Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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Grenadier Divisions) to three SS general commandos yet to be formed,

which could be established only with massive support from the army.

The boundaries between army and Waffen-SS had therefore already been

almost completely obliterated when on 20 July Himmler gained control of a

substantial part of the army in the form of the Reserve Army. Having been

appointed Reich Minister of the Interior the previous year, he prepared to

unite in his own person this monopoly of power spanning the whole Reich

territory—a reinvention of the old idea of a state protection corps, though

one now operating under the conditions of war and of positively gigantic

proportions.

If his appointment is viewed in the context of a series of other important

shifts of responsibility it also becomes apparent that the failed assassination

provided an opportunity for a group of Nazi political leaders who for some

time had been demanding ‘total war’ to get their way. These men had

agreed amongst themselves and attempted to pressure Hitler in this direc-

tion. As has already been mentioned, Himmler must be counted as one of

this group, along with Goebbels, Bormann, and Speer. On 25 July Hitler

gave Goebbels authority and far-reaching powers to move to total war,

and empowered Bormann to execute all necessary measures to ‘bring about

a total war effort’ within the party and its structures. Bormann was to exploit

this responsibility, among other things, to extend Himmler’s monopoly of

power. According to a decree from the Fu

hrer of 20 September 1944, in the

event of enemy forces penetrating into Reich territory executive power in

the ﬁeld of operations was removed from the military commanders and

transferred to the so-called Reich defence commissars (the Gauleiters). It

was then Himmler’s task to ‘coordinate throughout the Reich’ the measures

to be taken in the ﬁeld of operations by the Reich defence commissars.

The ‘gang of four’, namely, Goebbels, Bormann, Himmler, and Speer,

therefore had the Nazi apparatus of power de facto in their hands to a

considerable extent, while at the same time being careful neither to question

Hitler’s leadership nor to take any steps openly against the ofﬁcial number

two in the state, Go

ring. They operated only within a sphere of activity

determined by Hitler and made no serious attempt to exceed these bound-

aries. None of the four, for example, took any initiative to convince the

others that the war could be ended only without Hitler; in each case their

link to the ‘Fu

hrer’, both personal and as part of the political power

structure, was too strong. Thus the powerful foursome moved towards

inevitable and total defeat.

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In the night of 20–1 July Himmler, in his new capacity as commander of the

Reserve Army, gave his ﬁrst instructions. He reversed the orders that had

been issued the previous day in Fromm’s name and began to ﬁll the top

posts in his new sphere of operations with reliable SS leaders. On 21 July he

appointed Hans Ju

ttner, director of the SS Leadership Main Ofﬁce, as his

deputy and Chief of Staff.

How Himmler saw his responsibility was something he revealed a few

days after his appointment, when he wrote to Fegelein, his liaison ofﬁcer in

Hitler’s headquarters, that ‘everyone who opened his mouth’ would have to

‘be shot ruthlessly’ by ‘detection commandos [ . . . ] composed of the most

brutal commanders’.

He gave his ﬁrst address to ofﬁcers from the army

armaments ofﬁce and the General Army Ofﬁce on 21 July. The coup had

occasioned ‘deep grief for us soldiers’, he announced, even though he could

by no means be sure about the grief of those present. As an antidote to the

spirit of revolt he advocated a return to the ‘genuine, ancient military

virtues’, and to illustrate his point invoked the familiar catalogue he had

been making the SS commit to for years. To the virtues of loyalty, obedi-

ence, comradeship, hard work, and truthfulness he added another, howev-

er: faith. ‘All your training, selection, and skill’, he impressed on the ofﬁcers,

‘has been in vain if it is not founded on unshakeable faith in the German

prerogative and German victory. I base this faith on the merits of our

Germanic faith and of our race. I am convinced that we are of greater

worth than the others.’

In the following days there were more speeches to ofﬁcers of army

divisions that were similarly constructed round the catalogue of virtues,

‘decency’ of course being one of them. No attentive listener could fail to

notice, however, that the ‘faith’ that Himmler conjured up in these speeches

was only supposed to conceal the fact that he could not come up with

anything to counter the increasingly hopeless situation of the Third Reich.

Yet on 3 August 1944, to the party’s Reich leaders and Gauleiters,

Himmler presented a completely different face. There was no more talk

of communal ‘grief ’. Instead, Himmler was settling scores with the military

leaders, ‘this clique’. Every undesirable development, crisis, and defeat

suffered by the German army since the end of the First World War was,

he claimed, the result of a conspiracy of reactionary and incompetent

General Staff ofﬁcers: from 1941 onwards ‘these staffers’ were increasingly

to blame ‘for the spread of defeatism from the top to the bottom of the

army’.

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At the beginning of August Hitler authorized Himmler, ‘for the purpose

of reducing staff to examine and simplify the entire organizational and

administrative basis of the army, the Waffen-SS, the police, and the OT

[Organisation Todt, the Wehrmacht’s construction group]’. By so doing he

was giving Himmler leave to intervene in the organization of the Army as a

whole.

Himmler delegated this task to Pohl, the Head of the Business and

Administrative Main Ofﬁce, though Pohl discovered that a special appoin-

tee in the shape of General Heinz Ziegler had only a few months previously

been given the job by Hitler of standardizing the Wehrmacht’s organiza-

tion. Pohl was therefore in favour of discretion, but Himmler let him know

that that he was ‘not interested’ in whether ‘General Ziegler is still there or

not’.

Two months later he expressly forbade Pohl ‘to make even the

slightest concession’ to the Wehrmacht High Command.

Soon this new task was beginning to have consequences: in November

1944 Himmler had the recruitment ofﬁces for army ofﬁcer candidates

merged with those of the Waffen-SS and incorporated into the SS adminis-

tration. The Waffen-SS was given a quota of 17.3 per cent of those potential

recruits called for examination in 1944 , and the Wehrmacht High Com-

mand ﬁnally conceded the right to the SS Main Ofﬁce to reserve 20 per cent

of those army volunteers born in 1927 and 1928. In addition, it became

accepted practice to use Wehrmacht soldiers to ﬁll up SS units.

Gottlob

Berger, Head of the SS Main Ofﬁce, wanted to go further and take control

of the entire process of deployment both in the military and in the civil

realm, but time ran out for that.

Prisoners of war were also Himmler’s responsibility as commander of the

Reserve Army, though he delegated this area to Berger.

Now that Soviet

POWs fell within his ﬁeld of responsibility the Reichsfu

hrer-SS was once

more confronted with an initiative that he had hitherto rejected vehe-

mently, namely, the recruitment of Soviet POWs as a separate auxiliary

force of the Wehrmacht. In his speech in Posen on 6 October the previous

year he had called General Vlasov, the main advocate of this idea among the

Russians, the ‘Russian swine’.

In July 1944 he nevertheless decided to

cooperate with Vlasov as a result of mediation on the part of Gunter

d’Alquen, the editor-in-chief of Das Schwarze Korps and commander of

the SS-Standarte for war reporting. That same month, after his ﬁrst contact

with Vlasov, Berger set up a ‘Russian operations centre’, the head of which

acted as Himmler’s liaison ofﬁcer with Vlasov.

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On 16 September Himmler received the Russian general personally for

talks.

At the very beginning of the interview Vlasov raised the matter of

Himmler’s theory of subhumans; the latter was evasive and immediately

declared himself willing to have the brochure entitled The Subhuman that he

had had circulated withdrawn (and indeed, Himmler did shortly after issue

an internal instruction for all propaganda against subhumans to be stopped).

Himmler and Vlasov agreed to establish a ‘Committee for the Liberation of

the Russian Nations’, and Himmler made Erhard Kroeger, former leader of

the ethnic German population in Latvia, who had been in command of an

Einsatzkommando in 1941, political appointee responsible for the Vlasov

initiative and put Gunter d’Alquen in charge of psychological warfare. He

then had himself photographed with Vlasov (see Ill. 30).

Vlasov, whose activities were supported by Ribbentrop and Goebbels,

was given the opportunity on 14 November 1944, in a ‘Prague Manifesto’,

of issuing a call to liberate his homeland.

Meanwhile Himmler cannily had

Vlasov’s troops established under the umbrella of the Wehrmacht, by

contrast with the Galician or Ukrainian SS volunteer units; he had not

revised his position so radically that he was willing to integrate them into his

Waffen-SS. In April 1945 Vlasov, who on 28 January 1945 was ofﬁcially

appointed supreme commander of the Russian forces, would have more

than 45,000 men at his disposal. As far as the course of the war was

concerned that was no longer of any signiﬁcance.

The fact that Himmler was now in control of the Wehrmacht penal

system

was indicated rapidly by a brutalization of military justice. Accord-

ing to the new commander of the Reserve Army, ‘the penal system will

without exception be placed directly in the service of the war’.

The

Wehrmacht’s judiciary took this information on board: between January

and May 1945 alone something like 4,000 death sentences were passed.

Drumhead courts martial handed out 6,000–7,000.

In the following months Himmler also saw to it that Wehrmacht arma-

ments were merged on the level of personnel and organization with the SS.

Thus the A4 rocket project seemed ﬁnally to have fallen into his hands. On

6 August 1944 he gave Kammler, the Head of department C in the Business

and Administration Main Ofﬁce, complete authority to ensure the ‘most

rapid’ deployment of the A4.

Kammler did as he was told,

and on 6

September the ﬁrst raid on London using the A4 (or V2, as it was also called)

took place. In all more than 3,000 V2s were to be launched, more than half

of which landed on the British capital.

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Himmler claimed to be convinced that the V rockets would bring about a

turn in the war. At the end of July he had declared in a speech to the ofﬁcer

corps of a new grenadier division: ‘I know that we still have crises and

shortages to get through. We should not forget, however that V1 and the

V2,V3, and V 4 to come are not a bluff [ . . . ].’ He had, he said, news from

London according to which the constant bombardment of the city in the

previous weeks with V1s (the ‘doodlebug’ ﬂying-bombs developed by

the Luftwaffe) had already led to 120,000 deaths, which ‘absolutely matches

the numbers of V1s we have sent over and for which I have precise ﬁgures.

For we know more or less what effect they have and thus we can work out

ourselves the numbers of dead.’

It remains Himmler’s secret how he could

claim to know the damage done by a weapon whose impact on southern

England could not be veriﬁed by the German side. At any rate, the ﬁgures

he gave were almost ﬁfty times larger than the actual number of victims.

The drive with which Himmler in his new capacity attempted to expand

his power in all directions did, however, meet with resistance. When, on 23

August, Goebbels suggested to Hitler that, as part of the measures to

promote total war, Himmler should be put in charge of all the district

headquarters of the Wehrmacht, Hitler’s reaction was negative: ‘But the

hrer fears that Himmler is so overloaded with work that it will get too

much for him and the same tragedy will befall him as befell Go

ring. He too

had so many ofﬁces that he lost track of them.’ Himmler’s work would have

to be ‘concentrated’. As Goebbels explained further, Himmler had ‘tried

once more to take charge of the entire A4 programme, which the Fu

hrer

had categorically rejected. To do this Himmler would have had to build up

a new apparatus without being in a position to dismantle the existing

apparatus. So nothing is going to change here.’

In the end, in January 1945 Himmler was forced to give up not only the

A4 programme but also armaments as a whole, having been put in charge of

them in the meantime as commander of the Reserve Army. Thus the

miracle weapon, the capabilities of which had been completely overesti-

mated, had been placed once and for all beyond his grasp.

Terror and mass murder to the end

The nearer the Third Reich came to its downfall, the more Himmler

stepped up the use of terror in the occupied territories. On 30 July 1944

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Hitler issued a secret order henceforth suspending completely any court-

martial proceedings against the indigenous populations of the occupied

territories. Instead, ‘terrorists and saboteurs’ caught in the act were to be

‘crushed on the spot’,

while those caught later were to be handed over to

the security police and SD. Himmler’s henchmen were now instructed to

take independent action against resistance groups, in other words, to pro-

nounce ‘administrative death sentences’. Thus, for example, in occupied

Norway at least sixty-eight people were shot without any legal process on

the orders of the Oslo security police and SD.

Similarly, in August 1944 the commander of the security police in the

Netherlands, Eberhard Scho

ngarth, had several hundred political prisoners

in Vught concentration camp shot without trial.

After an assassination

attempt on HSSPF Rauter in March 1945, which, though severely injured,

he survived, Scho

ngarth ordered the shooting of a further 250 people.

In Denmark too the military courts were suspended and security police

and SD boosted their anti-terror activities. In August alone eleven prisoners

were shot ‘while escaping’.

In September 1944 Himmler ordered that the

entire Danish police force be arrested, claiming they were supporting the

resistance and should therefore be deported en masse to Buchenwald.

Thereupon more than 2,000 Danish police were taken into custody in an

operation led by HSSPF Pancke and sent to Buchenwald concentration

camp.

The extensive destruction of Warsaw that followed the suppression of the

Polish uprising in August and September 1944 also seems to have been

Himmler’s work. At any rate, in a speech to commanding ofﬁcers of the

military districts and commanders in charge of training he boasted that he

had given the order to ‘raze Warsaw to the ground’. ‘Every block of

buildings must be burnt down and dynamited’, he claimed to have said in

his orders.

Above all, however, this terror campaign was directed at Jewish mino-

rities who had hitherto managed to escape deportation. In the summer of

1942 the Slovak government had increasingly dragged its feet with regard to

the deportation of Slovakian Jews. As a result Himmler took care that, after

the start of the uprising there and the country’s occupation by German

troops in August 1944, this persecution was again advanced with violent

measures. He appointed his head of the SS Main Ofﬁce, Gottlob Berger,

who up to that point had shone as a desk-bound perpetrator, as commander

of German troops in Slovakia, named Hermann Ho

ﬂe, who had played a

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key role in ‘Aktion Reinhardt’, as HSSPF, and put in place a commanding

ofﬁcer for the security police, even though the country was not formally

occupied but in fact still had the status of an ally. The latter had his own

Einsatzgruppe at his disposal, and it embarked on a campaign of persecution

of the Jewish community in Slovakia. In the face of opposition from the

Slovak government the SS got its way and deportations were resumed.

Between September 1944 and March 1945 eleven transports deported 8,000

people to Auschwitz, more than 2,700 to Sachsenhausen, and more than

1,600 to Theresienstadt.

As we have already seen, in July 1944 the Hungarian government had

ordered a stop to deportations. After Eichmann, acting on his own initiative,

had had more than 2,700 Jews sent to Auschwitz in the second half of July,

the Hungarian government ﬁnally gave way to strong German pressure and

agreed at the beginning of August to their resumption.

Shortly after,

however, under the inﬂuence of Romania’s defection from the Axis on 23

August, Horthy again withdrew this agreement,

and on 29 August express-

ly instructed the newly formed Hungarian government under Prime Minis-

ter Ge

za Lakatos to put a stop to the persecution of the Jews.

Surprisingly, however, Himmler himself had already issued an order on 24

August to cease further deportations from Hungary.

Sonderkommando

Eichmann left the country in September.

At ﬁrst sight, and in view of

stubborn attempts by the Germans in the previous months to set the deporta-

tions in motion, Himmler’s decision seems incomprehensible.

If, however,

it is assumed that from the perspective of the Nazi regime the deportations

represented an important means of pressurizing their Hungarian allies, as

accomplices in an unprecedented crime, into binding themselves for good

or ill to the Reich, then Himmler’s change of course becomes comprehensi-

ble. If in these circumstances he had insisted upon a resumption of the

deportations, there was the threat of a severe political crisis, the end of

the Horthy regime, and thus possibly the loss of the Hungarians as allies.

And the Germans had as yet no political alternative to offer.

In the middle of October the situation changed. In the wake of secret

negotiations with the Soviet Union Horthy had announced that Hungary

would withdraw from the war, and the Arrow Cross Party under Ferenc

Sza

lasi mounted a successful putsch with German support.

Again the SS

tried to resume the deportations, to implicate their new Hungarian partner

too in mass murder and so bind it irrevocably to the Greater Germanic

Reich.

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Nevertheless, the original intention to deport the Jews of Budapest to

Auschwitz was now out of the question. The transport situation was poor,

and in addition the gas chambers in Auschwitz had already been dismantled;

all traces of the annihilation process were supposed to be obliterated

promptly and completely before any possible advance by the Red Army

into Upper Silesia.

Eichmann, who had returned to Budapest directly after

the putsch, now reiterated the demand of April 1944 that 50,000 Jewish

workers be supplied to the Reich so that they could be used in the

underground production of armaments.

From the end of October on-

wards those affected were marched towards the Hungarian border.

As a

result of the high death-toll from these marches (deaths which were not

concealed behind camp fences but took place in full public view) Sza

lasi put

a stop to them on 21 November. Those Jews remaining in Budapest were

conﬁned to the ghetto. Most of them managed to survive until the capital

fell to the Red Army in February 1945.

From the middle of 1944 onwards Himmler had been making various

attempts to offer the Allies Jews who were in his power in exchange for

foreign currencies or materials important for the war, presumably with the

primary purpose of putting out feelers to probe the possibility of separate

peace negotiations with the western powers. We cannot be absolutely

certain whether he or Hitler would actually have been prepared to release

a large number of Jewish prisoners in exchange for some suitable trade-off,

or whether such negotiations were simply an excuse to establish contact

with the western Allies. Presumably from the outset Himmler’s negotiating

position was set to move in a number of possible directions: if the western

Allies were prepared to enter into such negotiations one could attempt ﬁrst

of all to bypass such ‘humanitarian’ issues and sound out the political

possibilities of ending the war. Secondly, these contacts could be exploited

to sow mistrust between the western Allies and the Soviet Union. Thirdly,

the United States and Great Britain could be ‘exposed’ as the puppets of

Jewish interests and the negotiations broken off.

Himmler’s idea of using the Jews as hostages with which to blackmail the

western powers was not new: he had recommended this strategy before the

so-called ‘Kristallnacht’ (‘Night of Broken Glass’), and the mass arrests of

Jews during this November 1938 pogrom—accompanied by simultaneous

international negotiations to improve the opportunities for emigration—

ﬁtted into this scenario. Holding Jews hostage in order to prevent the

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Americans from entering the war seems to have ﬁgured both in the

Madagascar plans of 1940 and in the commencement of the deportation of

German Jews in the autumn of 1941, and since 1942 the SS leadership had

repeatedly allowed individual prominent Jews to emigrate to a neutral

country in exchange for large amounts of foreign currency.

Himmler

had obtained Hitler’s express permission to do this in December 1942, and

in this connection had ordered that about 10,000 Jews should be held back

in a special camp as ‘valuable hostages’.

The ‘holding camp’ of Bergen-

Belsen was established in spring 1943 with this in mind.

And again in

1942, Dieter Wisliceny, Himmler’s adviser on Jewish matters in Slovakia,

accepted a large sum in dollars from Jews, though it is not clear whether the

halt called to deportations from Slovakia was actually related to this payment

or whether the SS had in any case notiﬁed the end of deportations from

Slovakia because German policy towards the Jews was meeting with in-

creasingly strong resistance from the Slovak government.

Whatever the case, when Wisliceny came to Budapest as part of the

Sonderkommando Eichmann, representatives of the Zionist Support and

Rescue Committee (Vaada) in Budapest contacted him in order to negotiate

the emigration of a large number of Hungarian Jews in exchange for foreign

currency or goods. The SS’s desire for 10,000 lorries soon emerged as the

key element in the talks. The Jewish side paid several large sums in dollars in

advance. Two emissaries from Vaada travelled to Istanbul to obtain assur-

ances from the Allies to support the envisaged agreement with Eichmann.

Should Himmler have had hopes of making indirect contact with the Allies

via Jewish representatives, these were quickly dashed. The British had the

two Vaada representatives arrested.

Finally, two concrete agreements were reached in Budapest between the

SS and Vaada. First of all, at the end of June 15,000 Hungarian Jews were

deported as forced labour to Austria instead of to Auschwitz, so that,

according to Eichmann’s assurances, they could be held in readiness for

further exchange negotiations. But this was not a concession of any kind on

the part of SS, for its intention was in any case to deploy Hungarian Jews as

forced labour in the Vienna area. In the second place, agreement was

reached to move 1,684 Hungarian Jews, also at the end of June, by

special transport to the holding camp of Bergen-Belsen. From there they

emigrated in two groups in August and December to Switzerland. The

material quid pro quo was negotiated by Kurt Becher, director of the

equipment staff at the HSSPF ofﬁce in Hungary, ﬁrst with Vaada

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representatives and then, from August 1944, also with the representative of

the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Switzerland, Saly

Mayer. Up to January 1945 there were further talks on Swiss soil between

representatives of the SS and Jewish organizations about feasible exchange

deals: Jews for goods or money or—according to Himmler’s instructions to

Becher at the end of 1944—for Romanian ethnic Germans who in the

meantime had been cut off behind the German–Soviet front. When, at the

end of November, a representative of the American War Refugee Board took

part in one of these Zurich meetings it was the ﬁrst time that Becher had had

contact with an American government ofﬁce. Yet if this raised in Himmler

the hope of being able to advance to possible peace explorations, he was again

disappointed, for in this respect the talks were completely fruitless.

In parallel with this, in October 1944 in Vienna and in January 1945 in

Wildbad in the Black Forest Himmler himself was conducting negotiations

with Jean-Marie Musy, the former President of the Swiss Confederation,

over the release of Jews. As a result, 1,200 people were allowed to travel

from Theresienstadt to Switzerland.

Himmler was to refer to these ex-

change projects in the ﬁnal phase of the war when making a last attempt to

establish contact with the Allies.

Thus Himmler was fully prepared to give up fairly small groups of Jewish

prisoners if thereby he could achieve concrete returns and had the chance of

establishing politically useful connections with the enemy. He also seems to

have been willing to pursue serious negotiations for the release of larger

groups of Jews if that would prolong the life of the Third Reich. Himmler

was too strongly focused on utilitarian considerations to support the maxim

of dragging as many ‘enemies’ as possible down to destruction with him.

Instead, human lives were ruthlessly used as bargaining-chips. If exchanging

them promised to bring advantages, he was as ready to take such a step as he

was to commit mass murder. Having acted in close consultation with Hitler

on the question of the exchange of Jewish prisoners at the end of 1942, what

is not clear is up to what point in time and with what particulars Himmler

kept Hitler informed about these negotiations. Although Himmler asserted

that Hitler had found out about the release of the 1,684 and 1,200 Jews only

after the event and had been highly indignant, this may have been a trick to

show himself in a better light to his negotiating partners.

Himmler’s idea of holding talks with the Allies about the exchange of

Jewish prisoners rested, however, on the assumption that he would retain

control over the prisoners up to the last possible moment. For this reason

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