
4
On 3 August 1944 he was similarly vague when addressing the party’s
Reich leaders and Gauleiters: ‘We had been [ . . . ] on the trail, shall we say,
of all these reactionary conspiracies for a long time.’ In this connection he
named, among others, Johannes Popitz, Franz Halder, and Erich Fellgiebel
as suspects even before 20 July; while making the most derogatory remarks
about those conspirators who had meanwhile been exposed, he avoided any
comment about the extent to which he had been aware of concrete pre-
parations for the coup.
5
After 20 July Himmler became very active in order to compensate in
retrospect for his own failure. During the night of 20–1 July Otto Skorzeny,
celebrated in propaganda as the man who freed Mussolini, advanced on the
Bendler block with an SS company in order to occupy the building where
the headquarters of the Reserve Army (Ersatzheer) and of the conspirators
were located and begin questioning the officers who were already there or
who had been ordered to report there.
6
On 21 July the 20 July Special Commission was created in Office IV, the
Gestapo headquarters, of the Reich Security Main Office, and was com-
posed of up to about 400 staff organized into eleven groups. In the following
days 600–700 arrests were made and the commission succeeded in establish-
ing relatively quickly the detailed sequence of events of the attempted coup:
Kaltenbrunner, head of the RHSA, gave Himmler a daily report on the
progress of the investigation. Nevertheless, the Gestapo remained ignorant
of the actual extent of the conspiracy.
7
On 30 July Himmler discussed with Hitler how to proceed against the
perpetrators. Himmler noted: ‘1. Judicial process. 2. Stauffenberg family. 3.
Members of the Seydlitz family.’
8
In addition to the planned conviction of
the conspirators and their accomplices by the People’s Court, these headings
indicate that ‘clan custody’ (Sippenhaft) was to be applied to the family of the
attempted assassin, Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, and to that of General
Walther von Seydlitz, chair of the ‘League of German Officers’ founded by
German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union.
9
Above and beyond the Stauffenberg and Seydlitz families, the Gestapo
took more than 140 family members into custody in July and August.
10
On
25 October Kaltenbrunner let Bormann know that Himmler had refused ‘to
establish specific guidelines regarding clan custody. The whole of Count
Stauffenberg’s family must be taken into custody. Otherwise every case
must be examined individually.’
11
On 21 November Mu
¨
ller gave instruc-
tions on how to proceed with clan custody: thereafter Himmler intended to
decide personally whether this form of internment was to be imposed.
12
The regime was to make use of clan custody up to the end of the war. In
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April 1945 200 people in this category were still interned in Dachau
concentration camp, to which they had eventually been moved.
In addition, Himmler exploited the attempted coup to justify a new wave
of mass arrests. He obtained Hitler’s permission to do so on 14 August 1944,
as he noted in his calendar: ‘Arrests of S.P.D. and K.P.D. bigwigs.’ At the
same time he recorded: ‘Tha
¨
lmann is to be executed.’ Four days later the
former head of the KPD, who had been in a concentration camp since 1933,
was in fact murdered.
13
The arrest of the ‘bigwigs’ extended to all former KPD and SPD mem-
bers of the Reichstag and regional assemblies and town councillors through-
out the Reich. In this ‘Operation Thunderstorm’, as Mu
¨
ller, the Gestapo
chief, made clear in instructions to the regional offices, it was ‘irrelevant
[ . . . ] whether there is any evidence against them at this point’. Even
‘former SPD party and union secretaries’ were to be included in the
operation, which was to be carried out in the early hours of 22 August.
The day before, Mu
¨
ller, again on Himmler’s orders, gave instructions for
former elected representatives belonging to the Catholic Centre Party also
to be arrested, among them the former mayor of Cologne, Konrad Ade-
nauer. Far in excess of 5,000 people were targeted, the majority of whom
were, however, released after two to four weeks. The whole operation was
evidently designed to intimidate overwhelmingly any actual or potential
opponents.
14
The Gestapo did, however, see to it that opponents of the regime in their
custody, either prominent ones or those the Gestapo considered the most
dangerous, did not survive the war. In April 1945 an official in military
intelligence, Hans von Dohnanyi, former head of military intelligence
Wilhelm Canaris, his deputy Hans Oster, the military judge Karl Sack, the
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Georg Elser, who had attempted to
assassinate Hitler, were murdered in concentration camps.
15
Himmler assumes command of the Reserve Army
The campaign of retribution against the 20 July plotters and all other
opponents was, however, only one of the consequences of the failed
coup. On the very day of the assassination attempt Hitler appointed Himm-
ler chief of the Reserve Army in succession to Colonel-General Friedrich
Fromm, Stauffenberg’s immediate superior, who had been aware of the
698 collapse
conspiracy. Thus Himmler acquired one of the most important posts within
the army: the range of his responsibilities covered, among other things,
military equipment, law-enforcement throughout the army, prisoners of
war, reserve personnel, and training, in other words, all army training
establishments. In fact, in the summer of 1944 the Reserve Army consisted
of almost 2 million men. Although this appointment was made as an
immediate response to the coup attempt and was intended to humiliate
and punish the military, from whose ranks the conspirators came, it was not
a complete surprise. For on 15 July, five days before the coup, Himmler had
decisively invaded Fromm’s sphere of influence, something that, inciden-
tally, may well have contributed to Fromm’s final realization that a coup was
unavoidable if the army were not to be at the mercy of the SS in the short or
long term.
On 15 July Hitler had transferred to Himmler the responsibility in future
for ‘training, National Socialist indoctrination, disciplinary penal codes, and
courts martial’ in the case of fifteen planned new army divisions—a signifi-
cant encroachment by the Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS on the army and one that gave
rise to the expectation that in future Himmler would be put entirely in
charge of the creation of new Waffen-SS units. For Himmler, this extension
of his powers and the prospects arising from it were of decisive strategic
importance, for they provided the means of overcoming the shortage of
personnel that threatened the SS in 1944; for the recruitment quota con-
ceded to it by the army was no longer adequate to cover the SS members
required to replace German Waffen-SS casualties. And a further aspect is
important: there was a subtle connection between this task of Himmler’s to
establish new army divisions and ‘train’ them as National Socialists and his
addresses to the generals in May and June, in which he had openly admitted
the murder of the Jews. By this means the army was being told in no
uncertain terms that it was now an instrument of the political and ideologi-
cal objectives of the regime, and shared responsibility for the criminal
consequences of the latter’s policies.
On the afternoon of 15 July Himmler spoke with Fromm, who only a
few hours beforehand had been curtly informed by Hitler in the Fu
¨
hrer
headquarters of the new arrangement. In this interview Fromm, who had
been steamrollered by events, subordinated the new divisions to Himmler
‘with regard to their deployment’, allowed him to have a say about who
should fill the officer posts, and agreed to the subordination of the planned
divisions (which after 20 July were to be given the martial name of National
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