Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life
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the picture, it is worth mentioning that Himmler’s successors were the
Breslau Gauleiter Karl Hanke, as Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS, and the Gauleiter and
Bavarian Prime Minister Paul Giesler, as Reich Minister of the Interior.
Hitler used his testament to heap further blame on Himmler; Go
¨
ring, who a
few days before had also been removed from all his offices for flouting
Hitler’s authority, was similarly criticized. As Hitler wrote, ‘through secret
negotiations with the enemy, which they held without my knowledge and
against my will, and through their attempt in defiance of the law to seize
power in the state,’ both had ‘done untold damage to the country and to the
whole nation, quite apart from their treachery towards me personally’.
152
The accusation of being a faithless traitor to his leader and his country was
sure to be an extraordinarily heavy blow to Himmler, the more so because
he no doubt considered it unjust. He had delayed his initiative to the very
last moment, until the day, 22 April, that he heard from Fu
¨
hrer headquarters
about Hitler’s last briefing, at which the ‘Fu
¨
hrer’ declared that he was no
longer in a position to give orders and thereby had effectively abdicated.
Himmler had good reason to assume that, after Hitler had excluded himself,
he had the right, in the name of the Reich leadership, to initiate a move to
end the war by political means, as it was impossible to tell whether Hitler,
who seemed to have lapsed into passivity, had settled on the succession. Yet
Himmler did not realize that behind Hitler’s withdrawal of 22 April was his
calculation that, while keeping a door open for last-minute negotiations, he
could nevertheless hold onto the possibility to the last of distancing himself
once more from the peace soundings, should they fail, and of thus not
tarnishing his historical reputation with the disgrace of surrender.
153
As the last chapter of the history of the concentration camps shows,
Himmler failed to keep his agreement given to Kersten in March to hand
over the camps to the approaching Allied troops. Although Bergen-Belsen
had been handed over, this was only because the outbreak of a typhus
epidemic prevented any further ‘evacuations’.
154
Meanwhile Dora-Mittel-
bau and Buchenwald were cleared at the beginning of April on his express
orders. Of the total of 48,000 inmates at Buchenwald the SS removed some
28,000; by the end of the war at least a third of them had died.
In the middle of April the group of officers in the SS Business and
Administrative Main Office responsible for the concentration camps had a
final meeting at which, in line with a directive from Himmler, it is very
likely that the evacuation of the last camps not yet liberated by the Allies
was discussed. The camps in question were Sachsenhausen, Dachau,
730 collapse
Neuengamme, Flossenbu
¨
rg, and Ravensbru
¨
ck. There is proof that Himmler
instructed Dachau and Flossenbu
¨
rg directly that no living prisoners were to
fall into enemy hands. In the days that followed the SS leadership also
refused requests by the Red Cross for the last camps to be handed over.
The fact that Himmler broke his word is probably attributable on the one
hand to fear that his consent would be taken by Hitler, who disapproved
strongly of his trade with concentration-camp prisoners, as a breach of
confidence. On the other, the world should not be deceived by Himmler’s
appearance in the guise of a humanitarian intermediary: he was prepared to
save human lives only if he received tangible returns from the opposing side.
He still viewed prisoners as human capital, and intended to exploit them to
the end as bargaining-tools—hence his determination to keep them with
him at every stage of his retreat.
In view of the emerging division of the as yet unoccupied parts of the
Reich, the last death marches went in two separate directions. Prisoners
from Flossenbu
¨
rg and Dachau marched southwards, while those from
Ravensbru
¨
ck, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme marched north. These
evacuation marches collapsed into chaos, and frequently a large proportion
of the prisoners were shot by the guards. At the end of April more than
3,000 prisoners were transported in indescribable conditions by ship from
Stutthof near Danzig to Neustadt on the Bay of Lu
¨
beck, where those who
had survived the rigours of the voyage were killed on the beach by guards
and marines. American troops liberated Flossenbu
¨
rg on 23 April, Dachau on
29 April, and Mauthausen on 5 May.
155
Of the more than 714,000 prisoners
still in the concentration-camp system at the beginning of 1945, estimates
suggest that between 240,000 and 360,000 fell victim to the evacuations.
156
On the run
Himmler’s crowded diary in the last months of the Third Reich did not
allow for any more visits to his family in Gmund or to his mistress Hedwig
Potthast and their children in Berchtesgaden. Letters and telephone-calls
acted as a substitute. Both women were unswervingly loyal to him to the
end; no evidence has survived that suggests they came to have any doubts
about their relationship with this mass-murderer or about their life at his
side.
collapse 731
On 16 January Margarete Himmler received a visit from her brother-in-
law Gebhard, Heinrich’s elder brother. Her diary entry makes one suspect
that Gebhard—who since 1933 had enjoyed rapid success in his brother’s
slipstream in his career in vocational training—had, in view of the imminent
destruction of the Third Reich, brought up the fatal role his brother had
played in it and the fact that the Himmler family were actually staunch
Catholics. If his intention had been to cause Margarete to reflect in some
manner, then this attempt was a total failure. ‘He then wanted to have a talk
with me on my own. I sensed something unpleasant was coming. But that it
would become so awful, hearing him say such mean things about other
people, and that he would talk about his parents and Heini, raising his eyes
to heaven in that Catholic way! I’ll never understand it.’
157
Two weeks later
she wrote of Heinrich: ‘How wonderful that he has been called to great
tasks and is equal to them. The whole of Germany is looking to him.’
158
On
21 February she noted that she intended to stay in Gmund, as that was what
Heinrich wanted.
159
Margarete remained in contact with Himmler into April. Then she left
Gmund as American troops were advancing. Mother and daughter fled
towards the south and fetched up in a British internment camp in Italy. A
British Secret Service officer who questioned both of them thought that no
interrogation was necessary, as his impression was that Margarete’s life had
remained relatively unaffected by her husband’s professional activities. He
also attested that Himmler’s wife had retained a ‘small-town mentality’.
160
Hedwig Potthast saw Himmler for the last time in March in Hohenly-
chen, returning from there to her house in Berchtesgaden. After that both
spoke daily on the telephone, with the last conversation on 19 April. ‘Even
though I am still telling myself that the new year will be hard, perhaps
burdensome,’ she had written almost cheerfully to him in her last New Year
letter, ‘I am almost curious to see what it will bring. Above all I wish you
strength for the task you have been entrusted with by the Fu
¨
hrer and the
fatherland.’ A few of her letters from January 1945 are preserved, basically
describing her daily life in Berchtesgaden: she reported on their children’s
progress, and we learn that she kept up neighbourly contact with the
Bormanns and that Frau Fegelein, Eva Braun’s sister, paid her visits. She
also enjoyed the winter scenery in Berchtesgaden. ‘Why is it that you can’t
ski?, she asks in the last existing letter, dated 12 January 1945 .
161
Indeed:
Why had Himmler never learnt to ski?!
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Cut off from his family and his second family, and still in the Lu
¨
beck police
barracks, Himmler tried, after the failure of his attempt to make contact
with Eisenhower, to defend himself against the charge of being a faithless
traitor. In a radio message of 30 April to Kaltenbrunner, who had set up his
headquarters in southern Germany, he distanced himself from Allied reports
about his talks with Bernadotte, and about an announcement of the Fu
¨
hrer’s
death, which he had allegedly written. The fight, as he stressed, must be
continued under all circumstances.
162
That same day he was paid an unexpected visit by Grand Admiral Do
¨
nitz,
who had just received a radio message from Bormann from the Fu
¨
hrer’s
bunker in Berlin informing him of Himmler’s treachery and calling on him
unequivocally to take ‘swift and implacable’ measures against all traitors.
Do
¨
nitz confronted Himmler with the accusations that he had sought
contact with the Allies behind Hitler’s back, which Himmler denied.
Do
¨
nitz, who—by contrast with Himmler—had no instruments of power
at his command, noted this declaration of innocence and returned to his
headquarters in Plo
¨
n. There news arrived, still on the same day, that
meanwhile the succession as laid down in Hitler’s will ‘had come into
force’. In this manner Do
¨
nitz heard the news of Hitler’s death and that he
was to succeed him.
163
Do
¨
nitz thereupon asked Himmler to come and see him; he arrived
during the night accompanied by six armed SS men. Do
¨
nitz informed
him about the dispositions for the succession. Visibly shaken, Himmler
immediately offered himself as ‘second-in-command’, an offer that Do
¨
nitz
refused with thanks, pointing to the non-political nature of the government
he was to head.
164
Himmler reappeared several times unbidden in Do
¨
nitz’s headquarters,
until on 6 May the latter officially dismissed him as Reich Minister of the
Interior (Hitler’s dismissal of Himmler in his testament had, in the view of
those concerned, never become legally effective). The dismissal had been
preceded by negotiations with Himmler, who was still trying to gain some
form of official recognition from the new government in his capacity as
Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS. After his dismissal it was made clear to Himmler that he
was to keep his distance from the seat of government, whatever it did.
165
Walter Lu
¨
dde-Neurath, the Grand Admiral’s adjutant, and Count Schwerin
von Krosigk, Do
¨
nitz’s Foreign Minister, both agree in their memoirs that at
this time Himmler made a decidedly optimistic, cheerful impression and
spoke of how he and his SS would take on an important role in the
collapse 733
emerging post-war order, while claiming that if that were not to come off
he could manage to go into hiding.
166
To conclude from this that Himmler
harboured illusions even up to May 1945 about his future fate would be
going too far. Others who observed him more closely during these days
gained the opposite impression. To Bernadotte, Himmler appeared in April
to be exhausted and under great strain—‘he was manifestly having a serious
battle to maintain the external appearance of calm’
167
—and Schellenberg
similarly describes Himmler as in an extremely agitated state that he was
unable to control.
168
Throughout his life Himmler had been at pains to govern and conceal his
emotions and responses, to present himself to others as even-tempered and
very positive, and, whenever circumstances permitted, to be as amiable as
possible to those with whom he had dealings. As he saw it, his office, his
position with regard to his subordinates and vis-a
`
-vis his negotiating part-
ners required such a demeanour. For that reason nothing definitive can be
said about his actual state of mind in those days. The reports of Schellenberg
and Bernadotte indicate that he was fighting against the threat of psycho-
logical breakdown, concerned to maintain his vaunted self-discipline and
self-control.
To the end he made ever more hectic attempts to find some kind of
solution to avert his inevitable downfall. As he may have told himself, he still
had considerable instruments of power at his disposal: several Waffen-SS
divisions remained under his command, and in the territory not yet occu-
pied by the Allies he was in charge of the organization of the Reserve Army,
had command of the police, the Volkssturm, his network of agents, and
finally of the terror organization Werewolf, which was to be active behind
enemy lines. In addition, he was holding hundreds of thousands of prisoners
in the camps as bartering-counters.
At the beginning of May, when all attempts had failed, he stood empty-
handed. He had not managed to make really effective preparations for flight
or for a life under cover of a false identity. To whom could the head of the
SS and police apparatus turn with a request like that, without appearing to
his staff as a boss whose calls for endurance and whose displays of optimism
had simply been empty rhetoric?
Thus, his only recourse was to a forged paybook that gave his identity as
Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger, the name he chose hinting at his inner
reservations about actually denying his identity. As far as disguising his
appearance was concerned, though he had got himself some civilian clothing
734 collapse
and an eyepatch he had not even changed his spectacles. To the end he was
recognizable as who he was: Heinrich Himmler.
In practical terms he was equipped for suicide. Like all Nazi leaders he
possessed lethal poison. Yet beyond that he had evidently made no pre-
parations at all regarding the circumstantial aspects of a possible suicide. He
had neither chosen a place of significance (for example, some north German
Germanic sanctum) nor does he appear to have drawn up a declaration in
the event of his death, or, as far as one can tell, written a farewell letter. To
die in a last battle, as he had proclaimed he would, was not something he
wanted to do either, and he lacked the decisiveness to hand himself over
officially as a prisoner as, for example, Go
¨
ring had done. To present himself
candidly to the Allies, take responsibility for his deeds and misdeeds, and
defend his SS men—even had he possessed the courage to take this path, he
had blocked it off through his own contradictory behaviour in the previous
weeks and months. He could calculate that in any war-crimes trial not only
his crimes would come out but also his attempts to use lies, deception, and
shady deals involving human lives to avert at the last moment the downfall
threatening him and save his own skin. How, for instance, could he explain
the letter that he had given Kersten in March, in which he had pretended to
be working for a humanitarian solution to the ‘Jewish question’?
All that remained for him in this situation was to go on the run in a more
or less aimless way. On 11 May, now superficially disguised as Sergeant
Heinrich Hitzinger, he left the Flensburg area together with his private
secretary R
udolf Brandt, his adjutant Werner Grothmann, and a further
adjutant by the name of Heinz Macher, Heinrich Mu
¨
ller, the chief of the
Gestapo, and the chief of his personal security service, Josef Kiermaier. The
group of six men went first to Friedrichskoog in the district of Dith-
marschen, about 100 kilometres to the south.
In Friedrichskoog the weather was bad. Not until 15 or 16 May could the
six men cross the Elbe estuary, which was several kilometres wide, in a
fishing-boat and continue their journey to Neuhaus in Lower Saxony;
according to Grothmann, the intention was to get to the Harz mountains,
where Himmler would hide out for a time and then make his way to the
Alps. After Neuhaus they travelled on foot to the Meinstedt area. There
Brandt, Mu
¨
ller, and Kiermaier split off from the group in order to have their
identification papers stamped by the British commandant of the town, but
never returned. Mu
¨
ller was the only member of the group who actually
succeeded in disappearing without trace.
collapse 735
Himmler, Grothmann, and Macher continued their march, but on 21
May they landed at a checkpoint near Bremerfo
¨
rde, which had been set up
by Soviet POWs released from captivity. On this and the following two
days Himmler was sent to several camps, one after the other, until—
exhausted but outwardly calm, and without visible emotion—he stood
before his British interrogators, who had in the meantime ascertained his
identity. The fact that from his perspective only suicide was now an option
will have become clear to him during these hours. He could determine only
its timing now, and this he wanted to delay. When, however, it became
evident that in the course of an alleged medical examination an attempt
would be made to remove the poison capsule concealed in his mouth, the
moment had arrived: by biting on the capsule he could remain in control to
the last.
169
Ill. 32 Himmler’s corpse
736 collapse
Conclusion
W
hat role did Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS Heinrich Himmler play in the history
of National Socialism? How can his contribution to the ‘German
catastrophe’ be assessed?
These are the central questions that I have pursued in this biography. If in
a number of the preceding chapters I have focused quite intensively on the
development of Himmler’s personality, then this was not because I was
assuming it would be possible to attribute the Reichsfu
¨
hrer’s later misdeeds
solely to a defective personality development—for example, to his having
suffered childhood trauma or having been socialized in an environment
where violence was accepted. Psychoanalytical interpretations have not
been the focus of this historical biography. If, however, it is possible to
strip away the outer layers to reveal some kind of core personality, then a
sensible interconnection between biography and structural history can help
us to a better understanding of his political actions. The picture that emerges
can be summed up as follows.
Nothing in Himmler’s childhood and youth, spent in a sheltered, con-
servative Catholic home typical of the educated bourgeoisie of Wilhelmine
Germany, would suggest that someone with clearly abnormal characteristics
was growing up there. There are no indications at all of any particular
problems with his upbringing, of any marked tendency to be cruel, or any
noticeable aggressiveness; and it would certainly also be mistaken to see
Himmler’s later development as decisively determined by a father–son
conflict rooted in an unusually authoritarian upbringing, even granted
that the Himmler household was indeed very strict and his father monitored
Heinrich down to the detail of how he structured his diary—a tendency to
overstep personal boundaries that Himmler was to demonstrate later in life
in different circumstances with regard to his SS men. With the exception of
minor skirmishes, however, he does not seem to have reached the point of
rebelling against his father; nor is there any evidence of serious political
differences between father and son.
If a key to Himmler’s personality is sought in his childhood and adoles-
cence, it is his obvious weaknesses that are striking, and above all the
counter-measures he took to overcome them. Physically weak and often
unwell, Heinrich was emotionally inhibited and backward in his social
development: he suffered from an attachment disorder that made it difficult
for him to build up strong and lasting relationships. Throughout his life
Himmler was to struggle with these difficulties, which determined his
behaviour towards others. Yet he learned to compensate for these deficien-
cies or to disguise them, on the one hand by means of the strong tendency
towards self-control and self-discipline rooted in his upbringing, and on the
other by positively drilling himself in the forms and practices of social
intercourse.
For Himmler, who was born in 1900, as for many of his generation, the
First World War with its far-reaching consequences represented a rupture
with the past. Himmler became part of the so-called war youth generation,
which, although united by the experience of the war, itself suffered from a
complex caused by having been too young to take an active part in it.
Though trained as an ensign in 1918, Himmler had no opportunity to serve
in the military.
The fact that he had not had the chance to prove himself in combat was
responsible in significant measure for his continuing to model himself as a
young man on the concept of the ideal soldier, even after he left the army;
he regarded himself henceforth primarily as an officer who had been pre-
vented from exercising his vocation. This attitude explains his decision to
study agriculture, which was typical of disbanded officers who, seeing
themselves as warriors in waiting, were passing the time until the next
great conflict by acquiring the skills to earn a living but above all by
engaging in a huge range of paramilitary activities.
This soldierly world, which can be summed up in the words: sobriety,
distance, severity, objectivity, but also order and regulations, particularly
appealed to Himmler with his lack of self-confidence. He was constantly
indulging in self-stylizations as a soldierly man, although they remained
confined to the realms of the imagination. Though a member of various
paramilitary organizations, he took no part in any fighting in the immediate
post-war period. The fact that there was little place for women in this male
738 conclusion
world made it even more attractive to him, as someone with evident
difficulties in relating to women. Himmler was determined, as a soldierly
man, not to give in to erotic temptations, and when he was in the grip of
them he tried to suppress them with images of violence and war or to act
them out through his penchant for voyeurism. He compensated for his lack
of experience by interfering in the private lives of others, a tendency that
can also be observed when he was Reichsfu
¨
hrer-SS. It was only much later
that he discerned ‘homosexual dangers’ in this way of life, with its protective
cocoon of male solidarity and its self-imposed celibacy, and this was a
disturbing insight that strengthened his latent homophobia.
In the years immediately following the First World War Himmler lived
in a fantasy world shaped by the paramilitary subculture of the German post-
war period; he came into contact with the reality of the Weimar Republic
only in 1922, when as a result of the inflation he was unable to embark on a
second programme of study and was forced to take up a post as an assistant in
a factory that produced fertilizers. In the meantime he had been awarded a
diploma in agricultural studies. It was precisely at this point that his politici-
zation and commitment to the radical Right began. Himmler had originally
regarded himself as a supporter of the German Nationalist Party, but the
general radicalization of politics in Bavaria in 1922–3, and the fact that right-
wing conservatives and right-wing radicals merged from time to time,
smoothed the way for him to join the Nazis. In doing so he may well
have been impressed more by the strong presence of the Nazi movement in
the paramilitary world than by the political party as such. His model in this
period was above all Ernst Ro
¨
hm, not Adolf Hitler. It was not until 1923–4
that he gradually developed a coherent vo
¨
lkisch vision, involving also a
rejection of the Catholic faith. To the essential elements of this ideology—
anti-Semitism, extreme nationalism, racism, and a rejection of modernity—
he added occult beliefs and Germanophile enthusiasms; from these elements
arose an ideology that was a mixture of political utopia, romantic dream-
world, and substitute religion.
The failure of the putsch of 9 November 1923, the subsequent banning of
the Nazi Party, and the general economic and political normalization left
Himmler, who had now given up his job, on the brink of personal and
political bankruptcy. And yet this young man from a comfortably off family
decided to remain loyal to the political far Right and harness his professional
future to it. His highly developed powers of endurance, coupled with an
indulgence in political illusions, his self-image as a soldier, and the fact that
conclusion 739