Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

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sought permission from Hitler to make contact on the broadest basis with

the enemy powers, and Hitler had false information spread via Spain about a

Soviet offer to make a separate peace in order to lay the bait for the western

powers.

115

It is in this context that notes Himmler made in preparation for a

discussion with Hitler on 12 September should be viewed. There we read

the signiﬁcant words: ‘England or Russia’ and ‘Russia–Japan’.

116

A few years ago a short note by Churchill was discovered in the Public

Record Ofﬁce in London that may possibly be connected with these

soundings. This note, dated 31 August, reveals that the Secret Service had

passed to Churchill a series of documents, including a ‘Special Message from

Himmler’. It is impossible now to reconstruct the content of this message, as

Churchill had made the handwritten comment (which was an extremely

unusual occurrence) on the document: ‘Himmler telegram left and de-

stroyed by me.’

117

How such a telegram could have been conveyed emerges

from a letter from the Spanish Foreign Minister Ramo

n Serrano Su

er, who

at the beginning of 1944 had offered Himmler his good services should the

latter wish to make contact with Churchill. Himmler had the letter for-

warded to the German Foreign Ministry.

118

Whether he availed himself of

this or a similar offer in order to make an approach to Churchill or whether

the ‘Himmler telegram’ refers to something completely different is impos-

sible to establish.

119

Everything, however, points to the fact that he would

never have ventured such a step without the agreement of his ‘Fu

hrer’.

Only after Himmler had been in a position (as commander of the Reserve

Army, Commander-in-Chief of the Upper Rhine, Commander of the army

group Vistula, and as military head of the Volkssturm) to acquire an

impression of the true hopelessness of the military situation did he make a

series of attempts, albeit hesitatingly and indecisively to the last, to come to a

political agreement to end the war. The fact that Hitler, even in the ﬁnal

stages of the war, was not prepared to initiate serious moves to end it by

political means did, however, prove an obstacle to the realization of such

ideas of Himmler’s. Hitler was realistic enough to recognize that, with the

prospect of imminent victory, the Allies would no longer be interested in

such proposals, and he was as unwilling to resign as he was to surrender.

The Goebbels diaries indicate that from January 1945 onwards the

propaganda minister was in virtually continuous discussions with Hitler

about the possibility of making peace, but that in view of the constantly

deteriorating military situation Hitler saw such an initiative as bound to fail.

Instead, he at ﬁrst pinned his hopes on a split in the enemy coalition.

120

The

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(therefore purely theoretical) discussions between Goebbels and Hitler

during these months about the prospects for peace thus focused as a rule

on the western powers.

At the beginning of March, however, Goebbels was confronted with the

news that Hitler considered a separate peace to be a possibility, if at all, only

in the east: ‘The Fu

hrer is convinced that if any of the hostile powers were

to enter into talks with us, the Soviet Union would certainly be the ﬁrst.’

On the other hand, ‘the war against England’ was to be continued ‘with the

greatest vigour and ruthlessness’. Ribbentrop’s efforts ‘to put out feelers

towards the western countries’ were, therefore, ‘completely hopeless at the

moment’.

121

Two days after his discussions with Hitler, on 7 March, Goebbels had a

two-hour meeting with Himmler at the sanatorium at Hohenlychen.

Himmler, who had ‘suffered a bad angina attack’, looked ‘slightly battered’

to Goebbels. In the main the two were in complete agreement about ‘the

situation in general’: ‘He speaks of Go

ring and Ribbentrop in the most

critical terms, describing them as the two sources of error in our general

conduct of the war, and he is absolutely right.’ As Goebbels noted, Himmler

was ‘very worried’ about the situation at the front, but even more so about

food supplies. ‘The morale of the troops is without doubt affected. Himmler

admits this on the basis of the experience of the army group Vistula.’ But in

addition and above all, ‘neither in the military nor in the civilian sector do

we have strong leadership at the centre, because everything has to be put to

the Fu

hrer himself and yet that is feasible in only a very few cases. Go

ring

and Ribbentrop are obstacles at every turn to a successful conduct of the

war.’

What, therefore, should be done? It was, after all, impossible ‘to force

Hitler to break with the two of them’. This comment suggests that at this

meeting there may have been talk of using more forceful methods of

making Hitler adopt another political course, yet both were wary of taking

this idea further. According to Goebbels,

Himmler sums up the situation correctly in what he says. His reason tells him that

we have little hope of winning the war by military means, but his instinct tells him

that in the long run a political route will open up so that we can still turn the war in

our favour. Himmler sees this possibility more in the west than in the east. He

believes that England will come to its senses, though I am somewhat doubtful about

that. Himmler’s analysis shows he is focused completely on the west and expects

nothing from the east.

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Goebbels took a different view, as is shown by his diary comments on

Himmler’s statements: ‘I believe we would achieve more in the east and that

Stalin is more realistic than the English–American maniacs.’ What, accord-

ing to his own notes, he did not tell Himmler, was that the latter’s

judgement that it was in the west that a political solution was to be sought

was diametrically opposed to Hitler’s. By keeping this fact from him he

advisedly allowed Himmler and his western option to slide into a political

blind alley. He left the Reichsfu

hrer in a reasonably cheerful mood: ‘In the

atmosphere surrounding Himmler there is something very nice, modest,

and absolutely National Socialist, and this has an extraordinarily beneﬁcial

effect. One can only be thankful that, at least as far as Himmler is concerned,

the old National Socialist spirit still prevails.’

122

A few days later Goebbels was obliged to comment that Hitler was

harbouring considerable resentment against the Reichsfu

hrer. ‘The Fu

hrer

is placing a large part of the blame directly on Himmler. He says he was

continually ordering Himmler to move our troops to Pomerania, and that as

a result of repeated indications from the Department of Foreign Armies he

made the mistake of believing in the push towards Berlin and making

corresponding dispositions.’ Even when he, Hitler, gave clear orders, they

were ‘constantly undermined by secret sabotage. In this regard he levels the

most severe reproaches at Himmler [ . . . ] Clearly Himmler fell victim to

the General Staff the moment he took over as army group commander. The

hrer accuses him of rank disobedience and intends on the next occasion

to give him a piece of his mind and impress on him that if such a thing

should occur again the result would be an irreparable rupture between

them.’ Goebbels added: ‘I regarded entrusting Himmler with the command

of an army group as a mistake in the ﬁrst place. In the present situation that is

not what he should be doing, particularly not if it might lead to a rupture

with the Fu

hrer.’

And this breach evidently went far deeper still. Hitler conﬁded to

Goebbels that if, as Goebbels had suggested, he had transferred the supreme

command of the army to Himmler ‘the catastrophe would have been even

worse than it is anyway’—an altogether damning verdict for Himmler.

123

the days that followed Hitler was to send Goebbels the minutes of his

military brieﬁngs so the latter could see for himself that his ‘Fu

hrer’ had in

fact warned of a Soviet push towards Pomerania in the face of contradiction

from his military advisers.

124

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Hitler informed Goebbels two days later that Himmler bore ‘the historic

guilt for the fact that [ . . . ] Pomerania and a large part of its population had

fallen into Soviet hands’.

125

Goebbels, however, was intelligent enough to

recognize that this failure was rooted in the system: unfortunately, he wrote,

Hitler had ‘neglected to convert his opinion, which was based more on

intuition than on knowledge, into clear orders. As a result everyone has

done what he wanted, including Himmler.’ Goebbels was clear-sighted

about the issue: ‘Rather than making long speeches to his military collea-

gues, the Fu

hrer would do better to give them brief orders but then to

ensure with ruthless rigour that these orders are obeyed. The many routs we

have suffered at the front are the result of poor leadership methods and

wrong information.’

126

On 15 March, the following day, Hitler informed his propaganda minister

that Himmler had been to see him and that he had given him ‘an extraordi-

narily vigorous dressing down’.

127

At the same time, or a few days later,

Hitler also let Goebbels know that he intended to remove Himmler from the

command of the army group Vistula. Goebbels commented on Himmler’s

unsuccessful excursion into the higher echelons of the military command as

follows: ‘Unfortunately, he was tempted to chase after military laurels, but

he has been a complete failure. He’s bound to destroy his good political

reputation by this.’

128

In spite of this dishonourable discharge, Himmler, after his sudden

recovery, insisted, as Colonel Eismann records, ‘on celebrating in grand

style the transfer of command to his successor’, though inevitably his

‘theatrical swansong, which was not clouded by any kind of specialist

knowledge, made a strange and indeed positively repellent impression in

the midst of such an extremely grave situation’.

129

At the end of March another serious occurrence caused a further deteri-

oration in the relationship between Hitler and Himmler. Hitler accused, of

all people, the ‘Leibstandarte’—the original core unit of the armed SS,

which during the whole of the war had been deployed repeatedly in critical

military situations and suffered heavy losses, and whose leader, Sepp Die-

trich, was celebrated by the Nazi media as a war hero—of failure on the

Hungarian front, and compelled Himmler to issue the so-called ‘armband

order’: members of the unit were made to remove the strip with the words

‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’ from their uniforms—an extraordinary humili-

ation for the SS and its Reichsfu

hrer.

130

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When, in March 1945, Himmler was giving more intense thought to the

possibility of taking soundings towards ending the war by political means,

he was doing so, therefore, in a situation in which he had failed as an army

commander and had been seriously discredited in Hitler’s eyes. In the weeks

previously he had pursued his old idea of using Jewish prisoners as hostages,

and it appears that his escalating conﬂict with Hitler strengthened his resolve

to develop this project into a political mission. As the Third Reich was

conducting a war against the Jews, the key to ending the war logically lay in

the latter’s hands.

In mid-March Himmler’s personal physician Felix Kersten, who had

moved to Sweden and had offered his services to the Swedish Foreign

Minister as an intermediary, came to Germany, where he still had an estate.

Himmler told him that the concentration camps would not be blown up as

the Allies advanced; further killings there were forbidden and the prisoners

were instead to be handed over to the Allies.

131

He was to reafﬁrm this

several times in the following days,

132

and a short time later Himmler did in

fact issue the order to camp commandants not to kill any more Jewish

prisoners and to take all measures to reduce mortality among them. The

order was delivered to the commandants by Pohl personally.

133

Back in Stockholm Kersten informed his link-man to the World Jewish

Congress, Hillel Storch, that Himmler had in addition declared his willing-

ness to release 10,000 Jewish prisoners to Sweden or Switzerland.

134

As early

as February Himmler had been in direct contact concerning the release of

prisoners with the Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke

Bernadotte, who acted on behalf of the Swedish government. Himmler met

Bernadotte for the ﬁrst time on 19 February, when the latter was in

Germany, and again at the beginning of March.

135

Agreement was reached that Scandinavian concentration-camp inmates

should ﬁrst be assembled at Neuengamme, and ﬁnally Bernadotte, who was

continually including new groups of prisoners in his demands, gained

consent for them to be brought by Swedish Red Cross medical teams via

Denmark to Sweden. Himmler’s assent, given to Kersten, to the release of

10,000 prisoners was an important step forward in this negotiation process.

In fact far more than the 8,000 Swedish prisoners—actually more than

20,000 people—were to be rescued.

136

Bernadotte was, however, surprised at the manners and behaviour of his

opposite number, as he noted after their discussion in February: ‘He

appeared strikingly, indeed astoundingly, obliging, showed his sense of

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humour, even a touch of gallows humour, a number of times and liked to

make a joke to lighten the tone a little.’

137

It is quite obvious that Himmler

was still versatile and in the process of changing roles again in the very last

phase of the Third Reich, by presenting himself as a poised and conciliatory

negotiating partner who was at pains to bring things to a sensible conclu-

sion.

After visiting Himmler in mid-March, Kersten also brought to Sweden a

letter to himself from the Reichsfu

hrer. It is one of the most surprising

documents that Himmler wrote in his entire time as Reichsfu

hrer-SS. In the

letter Himmler ﬁrst gave Kersten ofﬁcial notiﬁcation of the release of the

2,700 Jewish men, women, and children to Switzerland, and added: ‘This is

to all intents and purposes the continuation of the course my colleagues and

I had been pursuing consistently for many years until the war and the

unreason unleashed by it in the world made it impossible to carry through.’

From 1936 to 1940, he goes on, ‘in conjunction with Jewish-American

organizations’, he had worked intensively towards a solution through

emigration, with ‘very beneﬁcial’ results. ‘The journey of the two trains

to Switzerland’, the Reichsfu

hrer-SS continues, ‘is, in spite of all difﬁculties,

the deliberate resumption of this beneﬁcial process.’

Himmler then felt obliged to refer to the situation at the Bergen-Belsen

camp. He wrote that on hearing the rumour that ‘a typhus epidemic of

catastrophic proportions had broken out’, he immediately sent a team led by

his chief medical ofﬁcer of health to the camp. ‘Cases of this type of

epidemic typhus’ were ‘very often found in camps containing people

from the east, but should be regarded as under control through the use of

the best modern clinical treatments’. Finally, he said he was sure that ‘if

demagoguery and superﬁcialities are excluded and all differences set aside,

wisdom and reason, along with humane sentiments and the willingness to

help, will inevitably, notwithstanding the bloodiest wounds, come to the

fore among all parties’. He concluded the letter ‘with all good wishes’.

138

The effrontery of this letter is breathtaking: did Himmler really believe

that by posing as a detached, humanitarian intermediary he could construct

a negotiating position with the western Allies? After all, by this point the

concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz had long since been

liberated, and for months detailed reports about mass murder in gas cham-

bers had been circulating in the international press. Confronted with his

own downfall, had Himmler drifted into a world of illusions?

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From a biographical perspective another explanation for his behaviour

can be found: for him it was simply important to preserve the outward forms

until the very end, and he did this by adding to the various roles he had

assumed during the Nazi dictatorship a further one, that of the honest

broker. If the chance arose to establish contact with the western Allies via

Bernadotte or other intermediaries, to extend the human trafﬁcking, and

possibly also to begin negotiating about a separate peace, then the other side

would not be dealing with an ice-cold, calculating Reichsfu

hrer-SS who

presided over life and death, but rather (and Himmler’s letter to Kersten was

designed to pave the way for this) his negotiating partners would have to

accept him in the role of a man of honour guided by the best intentions.

On the Allied side, it must be said, there was a different view. When the

Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress suggested involving

the British embassy in the transfer of prisoners to Sweden, the British

Foreign Secretary Eden wrote to Churchill that he was unwilling to have

anything to do with the business, and for one reason only: Himmler was

behind it. Churchill wrote ‘good’ on the report, and noted clearly in the

margin: ‘No link with Himmler.’

139

On 2 April Bernadotte had a further meeting with Himmler. After his

return to Stockholm the Count informed the British ambassador, Victor

Mallet, about their discussions.

140

According to Bernadotte’s report,

Himmler now, in contrast to the previous meeting, gave the impression

of a man who knew all was lost. When Bernadotte suggested that the best

course of action was now to surrender, Himmler responded that Hitler

opposed any such move and he felt bound by his oath.

Himmler knew, Bernadotte said, that he was No. 1 on the Allied list of

war criminals; he had complained that outside Germany he would be

regarded as brutal. In fact he loathed brutality. When, thereupon, Berna-

dotte reproached him with a concrete instance of a massacre by the Gestapo,

Himmler at ﬁrst denied it but at a further meeting the following day

conceded that, on the basis of enquiries he had made in the meantime,

this regrettable incident had in fact taken place. After this conversation

Himmler sent a message to Bernadotte via his secret-service chief Walter

Schellenberg to say that, in the event of Hitler’s radically revising his

position, he hoped that Bernadotte would go to Allied headquarters and

attempt to mediate. Was this an attempt to introduce the possibility of a

coup? Bernadotte took pains to get to the bottom of it, and a few days later

had the message sent that he would be prepared to make an attempt at

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mediation if Himmler assumed power in Germany and dissolved the

NSDAP.

141

Himmler remained indecisive, however, even as the days passed. He

could neither bring himself to declare himself Hitler’s successor and then

offer the Allies the Reich’s capitulation—a step even the serving Finance

Minister, Ludwig Count Schwerin von Krosigk, advised him to take on 19

April—nor was he prepared to brace himself for a partial military capitula-

tion in northern Germany.

142

On 19 April a further emissary travelled from Sweden to Germany. To

Kersten, Himmler had declared himself willing to speak directly to a

representative of the World Jewish Congress. Hillel Storch asked Norbert

Masur, a Jew of German descent who had emigrated to Sweden, to take on

this mission. The two-and-a-half-hour discussion took place during the

night of 20–1 April at Kersten’s property near Berlin and lasted until ﬁve in

the morning. In addition to Masur and Himmler, who had just arrived from

Hitler’s last birthday celebration, Schellenberg, Brandt (Himmler’s private

secretary), and Kersten were also there.

In this discussion too Himmler played the role of the man of honour. In

lengthy explanations to his Jewish guest he tried to defend, or else to gloss

over, the regime’s policy towards the Jews. The ﬁrst plan had been the

emigration of the Jews, but after the outbreak of war the regime had been

confronted with hostile masses of eastern Jews who had to be brought under

control. The war against the Soviet Union had been forced on Germany, he

claimed; in view of the dreadful conditions in the east many Jews had died,

but many Germans had suffered in the war as well. The concentration

camps had been severe but just. Yes, there had been abuses, but he had

punished those who were to blame. As a result of epidemics the death-rate

had been high, and that was why they had been forced to build large

crematoria.

Himmler gave ﬁgures for the number of Jews still alive in the individual

concentration camps, and claimed that 150,000 had been left behind in

Auschwitz and 450,000 in Budapest. This greatly exaggerated total for the

number of survivors was clearly a brazen lie. He then complained that

although he had handed over the camps of Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald,

atrocity stories were being circulated as propaganda about the alleged

horriﬁc conditions in the camps and he was being blamed personally.

Nobody had been dragged through the mud by the press in the last few

years as much as he.

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At this time reports and pictures of the Bergen-Belsen camp, which had

been handed over to the British army on 15 April, were in fact circulating in

the world’s press: between January 1945 and the liberation 35,000 prisoners

had died in the camp, which was piled high with unburied corpses, and a

further 14,000 died in the ﬁrst two months after the liberation.

143

Buchen-

wald had been liberated on 11 April; in the preceding days the SS had

transferred more than half of the prisoners elsewhere. There was no hand-

over of the camp.

Masur repeatedly objected to Himmler’s blatantly false presentation of

events, but was nevertheless determined to listen to the essential points in

the latter’s sermon in order not to put his mission in jeopardy. Overall,

according to his estimation, Himmler gave the impression of being intelli-

gent, educated, and historically aware. For the most part, Masur recorded,

Himmler had spoken calmly even when the discussion had become contro-

versial. His tense inner state had, all the same, been evident. Another thing

struck Masur: Himmler’s need to keep talking, which was almost unstop-

pable.

Finally, Himmler declared to Masur that he was ready to hand over a

thousand Jewish women from Ravensbru

ck to the Red Cross, and addition-

ally a series of smaller groups of prisoners of various nationalities. By then

the discussion had touched on every possible political question, and Himm-

ler had exploited the opportunity to give a wide-ranging defence of the

regime. It was possible to infer from this account that he considered

Germany’s defeat to be inevitable. The country would not, however,

surrender, he said. He himself had no fear of death. The best of the German

nation, as he had told Kersten on parting, would perish with the Nazi

leadership, and what happened to the rest was of no importance.

144

Bernadotte was to meet Himmler on two more occasions: ﬁrst of all early

on 21 April, immediately after Himmler’s talks with Masur, in Hohenly-

chen, where Bernadotte achieved further concessions with regard to the

release of prisoners,

145

and ﬁnally after Himmler had called for him once

again—in the meantime the Reichsfu

hrer had been forced to leave Hohen-

lychen for the north-west because of the approach of Soviet troops, and had

established himself with a fairly large entourage in the police barracks in

beck.

146

In the night of 23–4 April the two men met in the Swedish consulate in

beck. Himmler declared to him, according to Bernadotte’s account of

the conversation,

147

that Hitler had turned away from life and would be

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dead in a few days. He, Himmler, now felt entitled to act even without

Hitler’s consent. Now he asked Bernadotte straight out to convey to the

Swedish government his wish to arrange a meeting with Eisenhower, so

that the German western front could surrender. The eastern front would be

held as long as possible. Although Bernadotte immediately explained that he

considered such an initiative to be unrealistic, he declared himself willing to

communicate Himmler’s request on condition that Denmark and Norway

were included in the offer of surrender. Himmler agreed. Beyond that,

Himmler told Bernadotte, if his offer were refused he would take over

command of a battalion on the eastern front and die in battle.

148

In the days that followed Himmler waited anxiously for a response. On

28 April, at the Wehrmacht High Command, he chanced to meet Grand

Admiral Karl Do

nitz, supreme commander of the navy, and asked if the

latter would be ready to assume a ‘role in the state’ in the event of Hitler no

longer being in Berlin and a successor having taken over his ofﬁce. In

making his offer Himmler had already made it plain whom he regarded as

Hitler’s successor.

149

Bernadotte conﬁdentially informed the British and American ambassa-

dors in Stockholm about his meeting with Himmler. In addition, Himmler

had given Bernadotte a letter to the Swedish Foreign Minister, Christian

nther. As expected, the western powers turned down the offer of a

partial surrender, and exposed Himmler—who had expressed to Schellen-

berg

150

his fears of that very thing happening—to all the world by publish-

ing his offer at the end of April in the world’s press.

Charles de Gaulle, President of the provisional French government, tells

in his memoirs of a ﬁnal attempt by Himmler to get his head out of the

noose: via ‘unofﬁcial channels’, he had received a memorandum from

Himmler with an offer of an alliance. France was to join with a defeated

Germany to prevent a situation where it was treated by the Anglo-Saxon

powers as a satellite state. De Gaulle, for whom this train of thought

‘unquestionably contained a grain of truth’, could not bring himself to

respond to the friendly proposal—for, as he succinctly put it, Himmler

had ‘nothing to offer’.

151

Meanwhile, on 29 April Hitler in his Berlin bunker had also learned of

Himmler’s initiative from the international press. He ﬂew into a rage. In his

Political Testament, written the same day—the day before his suicide—he

expelled ‘the former Reichsfu

hrer-SS and Reich Minister of the Interior

Heinrich Himmler’ from the party and from all ofﬁces of state. To complete

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