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